This is my last month at Quizizz. At 2.5 years it was the longest job I ever held and I’m quite happy with the time I spent there and all the things I helped create. I’ll write more about it some other time but for now, I’m taking a break from salaried employment.
I’ve taken a break after both of my previous jobs too and they were extremely fulfilling. In my first break, I satisfied my desire to build something and learned that my craft just wasn’t there yet. In my second break, I learned that while I can now create something, getting people to use and care about it is just as important and very difficult.
I wonder how I will summarize the lessons from my third break.
I have some inkling of the things I want to do in the next 9 months and figured I’ll make a note of it because things don’t always go according to plan.
This is what I’ve been spending my evenings and weekends on for the last 1-2 months and it will continue to be my primary focus for the next few months. This feels like a high risk, high reward play that I’m extremely suited to take advantage of and for once, I want to go all-in and try my hardest because if this works out well, it’ll give me a LOT more optionality in the future.
I don’t expect this to be particularly fulfilling in the long-term but in the short-term, I think this has all the right ingredients for me to get nerd-sniped by it.
Why the secrecy? Because the jungle is a harsh world.
I don’t understand why learning a language has to be so difficult. I’ve been trying to learn Kannada for multiple years now and have barely made any headway. I see so many others like me with the motivation to learn but there just isn’t an effective way for us to capitalize on this motivation.
There are so many resources online to learn programming languages and they’ve matured to such an extent that it is easy to become a beginner within a few weeks. But resources for learning verbal languages are so far behind.
I want to fix this.
With the advent of LLMs, better speech-to-text, and better text-to-speech models, I think there is a opportunity here to change the game. There’s a rough design of an application in my head that is a step-change in how a language can be picked up.
I’m going to prototype this idea out and see how well it holds up in the real world.
Duo, I’m coming for you 🔪
If tech wasn’t so much more lucrative than academia or if money wasn’t a concern, I think I would’ve enjoyed being a researcher.
With AGI looming in the near future, I want to dive head-first into the weeds and understand everything there is to understand about the events that led up to this point.
In 2019, Greg Brockman responded to a HN comment I wrote clarifying some point and mentioning that OpenAI was hiring. I kinda wish I’d taken the plunge back then but now is the next best time.
With the entire day at my disposal, I expect to have a lot more time to read. In my last break, I read every single note by Andy Matuschak.
In this one, I want to read every post in Zvi’s best of and also, once again, catch up on all of Andy Matuschak’s notes.
I enjoy writing and putting my thoughts out there yet I don’t do it nearly enough. A few months ago, someone who read my one of my posts reached out IRL to hang and it was great to meet someone that shared some of my niche interests.
I want more of that to happen and the best way seems to be to write about things I care about and hope that people who are interested in it read it and reach out.
In all, it appears that there is more than enough to keep me occupied till the end of this year.
However, 9 months is a long time and I definitely expect there to be significant ups and downs but as long as I’m having fun and pursuing whatever’s the most interesting, I think I’ll be alright.