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My name is Thorne Wolfenbarger. I am on sabbatical after leaving Google in August of 2025.
I split my time between programming, reading, writing, and thinking about governance.
I spent 3 months this past year travelling the world asking people two questions: "What does it mean, to you, to be an American?", "What does it mean, to you, to be you?"
After asking 200+ people these questions, I think I have a better idea than before.
Now, I am back in the San Francisco Bay Area focusing on LLMs.
I live in a world that is wholly in my mind and anyone can visit if they bring a song to accompany them. These songs represent the visitor and these songs are the visitors and these songs form the multipolar powers that decide my fate. Thro...
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 firs...
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 suff...
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...
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 ma...
"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 to save you time. ...
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 all. I haven't had a job for one...
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 thro...
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 wor...
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...