2026 New Year Present

I got laid off today

The day at my ex-company came to the end. I got laid off today (literally several hours ago) and my company account got terminated immediately.

I won't say it is a surprising news, but it's still a bit of a shock.

For the past few months, I've been working on a project aimed to provide a sybil resistant social network via zero-knowledge circuits and some mathematical tricks. The goal was very similar to projects like BringId and WorldCoin. It was a cool journey, I enjoyed being part of the decision makers in the team and learned quite a lot about the math behind it.

Some reflections

Last year I'd been discovering myself, in terms of my interests, life and future. I like the way how Ethereum works. It's transparent, open-sourced, and always welcoming people to join. I messaged Justin before in the early-mid November, and surprisingly he replied me and even had a call with me (so did Kamil). I really like their karma and spirit. On the other hand, I also love what Anthropic does, even the name is so meaningful:

of or relating to human beings or the period of their existence on earth.

And their product name Claude is named after the great Father of Information Theory, Claude Shannon. They have the best ai agent product I've ever used, and I think they will be better this year.

I've been told that in this AI era, ppl always get the robotic contents, ideas, and even thoughts, and what truly makes you stand out will be your taste. I believe this concept and now my first priority is to find my own taste.

But how, you might ask? It's rather simple to me -- Try. Trying to explore everything until you find something that is really intriguing and interesting.

Failure

I used to think myself as a failure giving up a lot of things like my degree, projects. However, recently I read a line and here's the quote:

The times we gave up in the past often weren't due to a lock of perseverance -- it was a misunderstanding of time and progress. To have held on for so long despite frequent disappointment, even despair -- we were far more resilient than we realized.

which really inspired me a lot.

Next...

I already figured out what to do next, but it feels so weird when you face so much uncertainty.

I talked to several of my friends, and they thought this is actually a good sign. A good sign to 100% focus on what I want to do next and also a good time to pivot.

So the next step is to contribute to some open source projects related to Zig and Ethereum. To be more specific, I will be contributing to lodestar-z and zeam. I started writing things in zig since last July. I really like their mind of design and the enthusiasm from the community, which I think would make this language and ecosystem a lot better. Beside this, I will start researching on some AI stuffs, not in the LLM itself, but the software engineering part of it (things like system engineering, parallel engineering, etc.).

I might be founding a startup in the future, but it's not now I guess. We will see this in the near future.