Learning on Ahmed Alghali Blog

Notes on Writing - Writing is Why I Understand Myself

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 05:53:05 +0300

I once emphasized how I see writing as a must , and how it helps me to understand myself . I did not say that lightly. At the time, I thought I was already being radical in my statement. I thought calling writing a “must” was extreme enough. But I have come to a stronger conclusion since then,

Notes on Writing - Connecting Notes

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:35:00 +0300

Some of the things that force clarity of mind in writing are not the words only and the choice of words, but the links between them. linking notes is not a decorative feature. it is structural. it allows thought to move from being scattered into being shaped. this is something that can hardly be utilized in regular note taking apps, but when you use a more sophisticated system or a personal blog, you allow this feature to exist naturally.

Career Advice, AI and Learning How to Code

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 01:01:35 +0300

I remember my friend Awab sharing a thoughtful reading recommendation from the LessWrong community titled You will be OK . it is both a clarification and a gentle reminder of different ways to think and act under the existential threat of AI, written as a response to concerns raised by a young community member in Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse .

Lessons That Healed Me Then - Writing

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:19:51 +0300

you go through life for a long time believing no one has ever suffered the way you have.
and then, one day, you read something. or you hear something.
and you realize your suffering does not isolate you. it is your bridge.

Learning The Opposite

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 04:20:00 +0300

There’s a point at which everything you learn requires you to learn the opposite thing. If you learn to be patient, then eventually you’ll need to learn when to be impatient.
If you learn to control your anger, then you’ll have to learn when it’s good to be angry. And if you learn to be gentle, then you must learn when to put up a fight.
Life isn’t made up of a set of solutions for you to find.
It’s built on extreme behaviors you learn to balance.

Josh Terry

Why I'm Sharing Notes - Cognitive Overload

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:31:42 +0300

Learn to write, I’m dead serious about that, because… pick some hard problems and learn to write very, very carefully. when I say pay attention to the word, I mean that pick the right words, organize them into the right phrases and get your sentences straight. read and write everyday and see if you can discover what is true.

Jordan Peterson

Why Im Sharing Notes - Why Im Writing in English

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:33:40 +0300

Why I am writing in English and not Arabic.

There is a guilt that comes with it. shame on me for writing in English while being Arab by mother and father. I have never fled to a western or European country. I was not obsessed with western movies, in fact I barely watch movies at all. I accidentally watched two movies in the past two years and that was it. yet I am still influenced by the west. that is simply the reality of the world we live in today. influence no longer requires migration. it travels through knowledge, through the internet, through science, through code.

Computation Is Not Reality

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 22:22:27 +0300

Recently, I’ve been working on the reproducibility of machine learning research. In practice, this meant doing far more infrastructure work than actual machine learning modeling. I found myself digging into operating systems, containers, storage, and hardware details. and suddenly, I started questioning everything, not because it wasn’t interesting, but because I was drifting away from the kind of problems that originally made me fall in love with machine learning.

Why I’m Sharing Notes - Reflection

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 09:32:11 +0300

do things badly

As the years pass by, I find myself adapting to different reasons to keep living, and to share, I’m not as clear as I used to be about why I should be posting something publicly, but looking back over the years, I recall how writing started. How reasons changed.

What you want to major in might not be exactly what you imagine it to be

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:55:53 +0300

I’m not sure if it exactly look as I imagine it

Zeinab

The first time I encountered this idea was when talking to Zeinab Sami 016 FMSI, while I insisted that she must study how stochastic processes are involved in machine learning, she responded with something that falls into the idea: “Your perception of this major might be different from the reality.”

Flow State and Sleep

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 19:52:21 +0300

Lately, I lost my ability to focus and maintain a flow state. I don’t sleep late, I eat relatively healthy food, and I’m not dopamine addicted. The problem comes down to practices that would align your efforts with what you want to achieve.

A Quiet Advantage Of Being Left Handed

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 23:00:00 +0300

It took me about a month to realize something small but surprisingly important. being left handed is a quiet advantage if you are a teacher, a professor, or anyone who lectures using a board.

Learning Faliure Modes - Branching

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:50:51 +0300

This is part of a series of notes I’m taking to understand the person I am when learning something. most of them are about understanding myself and applying useful techniques.

Reading about neuroscience can help me save time instead of experimenting blindly and trying to see what works. and I plan to study neuroscience some day, but as for now I want to share what I’ve learned by myself, as I spent the first 19 years of my life learning how to learn. I never even signed up for the famous Coursera course on this topic. the road of learnign was lonely, paved with faliure moods, it was an experimentation based road.

Learning Faliure Modes - Floating Information

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:50:51 +0400

I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. it has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.

Why I'm Sharing Notes - Regret

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 23:50:55 +0300

One of the main incentives behind sharing my notes in public is not the urge to talk. As social creatures, we naturally love sharing experiences, stories, and ideas. But I buried that essential human feature for a long time. I used to post on Facebook , not consistently, and then I went through what I called “ Manulasis ”(I heard of this back in high school in one of the articles but I forget the spelling/word but never the definition): the tendency to give up explaining things to people. I essentially gave up sharing altogether. I became detached from the external world without even noticing, day by day.

Why I'm Sharing Notes — Learned Too Late

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:48:47 +0300

There’s an anecdote about Richard Feynman when a historian walks up to his desk and sees all the sheets of paper lying around on Mr Feynman desk and makes a comment about these being a record of Feynman’s thinking and then Mr Feynman corrects the historian and says that: these are not a record of my thinking I think on paper and then the historian presses on and says that surely you’re thinking in your head and these are only records of the thoughts in your head and that’s when Mr Feynman says: no they aren’t a record of my thinking process they are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.