Tamseel's Weblog

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  • Figure-out-ability of the universe

    In

    The biggest blessing we have is the figure-out-ability of the universe. Things happen according to patterns and rules, and those patterns and rules are discoverable. And if we figure out the core patterns, they are fairly consistent and allow us predictability over at-least a short span of time. Had there been no rules, no patterns, if everything was random, we would have been doomed. There is no such thing as randomness, but only probability distributions.

  • Project Life

    In

    Nerds have a tendency to systemize some things. They might not call it as such, but at all the times, they’ll have several projects ongoing. For instance, a project I currently have opened is systemizing some things for my parents so that they don’t face much problems when I’m not available (since I’m planning to move out soon). In this POV, everything is a project, e.g. buying a new phone, travelling to some city, etc.

    The thing with projects is that they have a position in relation to each other. Some projects are sub-projects of other projects. For instance, a project fixing wifi problem at our home was a sub-project of the project systemizing things for my parents which was a sub-project of my moving out. Similarly some projects are more important than other projects, so you need to be able to prioritize between them. How to run and manage multiple projects in parallel is a project of its own, which improves the efficiency of other projects. Also important to note that the term “project” is just a label. It does not need something to be boring. If you are going on vacations, that too I’m counting as a project.

    This point of learning their relative position, hierarchy and how they effect each other is useful, because projects are not sacred. If what you really want is A, and for that you initiated sub-projects B and C, but you later realize D fulfills A better than B and C combined and is simpler, then you can shoot B and C in the head and work on D instead. The benefit of this kind of thinking ultimately gives you an anchor point. What’s that anchor point? It’s the project of which everything else is a sub-project: Project Life. Is that project going right?

  • I was wrong about emails

    In

    Earlier I had posted on my weblog about why I liked emails as a form of communication. I was so wrong.

    Emails are useful form only if the communication is: (i) pre-structured, and (ii) necessitates long-form text. In all other scenarios, you’re better off texting.

    The point of conversation is not just to share maximum context, but firstly to find the right shared context, and that requires a very fast feedback loop. This fast feedback loop is not possible in any way other than texting (apart from verbal conversation). Now that I have gotten used to texting, emails feel pathetically slow.

    For maximum context dumping and fetching, blogs, essays and books are the way to go.

  • Institutionalized

    In

    Humans have a tendency to get institutionalized. i.e. to get used to a way of things, e.g., prisoners sentenced for life at a young age get institutionalized to life in a prison and when offered parole at a later age, find it painfully difficult to live a life of freedom. This is also the reason old people find it very hard to migrate to a different house, city, or a country.

    We not only get institutionalized about our environment, but also our way of seeing things and thinking about things.

    One particular pattern of getting institutionalized is when a not-so-good system helps a person escape a terribly-worse system, but then the person gets institutionalized to the not-so-good system. Thus, later when he gets to see way better systems, he cannot wrap his head around the fact that the system that saved him from the terribly-worse system is actually not-so-good, and starts thinking that something must be wrong about these better systems, even if he can’t see anything wrong. In an extreme end, he’ll start making up wrong things about these better systems.

    This pattern is very apparent in people that join rebellious groups, for instance, criminal gangs that help someone out of some serious trouble. But rebellious groups are of all sorts, e.g., we had a rogue student-organization in our university, that was a very small ineffective rebellious group1. But then there are also, political factions, cults, etc.

    But this pattern is more common in our everyday ways of looking at things or thinking about things.

    For instance, one might notice that there are so many people or places that promise to help you achieve x, but later realize that all of these people or places are frauds or are ineffective, he might get skeptical not just of those fraud or ineffective people, but even of the fact that x is something achievable. In some cases, x might actually be unachievable e.g. if someone promises you to bring back the dead. But in everyday cases, x are things that are achievable, e.g. understanding about things, good friends, happiness, etc. So, for instance, if an actually happy person meets such an institutionalized-skeptic of a happy life, he cannot believe that living a happy life is even possible. Similarly, someone who could not understand things by reading textbooks would think that he is incapable of understanding things (most textbooks are extremely poorly written, or in many instances the person lack the pre-requisite knowledge for understanding a concept, where it’s better to re-start learning from first principles).

    That was a common person example, but this is a pattern in overall way of institutionalized thinking. For instance, Einstein had gotten institutionalized to his relativity model which was a way better understanding than Newtonian model, but he couldn’t grasp the quantum theory when it came along which provided an even better explanation about some things.

