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Sergey Brin's Unretirement

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Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#51

Post by adrianN »

somenameforme wrote: post #40
pm90 wrote: post #29

Living as we do in a society where basic needs are not guaranteed without a giant pile of money, most humans don’t get to experience what it feels like to be in a place where you don’t base your life decisions on financial well being. Thats very limiting; it isn’t that surprising that someone who has achieved that is now looking for meaning in other things. Besides: if you’re Sergey Brin, I imagine you can get to tal…

I don't think this is really accurate because the traditional state of society, and one that remains in the 'developing world' which is almost certainly still the wide majority of the world at this point, is families living in multi generational housing with many people contributing. This enables older to generations to comfortably 'retire' when they see fit, and provides financial comfort and security. It's basicall…

I think you might be romanticizing multi-generational households a bit. We introduced social security systems precisely because the family systems failed so frequently. In all but the richest families no retirement as we understand it today was possible. Illness or death of the main bread winners was fatal to the whole household and children were expected to work as soon as possible.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#52

Post by jaden »

It's interesting to hear about his experience, but I'm not sure if it's typical. There are millions of people retiring each year, presumably many are happy to be done with the drudgery of work and excited to spend time on hobbies and projects they enjoy.

I'm curious to know how many retirees end up like Sergey and how many you don't hear about because they're too busy enjoying their retirement.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#53

Post by snowwrestler »

lovich wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please not post snarky comments or shallow dismissals to Hacker News? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. No one is saying you owe billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

@dang, I get what you mean in a vacuum but this article is pretty insulting to the readers intelligence. The third sentence of the article is > But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5. Does anyone really believe the co founder of google retiring after their rise to supremacy in search was the equivalent of someone quitting their 9-5? They might hav…

The article is not about Sergey Brin, he is just the hook. It’s about the loss of meaning people can face after retiring, which can happen to anyone who is able to retire. That’s not everyone, but it’s also not just billionaires.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#55

Post by Spooky23 »

It’s easy to eye roll at billionaire guy wanting to go work, but it’s a real thing, I recall my dad struggling with retirement, after having planned so long.

He did a bit of consulting, was a rural mail carrier for a year and ended up managing a county program for a few years. He also discovered teaching as an adjunct professor, which he loved deeply. At some point, he was ready, and he had several good years of retirement with grandchildren and travel.

With a story like this, I choose to see what we have in common with a very successful, very rich person. Many people think “If only I had a more, everything would be grand.”

Well… Brin is a billionaire controlling one of the most powerful corporations on the earth. He found meaning in his work, or chose his work because of the meaning to him. Either way, given the ability to do anything, he made his choice. Don’t worship the guy, but perhaps see the humanity that we all share.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#56

Post by slyall »

nsoonhui wrote: post #50
LarsDu88 wrote: post #26

Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least) Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology. It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once. That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her milli…

Sergey might have some positive influence on Gemini, but given that he isn't an AI scientist ( AKA no technical background), I really do wonder what sort of influence that (only) he could have had, beyond just bringing in key people.

I assume by "no technical background" you mean he doesn't have a PHD in AI.

He's probably not developing the low-level algorithms but he can probably do everything else and has years of experience doing so.

He's also perfectly able to spend 60 hours a week improving his AI skills using the best teachers in the world.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#57

Post by tombert »

alex1138 wrote: post #54
alex1138 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

You could just edit your first comment instead of replying to yourself multiple times.

I haven't read RFK's book and even if every single fact in that particular book was true (which I very highly doubt), it wouldn't change anything he's done in the last year that involved gutting American medical research, spreading misinformation about vaccines that's debunked within their own "research", and coming up with the absolutely genius idea of "tell doctors to tell patients to eat better" to "fix" American's illnesses. Oh, and telling people to eat fried food as long as its fried with beef tallow. That's really dumb.

He's an utter and complete moron at best, and the only reason that people (like you presumably) listen to him is because of his last name.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#58

Post by lovich »

snowwrestler wrote: post #53
lovich wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@dang, I get what you mean in a vacuum but this article is pretty insulting to the readers intelligence. The third sentence of the article is > But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5. Does anyone really believe the co founder of google retiring after their rise to supremacy in search was the equivalent of someone quitting their 9-5? They might hav…

The article is not about Sergey Brin, he is just the hook. It’s about the loss of meaning people can face after retiring, which can happen to anyone who is able to retire. That’s not everyone, but it’s also not just billionaires.

I do not accept that the analogy was made without an implicit attempt to conflate the two positions.

Most tech jobs aren’t a 9-5 either since that’s a traditional hourly job and tech has on call rotations that are unpaid.

This is what I’m talking about with the article insulting the readers intelligence. If you wanted to make the point of “people who retire should be aware that they need to find meaning outside of work” then it could just say so, instead of trying to act like it’s so hard to be so wealthy that there is no more struggle in life and you need to invent new ones for yourself.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#59

Post by Ericson2314 »

The problem with famous people unretiring and doing something different is they are kind of the nepobaby children of their former career arc selves. I both feel bad for him but am glad he's happier now.

Would I would really like bored FIRE people to do is advocate for shortening the work-week. The world needs to chill the fuck out, and leisure should be more abundant. Bored retirees have a unique credibility in advocating for this, and the time to do both grassroots and grasstops advocacy. (Think tanking and lobbying are descendants of the original retirement project, if you think about aristocracry as the original governmance system.)

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#60

Post by ares623 »

adrianN wrote: post #51
somenameforme wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is really accurate because the traditional state of society, and one that remains in the 'developing world' which is almost certainly still the wide majority of the world at this point, is families living in multi generational housing with many people contributing. This enables older to generations to comfortably 'retire' when they see fit, and provides financial comfort and security. It's basicall…

I think you might be romanticizing multi-generational households a bit. We introduced social security systems precisely because the family systems failed so frequently. In all but the richest families no retirement as we understand it today was possible. Illness or death of the main bread winners was fatal to the whole household and children were expected to work as soon as possible.

I base my multigenerational dream on the documentary “Encanto”
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