So to answer your first question, it's less about _reading_ and more about _doing_. The interfaces for humans are not always the best interfaces for machines and vice versa in the doing, because we're no longer dealing with text but dynamic UIs. So we can cut out the middle man.

As for coding, Karpathy said it best: there will be a split between those who love to code and those who love to build. I too enjoyed writing code as a craft, and I'll miss doing it for a living and the recognition for being really fast at it, but I can do so much more than I could before now, genuinely. We'll just have to lean more into our joy of building and hand-code on the side. People still painted even after the camera was invented.

What I'm saying is that the AI hype is making people make that business decision, and that is ultimately a good thing because it means more human accessibility. Not just for people with disabilities, but through interoperability and fewer silos like YouTube.

Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead.

One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.

Before that I used Happy (https://happy.engineering/) which is also open source and a lot more sophisticated. It has a voice assistant that can chat with Claude Code on your behalf in the mobile app. However, it wasn't very reliable, and there are other reasons to use Hapi instead (documented in the Hapi repo).

Before that, Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) a YC company and seemingly a proprietary Happy fork (?) but it never worked properly for me.

Long story short, there are a few of the around, and frankly I really like to use them. Unlike other commenters, I don't find that they wreck my work-life balance. Rather, I can go out and have a walk in the park, only checking in on long-running tasks every once in a while. The diff view is pretty good too. There are many tasks where I'd rather not stare at my PC all day and instead do other things, and these tools allow me to do that.

They also had good incentive structures for keeping the bar high -- you could get kicked out for having a bad ratio, so the easiest way to pump your upload up was to fulfil obscure requests for FLACs you could purchase online but were extremely difficult to purchase (if you're lucky it's just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I'm still looking for to this day after it shut down.

Because I cared so much about being part of that private tracker, this is what also prompted me to rent a seedbox for the first time. I paid in Bitcoin out of paranoia (I lived in Germany where the fines for piracy are HEFTY, and they actually do come after you) back when Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much, and later found that that old wallet suddenly had a couple thousand in it instead of the spare change I couldn't move!

So for example, it's possible that if you already have chronic illness, a disability, or any other kind of health issues, you're more likely to have higher social isolation and therefore be more lonely, in addition to having a higher mortality risk. There's an outside variable (your health) that is correlated with both (loneliness and mortality), but that doesn't necessarily mean that loneliness causes mortality. If this were the case, we could defend claims like "autism increases mortality", because we already know that autism increases social isolation.

This is the injustice. The decisions made by these institutions are not just. Sometimes they're business decisions (e.g. a university can make more money price gouging international students, when we're getting an identical education).

There can be an overlap with privilege, but at that point you're arguing semantics. For example, I'm privileged if I don't get racially profiled by the police, but it is also unjust for police to racially profile me. To say that it's down to the institutions/countries/individuals making the decisions is the same argument as "well that bakery is a private business, they can decide not to serve you because of your nationality".

Of course there are Germans and Brits that haven't had the same opportunities that I have had, and of course it wasn't handed to me on a silver platter either; I still had to work hard. But my point is that if I were Egyptian _no_ amount of hard work or luck would have gotten me where I am. It would have been quite literally impossible.

I'm not even going to begin to crack open the can of worms that is the colonial history of the same countries (in my case the real and lingering effect that the UK has had on Egypt). The way you compare the institutions "built by the UK" and the ones "provided by Egypt" makes it sound like "well maybe Egypt should just do better m" when the reality is that the prosperity of these very countries is built on centuries of injustice and blood. Call it what you want but it's injustice all the way down.

It's hard to quantify the kinds of doors it has opened for me. I was able to get a scholarship to study in the UK that covered home/EU rates (a third of international rates, while I might not have been able to get even a student loan otherwise), get government funding for a PhD that would not have been accessible to me otherwise and other grants, travel to international conferences without thinking twice about visas (unlike many colleagues) meeting people that would impact my career and skipping all sorts of and barriers along the way, and never had to worry about deportation because of the EU settlement scheme, easily become a founder (no visa sponsorship needed), and so much more! Even travelling/business in the the middle East, being German rather than Egyptian is an entirely different life, one that my cousins cannot even begin to imagine.

There's a parallel universe where I'm stuck making ends meet in Cairo where I was born, dreaming of a brighter future, feeling all my potential fade away. I know because my immediate family is that version of me - no less talented or worthy of the opportunities I got because of my nationality!

I see the kind of freedom that I have because of that passport as one of the biggest modern injustices.

I wrote about this here https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/views/phds/ My number one bit of advice would be to stop listening to your advisors and do what you think is right. They're the ones that led you to the point of no hope despite your efforts.

If I could go back in time, I would go straight to founding instead of wasting some of my sharpest years on a PhD, but I would never have known that had I not done it.

My termux session runs permanently in the background out of laziness (though this does noticeably shorten your battery life, but it's been mostly manageable) so all I need to do is start AVNC.

There are a lot of little configurations and quality of life things that I tweaked over the past year or so of doing this; happy to write all those up somewhere if you're interested.