inc.com
Google co-founder Sergey Brin on leaving retirement to work on AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37226292 - Aug 2023 (25 comments)
Back at Google Again, Cofounder Sergey Brin Just Filed His First Code Request - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34645311 - Feb 2023 (16 comments)
We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the adrenaline rush of experiencing the blues Monday morning!?
Another colleague used to drive up to the parking lot of their previous employer, post lay-off., so that he could feel normal., and he did this for well over 6 - 8 months. Pack bags, wave to his wife and family, drive up in his Porsche to the parking lot and I guess feel normal !?
I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google.
But that "work as identity" may still be a problem. For a lot of us, what we do is who we are, and so not having any work to do is like not having an identity.
I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often. In CA people ask that so they can mentally rank you as worth their time or not. Elsewhere, people ask you how your weekend went, or how your family is. One of the awesome parts of moving to Austin was not hearing that as the first question as much.
I moved to California a few years ago from the Least Coast (insert shaka, surfer, wave emojis here) and had multiple other out-of-towners in the same situation as me say the exact opposite at a party. They all were adamant that they had yet to hear "what do you do [for a living]?" since they'd moved as they did ad nauseum when they lived on the other side of the country.
I've not noticed either way. My pet theory is that people hear this frequently if their social and professional lives bleed into each other which they do if one lives in a town dominated by a specific industry or profession. Those moving westward during COVID and remote work suddenly had to contend with this much less.
Wealth signaling still seems to me to be done primarily by conspicuous consumption and expensive hobbies.
A few times I've quit a FAANG job with no plan for after other than to wander, and both times the lack of professional competition meant not just coasting horizontally but that I was actually lowering myself somehow. Hard to explain, and I don't fully understand it.
I also noticed most people, especially women, determine your value by your 'right now'. While intentionally unemployed I'd answer truthfully and with a smile, 'I'm unemployed!' which visibly confused people.
when i’m working i find retired people boring
when im taking 6+ month break i find the nervous energy of employed people annoying
ultimately, comfort comes from being around like minded people
then again seeking comfort rings hollow to me, even though it’s quite enjoyable in the moment.
Much less true in other places (e.g. Midwest), where community / taking care of others is valued.
The proper term is "Funemployed"
Can also describe my job as 'endlessly deliberate over the placement of pixels'
Getting asked what I do for a living is totally fine. It’s on my website, the whole world can find out if they bother to search. I’ll save you a search.
The point is people are different. Not everyone wants to share their private interests with you, especially if you just met. What you consider interesting conversation, well, for some of us it’s just intrusive. I also don’t care what you like to do 99% of the time. I’ve been socially forced to sit through way too many of these “interesting conversations”.
If you’re at my home for dinner, I hope anyone that still feels this way does answer “the details of my private life are none of your business” when I’m trying to get to know them as a friend, so I know never to waste another good meal on them.
"I mostly breathe. It's a bore but you gotta do it"
"I meant for a living"
"Same"
I identify more with myself as a child than I ever did with my work.
Why would I identify with someone else’s goals that I’m being paid to help achieve?
> 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.
It's also not really weird for a job to become such a big part of your identity, when people spend most of their time at work or at home thinking about their work.
Definitely one of his more interesting qualities.
That's only 1/2 of the dynamic. People also like to assign an identity to others.
For example, if I say, "I'm semi-retired." ... the follow-up question is always "Oh, so what did you do before that?" ... which is polite coded-speak for, "Did you inherit money or what work did you do for money that put you in the position to do that?"
People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc. Having a "no identity" stance isn't really a satisfactory answer for many listeners. They want to know more.
EDIT to replies: I do understand the harmless "small talk" aspect. I should've added more to re-emphasize the "people assigning identity" aspect.
Once I reply to the followup question with "Oh, I used to do consulting for finance" what then happens is others then introduce me as "And this is jasode -- he was a consultant for X". My ex-consultant life that I last did over 15 years ago is now part of a tagline/subheading associated with my name even though I never intended it.
The point is other people have this irresistible urge to "fill in the blank" with an identity -- especially an identity that is tied to how one earned money. I'm not complaining about this and it's just an observation of what humans naturally do.
Having a natural ebb & flow to conversation is all true but that's not the issue. Let me restate it differently.
It's ok and natural to ask what people do/did for work. It's also natural to respond and share what was a significant aspect of their life.
The meta-observation is: others then like to compress whatever life narrative they hear into a "shorthand" or "identity" -- even if the recipient never intended it to be his/her identity. Several parent comments mention "their work being their identity is the problem". My point is that the identity we get tagged with is often outside of our control and we didn't create the problem of work being our identity.
My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant". For that identity to change, I'd have to do something new that was significant enough to override that ... such as... get into another career, open a restaurant, become founder of a startup, etc.
How does one have "no identity related to their job"? Sometimes you can't unless one wants to be evasive about what one does to earn money.
The fact that you’re neighbors with these people changes things. Maybe it’s a wedge into a Socratic discussion about how work isn’t and has never been your identity, where you come to some new and better mutual understanding.
But yeah it’s challenging. If people are so accustomed to viewing about themselves and others thru the conventional status/hierarchical lens… sometimes they can’t understand that it’s a lens and not reality.
The obvious answer is to have some other identifier that supersedes the job. Do you have some other interest or hobby that you spend your time doing? That you talk about all the time?
People get associated with their job because it’s probably the thing they spend the most time on and it’s also a common topic of conversation. If every time someone asked you about your job you said, “it’s good” and steered the conversation into a story about your latest epic ski trip, you’d probably be the “guy who skis” instead of the “ex-consultant”.
In modern life, yes. I wonder if it was such a low risk topic as we moved towards the past? For example the fear of the stranger is something that is very common in past writing across a number of cultures. If you met a stranger and they said they were a soldier it would have different ramifications than if they said they were a baker. Also in smaller social groups that required the work of everyone to survive it was a way of measuring the resources available in said group.
I am probing for topics of mutual interest, or topics that make other people passionate, to learn more about them generally.
In some people, this is completely orthogonal to their careers, but most of the time, there is an overlap. Like, I haven't yet met a railway engineer who wasn't a raging railway nerd at the same time.
