West of Lahore

On this hot summer day, I'm staring out the window - the sun pounding down on the pavement - and watching cars pass by and humans walking along To imagine that one day, maybe 25-30 years from now, seeing bi-pedal machines walking by, while looking out the same window, will be as normal as seeing those cars - is a humbling yet exciting prospect Todays musing are inspired by R1-Omni, a ML Model that can detect emotions I did a superficial reading of it, but why stuff like this is exciting on some level is because we humans seem to be building operating systems to power robots and machines to operate like - humans. Everything I see and read these days in tech, makes me more and more convinced that one of the frontiers of human technological advancement as it relates to extending human capabilities, is the desire to recreate the human itself My belief in this is primarily since I am an optimist that the world is moving towards an abundance of wealth. We might, might not, see it in our ...

Im forced today to ponder over the differences between how, in my opinion, culture can find itself manifesting in the language and leisure of a people A recent documentary called "The Thinking Game", which follows Demmis Hassabis, the CEO of Deep Mind, made me think about all the thoughts that are flowing through me right now  The documentary, to tell you a little about it, maps out feedback, or rather positive-feedback based reinforcement learning and how it is changing the landscape of what humans once thought was possible. Its an interesting approach to the frontier of AGI or Artificial general intelligence.  But thats not the topic of my musings - on this very hot evening of June in my home city of Lahore.  No. The topic on my mind is what the RL algorithms in the documentary were being trained to play - Games.  Today I am thinking about the difference in games and how they manifest and what they tell us about culture and people and how they seem like precursors ...

Here is a picture of the inside of a human cell. We have this thanks to Radiology, nuclear magnetic resonance and cryoelectron microscopy Here is a picture of the andromeda galaxy  I could spend days, weeks, maybe months. Just contemplating these images. Maybe I should. Maybe we all should. Maybe then the world would be a little more peaceful.

Sadness - Grief - Ungratefulness -Victimhood - The counter to all is Joy. Internal Joy. Regardless of situation A lot of these feelings that arise in daily life primarily seem to be a manifestation of the expectations we have in our lives, from the people around us, from our own life, from the world and from nature.  These days I have begun to think cherish walking in the park. Begin to cherish being around nature, to dip my feet in the earth and to smell the moisture in the air.  The darkness of the coast and tides lashing on the shores is strangely inviting.  There was a point in time when it seemed like the uncertainty of water over my head would be something that I would find painful. Now the thought of ice cold water in my lungs and over my head, the darkness and and depth of the ocean seems a welcoming prospect. And maybe that is an indication of the neural rewiring I have tried to achieve for so long. Though I still have a ways to go. Things are changing internally...

We never think about thinking, metacognition, they call it. Its something that has stuck with me for a really really long time since I first heard about it about 15 years ago  Then I heard Amin Toufaani taking about Lygometry, the quantification of what one does not know. What a cool name, Toufaani, what a cool name, Lygometry.  Now the two things are together in my mind, Lygometric approach to thinking should be something taught at schools and beyond. Everywhere someone is teaching something we should teach them what we do not know, so they understand how to think about things that dont make sense to anyone. Why is this important, well Toufaani suggests (and i agree with him here) that knowing what you do not know allows one to be creative in finding solutions to open ended problems And then again I find this interesting, since my entire life has been open ended problems, which I now realize, I need to be able to think about and solve, should I ever want to rid myself of the ...

Its the not knowing, the unending sadness, the hope that life will one day turn out better. That, is the tether that holds most of humankind to the anvil that is life.  Slowly sinking, feeling the crushing weight as the air around you capsules your descent into the dark, deep unknown Writing is strange. Its a melancholic endeavour so embroiled in the human psyche that it sometimes gives me pause. To be human, is to think. To think is to say, to say is to write and in turn to think. And so the yin and yang seem to circle back, and connect.  I am but a simpleton. Wandering and wading through the depths of what I do not know, guided by the dim light of what I do. And maybe then, that is my entire story.   Maybe then, it is not - Je suis une homme