    How to de-institutionalize then? For anyone who has had experience helping old people switch to a newer technology will know how hard it is for them to grasp it, even when the newer technology is more convenient. So, before you think about de-institutionalizing, re-think if it’s really necessary. If it involves other people, you should respect their preferences on your own, because you might end up doing them more harm then good by trying to de-institutionalize them.

    The only valid question then, is how to get yourself deinstitutionalized. The difficulty of getting out of a bad system is proportional to the time you have spent within. But even still, among people who have lived same time institutionalized, some get deinstitutionalized while others don’t. And it seems the pattern with them is that they interact more with people from other systems. But not just other systems, but better systems. So, they interact more often with people who look at things more perceptively, people who think about things more rigorously, or people who live their lives more fulfilled. But the important thing is that they engage in an honest dialogue and not a debate. Someone who actually has a better system has no need or desire to argue with anyone else. And so if one interacts in a debate-ish way, the people with better systems will start avoiding him, and he will find himself arguing with people who like arguing, which is people with other equally-bad or worse systems. And that is a terrible way to get locked-in in your institutionalized thinking.

    1. There was a classmate of mine who was an active member of it. He was a nice boy otherwise in class, so I couldn’t understand why he joined that. I tried to avoid bringing up this topic, but as I talked more to him, he started telling about it himself, and I realized what was the thing. He was a shy and cowardly kid, but joining this thing made his cowardice go away, and so he became blind to all the morally wrong things this group was doing, even though he himself had good morals. ↩︎

  • Buying e-reader in Pakistan

    In

    When I was buying mine in March 2025, I found that there’s only one guy in Pakistan who imports used or almost-new e-readers from abroad. You’ll probably find the same guy on FB, OLX, Daraz, etc. (with usernames Syed Online Store or Readers are the leaders).

    I found that I care about three things most. 1) Screen Size, 2) Frontlight, 3) Display Resolution.

    Screen Size

    Small screen size means more page turns per book. Almost 80% of ereaders you’ll find would have 6-inch screen. This is equal to some mobile phones, just less rectangular. For book-reading, it felt too small. So, you should try finding one with 7 inch or 8 inch screen. Mine is 8 in, and it is perfect. Larger than 8 inch give more of a magazine feel and are suitable only if you wanna read scientific papers, mangas, PDFs with large paper size, or stuff like that.

    Frontlight

    Eink readers are supposed to give a paper like feel, but still since there’s a thin plastic touch screen between the display, light is not reflected back from the surface as good as paper itself. So, when you take the e-reader outside, it will be readable perfectly, but in a normal room where you can read paper properly, you will find the e-reader not so well lit unless you are directly sitting under a tube light or something. So, you should opt for an e-reader with frontlight. You will also need it if you wanna read at night with lights off. (The seller will call it backlight, but he means the same thing).

    Resolution / Pixel Density

    E-ink display technology has evolved a lot between 2010-2020. Older models used E-ink Pearl technology which had around ~167 dpi but newer models with E-ink Carta display have around ~300 dpi (same as book-print quality). For good reading experience, make sure not to buy anything <250 dpi.

    Note: Resolution (such as 1448 × 1072) is only comparable if you are comparing same screen sizes. The proper comparison is thus by using pixel density (dpi/ppi). The seller might not know exact resolution/dpi but just tell him you need one with good resolution and google the exact dpi for the models he shows yourself.

    Manufacturer / OS

    Amazon’s Kindles have largest e-reader market share, but that is mostly because of integrated system with Amazon’s kindle store. But if you are not buying e-books from Amazon kindle store (maybe because *coughs* the author directly sent you an e-book file), standard .epub files won’t run on Kindle. So you either need to find *coughs* ask the author for AZW3 or MOBI version, or convert the file. Also, Kindle’s overall UX isn’t considered good. Kobo’s UX on the other hand is considered best among all e-readers (based on user reviews).

    Now Kindles and Kobo both use their own OS, but some e-reader brands like Nook use Android. Android is an overkill if you wanna use e-reader just for reading stuff and hence should be avoided unless specifically needed as it will consume more battery etc.

    How I bought mine?

    I actually didn’t know all this info. It took me a lot of googling and some experimentation to learn this. I asked the seller to give me a list of all models he has, so that I can choose. When he gave me, I gave that to Grok and prompted it to google relevant specs and it returned a table, which I took to Excel and filtered according to my needs and decided. First, I bought a 6-in Kobo Clara (which had front-light not working1 and thus I could get it at lower price), but realized that 6-in was too small and front-light is necessary. The seller was nice enough to have me replaced it. I then chose an 8-in Kobo Forma (with minor scratches and page-turn buttons not working) which was the only >7-in model he had at that time with good resolution.