I definitely find this more true in some cultures. e.g. silicon valley, it seems people want to know where you're at on the "hierarchy". Many parts of Asia too, you get treated differently if you're a low level worker, regular worker, executive etc.
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.
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 through family. My younger self is certainly guilty of giving someone a strange look when within the first five minutes of meeting them, they told me whose cousin they were.
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.
For many people, what they do for work is by far their biggest interest.
Many people have few to zero hobbies. They fill their days with work and then distraction.
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.
Tech bros would mock Finance bros who would open a conversation with anyone who would listen with "Hi, I'm Marcus, I work at Goldman Sachs" and yet here we are now ...
"Hi, I'm Marcus, I work at Google"
"Whatever I feel like"
It's very helpful to zoom out and do LIFE for a change. I got laid off three years ago, started my own project. Didn't take off, but also two mini-mes showed up during that time, and I am infinitely grateful that I could punt on work and just be there.
Hashtag blessed and all. That backrent I owe now, well, that's a bitch.
I will say in Sergey Brin’s case, he had the unique opportunity to go back to work with the best and brightest without any friction, and nobody could tell him “hey maybe your credentials don’t quite stack up high enough for this department yeah?”
But for the rest of us, there’s FOSS, there’s computer repair, home automation, day trading a small fraction of your wealth, volunteer work at hospitals and libraries, gig work apps like taskrabbit…
If you are bored after being away from work for even a month, I’m not sure I could be friends with you.
I wonder if that'd still be the case should he drive a Ford Focus.
Tying your identity to the place where you're helpful and where that help is appreciated and acknowledged isn't mental illness.
Do you think it is healthy behavior to go to a parking lot at 0900 every day and do nothing because you mentally cannot face the idea of not going to an office?
That's just your take. We don't know where he sat in the team, so we can assume the idea that he wasn't appreciated by his teammates as incorrect. He didn't make the cut based on unknown metrics from upper management, but they have their own reasons for doing things.
Getting in to the parking lot of the old office sounds way healthier than not making it out of bed at all.
Missing your ex and lying around depressed in bed is less unhealthy than getting into the car and sitting outside their house.
At minimum I think it would be healthier to tie part of your identify to an aspect of your career you enjoy rather than a specific employer itself.
Instead he chose to sit alone in a parking lot so he could feel "normal". Feeling compelled to do a specific action (excluding things like breathing) just to feel normal has a name, and that name is "addiction". It is not usually considered a good thing.
I didn’t experience an identity crisis for a single day. I didn’t feel insecure or anxious about not working. The only real friction came from my family.
One big difference was social life. In India, I was constantly meeting people—connections were easy and organic. In the US, maintaining a daytime social life felt much harder. Everyone is on a treadmill—insurance, income, careers—often not by choice. I know there are ways to build community here, but in India it just happened naturally.
My extended family struggled more than I did. Once it became clear the break wasn’t temporary, there was a kind of quiet depression around it. I initially framed it as “taking a breather” by doing an executive MBA, but the break never really ended.
What eventually brought me back wasn’t overt pressure, but practical limits: my spouse’s mental health, and the constraints of India’s education system for our partially disabled, special-ed child. Those realities mattered more than any career concern.
The primary reason for this is the built environment we live in here in the United States. It's very difficult to organically build connections when you have to drive a car somewhere to have basic social interactions. Even some of the items you mention, like insurance and income are very much informed by the requirement to have a car to participate in society.
One simple reason I think is overall US is very rich so people just can have anything they need on their own and sharing small things which lead to more interaction is simply not needed.
We have neighbors - sometimes we need someone to grab a package, or we make too much food and we share, &c. or we run into each other walking to a restaurant or through the park. But this isn't the norm. We live in a neighborhood built before the introduction of cars, so homes are built a little bit closer together, but not too close, and we have mixed-use developments and a good level of density to support restaurants and other amenities.
You can't have spontaneous interactions like that easily in the United States because we build too much sprawl, visiting people or showing up to a bar requires a drive, and in the end you wind up just staying at home participating in surrogate activities like social media.
It really comes down solely to cars and car-only infrastructure that degrades our social interactions to an extreme extent.
-edit-
I do want to mention, at least when I was a kid/teenager I recall we used to show up to people's houses uninvited/unannounced too. But we did not talk to our neighbors. That was a weird thing. There are some cultural things here. But also even if we wanted to visit someone, well, gotta hop in the car. Maybe stop and get gas, and the next thing you know, eh it's too much effort. Might as way stay home. That's kind of how that works. The car-only model that is implemented in most of America, particularly the cities not so much rural areas, is a leading cause of cultural and social malaise I believe in the West.
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 working at Costco for years. I don’t know them. It’s not the built environment. I’d need to take effort to build a relationship with them. My neighbor would. I’m simply not so inclined.
Hardship can force it more often, perhaps, but that is accidental and secondary.
In all the times I've traveled on forms of "mass transit" (airplanes, subways, trains) the only time I've ever really talked to someone was at the seat-together dining on a long-distance train. Otherwise you can sit next to someone for 20+ hours and never say much more than "excuse me" if you need to use the restroom.
(Another counter to this is kids, if you have kids and there are kids anywhere within screaming distance, they will find each other and immediately be best friends. Parents get dragged along - https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-2/cafe/ )
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 cashier precisely because of the environmental structure.
Contrast that with walking down the street to a local store that one of your neighbors owns. I bet you would already have a relationship unless you chose not to. Why? Because you'd also see them at your kids birthday party, or you'd see them at the bark down the street, or out on a walk.
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.
Socialization isn't a choice one makes, it's supposed to be organic. The fact that you have to choose and make decisions around interacting with other people proves my point.
That's a very interesting observation!
I have a theory that reducing "friction" is actually a net negative after a certain point, and US society is way past that point. But everybody keeps doing it, because they're myopically focused on little problems and don't see the big picture or down have a full understanding of all the alternatives.
People need external constraints, because those are the things that keep certain internal drives under control.
It's like when food was scarce it made sense to gorge yourself on calorie rich things and avoid physical effort unless absolutely necessary. Now that food is abundant and it's actually possible to nearly completely eliminate physical activity, we have an obesity epidemic, because those drives no longer hit external limits and are now out of control.
I’m not actually sure what you don’t get.
I’m all for not living a lower level grind and riding a dirt bike. Most jobs simply aren’t interesting.
