Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sergey Brin's Unretirement

inc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 499 posts

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#471

Post by DannyBee »

plicense wrote: post #364
DannyBee wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kinda right, kinda wrong. I was a workaholic - I was a VP of engineering at Google. I'm doing fine retired. You don't have to find purpose when you retire At all. Instead, you just have to be willing to face each day when the day has no expectations. You can do anything you want, and decide you love it, hate it, whatever. You can do it again the next day, or not. you can hate it one day and love it the next.…

Just wanted to say, one of the exciting things I realized when I joined Google was that the maintainer of GDB was my org's director at that time. Not sure how much it matters, but it gave me confidence in the leadership to know that someone who knows the details is running the show at the top. It made me trust the leadership chain much more than I normally would otherwise.

Thanks - it is truly and greatly appreciated :)

I wonder if this was the LOL[1] days - looking back on it, it's hard to believe how much people outside the org cared about the name, and us trying to not take ourselves too seriously.

[1] For everyone else, at one point we named the org Languages, Optimizations, and Libraries. People either loved or hated it.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#472

Post by aatd86 »

vidarh wrote: post #450
aatd86 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we agree. The subtelty is that, it is about closed and open systems. Your partial knowledge makes things a locally open system. You are processing new data and then acting accordingly. That's dynamic agency. The better you can get knowledge, the better you can influence the next step. That realization happens at the meta level and gives you agency in your actual universe. Even though at the meta-meta level, t…

So again, this is basically the compatibilist stance. To me, it rings hollow because it glosses over whether you actually made a decision in a way that is qualtitively different from how a clock "chooses" to move the minute hand one minute further. And so I would answer to your question about regrets that I don't believe you had that choice. That you couldn't have chosen differently given the same inputs and state. Y…

Interesting thought exercise, let me try something:

Only if we can predict everything ourselves do we not have a choice. But since we don't know what we don't know and that may occur at any moment (black swan), we can only act given probabilities.

Then what we control is our level of appetite for risk of an undesired outcome.

That risk is not data that we can reliably measure and assert. So it creates randomness/stochasticity in the system.

That's why I was speaking of open vs closed system.

Randomness provides agency.

That randomness is subjective. You may well still be predictable for an omniscient person. But that person would not have any agency. You do as long as your choice does not rely upon knowledge.

I guess that's why the human society is weird in a sense. People act from belief they have no certitude about.

A clock does not do that, there is no metacognitive process to influence an action toward a yet unrealised future. Seems incomparable?

But yes, other than that, there is not real accurate way to deny compatibilism I'm afraid.

In fact, true agency is the attempt to eliminate choice.

It is like being in a Labyrinth where the walls are moving.

The clock sits in the labyrinth and gets crushed by a moving wall.

An agentic person detects the movements and recalibrates.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#473

Post by aatd86 »

black_knight wrote: post #337
aatd86 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true but the path to that seems to require a weird optimization where it is concentrated among a few before being being widespread. Technologic improvements should help. Help decouple time and money.

Why though? And when does this start being for everyone? We have had agricultural machines for ages, but I still have to pay an ever increasing part of my salary (and hence time here on earth) not to starve.

Because of asymmetry. Some people are more inclined toward certain things than others. People who are excellent at math are much more likely to be able to advance AI for instance. The goal of physical systems being to remain at rest/(humans included ;) the gradient of resources lean toward these people so that they can improve the technology allowing everyone to be able to conserve their energy (be lazy in a sense).

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#474

Post by marcus_holmes »

weinzierl wrote: post #202
marcus_holmes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of " that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity. I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google. But…

> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of " [..] Risking a stereotype. In my experience from traveling the world it's a tell-tale sign for being from a culture heavily influenced by the Protestant work ethic. Introduce yourself like that in Spain, Italy, or Brazil and you'll get strange looks. On the flip side, I've found that people who do not define themselves through their work primarily often do so…

Agree, it's definitely a cultural thing.

I've also lived on a small island where on first meeting, two locals will work out how they're related. I guess similar to the cousin thing.

