Identity
The velocity at which I’m updating my beliefs about the world has never been known to be slow; saying “Oops” and updating my beliefs implies updating my behavior if needed. This oscillating pattern of behavior has been defining the kind and amount of love I receive in this world, updating a behavior is either bringing me joy by interacting with people, loving myself, or appreciating the world, or has led me to a series of overwhelm led by the need to solve the questions I’m cornered with.
To nerd out and talk about a particular topic that you are deeply interested in/ obsessed with, requires you to unveil part of yourself. Your personality, your affection, your love for that topic. Often, it feels like dancing in the symphony of that subject(my analogy is very consumed, but I feel it holds true here).
One of the most common questions I get is how I managed to learn so many media formats in such a short amount of time. people often assume I learned everything simultaneously. that is not true.
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.
I remember once posting on Facebook about how I dislike people who compliment me , and I wrote something along the lines of: if you want to be a good friend of mine, do not give me compliments.
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everything, not because it wasn’t interesting, but because I was drifting away from the kind of problems that originally made me fall in love with machine learning.