So very sad.
Their point is that the sheer allure for many people of that level of influence is powerful and makes other options likely less appealing.
It aligns with a common design principle: constraints often make a problem space easier to navigate. I suspect life is similar. Having limited time creates a "specialness" that is easily lost when you suddenly have an infinite amount of time at your disposal.
I think that kind of thing strikes many people. Sometimes like with Socrates and his daimonion which restrained him from risk and other times like with one of my favourite lines in all literature where Ahab of Moby Dick remarks:
> What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me?
I find so much of this relatable in my own way, billions absent. It's good to see there are others who feel this way. Community from afar.
We know they lied about video metrics; everyone has to pivot to video to stay competitive (with fradulent metrics)
Given the suspicion of fake accounts and further ad fraud how much have companies felt they have to follow trends rather than come up with sort of, their own organic business models
I remember seeing an interview (Dwarkesh?) with Sholto Douglas who had been working at Google at the time (now at Anthropic) who said he would work late there and the only other person was Sergey Brin, apparently wanting to be part of (or following) the development/training process.
Doesn't mean soft power isn't important, because most of the time there isn't such a hard conflict. Well, hopefully.
And "Don't Be Evil" was a long time ago in a Google far, far away.
Youtube comments are completely censored in real time with some sort of AI, it's horrible
Let's say you have Facebook, which is notorious for banning people yet never seems to ban the things people report that should be banned. That's a real life example, but take any hypothetical company
If someone posts x bad thing and doesn't get banned, do we immediately take our torches and storm the premeses to protest? Maybe, maybe not; "look, scale is hard" (and sometimes calls to remove things outright get politicized, as seen in the last few years, so sometimes it's a tricky line)
That would be... not fine, but more fine than it is now. The lack of fairness in the bidirectionality ensures that you, Joe Schmoe, get a month ban for calling someone a jerk while the most egregious hate or racism or... anything... gets a quick check followed by This Does Not Violate Our Community Guidelines
(And of course because these services are monopolies, well, too bad, you just have to suffer. Hope you don't need the information from that Facebook page, because Facebook will tend to make it borderline impossible to view something public without an account)
Facebook is much worse because everyghing on there is user gemerated. Any small company would be just crushed by governments if they would have similar issues.
If the DEA and ATF wants to staff every shipping hub with people checking every package, that's fine by them (though admittedly it would hurt revenues).
For Google and Facebook and all the other user-content sites, it's just impossible to actually, fully uphold the law themselves, so their best bet is just to try to make it a pleasant experience for the users and leave upholding the law to the upholders of the law.
OTOH deep fake gepolitical commentators are all over the place, and it is allowed (sometimes Youtube shows a label, sometimes the channel itself describes itself as a "fan channel" of the commentator, and not the real deal. Sometimes e.g. for Shorts you can see in the info whether things are AI generated).
I don't mean this in a creepy way at all, but I got the impression the greatest source of joy was hanging around with younger people. A hungry grad, a cleaner, a nurse, male, female, whatever.
I'm sure he enjoyed his peers as well, but I could detect a shade of boredom of those interactions, which inevitably had stress and responsibility attached.
I think what I'm trying to say is that work isn't just about challenge, it's about socialization and having fun. And one of the greatest benefits of being financially independent is being able to navigate to those kinds of moments without the pressure of being on the make.
Is it? I know people who are really happy without doing much in their retirement. Probably because they weren't workaholics.
To my mind, if one doesn't have hobbies during the working years, then they will struggle to find purpose when they retite.
I am saving up to retire early. If I mention this to friends, most look at me with big eyes and ask “But what will you spend your day on then!?” in a sceptical tone.
I imagine they think I want to drink beers and play golf all day every day, or something like that.
I’m a bit heart broken, that so many of my friends cannot imagine being masters of their own time, without thinking it would be bad for them and/or unproductive.
They seem relieved when I explain it’s more of the perpetual weekend I’m aiming for: sleeping till I wake, reading, cooking, hanging with friends and family, coding on my FOSS projects etc.
As a developer if, let's say, AI does make my profession no longer a viable option monetarily, what would happen if my entire identity is tied to it?
You cannot fully control your career no matter what. Many external factors can affect it and you deeply if that's your identity.
What if you can't even teach after retiring because nobody else cares about it?
For me it's about risk/reward and unfortunately in our current system the fact that all my efforts reward someone else disproportionately more completely taints it.
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. It's completely up to you.
For some people, this lack of structure is crushing. For others, it's liberating.
It's similar to having spent significant time alone as an adult - some people can't deal with it, some can.
I meet a lot of people who are like "I haven't figured out what i will do when i retire". These are the people i worry about, because there isn't anything to figure out. They want a structure that probably won't exist. They will likely tire of trying to force their own structure on it, and seek structure elsewhere (IE work).
In the past 3 weeks i've done the following:
Building powered paper airplanes with the kids
Mentoring high school and college students
Advising startups.
Woodworking
Hacking on CNC machines
Hacking on minecraft mods.
Hacking on compilers.
Playing video games.
and a lot more.
The next 3 weeks may be the same or different, depending on lots of things (mood, energy, schedules).
There are also days i do nothing cool or useful at all, and feel great (and unapologetic - nobody gets to judge my retirement but me, my spouse, and my kids :P) about it
The world is really big, and has lots to do. You just have to be able to drive yourself because you aren't being forced into doing anything at all.
In the end - for some i also feel it's similar to divorce - lots of people don't get divorced because they don't want to deal with being alone.
Retirement similarly forces you to spend a lot of time with yourself (even if you have an SO and even if they are retired). Lots of people don't like that, at all, for various reasons. Work lets them ignore it.
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.
It can be something other than a job. It just can't be done alone.
We are social creatures and need to be needed by each other. Luckily there are plenty of people in need.
A more general need from what I see is to engage with and to accomplish non-trivial things.
For some it might be helping others people, for others it might be learning, researching or creating.
To each their own.
My perspective on these things have changed when I saw a successful old friend of mine thank his friend for asking his help. I feel like being asked to help by a friend might actually be a privilege sometimes.
I FIREd 3 years ago and don’t miss working one bit.
I think leaving work becomes more difficult for those who do need to feel valued and especially if they don’t have interests outside of it. There are many people like that.
