Everyone always need twice as much as they have to retire. Most people will also never do it.
Reading the FIRE subreddit I have realized that most people like the fantasy of retiring more than actually retiring. A lot of them wouldn't actually know what to do without the daily societal pressure to grind. Life is tough when you are out of the beaten path and need to figure out how to fill your days apparently.
TBH I think most people's lives are on autopilot and I can't blame them. This is what late stage capitalism has endoctrinated into our culture. I was one of them until some events made me look critically at retirement. After crunching the numbers I could have retired years ago. Sticking it out a bit longer to squash the rest of the concerns my spouse has.
> crunching the numbers I could have retired years ago
How do you reconcile the apparent hypocrisy of your wealthiness?
The stereotype is a boomer taking their winnings and then complaining about the system.
I've got just enough money to start worrying that my savings will mostly be taken by my government. Perhaps it is time for me to join the old white man complainer's club (is HN that?).
> How do you reconcile the apparent hypocrisy of your wealthiness?
Does this specific category error have a name? I see it so frequently, it's ridiculous. Being genre-savvy/aware of the meta-game doesn't mean one can opt-out, or refuse to play. Recognizing how a game is rigged often allows one to play it better than the average person.
I'm not GP, but my acknowledgement that society is unequal, and that I sometimes benefit from the inequality doesn't mean I have to be dude under the bridge, nor is it immoral since I cannot opt out of humanity. All I can do is minimize my odds of falling into societal cracks, and I make no apologies for that.
For myself I usually call it "(not) playing to win", after David Sirlin's book (see also https://www.sirlin.net/ptw for the free web version). In it, he describes a phenomenon in competitive videogaming where some people try to forbid valid moves in an online game because they are "broken", like throws in fighting games or rush strategies in RTS games. Sirlin argues that because they recognize a powerful tool but refuse to use it, they needlessly handicap themselves. As such, they're not playing to win but playing to feel morally superior and consequently lose to those who do use all the tools the game provides.
In reasonably balanced games, it usually turns out the "overpowered" strategy is not all that overpowered and that they have huge downsides when played against people who know how to counter them. In real life, which has no requirement of being balanced, we can recognize that certain strategies ((explicitly legal and often even encouraged!) consistently work really well. Choosing not to use those strategies doesn't make one morally superior, just bad at playing the game of life.
That said, "minimizing your own odds of falling into societal cracks" often still includes caring for others around you. On a small scale, being rich but alone because everyone around you went bankrupt and/or became estranged to you is not much fun. On a bigger scale it's just good governance to make sure everyone has food, safety and entertainment, just to keep the pitchforks away.
> How do you reconcile the apparent hypocrisy of your wealthiness?
I'm not sure this is full on hypocrisy.
In this case this is the game we are forced to play (late stage capitalism). Doesn't mean I need to like the game, but since I'm forced to play I will darn make sure to win as much as I can.
As you can imagine, it's a planning heavy decision. I came off parental leave earlier this year and prior to that my wife and I talked about me not going back. However, we decided to delay until my next vesting later this year and to see how the midterms play out with this clown car of an administration and the potential impacts on healthcare. Barring anything catastrophic, it's happening this year. Parental leave already gave me a taste of the life I'd rather have.
Same boat, my son was born in October last year and have been back at work since February and I am already completely overwhelmed. Our plan is to wait for the second child and get another paternity leave and then I will fuck off from any corporate/enterprise job and try to do my own thing first and we'll live off menial jobs + the income from the couple of apartments we have on AirBnB.
I am not planning to stay out of tech altogether though, at least long term.
This was also my plan; hang in there for the next kid, wait for the next vest, etc. ultimately daycare is expensive, healthcare is expensive… I’m still stuck 6 years later waiting to quit but something always comes up and there’s always another vest around the corner.
Well obviously. Vesting schedules are explicitly designed the way they are to keep people around. That's their entire purpose.
Retirement is inherently a choice to earn less lifetime money and pour that time into family and other things you like doing. Waiting for the next vesting cliff is inherently a choice to earn more money and spend less time on your family.
My point is that it being a choice starts to disappear with kids, rising costs etc. It was a choice I could make independently, now it’s a choice the entire family gets to participate in since we’d need to sell the house, move to a lower cost of living locale etc.
Healthcare is the item that most FIRE folks underestimate. It was actually pretty tenable when the Obamacare subsidies were more fully in effect. Now that those are mostly gone it's a much larger line item in the household budget. I've only got a couple of years until Medicare kicks in so I'm not too concerned - unless they mess that up too - but for folks thinking of FIRE'ing in their 40s & 50s with kids still at home it's probably not advisable now.
I believe the parent comment was saying that the YT poster should have gotten some revenue share. Since the work they put in would in theory be enhancing the original work. Obviously these sort of things are created and consumed primarily by “super fans” who probably buy director cuts etc etc .
At least that’s how I read the comment and I agree.
Hmm... everyone is different and I'm not sure I'm the best representative of the "flow state" crowd. For one, I'm a DS not an SWE. Also I tend to do more research-y projects, projects where the requirements are vague at the start of the process and a big part of my job is requirements gathering. Projects that aren't super time sensitive TBH. Jira rarely works well. So the projects that have worked best for me involve lots of brainstorming meetings at the start, then documentation (literally Word docs), then development work, then restart the cycle. The worst projects involve stakeholders who want to make science decisions in real time. If that makes sense? None of this may apply in your world.
Why do you have zero support from anyone / anywhere ? What caused you to be in that situation? What happened to family / friends ? How have you made money in the past ? Freelancing I presume ?
I’m just pointing out some things I’ve observed. You didn’t really address them, you skillfully redirected.
1. You are supposedly some super intelligent autistic person… but you can’t even properly format the last lines of your post , so someone would have to struggle to copy / paste the link to your websites . That’s going to be a barrier for most people in a competitive landscape for attention.
2. You have only been on hacker news for 40 days. Or at least this account. Interesting. I’m not sure when an account crosses the “new account” threshold and stops being green.
3. No contact information in your profile. If someone wanted to help you , they would want to reach out directly and privately , you don’t give them a way to do that. Again, you’re supposedly some super smart autistic but you failed at a very basic thing.
I say all the above as gently and respectfully as possible. I’m trying to reconcile your supposedly genius level of intelligence with some fairly basic major gaffes.
I have to be honest. You're not being helpful at all. In fact you're being quite derogatory towards my condition.
"supposedly some super intelligent autistic person"
That is just an insult. And you said it several times.
Yes I can map out complex systems in my mind when I'm creating them.. that doesn't automatically make me good at everything and at understanding everything.
What are you actually trying to say here? Because to me it seems like to you set out to say I'm somehow pretending to Autistic or faking things based on your findings that I don't have contact information on my profile and that to you the links are some kind of barrier. I mean it's really not difficult to copy and paste the URLs if that's what you want to do.
I really don't appreciate the term "supposedly some super smart autistic" with the assumption that I'm not.
Everything is contained in unit tests, so it is really easy to check a small change and get the results for the same dataset.
I have had put the agents in a small feedback loop - but limited to ~5 iterations, since I do not want to burn through my credits. Honestly, I think putting it in a loop for a case like this does not show the "intelligence" part of AI, it makes it more of a more-sophisticated random walk.
I keep hearing these “I work in some hard field and the LLM isn’t any good at it”. I keep asking for examples and no one can provide them.