Thorne Wolfenbarger

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Thorne Wolfenbarger

What I See Coming in LLM Reinforcement Learning

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

One Month Out

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

Two Weeks of Unemployment

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

One Week of Unemployment

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 I accepted a voluntary layoff and my access was revoked at 5pm, Tuesday Aug. 19th 2025.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.

Thorne Wolfenbarger Statement of Beliefs

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

There is No Truth and There Will Never Be Truth

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

Running Ads for lifestyle.photo for one day

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

Weight Cycling

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" -

[Unfinished] Regret Minimization as a Life Policy

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

Why Capitalism is Abuse... Wait

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