I think this was illustrated well in the movie I Am Legend with Will Smith. He creates artificial situations where he is interacting with mannequins in order to fulfill this very basic need.
Its interesting that this part of the movie was missed by a lot of friends and family until I pointed it out to them.
I'd think this is universal but it's interesting to see others in this thread that disagree.
Is this generated by AI? English is all over the place in the article.
(If they used AI to create the article and put these baits in there, I might as well skip all the nonsense and let AI consume it for me.)
Company got sold, the owners were great and made sure everyone was taken care of.
Almost all the owners are now back working in one way or another. It's about +5 year since the sale.
- 1 spent the first year travelling
- 1 did loads of house stuff
- 2 got really deep into woodworking
Still the same people; I just think they got bored of the banality.
Additionally, I could see myself going back to work at a company if I saw a truly exciting project. But that excludes around 98% of the jobs I see out there.
No, the next generation of privacy management experiences that will impact billions of users configuring their privacy settings isn't interesting.
There are various ways to look at numbers but my thumb rule is 4% inflation 9% growth keeps you perennially happy with some choppy years of course. 4% inflation 9% growth implies you can withdraw 4-5% every year and still have equivalent portfolio in inflated money.
Five years ago I paid for “market rate“ insurance through my business for my family because we did not qualify for ACA subsidies. The cost was about $40,000 per year.
Good advice though, it really felt like a good point in my career to move on somewhere new.
I think the more important goal in FIRE is the 'FI' part - financial independence. Something that allows you to retire early - not necessary that you have to use this privilage. Something that allows you to next day take a day off or week off or 1 year sabbatical to recharge without asking anyone for permission or worrying if you will be able to pay the bills.
I think even in 4-hour-workweek Tim Ferriss called it taking mini-retirements throughout your life rather than at the end of you life.
Financial Independence, You're Not The Boss Of Me.
Once you're financially independent, at a level that you're comfortable with, you don't have to put up with crappy bosses.
If you're Sergey Brin, you kind of don't really have a boss, do you?
If you "retire" into working at a hardware store, or volunteering at the Humane Society, or just shifting into a lower-stress job...
Well, that's the dream, isn't it?
I was so happy when I realized that, unless there were dramatic shifts in the markets, I would always be able to find "decent" work for great wages. And maybe I could be patient and find "good" work for "pretty great" wages.
Once I had that level of comfort, I was way, way more brave at work. I thought, "Well, they could fire me for their own reasons, any day. So, I might as well do The Right Thing™. If they fire me for doing The Right Thing™, well, I didn't really want to work there anyway, did I?"
And then there were dramatic shifts in the markets, lol. But fortunately for me, I had built up a nest egg, and now I've shifted into a lower-stress job.
I honestly don't know what advice I'd give to younger folks. Move to Norway?
But I think "Fuck you money" implies, "I honestly don't have to worry about money, ever again."
Now, we all have different definitions for that, but the kind of thing I was talking about is definitely not "Fuck you money," to me.
I think if I had "Fuck you money," my best friends and close family would all have their medical debts paid off. I think my parents and in-laws would have their mortgages paid off.
FUM is the freedom to walk away. FMM is the power make your own terms.
Finding a purpose outside of work seems like the main issue most people struggle with when doing FIRE. Once you get going, the saving is automatic and addictive to some, but figuring out what to do with your life to give it meaning outside of a traditional work context is not just an issue with FIRE.
I said "Yes! If you don't mind that all the balls land on the floor."
Sergey found someone else to juggle with.
That person became CEO of a major Alphabet company.
Work feels pretty stifling to me.
That is exactly what I do now. Every question I've ever had I now have the time to devote to answering it. I take classes, I volunteer, I mentor Comp. Sci. students. But, more than anything, I still write code. I spent the last few months creating an LLM from scratch which was incredibly fun.
That said, I have a friend who will probably work until he dies. His only real interest in life is his job. I'm not suggesting that is a bad thing; its more to the point that "retirement" isn't a panacea for everyone.
Stephen Hawking, Einstein, Marie Curie, and Linus Pauling never retired. Did they not "truly live"?
That's also the reason why these multi-billionaires never retire. They've retired from real work a long time ago.
Same way that dusting your cupboards is work.
One is doing lifework, the other is doing labor.
It's pretty cool doing whatever I want for now, but I don't think I can do this for another 40 years. I feel like there's something missing - the sense of accomplishment whenever I finish a task. Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.
So maybe at the end of summer 2026 I'll wait for recruiter emails and start responding to some of them. I'm done with applying to 100 jobs to get one response. Maybe I'll try a startup job to experience working in a place that doesn't have a 50-page document describing level expectations.
I don't think I un-retired but I'm performing some commercialy valuable tasks for someone.
So just decided to get a motorbike license and go check out Asia.
Ended up finding a partner (totally unexpected) selling everything, moving abroad, marrying them and now expecting a child (planned), all in a manner of 3 years.
Has been quite the joyful and interesting experience, all after I had the deeply depressing feeling of having “solved life” at my nice position in the EU.
There are so many places in the world where you can feel you are actually doing great service to the community, on a shoestring budget and feel happy and fulfilled.
This comment reminded me of a book I read recently - Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anne Lembke. She talks about how pleasure and pain and experienced by the same region of the brain and they need to be balanced. I'd highly recommend reading that book.
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 millions in the divorce proceedings to get RFK Jr into a cabinet level position to gut billions in research spending. :(
Whats the quality difference between default ChatGPT and Thinking? Is it an extra 20% quality boost or is the difference night/day?
I've often imagined it would be great to have some kind of chrome extension or 3rd party tool to always run prompts in multiple thinking tiers so you can get an immediate response to read while you wait for the thinking models to think.
I use Thinking and Pro. I don't use the default ChatGPT so can't comment on that. The difference between Thinking and Pro is modest but detectable. The 20 minute thinking times are with Pro, not with Thinking. But Pro only allows 60k tokens per prompt so I sometimes can't use it.
In the $200/month subscription they give you access to a "heavy thinking" tier for Thinking which increases test time compute by maybe 30% compared to what you get in Plus.
I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall. It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.
For a while people couldn't see how Google could catch up, either. Have a bit of imagination.
In any case, I welcome the renewed intense competition.
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.
