malacled

my disease is spreading exhibit A (got Bahar to start scrapbook journaling)

a friend hit me up asking for intro to agentic ai courses and now I’m being accused of spreading propaganda (I’m guilty)

Now I know why you recommended this course 😆

Mentioning Uzbek food

with no stanford cofounder btw, iykyk honestly, that almost 90% guarantees we won’t make it, but I’m trying to get more comfortable with shooting for the moon. if we do make it, that’s an extremely strong network + they take 0% equity. and if it doesn’t work out, there’ll be other opportunities. wouldn’t be the first time we got rejected from something, won’t be the last.

very late update: passed to international stage, we’ll see from there in other news, I’ve officially replaced most of my social media consumption with more productive things. unfortunately, my “in between” bouts in life are now filled with another, even worse addiction: substack. the issue lies in the framing: reading doesn’t feel like a negative addiction. it’s just another form of scrolling, but the one that ultimately (as an acquaintance quite cleverly put it) “just holding you back from doing the only thing that matters: doing the thing”. my substack is full of people writing and creating, as is twitter, as is linkedin. reading them gives you the false sense of doing something “productive,” the same weird boost you get when rebuilding your life to-do list at 2am on a tuesday, only for the checklist to be abandoned by thursday noon. all that complaining to say - I blokd to hell and back and I finished a side project. maybe it really is this damn phone, mom.

revisiting roots, recalibrating purpose (no I’m not a hijabi now I’m just in my hometown)

Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized. I was looking at the amount of my time, therefore my life, that had been turned into garbage. And the worst part is that I could've prevented it. -substack article

our “stuff” quietly turns into a graveyard of our hours. harsh but needed reminder, I suppose, that every object is a receipt for time spent, sometimes on things that never truly mattered.

saying something like this) is not a smiley face at the end. it is to essentially put the sentence in (), to emphasize that it’s a “btw, x” type of phrasing or that this is the last I’m speaking on this specific thread of thinking. it has no eyes how can it be :)? I digress.

“The city does not tell its past,” Calvino wrote, “but contains it like the lines of a hand.” I trace those lines and find the valley of my childhood fading, the city growing over it, new paint that makes the wall brighter, but thinner somehow. “The beauty of a landscape,” Pamuk said, “resides in its melancholy.” maybe that’s what this is. the soft ache of witnessing life move without you, the quiet proof that I’ve been gone, and that I’m still alive enough to notice. because noticing is its own kind of grief gentle, wordless, human. the way the light falls differently through the same window, the way the air smells older in the house you grew up in. and somewhere between the dust and the glass, between what’s gone and what’s still familiar, I realize how fragile our agreements with time really are how every return rewrites the memory of home. how being alive might simply mean learning to love the parts of the world that keep changing without asking.

finally came home. the paint looks whiter, though it isn’t. the rooms have shrunk slightly, or perhaps I’ve grown past their scale. a new bucket of toys lay by the arch by the second floor, my sister’s world expanding in characters I no longer recognize. our street bears a sign now, its letters pressed into stone as if they’ve always been there. the city hums in unfamiliar rhythms, a bagel shop by my university, hidden along rows of construction sites, drowning in scaffolding and dust. I nearly walked past it, the laugh of a friend, the smell of warm bread, cutting through the autumn air. I tell myself these are good changes. and they are. yet each new thing arrives carrying a small funeral for what stood before.

my favorite part of any hackathon lives in that space between submission and announcement - the calm after the sprint, the glow of shared creation. it’s when you realize that what you built, and who you built it with, already feels like a win. (never done 3d visualization before and felt dumb the entire time 100% azizbek carried)

the two are not mutually exclusive (ly Aqsa)

I somehow booked myself for 3 things at the same time tomorrow, wish me luck (maybe cloning myself in 9 hours is possible - I work better under pressure anyways)

playing catch up with my usual sf shenanigans now that I have a ticking time bomb

just clocked out for the last time bye bye corporate

sf companies are not serious whatsoever btw