In the city I currently live in, it's fairly normal for locals to ask where another local went to school within 5 mins of meeting them, because that establishes an identity here.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#475

Post by marcus_holmes »

lucianbr wrote: post #198
marcus_holmes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of " that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity. I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google. But…

What is the point of the "I'm Marcus" part of your introduction? Reading your post I get the impression it has zero value, or at least you think so. > Hi, I'm Marcus > What do you do Marcus > I'm on a break now, but I used to be a director of IT Is this really difficult? Seems really easy, and I was never a director of anything. Maybe that's the problem.

Well, the "I'm Marcus" part is saying "I would like you to call me Marcus" I guess.

You're right, it is easy to say. But there's an identity and professional pride and all sorts of stuff wrapped up in the job title that isn't so easy to let go of.

It also leads on to questions like "and what are you doing now?" which get to "I'm lazing around doing nothing because my mental health took a hammering while I was IT Director", and so on. It's all so much easier and tidier with the job title.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#476

Post by alex1138 »

dang wrote: post #469
alex1138 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You're doing it quite badly. I don't want to ban you, but posts like this make it hard not to, because people will start accusing us of enforcing the rules unfairly. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: perhaps this will help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722 . More at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... .

I do apologize. However, it's also fairly bad faith for this other person to repeatedly accuse me of being a bot

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#477

Post by massysett »

ericmay wrote: post #442
massysett wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the built environment is that determinative. I live in a car-dependent suburb. Walk Score 2. My neighbor knows the whole street. She knows the garbage men. It’s because she wants to. When I run into her outside, she chats. She walks her dog and chats with dog owners and anyone else she sees. Easy relationships are available at the grocery store, post office, etc. I’ve been seeing some of the same people…

It's absolutely the built environment. Your Costco example is a clear example. you drive to Costco, you walk in, grab generic packaged goods without needing to really talk to anyone, and then go to the checkout and use the automated kiosk to make your purchase. There's no reason to have a human interaction, so why would you bother getting to know the cashier? You're never going to build a relationship with the cashie…

I made the choice at Costco to not build a relationship with anyone. There's a guy standing at the entrance checking memberships. I've seen him for years. I don't know him. I don't use the automated kiosk if I have several items. I see some of the cashiers for years. I'm cordial but I don't chat them up. One woman who has been there for years chats with me a bit; I'm cordial but don't reciprocate a ton.

There's a corporate supermarket owned by a Dutch multinational not far from me. I see some of the same employees there every week. One of them loves people and recognizes me. I could stand around and chat with him if I wanted. But I don't want to.

I made this choice. Someone who wants to build relationships chats with people. Folks like that chat with people at the grocery store, on the airplane, waiting in line, etc. Often it leads to nothing, occasionally it leads to something. But the point is, they practice it. I don't. The built environment is not stopping it. Not being in a "local store that one of your neighbors owns" has nothing to do with it either. Plenty of relationships are built in corporate chains.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#478

Post by stuxnet79 »

abraxas wrote: post #356
throw101010 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a business/formal context it would be normal to introduce yourself like this in the countries you've mentioned. Do people introduce themselves like that in informal contexts in the USA? If so that's indeed a bit weird, and more a topic you would start talking about for small talk or if someone asked about it.

Americans don't usually have friends. Just "contacts". Working age "parties" are often just cloaked networking events.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. It is very much true in my opinion, especially so for the big coastal metro areas.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#479

Post by taneq »

mpweiher wrote: post #387
taneq wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience (at a much smaller scale than these guys, of course) the legal papers power is more of a formality. It’s the soft power tied up in knowledge, relationships, trust and goodwill that really count.

Right up until the point that the person with the legal power yanks the rug from under you.

That’s when you find out if the soft power you’ve accrued is sufficient.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#480

Post by alex1138 »

alex1138 wrote: post #476
dang wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You're doing it quite badly. I don't want to ban you, but posts like this make it hard not to, because people will start accusing us of enforcing the rules unfairly. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: perhaps this will help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722 . More at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... .

I do apologize. However, it's also fairly bad faith for this other person to repeatedly accuse me of being a bot

Also, many of my comments which are not controversial are similarly marked "flagged". Maybe that's a way to defuse flame wars, but it sure leaves a bad taste/bad optics
Post reply on HN