198 Days Post-Google

I took a voluntary layoff from Google ~200 days ago. I have split my time between software, literature, and governance. Previous articles:
One Week of Unemployment
Two Weeks of Unemployment
One Month Out
136 Days of Unemployment

These first 6 months were part sabbatical, part work. I am officially back in the bay since Jan 31st. Here are the things that I have done in these 6 months:

• Visited USA
  • NYC, Boston, Portsmouth, Ogunquit, Portland (ME), D.C., New Orleans, Austin, Denver
• Visited Europe
  • London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Stockholm
• Software
  • Brought lifestyle.photo from $0MRR to $385MRR. ~700WAU
  • Published What I See Coming in LLM Reinforcement Learning
  • Submitted to the Gemini 3 Hackathon (results pending)
  • Worked through David Silver's RL Course | Associated Textbook
  • Worked through the Deep Learning Book
  • Hand-implemented, trained 5+ (little) language models
• Literature
  • Read: Women (Bukowski), Ham On Rye (Bukowski), Post Office (Bukowski), The Stranger (Camus), Moravagine (Cendrars), Basil Bunting on Poetry (Bunting)
• Wrote So You Want To Build a Road
• Completed the book version of Objects Of Focus (release soon)
• Wrote 100+ poems
• Governance
  • Read: John Locke's Second Treatise on Government
  • Wrote: How Government, Society, and Freedom Relate
  • Attended local protests, organizing events
  • Asked ~200 people my "America Question" (writeup pending)
• And lastly, had a lot of fun :)

My EoY goals:

• Scale lifestyle.photo to $1,000MRR
• Release Objects Of Focus (The Book), Release my 2025 poems as well
• Publish one LLM-related paper on Arxiv
• Win the House for Democrats, have a quantifiable contribution to reference