    How to buy yours?

    First check out Ereader ComparisonTables to get an idea of different models and their features and decide what features matter to you.

    The seller I mentioned earlier is generally less responsive, due to other workload or something, and so he’ll reply late. If you’re in Karachi better visit his shop, or if you wanna buy online, try to share your requirements clearly early on so that it takes less back and forth for the final decision. It took me around a month from initial inquiry to final decision, which probably is not a good way to do it.

    Other options are some shops that import new Kindles, or people who would have bought it from abroad, and are selling their used ones on OLX or FB groups.

    After you buy your E-reader

    If you are a nerd and need the best reading experience, KOReader is a must. Most e-reader UX’s suck and allow very little customization. KOReader is a third-party open-source software that can run on most e-reader devices (earlier it couldn’t be used on Kindle, but now even Kindle jailbreak has been released). It has some initial setup overhead, but with KOReader, you can make the device fit your needs. Kobo’s UX is best among all default manufacturers but even still, the page turns are slower on Kobo’s default UX (called Nickel) than if I use KOReader on same device. There are some engineering reasons behind it. There’s another third-party software called Plato which is even faster than KOReader but is less customizable.

    1. Note: The seller would also have some models with some defects, which will allow you to buy them at lower price. ↩︎

  • Invent

    In

    We can always source ideas for interesting games from other people. Games we see on tv, read about in books, so on and so forth. But somehow, the games that turned out to be most interesting were the ones we had invented ourselves.

    This can be generalized to a lot of things in life.

  • In

    See this: nat.org

  • Memories

    In

    While reading an essay, I notice this. Relevant to something in the essay, I recall a similar experience I had also had. But then I notice this. I had mentioned this experience in an email to someone. Writing that thought had created an indexed entry in my brain. Had I not typed that out, my brain could not have indexed that.

    Our memories are very quick to fade. When we write them down, we create a hard impression. But once we do that, our brain says — hah, this fool finally wrote it down somewhere, now I can let that memory go. And it goes and archive that memory into the deeper much hard-to-access archives. With that, the memory of that experience is no longer accessible, and a summarized carbon copy of the impression we had made replaces it.

    This idea is frightening. Frightening because we are at the mercy of the accuracy of our impressions. This increases up the responsibility for how we write. It’s way more often than not that people retro-fit a narrative or a vision to their story. But we should aim for impartiality. Because if we have made any progress, it is by realizing the susceptibility of us getting fooled by no other but ourselves.

  • Self-Referentially Ideal Premise

    In

    One of the characteristic of a specific kind of faulty premises is that it self-references itself as the ideal premise. (The problem with such logic if not apparent can be seen through Godel’s incompleteness theorem.) The result of such characteristic is that it indirectly mandates that the objective function of a person believing such premise is to spread it as much as he can. But there’s a counter-intuitive consequence of such an objective function. Imagine a few people living on an isolated island hold such a thing and ultimately succeed in selling that idea into the minds of all people in such an island. Now, what are those people supposed to do then? What should be their objective function now that the premise has spread as much as it could be? Well, you can say they also had their own personal objective functions before, why can’t they have again. That is because the premise restricted from them, because it mandated a different objective function — the spread of itself — which ultimately has ceased to be further achievable. If the island is not isolated, then ultimately the people would go out for conquests (which history tells us people usually went to). And the premise would continue to live. But ultimately, the earth is a spheroid — an isolated island in the sea of cosmos. And thus an isolated island is perfectly suitable scale to think why is there no such island where all people are completely sold to such a faulty premise and aren’t living the ideal life as does the “ideal” premise promises them? Because such a self-referentially-ideal premise is like a virus that lives as long as the population of hosts is somewhat immune to it. If the whole population of hosts contracts a fatal virus, it’s not just the death of the population of hosts but also the population of virus itself. That is why there are so many premises mandating the ideal world but not even a single tiny island that represents anything as such. Ironically, if there are any islands remotely resembling an ideal state, they are the kind where people would get horror at even the idea of such an “ideal” premise.

  • Post forwarding

    In

    I am typing out this text on my weblog, and when I will hit publish, it will also become a post on my linkedin account. This has two benefits. 1) I get an easily searchable and shareable copy of my social posts on my weblog. 2) I can have linkedin blocked (on both my pc and mobile) and still be able to post stuff, and maybe I can unblock it once a week to check comments. And if someone wants to reach out to me, that too is pretty easy to figure out.

    n8n being open source is cool.