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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> No one will probably remember us the way they’ll remember pg.

The older I get, the more the whole "legacy"/impact issue seems overhyped; pg (and everyone alive today) is not going to be remembered for long either; perhaps 2 more generations, and it's a wrap. No one is remembered forever. That thought keeps me rooted firmly in the present and on the immediate impact I can have.

I have never been into poetry, but both versions of Ozymandias (Shelley's[1] and Smith's[2]) deeply resonated with me. I wholly agree with you, your impact, and your legacy, is with the people around you, in the here and now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Smith)

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I've always found this goofy copypasta version of the poem to be really funny, because even in the silly voice it assumes, it still manages to capture something of the essence of the piece. Even as written here, that last line has a certain power and resonance:

    I met a traveller from way the hell off
    who said: two gigantic, fucked-up rock legs
    be out there in the middle of goddamn nowhere
    right next to them covered in shit some kinda big face
    looked pretty pissed & upset & whatnot
    all damn covered in words
    “yo ozymandias here, this my shit”
    “better than your shit, get fucked buddy”
    not much else tho, just sand
    shitloads of sand all over the place

For some reason, I enjoyed this very much

This gave me a good chuckle

This is all broadly true, but the fact that 'Ozymandias' is frickin' Ramesses II does undermine the message of the poems a bit. Or more generously, it adds another level of depth to the point that someone's future fame can't easily be predicted by looking at their current fame.

But even Ramessess II is not really "remembered" by more than a tiny handful of people. Most people who recognize the name know nothing about him, and most would never come up with the name unprompted. Most knowledge about him is lost.

We know him in the very abstract, not all much different to how we know the Ozymandias of the poems.

Does that level of being remembered matter?

To the extent that being remembered after your death matters at all, then absolutely, yes. To go back to the original point of comparison, many more people know Ramesses II now than have ever heard of Paul Graham, and this is when pg is still alive and probably near the all-time peak of his fame. There's a relatively small, but not that small, number of people who can name some of Ramesses II's monuments or other achievements without looking them up. And there are many millions of people who are vaguely aware that he was one of the GOAT Pharaohs, and that was more or less the core objective of all the monument-building.

I mean, who knows what random selection of events will cause someone to slip through the crevasse of history into the future. Imagine being the fossil that is found and paraded as the missing link between our species and the one that roams the earth 100,000 years from now, and Ramesses II nowhere to be found...

Imagine being the dude that made a mistake in accounting, and being remembered 5000 years later because it's the earliest recorded name we know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_Period)

I didn't find a mention of him making a mistake in this article, but I think I read somewhere a while ago that the numbers he wrote on the tablets had some error somewhere.

Rameses's legacy did enjoy a brief revival in the West as a brand of condoms.

https://daily.jstor.org/short-history-of-the-condom/

I’m just a grain of sand, briefly resting in the dune, before the next gush of wind, and I’m gone.

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