About
I'm Abhinav — a software engineer based in San Francisco. After working for a few different large tech companies for 4 years, I left to work on technology that serves people instead of extracting from them.
My work spans four intersecting domains: digital privacy and anti-surveillance, self-hosting and digital sovereignty, personal AI agents, and AI safety and human-computer interaction. I believe technology should be a tool for empowerment, not a mechanism for control.
Background
I was an ICPC World Finalist in competitive programming and a Codeforces competitor. I've worked as a software engineer at Google, Uber, and Apple on large-scale systems used by millions. I'm now working on privacy, AI safety, and digital empowerment.
What I Build
I run a full self-hosted infrastructure stack from my home — Proxmox virtualization, Docker services, DNS-level ad blocking, media servers, fitness tracking, and a personal AI agent ecosystem called Hermes with 80+ skills managing different aspects of my life.
Through my consulting practice, lbr8.tech, I help people liberate their technology from surveillance capitalism — protocol cards, a liberation agent, and one-on-one consulting.
What I Care About
- Digital sovereignty — control, autonomy, resilience. No platform should hold your data hostage.
- Anti-surveillance — rejecting systems engineered to shape behavior through data extraction.
- AI safety — building AI systems that empower people and prevent catastrophic outcomes.
- Intentional technology — tools that respect attention, not exploit it. Digests, not feeds.
- Open infrastructure — self-hosted, interoperable, adaptable. Your stack, your rules.
Beyond the Screen
When I'm not building, I'm on a motorcycle (RC 390, track days at Laguna Seca), running half marathons, cycling, or hiking. I'm vegan, I think in incentive structures and game theory, and I read about the metacrisis, the philosophy of technology, and systems change.