Sergey Brin's Unretirement

Maybe say exactly that? You can convey the sentiment without the snark, which can seem corrosive to community.

I've posted 23 comments in the last 24 hours, 386 in the last month, 4828 in the last year. Plenty of things get my personal attention!

A couple points that are important, if you want to understand how moderation works on HN:

(1) we're mostly responding to a random sample of the total content - there's far too much for us to read it all. I have the impression that when someone posts a "you're moderating this, of all things?" comment, as you did here, there's probably a background of seeing lots of cases where a comment ought to have been moderated but wasn't. Then the moderators' priorities start to look strange. The likeliest reason for this, though, is that we just didn't see it.

[editing - bear with me...]

It is everywhere now. Musk censors his X responses, Grok defends billionaires, the all-in podcast has only positive comments in suspiciously perfect English since a month or so. Previously they allowed criticism.

(And hardly anyone mentions Greenland on X.)

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 hear you! I didn't read the entire article but I agree it doesn't exactly pattern-match to very good. We highly prefer articles that respect the reader's intelligence; they aren't always easy to come by.

The lede is that Sergey is back full-time at Google and I haven't happened to see any other post about that, let alone a good one. If there's a better article, we can consider changing the link.

(and in any case, people still should not be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452725 to HN, no matter how bad an article is—so the moderation point stands.)

I can play World of Warcraft indefinitely.

Everyone, even the laziest person likes doing something even if that’s just parking yourself in front of the TV and stuffing your face.

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.

Had this exact situation. Turned to drugs. Lived like a GTA character. That’s unsustainable, similar to luxury vacations which turn dull. Now I‘m finding investors for curing MS with a team of researchers who‘ve built sth that is more accurate than CRISPR to cure my sister. I actually want to get in contact with Sergey Brin about that because we might have something interesting for him - but my American contacts are only connected to Musk and people like a Polygon founder and music/hollywood people. This is not a psychotic or exaggerated message, I‘m sure HN can vet us (@dang) and get us contacts, currently I‘m talking to family offices in Saudi Arabia. About meaning: if you get bored, aim for bigger positive impact.

paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29857928/

I'm curious, what types of prompts are you running that benefit from 10+ minutes of think time?

When ChatGPT takes 20 minutes to reason, is it actually spending all the time burning tokens or does a bulk of the time go into 'scheduling' waits. If someone specifically selected xhigh reasoning, I am guessing it can be processed with high batch count.

It's called OPEN AI and started as a charity for humanitarian reasons. How could it possibly be bad?!

None of you deserve the karma to be able to have access to the downvote function

I know how frustrating it is to have a contrarian opinion and get smacked with the majority's reaction to it (believe me, I know - it's an asymmetric experience in the worst way) - but lashing out is not a good way to react to that. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's insufficient on this site to be right, so I'd leave that aside. For months, referencing the Somali autism scam would have gotten you flagged reliably. Now, Tim Walz is not going to run for governor because of it. Things can be real and you can be downvoted.

There's a tweet that illustrates the idea, though the consequences on this site are minor:

> A black woman invented the telescope. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? A black woman invented the telescope.

> he can probably do everything else and has years of experience doing so

he literally can't and he literally doesn't

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

this such a weird take - that some random billionaire, by virtue of his/her billions, is not only able to perform superhuman feats, but actually does. can you point to literally any instances of this phenomenon of the billionaire superhuman? like you realize that

1. studying for 60 hours a week requires either copious amounts of stimulant or absurd "neurodivergence" (read: the best scientists/mathematicians/etc don't have that kind of attention span);

2. there are no best teachers in the world - there are top researchers and they're busy doing research (and if he had hired them, we'd have heard about it);

3. does he have the optionality to do these things? sure but that same optionality means he could alternatively sit on his yacht all day, eating shrimp and caviar and getting felated. without any prior instances of the billionaire superhuman student and many prior instances of the billionaire hedonist, as a rational person, i can only assume that what he's actually doing is the latter (hedonism).

like bruh just because the guy hit the lotto doesn't mean you should worship/idolize him.

A charitable interpretation of what GP said is that Brin might not have a specific expertise in AI.

I also think this doesn't make sense, because he certainly stayed on top of things

I'd be happy to do 60-hour weeks of good work, in a good environment.

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.

I wonder whether we're trending towards a high-sensor variation of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" / Vannevar Bush's Memex that ingests the details of a user's daily life (the smart glasses being a primitive first example products of such) and identifies salient information in their lives can help us perform mass customization of instructions into direct prescriptives, with backing evidentiary data for SME's. Instead of "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", the interaction becomes "do this, anticipate that outcome" to the user, and if an SME (a doctor in your example) asks about it, the system recalls and presents all the factors that went into deciding upon the specific prescriptive.

There's a great article on the history of social security here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Social_Security_in_...

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.

You are 100% correct.

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.

I base my multigenerational dream on the documentary “Encanto”

It's honestly a bit confusing to use words to mean things that they don't generally mean.

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.

You switched jobs to childcare

My dad has developed an unhealthy addiction to buying used agricultural equipment and machine tools. He's been busy importing them to his rural farm. I have no idea how we'll clear that up once he's gone!

He's not a farmer. Just a farm tool collector.

me -> my

> I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often.

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.

It’s so commonly asked in DC that it’s been a meme in dating circles there for decades.

>While intentionally unemployed I'd answer truthfully and with a smile, 'I'm unemployed!' which visibly confused people.

The proper term is "Funemployed"

life is phase oriented

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.

This is especially true around NYC, SF, LA. The culture is built around accomplishment and work identity.

Much less true in other places (e.g. Midwest), where community / taking care of others is valued.

The people worth knowing were the ones enthusiastically socializing with me after uttering that phrase.

I really don't like getting asked what I do for a living. I exchange labour for money somewhere out of necessity, what's at all interesting about that? What I do in my free time is who I am, and that's much more interesting to talk about, to me.