I also think this doesn't make sense, because he certainly stayed on top of things
Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money.
It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommendations (even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible :)
I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though.
I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.
Alphabet has effectively monetized the world economy and gained outsized influence on policy, and Brin has about 25% of voting shares on the company
His money is on advocating that people widely forfeit a right acquired by labor movements in the early 20th century, and through his ex, on public-sector scientific research becoming unviable
This amounts nakedly (if fortuitously) a further consolidation of power and capital in the hands of a powerful few
(In my head at 2am, I was (wrongly) taking that as a given, understood by everyone, and then remarking on a tangent from there. About the implications of 60hr/wk at Google specifically. And then going from there, about how maybe it didn't have to be like that. Moot for Google in reality, but it makes a good example for what-if thinking or daydreaming about how we'd like the next good tech employer to be.)
There are so many things worth doing in so many areas that pinning your whole weekly life on a single one is just an immense waste.
Cap the time that a company gets to have from you, and achieve so much more.
* You like the craft.
* You want to be there for your team.
* You like that your financial needs are taken care of, so that you don't have to think about that.
* You like that everyone else's financial needs are taken care of, because you want everyone to be happy.
* You like that there's alignment by everyone on this. (Even though there will be disagreements on, say, how best to accomplish the mission.)
If someone gets in and doesn't actually have or find motivations like that, or doesn't rise to the occasion despite help, I guess they'd be managed out. That cultural mismatch wouldn't be good for anyone involved.
You answered your question by yourself: the company has to prevent these morons from getting in.
That solves half of the problem of typical work dynamics already; the second half, preventing unqualified morons from getting in and setting themselves up for life by being paid good money for doing nothing, would need to be solved in some other way.
If you put yourself in their shoes, you realise that you have to give advice for the 10-20th percentile parents (or worse) because you are giving the same advice to everyone.
The alternative would be to offer more complex advice such as "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", but the perception is that's too difficult for people to follow.
So you end up making very defensive (and therefore onerous) recommendations.
An interesting fact is that, since the introduction of the "baby sleeps on their back, alone", SIDS has gone down, but flat heads have gone up. It's probably been a good tradeoff, but it's still a tradeoff.
Also, I've seen a second time mother refer to "don't cosleep" advice as "western nonsense" which I found funny because it puts things in perspective - vast swathes of the world think cosleeping with your child is safe, natural and normal.
There seems to be much less hallucination of facts than in other tools I've tried and whenever Gemini makes assumptions on stuff I didn't explicitly specify in the prompt, it says so. The answers also always have nice structure: it starts with a short and concise version, then gives me options and more details and considerations.
I also like the feature that I can make it remember facts across chats. I'm a physicist by training and I've told Gemini so, so now every time I ask something, it gives me an answer perfectly tailored for a physicist (often with mathematical formulas, etc.).
Of course maybe your hobbies or your dad’s hobbies are social. when someone says “hobbies” to me I generally think of things done mostly alone and I know for me, that’s not enough
He's not a farmer. Just a farm tool collector.
only a few at a time, of course, maybe only two, and by rotation. and then maybe i would narrow it down to two or three for long term.
would try to make money from a few of them too.
I try remind myself of this with the Bukowski poem 'air and light and time and space': https://allpoetry.com/poem/14326888-air-and-light-and-time-a...
but maybe being in a corporate environment (any any env) shapes your thinking in such a way that it’s really hard to think outside tha conditioning. feels like that to me only a few years int working
Those hobbies, interests etc sounds like middle class thing where people take upon gardening, cooking, hiking, surfing or some such that they couldn't do enough while working. For people like Google founders they would've had any adventure they seek outside work anywhere in they world every weekend.
People forget Bill Gates advised (maybe still consulted) by MS long after he formally moved away from any official position in company.
A man who can pay for the livelihoods of like-minded individuals to work on a common goal sounds like a dream.
FIRE is sick. Go for it as soon as possible, before marriage.
They never have to work. They do it because they want to.
Retirement implies there was work you didn't want to do. You did it because you had (or wanted) to make some money. Now you have enough money. You've retired.
Hell, it isn't even applicable to many wealthy software engineers who got rich from tech startups. Many are coding as much as when they were working.
But I was still "working" the whole time. I was running a small startup, and still keeping up on tech and taking speaking gigs. I was not great at fully retiring.
I unretired when the second kid got to 1st grade. We could no longer travel on a whim and the house was empty 6 hours a day. I didn't seek work, but someone reached out with an interesting job and I didn't say no.
Funny enough, my wife and I were just talking about how we were both bad at retirement (she also retired and has since gone back to work). But we talked about how the next retirement will be better, because the kids will be gone and we'll just sit around making art and building Lego all day.
We'll see if that actually happens!
Retirement has the definition to stop working. One could argue that another definition may be that you reach an older age and start receiving pension payouts (regardless of whether you keep working or not).
But having a passive income alone simply doesn't mean retirement.
It lines up with the AI arms race kicking into overdrive around ChatGPT's triumph in late 2022. Brin pops out of hiding right then, admitting Google "messed up" and starts coding, analysing losses, and basically playing dictator with his super-voting shares to shove the company back on track.
Rivals like OpenAI yanked him in and now he's in the office daily because the "trajectory of AI is so exciting" - translation: his ego couldn't handle watching his empire get outpaced, and with those voting rights, he can bulldoze through bureaucracy to keep the throne.
Ultimately, it's less about some profound quest for purpose and more about a control freak safeguarding his legacy and billions as the tech world burns. He never really let his kingdom go.
There were a bunch of people, from across the country, MANY in retirement, trying their best to sell themselves that they are the right candidate.
Sergey can just make a phone call and he gets to build Gemini and run a billion dollar organization and have meaning in old-age. This is what wealth buys you. The rest of us, I guess, we will be arm-wresteling for the few open oppertunities to make an impact.
"The tech founder’s return to full-time work is a reminder that even billions can’t guarantee a happy retirement if you don’t also do this. "
The only thing I don't quite get about Brin is going back to Google. Since he doesn't need the money, why not support open source AI projects?
People often like doing the things they’re good at and not necessarily because they’re interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mole:_Undercover_in_North_...
The welfare program (kontanthjælp) is difficult to join and you are ineligible if your net worth exceeds 15.500 DKK (~€2000).
