This budget should make your blood boil. Let me show you why.
Pakistan's interest payments this year: Rs. 8,054 billion.
Pakistan's entire development budget, roads, dams, hospitals, schools, everything: Rs. 1,000 billion.
Eight rupees go to debt service for every one rupee invested in this country. This is not a budget. This is a confession.
Understand what this debt is. It was not borrowed to build Pakistan. Over the years, it was borrowed by corrupt politicians who were simultaneously busy building their own empires, inside and outside of Pakistan.
Now you and I are paying interest on their corruption.
Government will borrow another Rs. 7,000 billion on top of everything that already exists.
Borrow to pay interest on previous borrowing.
This is a debt trap and we are in it.
And they took out full page newspaper adverts at your expense to celebrate it.
Now let's look at Bangladesh. Same region. Same starting point. Very different choices.
Bangladesh total budget: $76 billion. Pakistan: $60 billion.
Bangladesh development spending: $24 billion. Pakistan: $3.6 billion.
Bangladesh interest payments: $10.4 billion. Pakistan: $29 billion.
Bangladesh education budget: $6.9 billion. Pakistan, federal and all four provinces combined: $3.5 billion.
They have 83 million fewer people than us and still spend twice as much educating them.
Bangladesh defence: $3.5 billion. Pakistan defence: $10.8 billion.
We spend 3 times more on defence than Bangladesh and our interest bill is 8 times their entire defence budget.
They are spending 6.5 times more on building their country than we are. And they are paying a third of what we pay in interest.
Now look at what this has done to our people.
Pakistan's GDP and Bangladesh's GDP are almost identical, around $450 billion each.
But Pakistan has 83 million more people.
Bangladesh's income/person: $2,621.
Pakistan: $1,901.
There taka is 122/dollar
Our Rs is 278/dollar
Poverty in Pakistan: 44.7%.
Poverty in Bangladesh: 5.9%.
Literacy in Pakistan: 60% (doubtful)
Literacy in Bangladesh: 77%
Once again our interest payments:
Rs. 8,054 billion.
Our defence budget: Rs. 3,000 billion. Interest payments are 2.7 times the defence budget.
This is far more damning than anything else!
I want to say something clearly. If this trajectory is not broken in the next two to three years, the security of this country will become unaffordable.
This is not a political statement.
This is basic maths.
These numbers are not accidental.
This is what elite capture looks like.
Wake up.
#Budget2026
#Corruption
A 30-year-old solo developer decided to stop chasing trends and made $77,000 in a single month
He built 35 different micro-SaaS startups while working completely on his own
He didn't build complex AI agent teams
He just paired a basic code editor with a single AI chat window
Every single day, he follows a military-like routine: wakes up at 6 AM, hits the gym, and locks in
For 4 to 6 hours straight, his phone is completely off. Zero social media, zero emails. Just pure deep work
He doesn't even check bug reports or customer support in the morning to keep his focus clean
Out of 35 startups he launched, 30 completely failed and made $0
But one single project (Trustm) now generates over $35,000/month alone
His main secret? He ships features immediately instead of polishing them for months
I recommend reading the article below
Opened Shipper and sent this prompt:
"Clone Twitter and make it into a website + mobile app."
A sentence and it started doing everything right away.
Watch it in action:
My leader @ImranKhanPTI sits in jail with his health in jeopardy. His imprisonment weighs on us every day. But I know him well enough to say this: He would want Pakistan's young people to keep building, to take on the world. Especially in AI. Especially now, without losing sight of the political struggle, which we will not abandon.
This thread is for them 🧵
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Forced to stay away from my country gave me two benefits: More time and more passion. I chose not to waste either. This is a personal account:
It started with my need to transcribe my long speeches, some over thirty minutes, in mixed English and Urdu on YouTube (which gave a Hindi/Sanskrit transcript). The platforms available would do a bad job with the mix. So, I asked my coaches — ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini and I concluded to do it myself, locally, with Whisper’s large, medium & small models and other AI tools. This was completed in Dec ‘25
For the sake of open source and transparency, I am publishing it on GitHub.
https://t.co/yR9X32e819
In January ’26, I began building the Dr Arif Alvi AI Archive. An attempt to bring together everything I had said, written, read, and recorded across decades, and make it searchable, synthesizable, MINE.
I built it alone. No team. No budget. Just time, curiosity, and persistence.
It runs entirely on my enhanced laptop. My data never leaves it.
My AI agents ingest my writings/articles; thousands of books read and summarised; millions of words of archival material; my thousands of speeches on YouTube press conferences; thousands of talk show appearances since 2000 and clips on YouTube. All scraped from the net via APIs— indexed, and alive inside my local RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system that answers back.
My 50,000+ tweets are searchable faster than X's own tools. Not just by keyword but semantically.
None of it leaves my computer or enters the public domain, remains private.
—
The local LLMs answer questions, draft research briefs, synthesize across all data. When I need to reach beyond my own archive, they augment from public LLMs — ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, others.
I use the archive every day, updating it regularly. It has changed how I think and work.
—
Following are the layers of the stack — what I built is one-of-one. But what I built it from is available to every-one:
▶️ Ollama / Llama / Phi / Qwen — local LLMs running entirely on-device
▶️ Whisper — bilingual English-Urdu speech transcription
▶️ ChromaDB — vector memory across 70,000+ chunks
▶️ Sentence Transformers — semantic search across tweets, speeches, and archives
▶️ Streamlit — dashboard with dual modes: semantic search and AI research
▶️ Six LLM interfaces (ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot) for python scripts and for augmentation of local output
▶️ OpenClaw and GitHub — for code management
▶️VS Code — for scripts and code writing
None of them are mine. The COMPOSITION is mine.
—
I should tell you what it took to get here.
I started learning Python basics from online courses. I am not a programmer, but I reviewed and iterated over a million lines of scripts —learning, correcting, improving, understanding—just enough to keep going.
I had launched Pakistan's Presidential Initiative on Artificial Intelligence in 2019. I thought I understood AI but I took advanced courses anyway. There is always more to learn, and humility about ignorance is not a weakness. It is the only honest starting point.
—
There are tens of thousands of students, researchers, operators, lawyers, and doctors across Pakistan and the world, quietly trying to dabble in AI right now.
To them I would say: software writing is mostly done by machines today. You do not need to become a programmer. You need to understand enough to read, direct, correct and employ tools — like a symphony conductor, with an AI baton.
More than anything, pick a project. Something real, something yours.🔑 Scripts fill the architecture. Concrete fills the blueprint.
GET TO WORK
And do not move slowly. AI tools and agentic systems are changing every single day. What was remarkable yesterday is ordinary today. Sometimes the gap is hours, not months.
The people who stay ahead are not waiting to fully understand it before they begin.
THEY ARE ALREADY BUILDING.
—
Pakistan cannot afford to fall behind in this.
Not out of nostalgia for what Pakistan was, but out of economic and strategic urgency for what it must become — because our talented, hungry people can build anything when given the tools and the leadership.
This is for them.
START
English is full of Arabic words from the Islamic Golden Age, yet this influence is hidden
“Experts” trace these words to other sources to downplay our achievements
Malcolm X said:if you believe you’ve never achieved anything you’ll never achieve anything