Zaynab 🏔️

tech | writing | productivity | books | unprocessed thought | building @selfstartup_

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

@haruncodes Thanks - WW3 brought me back 🤧

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

I haven’t been here over a year..I come back to find everyone asking Gr0k to fact check everything

“Is this true?” 🥴

its so embarrassing to read 😭😭

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

@haruncodes Sigh* I think I’ll log out again 🫠

[Suppressed News. @SuppressedNws]

Moroccan Harvard graduate and Microsoft engineer Ibtehal Abu Saad disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary, accusing AI chief Mustafa Suleyman and Microsoft of aiding Israel’s genocide in Gaza through tech and military contracts.

“They might come after me for what I said, but my fear of retaliation doesn’t even compare to my fear of contributing to technologies used to bomb innocent people. To me, my greatest fear is waking up on an ordinary workday only to find out that the code I wrote might have played a part in killing children. That’s the haunting thought that consumed me.”

[taimur @taimurabdaal]

This Ramadan I found a workflow that’s really helped me engage more deeply with the Qur'an whereas historically I've struggled to go beyond a surface reading

Curious to hear others’ thoughts and advice:

1. Reading a plain english translation (Oxford World Classics) with no archaic words ("verily", "thou") or line breaks each verse
Can lucidly read it and just take it in vs having to overcome the linguistic hurdles first

2. Not worrying about reading the arabic alongside
Historically I've tried reading one verse at a time in arabic then the translation (disaster), and also tried reading a chunk in arabic then the translation of that chunk (better but still makes it harder to just understand because you basically take a "break" pretty frequently).

As a non-Arabic speaker, I view reading the quran in arabic now as broadly a different activity than reading a translation. Obv still good to read in arabic + be on the arabic learning trajectory, but while my arabic is poor, I’ve found it more fruitful to separate the two

3. Trying to approach the Qur’an afresh
I’ve read the quran in bits and pieces my whole life but I didn't have the locked-in mindset of "these are the words of God, that's pretty crazy and I really want to know what God is saying".

2 decades of low-quality engagement de-sensitised me to it, so when I'd read it I'd often be thinking "yeah I get it, one god, day of judgment, prophets, hellfire, I know this stuff"

Basically wiping away any previous engagement in my mind and trying to start afresh has been super helpful

4. Making notes as I go along of bits to dig deeper on
Almost every 10 verses theres something that I end up noting down, and knowing that I have it recorded somewhere lets me just focus on getting through a big chunk (e.g. 1 juz or 1 big surah) to see the bigger picture, knowing i'll be filling in the gaps later.

Without writing stuff down, each new question that comes up kind of builds up into this snowball of haziness so after reading for 20 mins you feel like you haven't really understood much at all

5. Having a quick way to get a preliminary answer to each question
A combination of The Study Qur'an + Sheikh GPT gets a reasonable answer pretty quickly, so you can clear things up as you go along. There are of course some topics/questions where I have particular interest where I want to spend a lot more time, e.g. reading a whole book about it, but most questions can be cleared up quickly, removing the haze of uncertainty that builds up as you go along, and the rest are bigger things for which deeper reflection and grappling is really fruitful

6. Doing it solo first, rather than in a class or with a youtube lecture
There's obv value in doing it with a teacher/class, but for me, doing a first pass on my own has let me actually engage with the Qur’an myself, rather than via an intermediary who is deciding what the salient points/questions are.

I've previously tried a couple of classes and a bunch of youtube lectures and I found that without my own pre-reading and thinking, I feel like I'm trying to enter someone else's understanding rather than construct my own.

The stuff that gets a lot of airtime in classes is not necessarily the stuff that I’m especially interested in at any point in time, which makes the class less engaging. E.g. i was always baffled as to why in a pretty casual tafseer class, they're getting hung up on some specific arabic word and spending 20 mins dissecting that 1 word. Now I definitely get it — there are a lot of words/concepts that I'd love to see dissected at length — but my words of interest are not necessarily the same as the words the teacher is spending ages on. Would be ideal to do it with a teacher but read the stuff beforehand and come prepared with thoughts + have a good attention span, but historically I have not been there

Keen to hear others’ experiences! 🙏

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

Inevitable Iced latte secured ✅

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

Eid Mubarak friends

[harjit singh .⁺˚✦･༓☀️ @_harjitsingh]

"AI has made art accessible." we were drawing on cave walls, pick up a pencil

[kelly 🌸 @lychkel]

i think you can learn a lot about how confident people are in their own skillsets from observing their reactions to AI - is your first instinct to fear being replaced, or does a fire get lit inside you instead to create even more? to experiment, and push back against the odds?

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

This new wave will force us to reintroduce creativity and art and what it truly is

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

The NFT era is so laughable now…

[Braelyn ⛓️ @braelyn_ai]

how many layers of internet culture are required to understand this?

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Just trying to do my part

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

Graduation day 😮‍💨

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

There’s still something so beautiful about the human craft and in all the time that it takes. I hope we don’t lose the appreciation for that.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Since Studio Ghibli is trending, worth noting the mind-boggling effort Hayao Miyazaki and his team put into a film.

Each has 60k-70k frames, all hand-drawn and painted with water color.

This 4-second clip (“The Wind Rises”) took one animator 15 months to do.

In the documentary “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki”, the legendary Japanese filmmaker talks to one of his animators (Eiji Yamamori) after they complete the crowd scene.

The exchange is gold:

▫️Miyazaki: “Good job.”
▫️Yamamori: “It’s so short, though”
▫️Miyazaki: “But it was worth it.”

The animator gets a second of joy (he’s pumped) but on to the next.

***

Link to doc: https://t.co/z3F4oSQxZM

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

I’m lovingggg this trend 🤩

[Casey Williams, PhD @SciFiClimateGuy]

@sama Another Studio Ghibli meme

[Zaynab 🏔️ @zaynabintech]

Current obsession: Turkmenistan 🇹🇲

What is going on over there?