From my point of view, you have to be very creative to live a fulfilling life in Denmark, with such limited finances.
I find it difficult to relate to such worlds. I make up all kinds of explanations like, "well, it must be because while they have food and housing, they don't have any funds to entertain themselves". Or, "well, it must be because they simply haven't had sufficient education to reach an activation level where the higher tiers of Maslow's come into their line of sight".
And then I read about plenty of counter-examples, like wealthy offspring living the textbook aimless/dissolute/pick-your-adjective life, or the ennui of able-bodied welfare recipients with quite reasonable spending cash from generous Scandinavian welfare regimes when one considers the mind boggling amount of free media, free libraries, free parks, free entertainment in general in the developed world. Perhaps this is just part of their human condition for people suffering from this malaise.
And here I sit, drowning in ideas of what I would be interested to pursue to know our beautiful universe if only I had the time. So much so I write them down into a file just to quiet the cacophony in my head like a dog seeing squirrels everywhere he looks, just so I can get real work done on a timely basis, haha.
When once asked whether I'd ever be bored with eternal youth and boundless resources, I immediately replied an eternity is still too little time to satisfy my curiosity.
Actually just jobless, but I was doing side projects here and there
Retirement gets boring fast —- and you lose connections to the rhythm of society fast.
For the vast majority of humans, an idle mind is depressing and destructive
It’s as if they’ve never heard of Maslow‘s Hierarchy of Needs before and further did they don’t know Self Actualizing is right at the very top.
Without that key stone on the top the human being is still a wanting animal. And if you somehow “mission complete” one Self Actualizing, then you immediately start to want something fresh “purpose” etc.
And obviously Self Actualizing doesn’t have to come in the form of work, although often it does.
"Self Actualization" being a primary universal human need is just one guy's personal opinion, it isn't a law of nature or physics.
I am partial fire and I feel that line of demarcation personally. I've also watched it play out in others like clockwork. As wealth grows, new responsibilities emerge.
[0] https://www.oesterreich.gv.at/de/themen/arbeit_beruf_und_pen... (only in German unfortunately)
[1] https://academic.oup.com/geronj/article-abstract/46/1/P9/638...
Of course it does. I've seen it in my parents' generation: many wanted to reach retirement do "do nothing" and, well, they just lost their marbles. Doing nothing is neither good for the body, nor for the mind. Endless TV watching or endless pina colada drinking in the pool (or both at the same time): idleness brings absolutely nothing good.
But my parents' friends who kept working a bit (like my godmother who kept supervising her real estate agency): she stayed sharp and fit.
People think they're going to read and do exercice etc. but truth is: most are going to do jack absolutely shit. And turn to the latter.
So keeping partially active is the best thing possible.
I see it with my mother-in-law: 70 y/o, still working, daily, with my wife (they own a little SME). It keeps her in the loop: she still knows how to use a computer, her mind is quick. She's not idling.
The financial aspect of it all is something else: but people doing nothing is not what a society needs.
I took a semi retirement approach to the business, there really wasn't a lot of things to do, my role was sort of just "managing" programmers. I got so much free time that I could even start a second business on the side.
Despite my best ability to stretch my work, I couldn't even fill up half of my working hours. One would have thought that this is heaven. But the time I was most free was also the time I was most miserable. I wasn't happy, I was gaining weight, I was perennially asking myself why the business couldn't be bigger and I couldn't sell it, so that I can be real millionaires and billionaires with financial freedom!
Then fate intervened, the sudden fortune disappeared and I no longer had the luxury of just "managing people"; I have to do hands-on. And it was this activity, the feeling that I was contributing to something, that I was writing code again and actually building stuffs, that made me happy again.
Today we are bigger than what we once we were, but still, I am writing code and pretty much hands-on.I vow that I will never retire, even though if I could. Because it's the meaningful work that sustains life and provides happiness. Being able to work on it is a luxury that I will never want to give up, ever.
For you.
For me, it is having the time to do what I wish. Currently helping a friend with recovery after a major surgery. Next month, who knows?
No, it's not at all the same as "meaningful work".
At least in part, I do not need the attaboys or regular 'sense of accomplishment' that one get from plate-spinning or other meaningful work.
Retirement is a scam. Figure out what you want to do and do it until you drop.
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.
The fact he's allowed back inside Google means Google still has a massively unresolved workplace sexual harassment issue.
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.
The article actually includes some of these examples, but I get the feeling that a lot of readers did not make it past the Brin part.
I believe I'd do the same, forget about coding yet another little project/library, and go into the real world dedicate part of my time to causes that can't pay much but have meaning to others.
In most cases I know of recreational employment has little to do with their former employment. They often put in a lot of hours and it is still "work" in the ordinary sense but it is entirely self-directed.
The FIRE types are not working to survive by definition, allowing them to work at non-profits for a pittance, run a farm with no meaningful market, do thankless maintenance on FOSS, or travel around the world saving the whales. The lack of a meaningful paycheck doesn't make these things not "jobs" for all practical purposes.
In this case I agree though, he’s the boss, not beholden to anyone. Can wander around and do what interests him.
paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29857928/
short: We have a rigorously validated antigen-specific immune tolerance platform with bystander suppression, NIH/MS Society backing and a clear translational gap.
Just be sure to swap games once in a while so you don't get bored.
Most people though genuinely like activities that most times would be impossible to monetize enough to make a living, which isn’t a problem if you’re rich. Alternatively, there are plenty of things people want to do that they have no intention of being the best at, they want to dabble.
Working on something fun and novel, like in his case Gemini, mentioned in the article, is the ideal.
As no governmental authority is actively investigating the allegations, Sergey Brin might never have the opportunity to clear his name from the Epstein child abuse allegations in the court of public opinion. If there would be an investigation and/or court case, Sergey Brin's lawyers would at least be able to legally clear his name. As long as evidence is being withheld, any association between Microsoft and Google leadership and Jeffrey Epstein will bring up rumors about their involvement in the child abuse, even though they might have been "only" clients of the JP Morgan private banking services for high net worth individual which was managed by Jeffrey Epstein.
That ship sailed a long time ago. It then proceeded to sink, ending up a haunted wreck that we might see in a new Pirates of the Caribbean film.
Problem is, Captain Jack Sparrow these days isn't what he used to be either.
