A charitable view is that they intended "ideas that I had germinating for decades" to be from their own perspective, and not necessarily spurred inside Google by their initiative. I think that what they stated prior to this conflated the two, so it may come across as bragging. I don't think they were trying to brag.
replyI don't find it rude or pretentious. Sometimes it's really hard to express yourself in hmm acceptable neutral way when you worked on truly cool stuff. It may look like bragging, but that's probably not the intention. I often face this myself, especially when talking to non-tech people - how the heck do I explain what I work on without giving a primer on computer science!? Often "whenever you visit any website, it eventually uses my code" is good enough answer (worked on aws ec2 hypervisor, and well, whenever you visit any website, some dependency of it eventually hits aws ec2)
reply100% but in this case they uh… didn’t work on it, it seems?
replyFWIW, I interpreted more as "This is something I wanted to see happen, and I'm glad to see it happening even if I'm not involved in it."
replyThat's correct. I can't even really take credit for any of the really nice work, as much as I wish I could!
replyCould be either. Nevertheless, while tone is tricky in text, the writer is responsible for relieving ambiguity.
replyeliminating ambiguity is impossible. the reader should work to find the strongest interpretation of the writer's words
replythat’s a lot to expect of readers… good writing needs to give readers every opportunity to find the good in it.
replyIt is a lot to expect of readers... It's also explicitly asked of us in this forum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
replyfair point
replyit’s fine for a forum to try to have different expectations than the local cafe - that’s kind of like a host asking their guests to remove shoes before walking into their home. but it doesn’t really change a priori basic facts about good writing.
replyperhaps this is the appropriate forum to reference pg
It's also natural language though, one can find however much ambiguity in there as they can inject. It hasn't for a single moment come across as pretentious to me for example.
replyThink of all the tiresome Twitter discussions that went like "I like bagels -> oh, so you hate croissants?".
From Marx to Zizek to Fukuyama^1, 200 years of Leftist thinking nobody has ever came close to say "we can fix capitalism".
replyWhat makes you think that LLMs can do it?
[1] relapsed capitalist, at best, check the recent Doomscroll interview
Yeah it comes off as braggy, but it’s only natural to be proud of your foresight
replyNatural? Sure. Deserved? Not really, not unless we’re also forthcoming in our lack of foresight and the times we plainly got it wrong.
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