West of Lahore

You read a headline that says "Road made completely of recycled plastic" and you think this is great for the environment. They're cleaning up plastic waste and reusing it, until you realize the abrasion and wear from vehicles and the weather causes microplastics to spread into the environment at an accelerated pace. Microplastics will stick to the tyre and go as far as the car can take them, think of a bee carrying pollen from a flower, rain water will cause the upended plastic to seep into the soil -> from the soil to your food -> to the food of the animal that becomes our food -> to our bodies and so on. Then diseases that you cant identify that seem to emerge seemingly without cause. But there is cause, the only thing that you can count on in this world is that there is certain cause and effect. Over the years Ive come to question everything, even seemingly innocent headlines about recycling  - microplastics 100x what we thought before, in plastic water bottle

A friend recently filed for a couple of Patents after completing their PHD in Deep Learning in Medical imaging, I was trying to understand their thought process to finding solutions to complex problems and they said simply "I try to ask why a lot, why are people doing it this way, why not that way, and what happens if I try it some other way" Asking why recursively seems to be an great way to break down and analyze problems, and if you have an interdisciplinary view of the world, you might be able to come across a revolutionary novel way of solving the problem which could be simpler and faster than what was being done before At face value it seems to be a simple approach, I mean all you have to do is dive into your existing pool of knowledge and try to connect as many different disciplines as you have knowledge of, NASAs famous James Web Telescope needed to be folded and deployed in space and unfolded, the solution was inspired by the art of Oragami But what troubles me is th

Wisdom seems to just be applied pattern recognition, in the hopes of a strongly predetermined positive probabilistic outcome Its a mouthful, but I like describing it this way  The above is my academically inclined way of saying, you are wise if you have recognized enough patterns in situations, so much so that you can "feel" what the outcome would be, were you to take a certain action in a certain situation.  At its core, today, we are teaching computers how we express our own reality. And so, the more I learn about computers and computation and mathematics, the more I learn how to think about thinking itself.   This has been my main motivation for the last decade to further myself in this field - An effort to learn how to think more clearly, because to me, that is what will inevitably determine the success of my decisions, which will directly influence the quality of my life and of those that depend on me.  I cant help but think today that Nvidia is to the AI era what Levi S

If you grew up post internet but before social media absorbed the world, you might recall countless sunny evenings after school lost to Pokemon games, specially ruby, emerald and sapphire I was chasing that nostalgia when I put on this Speedrun. A few awesome things I noticed and wanted to document 1. This YouTuber, Gunnermaniac has been doing Pokemon Speedruns for more than 10 years - ridiculous consistency - something anyone entrepreneurial will appreciate, I cant go two months without pivoting to a new project 2. Throughout much of the game, Gunner often iterates that hes spent 30-40 hours perfecting a certain movement or replayed a certain portion of the game almost as many times, and that really made me pause and think about how undervalued his effort would be to the average person, who might look at this and scoff "get a real job" 3. There is an extreme level of detail to be found even in the simplest of things, if we choose to uncover it, to a novice like myself eating

  Guess what you can buy for $2.99? A cup of coffee or 8 hours of this man’s life. Sounds crass, but its true. This breadmakers name is Ifftikhar, he’s over 50 and I’ve known him for 10+ years, and there are millions just like him, working weekends to support their family, for literal pennies It’s Sunday, and today I sit and think of where the world is going. Something is horribly wrong. We don’t need time machines to travel back in time, we just need an airplane That’s how I felt moving from the US to Pakistan in the early 2000s - like I had travelled back in time - more than 2 decades later I still feel the same way. Social media has helped expose things but the intertia here is too high, I don’t anticipate the lives of such people changing even in the next couple of decades While the world struggles with thinking about robots taking over their livelihood, people like Ifftikhar can barely comprehend what they’re talking about much less relate, because their daily lives are so untouch

  As the title suggests, I thought I'd do a post on how working at a start up vs working at a corporate Job has been for me as an on-again-off-again entrepreneur, and what I would do differently based on what Ive learned, should I start a start up again A bit of backstory for context: I have an engineering background but began my career in sales Here are some stats for comparison (these will be important for later) Company Founded   No of Investors Employee Size Industry ARR (USD) Ops From CEO https://gomotive.com/ 2013 35-40 4500 + Transport Hardware + Software $190-220 Million USA/Mex/Pak/Ind https://www.linkedin.com/in/smakani/ https://jibble.io/ 2016 2-4 80 + HR Software $2-4 Million UK/USA https://uk.linkedin.com/in/asimq I've worked at both places in for a comparable amount of time in adjacent enough roles, and since the companies are similar in that they are spearheaded by leaders of similar origin/education and both work in SaaS, I