If only we all had a time in life to do what we love, get paid, and face no paywalls. I call that "liberated work". If only at least retirement was like that.
Snark aside, good for him. Absolute non-news though, as is any extraordinary individual action during and contributing to a bubble. It'll be interesting to see what stays when, or if, the bubble ever pops.
Once you buy a yacht 450 million dollars of ownership in a company you had goes to people who built a beautiful thing that exists in the real world and you're on the hook for employing a lot of people to maintain it.
I take a lot more issue with accumulation and hoarding of wealth than the spending of it.
If someone starts paying the fisherman, farmer, builder, more to stop doing what they are doing and start building mega yachts, then there will be less fish, bread, and houses for others.
That said, I assume it's much simpler than that and it's just about the hypocrisy of the climate change billionaires to be bellowing out carbon while demanding the selfish greedy commoners cut our emissions.
https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/imagine-130000000-washing...
Once someone reaches that level of fame and fortune it's almost a requirement if they want to travel or have some sort of 'vacation'. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely a great problem to have, but it's one of the only ways to find privacy at that level of wealth.
If I'm ever super wealthy, I hope I can also stay somewhat anonymous so that I can walk down the street like any other person.
I'm not envious of anyone's big yacht, but I wouldn't waste my money that way (you can probably rent one for special occasions) - as long as there are still children hungry or without schooling.
That said I don't think I could ever justify spending THAT kind of money on it.
Then I got cheated out of my position in the crypto project. Literally scammed by the project founder with the full support of government regulators who are supposed to be preventing this stuff and lost all my income overnight. The regulators literally facilitated fraud instead of preventing it... And I had the pleasure of being gaslit about it while also being gaslit about COVID by a different set of regulators. I became a conspiracy theorist during this time! Now I'm forced to work again...
It's especially infuriating in this age of perma-bailouts where the system is basically bailing out everyone with assets.
I figured out that the system is a scam. I can prove it to anyone in excruciating detail, with citations. If anyone should be bailed out, it should be me. I shouldn't be forced back in the hamster wheel. It's hard to compete against others who think the system works a certain way and don't realize how the hamster wheel works. I shouldn't have to compete with delusional fools who think that their effort spent on the hamster wheel is going to yield any rewards.
Anyway it drives me nuts how the only people who can afford to retire, choose not to... And those who are desperate to retire, can't! This is so pervasive, it feels like a psyop.
All in the knowledge that no one is going to be time-tracking me or doing performance reviews, and I can just not do work at any moment I don't feel like it or have something better to do that day, like go to my private island or take my private jet to burning man etc (or as it turns out do a talk at Stanford). All while you have so much money that the price of anything from clothes to cars to houses is just some arbitrary number that has no meaning to you it is so absolutely tiny number... not that you actually buy anything yourself any more, mainly your team of personal staff deal with that grubby reality.
As for the rest of us, well we need to pay the bills while playing "the game" and politics and cowtowing to keep the money coming.
In our advanced society, with incredible automation, we should _all_ have vastly more freedom and control over our time.
How we go about changing this, I do not know, but everyone just playing along nicely in hope of one day being the one who strikes gold seems not to be working!
“Life isn’t fair, suck it up and get good!” is another form of suppression/delusion. Well, if life isn’t it fair, let us at least try to counteract that with cooperation. It seems to me that we have all the tools and technologies we need to make it a lot better.
Dreams and hopes are great - I believe we have zero actual agency, but that doesn't mean I lie in bed despairing, because not doing the work and trying will still have negative effects whether I have agency over that decision or not.
But the point is that dreams and hopes are also often used to play up the idea that "anyone" can achieve something everyone clearly can't, and so for most people, their most ambitious dreams will never be reached, and so a better gamble for most people would be to work for a society that improves everyones odds at reaching at least some of them.
It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even if that compute can be deterministic at a higher level, but you should not care.
It's a nested universes system just like in type theory. The meta of the meta. Agency is only defined within a single universe at a time.
I addressed that in my comment, but let me address it again since it's the most frequent objection to this:
> You could choose to stop doing anything.
In the mechanical sense that an "IF ... THEN ... ELSE" statement makes the program "choose" which branch to take, you're right, yes I could.
But then I'd also suffer the consequences.
As I pointed out, if I were to life down in despair and not go to work, I won't keep getting paid just because I didn't have agency over the "choice" of whether to lie down and sulk or get up and go to work.
But for "agency" to have any meaning, we can't interpret choice that way. If we don't have agency, then while I may have an artificial "choice", that "choice" can't change the outcome.
In that case every "choice" I make is just as deterministic as that IF ... THEN ... ELSE: The branch taken depends on the state of the system.
> Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(untealised futures) gives you agency. > > It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even that compute ca be deterministic but you should not care.
What you are describing is compatibilism: The school of thought on "free will" that effectively says that free will is real, but is also an illusion.
Personally I think that is basically brushing the issue under the carpet, though I also think it is the only definition of free will that is logically consistent.
I do agree with the point that you mostly should not care:
You need to mostly act as if every "choice" you make does matter, because whether or not you have control over it, if you do lie down in despair, your paychecks will stop arriving.
Cause and effect does not care whether or not you have agency.
Where I take issue with compatibilism is because there are considerable differences in how you should "choose" to act if you consider agency to be "artificial" or an illusion (compatibilism) or not exist at all (for this purpose these are pretty much equivalent) vs. if you consider it to be real.
E.g. we blame and reward people or otherwise treat people differently based on their perceived agency all the time, and a lot of that treatment is a lot harder to morally justify if you don't believe in actual agency. Real harm happens to people because we assume they have agency. If that agency isn't real, it doesn't matter if we have an illusion of it - in that case a lot of that harm is immoral.
To tie it back to the thread: Whether agency is not real at all, or just significantly constrained by circumstance, it changes the considerations in what we should expect ourselves and others to be able to overcome.
E.g. it makes no logical sense to feel bad about past choices, because they couldn't have gone differently (you can still feel bad about the effects, and commit to "choosing" differently in the future). You also then shouldn't feel bad if you haven't achieved what you wanted to if you believe the context you live within either have total control over the actions you take, or "just" a significant degree of influence over it.
