u/tharsalys

I have a weird problem.

I grew up as a Muslim, and when internet happened to me back in 2012, one of the first crushes I developed was a German alt girl. She introduced me to In Flames and I went down a rabbit hole.

I was 14 at the time and it was like a whole world opening up to me. In parallel, I was doing aitekaaf and going with the tableeghi jamaat lol. Khair, around the time when I was 16, after much study of philosophy and debates and literature and whatnot, I decided to apostatize and became an atheist.

Then I remained an atheist up until 2022, when a series of "events" led to a spiritual reawakening. But in this time, I had been thoroughly "alt-pilled".

I never dressed up as such mainly because back then ... you couldn't even find this stuff in Pakistan lol. I had to make do with just dressing in black and making my entire wardrobe black. But all of my tastes -- in media or political -- were very much alt.

By the end of 2022, I reverted to Islam once more (looong story) and by 2024, after exposure to authentic sufism (i.e., Al Ghazali) I have become what many would consider "extra religious" or overly religious -- I perform tahajjud and have a strict schedule of ascetic practices.

What I find funny is that being a "weirdo" like I used to be was just as alienating as being "extra religious" is. I have never felt more like an outsider, I think that's an experience that everyone who learns the religion outside of the cultural norms goes through. You realize just how ... rare true religiosity is.

I know alt has a deep history with religion. It's a response to organized religion in many ways but it also sort of expresses a kind of longing for religion at the same time (with all its quasi-religious symbolism in crosses and whatnot). What I'm curious about is:

1. Could there be something like an "Islamic alt"? with Islamic symbolism ... a meme from 2016 comes to mind "emo goth hijabis from karachi" (iykyk)
2. How philosophically compatible is alt with being truly religious (not in the cultural religious sense where religion is a crutch for the ego and social status)?

I don't know the answer to 1. For 2, I have a lot of thoughts. The long and short of it: I've never felt more like an outsider than I do now.

Assalamu Alaykum.

I just launched my YouTube channel dedicated to figuring out a civilizational framework for technology from the Muslim world. My first video is a bit controversial but I wanted to lay out all of the questions that I want to get to the root of.

I'm a serial entrepreneur with multiple ventures under my belt. I've personally run into the limits of building out from Pakistan and come to the conclusion that the limits are entirely "internal" but not in the self-discipline sense. The video lays out the rest. My hope is to spark a conversation around the questions at the end.

My mother got a call from a dude impersonating as a bank rep and she almost fell for it. I was able to intervene because I overheard.

So now I've made a simple rule:

No official -- be it banks, govt, police, even judiciary -- would ever call you. And if they do, you can cancel it and they can still get the job done.

So instead of letting my boomer parents do the mental gymnastics of figuring out which call is legit and which one is not, I've just told them to cancel all such calls. Nothing will happen.

Problem with telling them technicalities like "if anybody asks for your account pin, don't give it" is that there ARE in fact cases where bank reps will ask you to enter your pin via automated steps. And scammers have set up those too now. Anything the bank does, eventually scammers will catch up. So don't let your aging parents worry about these technicalities. Just make a hard rule to cancel all calls from all officials, even if there is an active inquiry going on. Do correspondence via email or in-person only.

Hope this helps.

I have a large amount of crypto USDT stored in Binance (from projects and consulting etc). I need to somehow bring it to Pakistan without getting hammered by taxes and FBR getting on me ass.

I have a company registered in Dubai. My current, naive, thinking is to somehow cash the crypto in Dubai using P2P in AED and then receive the PKR as remittance from the Dubai entity. But the P2P rates are bad. And I don't know if this is even the correct way.

Has anyone done this before? Any tips?

Not sure how many of you guys are following me on Linkedin (I know some are) but I've been preaching about the problems with "Full-Stack Engineering" as a "specialization" for years (tl;dr it is not a specialization), and now with AI, the final nail in the coffin has been hammered.

But given that the Pakistani tech industry has been a glorified HR industry instead (i.e., outsourcing labor, rather than tech), and the easiest thing to outsource was whatever attracted most Upwork proposals ("You can build a whole app yourself? Seriously?? wow"), a lot of fresh graduates or current students are confused about which direction to take.

On the one hand, AI does full-stack better than you. On the other, our local industry has no vacancies apart from full-stack and now they have no vacancies left.

Tough situation.

In order to know which skill-sets are worth investing in, we need to have a hypothesis on two things:

1. Where the global tech industry is going
2. Which parts of the "tech food chain" will trickle down to us in Pakistan

If you're super talented, I recommend ignoring no. 2 altogether and just building on 1. If you're less talented (or hard-working), have both hypotheses and balance them.

Here are some of my hypotheses:

Global trends:

- Inference optimization is here to stay because compute, from this point onward, will always be a constraint. Think kernel optimizations, with each architecture/model combo posing its own challenges. A lot of it can be agentified but it still requires a high knowledge ceiling since specific hardware knowledge is involved.

- NPU or other specialized chips will require specialized talent. Practically, every company running on an NPU cloud needs maintainers for torch-npu or similar libs. So you have an open-source entry here too.

- China's GPU (or general compute) market will continue to keep coming up and their software will keep on lagging. Right now, only Huawei itself has people who can program its own GPUs in their CANN framework lol. Because half the material is in Chinese. But they are actively expanding their reach by building partnerships in Southeast Asia (including Pak) and investing in trainings. Keep an eye on the Huawei ecosystem.

- Actual AI Engineering will remain in demand. More efficient model architectures are always needed. If you can only slap a couple APIs together and call yourself an AI Engineer then ... tough luck.

- Data. Anything to do with data. The world is running out of data. I don't even know where to begin laying out all the possible career paths in data but .. don't limit yourself to "data science" cuz there is no science to be performed when the data doesn't exist lol. Think where to get data from, how to generate more of it (roughly falls under data warehousing of old times but with a focus on capturing more data rather than storing what's already there). Every industry will need its own specialists.

Now, for the local market and where we can fit in the food chain:

- In the short term, expect a SaaS boom but don't let it fool you. Every software house will half-ass a SaaS in the next couple years. Most will fail and shut down. They will demand full-stack engineers but .. don't. Don't fall for it.

- Any company working in the data space, whether in collection or analysis or collation or whatever, keep an eye on that. Uplift AI, Miras AI etc are good examples. But we can go lower down the stack still (have yet to see companies pop up here but will soon).

- Expect a data center boom so cloud engineering (not building on TOP of cloud, but ... actually building the cloud) will have some pull. The complicating factor though is that currently all Paki data centers are basically white-labeling Huawei or Alibaba cloud. But it's still worth getting those certifications if only to get entry into the wrappers.

- Cyber Security. I know CyberSec has had a long dry spell in Pak for years, but I'm hoping there will be a resurgence if only because of the fact that every nation will not need its own sovereign AI and all of them will f*ck up and will need specialists and Pak is well-positioned to supplant this gap.

- Defense tech is about to have its heyday. If you're in NUST or Air, stick to defense and don't fall for a higher salary elsewhere (unless you can work directly for Lockheed Martin .. brother why?).

Aaand .. yea that's all I can think of top of me head. It's not comprehensive, there's probably 50 directions I'm missing rn but do check out my substack or Linkedin because I plan on re-launching my forum dedicated to Paki tech services sector but now not limited to services because I'm tired of our entrepreneurs thinking "product vs service" is a business model question instead of a delivery model one but I digress.

Hope this sparks a discussion. Times are hard and they are going to get harder still. You're going to be shitting your pants anyhow, might as well shit them with a guarantee that one day you will be able to clean yourself.