What happened the last 3 years? | LiveOverflow

The Gist

LiveOverflow explains his three-year absence from YouTube, revealing that he built 14 Android security courses for Hextree, spent all his savings building a home, and suffered the tragic loss of his newborn daughter Maya in 2025. He now uses local AI tools like DeepSeek to accelerate his security research and balance work with fatherhood.

Quick Overview

LiveOverflow returns to YouTube after a three-year hiatus to explain that his silence was caused by intensive course development for Hextree, financial strain from building a house, and the devastating death of one of his twin daughters, Frida, who died during a complicated birth in July 2025. He details his evolving reliance on AI models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek to handle complex security audits, reverse-engineering tasks, and video production workflows.

Key Points: Thomas from LiveOverflow released no videos for extended periods between 2023 and 2026 because he was entirely consumed by building 14 Android security courses, 50 flags, and 170 videos for Hextree.io. The creator drained his personal savings to pay for building a semi-detached house in Germany, forcing him to rely on consulting work for Cure53 and Google to survive. His twin daughter Frida tragically passed away during a traumatic birth in July 2025 due to a shared placenta and severe oxygen deprivation, while her twin sister Maya survived in critical condition. LiveOverflow initially dismissed early LLMs like ChatGPT in 2022 as flawed novelty text completions, but experienced a technical eureka moment when advanced reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 successfully reasoned through complex Go race conditions. He uses AI-powered agents and custom local models to automate code reviews, generate video animations, and run preliminary penetration tests for his security research. Despite acknowledging valid criticisms around the economic pressures, surveillance impacts, and deskilling caused by AI, he maintains that understanding and using these tools is essential for modern cybersecurity work.