And so we're back to my original argument that for most people, acting as-if they have agency by "choosing" to bet on making the surrounding conditions more amenable to good outcomes is a better bet than thinking they have agency or enough agency to achieve a different outcome.
But again: The fact that I believe we have no agency, does not mean I won't try to do things that will get me better outcomes. I just don't assume I could act any other way in a given instance than I end up acting in that given instance, any more than a movie will change if you rewind it and press play again.
That realization happens at the meta level and gives you agency in your actual universe. Even though at the meta-meta level, that realization itself can be deterministic.
Not to be confused with someone who would be external to the system and could watch your life as if it was a video tape, being omniscient. They would not have agency in your system as they can't interact with you and for them everything is predetermined, and they could compute the next state of the system from the past state. You can't but the system is impredicative enough that by recognizing this, by self-consciousness, the system effects itself toward its own favored state. And in fact, the more knowledge you have, the less agency. Because the fewer choices.
The meta level person doesn't just observe how the video. It observes the fact that people realize they are characters in a video and how that realization affects the choices they make. Given the initial conditions.
Should you have regrets in life? You had the choice of knowing more and be more able so it makes sense. Could things have happened differently given that they did and obviously you wanted back then for them to be different and wish they had been? Or did it happen because the conditions were set to happen?
Basically the question is whether we control our odds? Doing anything is controlling some odds so I'd say yes. Requires increased self consciousness. Being able to imagine what is not there. Animals seem to have that capacity. Especially humans. We can make sure that certain things don't happen by virtue of our own existence. This is our agency. Are we biased by construction toward the best odds of we can recognize them? Yes. Are their really things with the exact same odds in the system? Wouldn't that block us? Probably. But the system is already made in a way that it wouldn't happen by virtue of having (at least local) asymmetries. In practice we wouldn't be blocked. Someone perfectly symmetrical in a system that also is, would perhaps. But there might not be any two same most desired odds then so no. Unlikely.
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. Your "choice" followed the preceding state with the same predictability as a well functioning clock.
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.
But, as you said, we still all make decisions every day, and those decisions do affect our lives. So by acting as if we have agency, we can still have a positive impact, both on ourselves and others.
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.
Just like becoming a MD has much better odds at getting you some amount of money than dropping out of school. About the same path by the way.
But you can keep playing the lottery if you think it has better odds or even the same odds...
Seriously, I'm glad he came back and found something he's interested in. I bet his role has grown some responsibilities, too.
> "Going back to work just for fun might sound like a uniquely billionaire move."
Ah yeah? Can be boredom too. I fail to see why this article wants to promote this.
> Like many people, Brin had a relaxing vision for his post-working life. “I was gonna sit in cafés and study physics, which was my passion at the time,” he told the Stanford audience.
Any why would anyone take this at face value? How many of the guys there were paid to go there by the way?
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.)
What's the point of all that money if you won't even hire someone to help you find hobbies.
So many STEM universities have online courses. The art world froths itself mad over smart people with stupid money. Local projects beg for angels like him.
Hell even just doing the AI schtick but for free open source or as a pet startup.
My mind reels with ideas. Why didn't his?
It's something you can do when you have money and time but no ideas.
That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.
My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.
One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.
This new world of low fertility, small household size or even people living entirely alone, high external dependence, and the consequent broad insecurity - is still extremely new. And I do not think it will survive the test of time.
Pre-1960s, the elderly were living in SROs, often windowless, with family (without aid or care), in county poorhouses, or marked as senile and sent to a mental hospital.
Retirement and living with family was viable for many as long as they remained healthy. People imagine Norman Rockwell. Reality was very different.
It was not because family systems were failing. It came about in the era of the great depression, and the idea was rather unpopular at first, particularly among groups like farmers who had no interest in the new taxes that would come alongside it. Some of the arguments in favor of it were it being a way to get older individuals out of the work force in order to make room for younger workers. You have to keep in mind it was introduced at a time when unemployment rates were upwards of 20%. And retirement was and is absolutely possible. When people own their land and house and have basic maintenance skills, your overhead costs become extremely low.
Of course there's also no reason these things must be mutually exclusive. I think the ideal is to learn from the past, which proved its sustainability over millennia, and work to improve it. In modern times we've instead set out to completely replace it - or at least build up something from scratch, and what we've created just doesn't seem particularly sustainable.
In the early days, many considered Sergey Brin to be the soul or the conscience of Google. He was reportedly the driving force in Google originally pulling out of China rather than capitulating to the censorship regime [1]. This was also after the apparent state-sponsored hack of Google in China [2] so perhaps the motivations were mixed? I don't know.
But Sergey I think is a good example of someone for whom his creation outgrew him. I'm reminded of an old Jeff Atwood blog post where he quoted Accidental Empires [3]. Sergey was a commando. By 2010 Google needed an army. Now? Police.
GoogleX has Sergey's playground but if you look at the track record, possibly the only success I think is Waymo. Glass (mentioned in the article) was not a success and his affair with a subordinate also destroyed his marriage [4].
To me it felt like Sergey was drifting many years before he stepped away. His stepping away felt more like formalizing something that had already happened.
I'm not a billionaire. Not even close. Honestly, I think I'm glad about that because it seems like despite being surrounded with unimaginable wealth, many such people end up isolated and rudderless, desperately dsearching for meaning and connection. Or maybe that's just cope (from me).
The article mentions Gates and how he keeps busy with his philanthropy. Well, there's another piece of common ground between Gates and Brin: Jeffrey Epstein [5]. That's not intended as an implicit or explicit accusation of child predation by Gates or Brin or even of either having knowledge of such malfeasance, to be clear.
But even with a fraction of the DoJ's documents disclosed as well as from the Epstein estate, we can begin to paint a macabre picture of the connections between rich and powerful people that for some reason always seem to have Jeffrey Epstein at their nexus and that means something though we don't really know what.
Has Sergey had a substantial impact on Gemini? Will he? I have no idea. I do wonder if someone worth $100 billion really has the perspective and drive to move something like this. Google has a deep bench of talent and one thing Google is very good at is optimizing code that runs at scale by making their own networking, servers, racks, data centers, data center operating system (ie Borg) and code and efficiency is going to be a huge deal in the LLM space for the foreseeable future.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704266504575141...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11920616
[3]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/
[4]: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...
[5]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/lolita-passports-and-m...