Karan Ashta

recovering nihilist | cheerful pessimist, rational optimist | ex - @haptik @CMcom_ pmm @webengage |

[- @MusialaEra]

I didn‘t think a man who has everything, literally everything, could still care so much about an award he‘s already won. I respect the passion, Messi is truly the definition of football

[(fan) Trey @UTDTrey]

2 Copa America & a World Cup, the current Ballon D’or winner, appearing in movie trailers & is playing with all his best friends at Inter Miami after completing football. Messi got the perfect end to his career. Sometimes even a hater got to accept defeat

[Ria Chopra 🐍 @riachops]

Richard Linklater made Before Sunrise based on his similar real encounter with a woman named Amy. He made the film hoping she'd see it and get back in touch, but she had already passed away before the movie came out. The film takes place entirely over the course of one day – and Linklater chose that day to be June 16th, as an ode to another single-day story: Ulysses by James Joyce.

Joyce had set his famous novel on June 16th, because that's the day he had his first date with his later wife. It's now celebrated as 'Bloomsday' – named after the book's lead character, Leopold Bloom.

So happy Bloomsday and happy Before Sunrise day!

[maharshi @maharshii]

Become a multidimensional person, Arjuna.

[major tom @tailwiinder]

Just met a guy who's in his early career grind phase and he said to me

"the pain of consistently working hard isn't going to go away, whether I like it or not, so I might as well do my part instead of complaining about every minor inconvenience"

Honestly... sums everything up

[Sherry @SchrodingrsBrat]

Oversharing is a symptom of loneliness because it’s the mind’s desperate need for intimacy, which has to be built over time with a slow exchange of secrets. The oversharer wants to expedite this process, they want the benefits of close friendship with someone they’ve just met

[Consulting Comedy @consultingcmdy]

Senior partner reassured that AI cannot replace him because he adds zero value to a project

[ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ @hamptonism]

rebranding Linear Algebra as Artificial Intelligence was the most successful marketing campaign of all time.

[Ananay @ananayarora]

ChatGPT is down so people are going to Claude but Claude can’t browse the web so people are going to perplexity but perplexity is hitting chatGPT and GPT is down so it’s hitting Claude so with all this traffic chaos all 3 are now down. Also nobody uses Gemini but just to show they’re getting a lot of traffic they shut down too. That’s how we got the AI blackout

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Yeah, @Jack is right

[Adam Chalmers @adam_chal]

My theory: burnout has nothing to do with how many hours or how hard you work. It's caused by working for people you don't like, towards goals you don't believe in, in systems that grant you no agency.

[Wisdom & Boats @wisdomandboats]

Real men cycle through these 4 moods daily

1. I miss her
2. Fuck you the world is mine for the taking
3. I need to work harder
4. I am at peace

[Dilip Kumar @kmr_dilip]

We are half way through this year. If you started the year with a list of goals and haven't made an progress yet. I'll tell you the truth again. This will hurt you.

Apps won’t make you calm.
Courses won’t make you rich.
Trainers won’t make you ripped.
Workshops won’t make you genius.
Supplements won’t make you gain muscles.
Conferences won't make you an entrepreneur.

You are the architect of your own sufferings & happiness. You have to take responsibility.

Motivation is in abundance. Easy to sell.
Discipline is scarce. You can’t buy that.

Inspiration is overrated. Don’t chase that.
Consistency is underrated. You want t build this.

Seek guidance to educate yourself. Don’t outsource your goals.
Use tools to aid your learning curve. Don’t surrender your desire on it.

Six months left. Go for it!

[Internal Tech Emails @TechEmails]

YouTube cofounder: "video idea"

February 13, 2005

[Aviral Bhatnagar @aviralbhat]

One of the biggest enablers in your professional life is a lack of drama in your personal life

[major tom @tailwiinder]

People upskill their way out of misery and mediocrity way more often than you think.

Your path and your journey might be unique to you, but the problems you face are most likely not.

There are people who've found success in tech despite having done nothing for a good 3-3.5 years during engineering.

There are people who've pretty much been held hostage by multi-year bonds in companies, upskilled on the side despite having to work 10 hours everyday, and broken out of it.

The thing is - most of you know exactly what to do to upskill yourself. You know exactly what steps to take. You're simply hell-bent on giving into the delusion that it's somehow more fruitful to chase an easier way to get there. You simply do not want to accept the fact that most problems are one google search away.

Your biggest issue is that you want your optics sorted out asap, not your skills or your career. You want it quick, without putting in much work. You want to LOOK successful more than being successful.

You need to accept that upskilling might be a slow process, and that's FINE. It's normal. No matter how quick and easy people make it look. If it's slow for you, that doesn't make you any less deserving of it.

Do not pay much heed to the part of you that wants you to remain mediocre. Slowly, but surely, make consistent efforts to break out of it.

[major tom @tailwiinder]

You, an average Indian CS engineering student, start engineering thinking you have 4 years left to insanely upskill yourself,

and you spend the next 6 months chilling around because you need a break after that JEE grind;

after which you realise that you don't actually have 4 years, you only have 3 years, because placements begin as soon as the 3rd year ends, and all the good companies are gone within the blink of an eye.

Now you have 2.5 years left, of which you spend 6 months figuring out "how to start coding" because you can't "afford to waste time". You're down to 2;

which is when you realise that you actually only have 1 year left because everyone's supposed to get an internship by their third year,

so you spend 4 months figuring out that C++ is the best language to start coding in, and you decide to grind leetcode for 8 months.

Then you realise that you also need to have some projects in your portfolio, so now you overwhelm yourself by deciding what stack to choose for your project while you:

- have the worst possible subjects in college with high backlog rates.

- need to make yourself stand out by building projects that nobody has ever thought of.

- gotta keep up the leetcode grind.

And if this wasn't enough, you realise that people are getting selected into GSoC, building a personal brand, launching products left and right, getting noticed; and you just can't figure out how tf it's happening to them and not to you.

Your focus is all over the place, your chances to succeed are low af even if the next few months go exactly as you planned, and you're slowly realising this and it's eating your soul away.

To manage everything, you've now turned to binge-watching useless clickbaity videos by searching this exact phrase on YouTube:

"How to crack FAANG placement in {months_left} months"

[Shervin @shervin]

I agree with Peter Thiel on this: Emotional Intelligence (EI) becomes more valuable as AI and AGI rise. Emotional intelligence and verbal skills will rise in value. Super-intelligence doesn’t guarantee empathy and communication skills. Humans can catch the most invisible human cues. A single speech can move millions to actions and change. A single conversation can change a human’s mental frameworks and inspire change. Those with high emotional intelligence and verbal skills will be a key bridge between Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence.

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Learn by doing.