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
Suppose we have reached endgame capitalism. Suppose we have colonized the worlds as in Ender's Game. How should we manage our stock portfolio? Investing in many uncorrelated assets de-risks your position. In 2026, there are not enough sufficiently uncorrelated assets for complete de-risking. In Ender's Game,
The opposite of freedom is oppression. Man is born into a state of freedom. Through a man’s interactions with the world, he finds himself oppressed or restricted in ways that limit this natural freedom. Man ought to introduce government in accordance with the principle that a society is only
Yesterday I read Code and Let Live, an article covering fly.io's new(ish) Sprites offering. Sprites (sprites.dev) offers persistent VMs that feel like ephemeral VMs—offering ~1s latency to fresh shells, state snapshotting, and a CLI that makes remote code execution a breeze. I created an
"I have a database whose schema doesn't match my SQLModel models. I need to migrate this. I want to use alembic's – autogenerate flag. I am running into issues" If this is you, that was me 15 minutes ago. Here is a Q&A
I keep a Google Doc titled "Notes". I look at it every day. I feel guilty whenever I look at it. I feel guilty because "Notes" has my TODO list. Notes has a log of how slowly I DO my TODOs, if I DO them at
If you are reading this, you are considering building a brand new road! First, congratulations! Building a new road is a serious undertaking and you probably don't even know where to start. That's okay! This instructional will walk you through your first "roadie" considerations.
RL for LLMs is going to be a relevant and durable process for AI development so long as we don't have AGI. Reinforcement Learning (RL) for LLMs seems to be a popular topic right now for those of us in the AI space; however, most of the world
Here I am – standing in the same place as yesterday. I see how everything has changed right under my feet. These are some of the richest moments of my life. I have the time and the energy to focus on the things that I care about. One month after leaving
Previous I'm writing this post in an 84º AirBnB in Los Angeles. I've finished Moravagine (learned many new words). I'm reading Basil Bunting On Poetry (learning a lot about poetry). I'm writing a lot of poetry myself and sitting in coffee shops
After four years, I've left Google. I accepted a voluntary layoff and my access was revoked at 5pm, Tuesday Aug. 19th 2025. When this happened, I felt a wave of sadness come over me, knowing that a defining chapter in my life closed and another had just begun.
My name is Thorne Wolfenbarger. I am an idealist. I believe in many things. I believe in the pursuit of knowledge and the idea that the accumulation of knowledge is a fundamental good. I believe that information has a will all its own. I believe that information wants to be
Essays
Words are words like your hands are hands. You change the world with either but only hold words to a superior moral standard. Is there truth to your front door – to remain locked before you turn the key? Is there truth that a stone must lie still, before you skip
Programming
I've made a lot of side projects over the years. I am a grown man now and have to admit that the reason that none of them found traction isn't because I got unlucky, it's because I never have legitimately made a product worth
Writing
Placing alternating weights on the chest, chiefly known as Weight Cycling, is an effective method of communication while simultaneously serving as a conditioning mechanism for the body and the mind. These weights, primarily metaphysical, can be adjusted at the handles. These handles, experience, can emulate "looking back" -
Essays
How do you live an aesthetic/good/satisfying life? You can prioritize optionality, control, or a plethora of other metrics. How does regret compare to these other life policies? What does it mean to minimize regret? The "regret minimization framework" is a framework popularized by Jeff Bezos as
Essays
Capitalism is an economic system that largely dictates the structure of a society built around it. If a society is "ideas we share" + "how we interact", Capitalism provides the basis/medium/infrastructure for how a capitalistic society interacts. Capitalism is abuse. Consider an individual - a
personal essay
Pre-reading is a useful activity before attending a lecture to make sure you get the most out of the delivered content. Doing some pre-reading lay out some foundations for the subject matter at hand and helps you connect the concepts introduces in the lecture more quickly and more deeply. What
personal essay
Follow up on "2023: Reflections and Looking Forward". This is the year I became a reader, writer, poet, and meditator on love. I took an ~6 month break from personal programing projects. 2024 was about the same as 2023, earning it a tie for "best year of
Programming
FROM python:3.12-slim-bookworm COPY --from=ghcr.io/astral-sh/uv:latest /uv /uvx /bin/ # Copy the project into the image ADD . /app # Sync the project into a new environment, using the frozen lockfile WORKDIR /app RUN uv sync --frozen RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl RUN curl
Essays
Knowledge is having a simple representation for complex data. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Knowledge is having a lot of data to work with in the first place. Sometimes, knowledge is only knowledge within a specific domain.
Writing
I hate ephemerality. I hate the mutability of life's structures. The shifting of connections through some agnostic evolutionary process - human and non-human. A person should remain their caricature. A person should find a community that suits them, knowing that this bond is a life-knot. Two people should
thoughts
Large Language Models (LLMs) are great when their needs are met: Need 1. Can consistently get relevant, well-formatted context for their inference Need 2. Can consistently output text w.r.t. an input schema Need 3. Are offered a sandboxed code execution environment Need 4. Are subject to human review;
Writing
He's so perfect! So why don't you text him? Well he doesn't text me! But he does, right? He texted you just as we sat down. He doesn't text me enough! I want him to want me! You know? No, I don&