> Adherents of the popular financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement scrimp and sacrifice to retire early. Only for many of them to discover their dream of post-work life does not match reality.

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.

FIYNTBOM

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?

I think this is just an extension of "Fuck you money"

I think you're very close to being right...

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.

That is what they call "fuck me money". As in, fuck me I'll just pay it.

FUM is the freedom to walk away. FMM is the power make your own terms.

It’s more than just money, it’s how you set up your life to be resilient to contingencies. For example finding a compatible life partner. For example finding happiness without lifestyle inflation and breaking free from the hedonic treadmill. Or perhaps having a good lifestyle business for some people. Or having extended family support nearby. I call these things unfuckwithability. Money is a big part of it, but may not be the biggest missing piece for many people.

Your username checks out re: moving to Scandinavia haha

I might have missed it, but I don't see this quote in the article. Either way, it feels disingenuous when a place like business insider posts these criticisms of FIRE like it is the ultimate gotcha.

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.

The quote is in the article. You may have to click to expand below the jump.

not only corporate but also many small shops still running some dedicated software for PoS. Maybe wine will work but it's a lot of hassle still and too risky for trying something that critical to work for such PoS scenarios. Also not sure if situation changed but at least 5 years ago most ATMs in asia were running windows based on talk with my friend working in this field.

Yeah I think my original comment was a bit overstated. I think it would have been more accurate to say Windows would die for the consumer desktop market.

unless you send your child to private school where all parents enforce such rule, your kid (that is 12+ year old) is going to be ostracize by majority of peers that have such phone. This is completely different environment comparing to times when we were growing up.

It's the same environment

by environment I mean back then we didn't have smartphones, social media, internet.

It's the same environment without the tech.

the question is if this is not survivor bias - 'Those were great parents and they where not ready so' doesn't implicate that most people that are not ready will be great parents.

It also what you want to optimize for. I would prefer to have hordes of good parents that just only dozens of great one in society. We most likely can also say: "Most worst parents didn't feel ready"

I had few projects like that this year and I can say it how messy and demotivating its to cleaning up mess.

And its actually not well paid because client now has the expectation that mostly everything is now done, you have to just only fix few things and you even have AI at your disposal so expect that you just write a better magic prompt.

I think actually often its faster and cheaper to start from scratch or at least rewrite whole module (of course still with AI with just better vibe engineering rather than vibe coding).

It's similar with house renovation - often its just cheaper and faster to tear whole building down rather than fixing it.

Would you be able to share any more details on the clean up projects you had to do? Like, wasn't front or back end, which tech stack, where were the LLM code issues etc.

I'm just very curious where we are at the moment with in this profession.

the project was iOS app and vibe coded in Claude Code - it was around half year ago so maybe things improved. Client actually knew some coding so actually quite impressive how far they did manage to go along.

However it was just adding pile of feature after features without taking time to refactor it. Client most likely did some few different attempts to add some specific feature or fixing something and there was a lot of dead code that haven't been used. This dead code actually confused AI and often tried to modify part of code that have been abandoned.

There was completely no tests. No performance tests. And some part of my job was to improve performance (cv/ai model inference) and robustness (crashes, memory leaks).

I think AI is fine and useful but whats bad with such vibe coded project if somebody hand over to you is you have completely no clue what part of the code are written/designed properly with good foundation if previous developer didn't test extensively and didn't refactor continuously. Even worse if you cannot talk to previous developer responsible for the project.

Not OP, but I’ve spent months cleaning up sqlalchemy models that were written in isolation using AI. Project was just not scalable.

> she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums.

Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close friends what online communities people hang out - the reason she didn't know about you being on HN.

Niche forums still exist with real humans like for example, LTT or openZFS forums. But main stream ones like XDA, reddit or YouTube etc are totally ruined by AI.

> All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell

It's unlikely that this is mostly for payroll. From AI I got:

"median total compensation per employee was approximately $279,802 in 2022, and with 183,323 employees at the end of 2024, total estimated compensation (salary + equity + benefits) likely exceeds $50 billion, or ~14–15% of total revenue"

So maybe it's not 1% as in Varoufakis talk but even if it's 15% of revenue that's also quite low. Also keep in mind in this AI reponse it includes equity (stocks) so that in this way employee is becoming investor/shareholder.

Fair enough! I was wary of doing the calculation that way for reasons that seem retroactively pretty dumb, so I'll take the L on that one.

remember EU had Nokia and Skype and that was before overregulation. What happenned? Both got sold out because EU doesn't have money printer and petrodollar. EU cannot compete even if it would reduce taxes and decrease regulation because they cannot protect their best tech companies from being bought by dozen of billions of printed papers. Most even such companies are on US stock exchange because that's another different money printer.

And Qimonda (Infineon/Siemens) - DRAM manufacturer. They could have prioritized EU for supply.

Yeah this would be weird if it's only for EU based companies. I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer' making all different stuff working different in EU, Japan, UK, US. To this already many variables also if the user has account in EU and also if is living in EU or for how long. Their whole compliance is not robust and reliable making this in fact dead on arrival. Any maker relying on this will have more complains from customers. Customers will think that all non-apple solution are buggy and reliable and will stick with apple stuff.

> I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer'

I think Tim Cook’s strategy is rather “hoard and extract as much money as legally possible, no matter what it does to the experience”. Selling tech products is no different to him than selling car parts of frozen meat. What matters to him is the pile of money at the end.

But still you can compete on prize or provide proper localization. In your link they share the are based in UK and available in 7 countries. Something that took half a year and a few devs now it can be done by one indie in 1 month living in cheaper country and charging 1/5th and still be happy about it.