Friends

I was at my friend’s house two days ago, four hundred kilometers away from home, and I was having the time of my life. After weeks of pressure and stress, that was what I needed the most.

I have the best friends in the world. The kind of friends that, even if you lose touch with them for years, you can pick up right where you left off with no problem.

The first night, we went to get some dinner, drank some coffee, watched some videos, and just talked about our shared memories. We were just having fun, cracking some jokes, and laughing from the bottom of our hearts.

I love them and I’m proud that I’m able to call them friends. We are there for each other. We try to help each other any way we can. I’m so happy that I’m surrounded by some of the kindest, most honest people one could find in the world.

I also have awesome people I’ve never met in person, but who I consider friends. Friends I found online who I feel just as close to as I do to my oldest friends. People who actually take time to ask how you’re doing and try their best to comfort you in hard times and help you with whatever they can.

I’m so lucky I am surrounded by the best people in the world, both online and offline. I wouldn’t be the person I am if I didn’t have them in my life. The most amazing and awesome people I could ever ask for. Friendships that money could never buy.

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Sunset over the Persian Gulf in Bushehr, Iran, with the glowing sun just above the horizon. Warm golden light stretches across the rippling sea, reflecting toward the shore, while dark waves and rocks fill the foreground beneath a calm, hazy evening sky.
Sunset over the Persian Gulf in Bushehr, Iran, as golden light dances across the waves.

It’s not my fault

I’m always proud that I try my best. I try my best to build what I build in the best way possible. I try my best to succeed in life, to survive, to learn, and to take advantage of opportunities. I work hard even when it’s tiring and exhausting. I try to save money even in the economy I live in. When I buy something, I try my best for it to be best quality possible. I try to drink good coffee and eat good meals. I try not to be influenced by other people easily, to not be pressured into accepting what I don’t like, and to have my own mind and my own thinking about different matters, not just accepting whatever I’m told.

But I’m just human, aren’t I? Sometimes I fail. The world is too big for me to take everything under control. Sometimes I forget that I live in a world where some oligarch or a government can decide how I live my life, whether I’ll have food the next day, or whether I can start my car and drive it. I sometimes forget that I can’t control how my life gets decided for, without my knowledge or consent.

With every failure, I blame myself for doing things wrong, for losing in the game they’ve set for me and those like me, but it’s not really my fault. It’s not that I didn’t do my best. I forget that I shouldn’t be ashamed of myself, that I shouldn’t be blamed for failing sometimes. It’s not my fault.

We are travelers, not settlers

I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. I’m not suicidal, and I’m not looking forward to death, but it’s been on my mind lately. With news every day about people dying, with incidents I’ve seen, and with everything going on around me, death keeps coming up.

Then I saw a video of Mohammad Eghbal (or Iqbal), known as the oldest bookseller in Mashhad, Iran, being interviewed. One sentence caught my ear. He said, “we are travelers, not settlers.”

How about that? We forget that we’re only passing through this world. We’re not here to stay, we’re here to pass through.

So why, in this short time we have here, do we tend to steal, lie, corrupt, and only look out for ourselves? Why live like that? Instead of helping each other and making things better, we chase after as much as we can get, just so we can die and leave it all behind.

I know it’s human biology. I know about survival instincts, and I know we all want a better life for ourselves and the people we love. But shouldn’t we still try to be better?

Ruining people’s lives to hold onto power a little longer, putting people through misery for a little more money, another yacht, another hotel, another supercar we’ll never even drive. It’s not just the ones who cling to power at any cost, ruling over people who never had a say in it. It happens on a smaller scale too, in ways we don’t always notice.

It just feels wrong. I’m not advocating for communism either, which I see as just another version of the same corrupt thinking. But I don’t like what we’re doing right now, and it’s not really about the financial or political systems we’ve built. It’s about how we, as people, think and treat each other.

Because we don’t exist in isolation. Every choice we make lands on someone else, and every choice someone else makes lands on us. We’re all traveling the same road at the same time, and how we treat each other along the way is kind of the whole point.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to gain more, live more comfortably, or have better access to resources so life is easier. But I don’t understand how we can be so cruel as to hoard and restrict those same resources from other people just for our own benefit.

It’s human, but it sure isn’t humane.

Context matters

I saw a video of a reporter, or at least someone holding a microphone, whose whole trick was quoting something and asking people whether Trump or Hitler had said it.

If you’re a friend, or at least follow this blog, you know I’m not fond of Trump. I don’t care for him. I believe he shows some intelligence sometimes, but I also believe he’s mentally unstable and isn’t fit to be the most powerful person in the world.

But that trick by the reporter is just a dirty, misleading move. Quoting something out of context, then making someone look bad because they agreed with it without knowing what it actually meant, is not right.

Let’s imagine there’s this quote: “this is our path to a better world, to a beautiful world, and to a world with no suffering and no harm to humanity.”

This is a beautiful quote, isn’t it? If Abraham Lincoln said it, we’d guess it’s about freeing slaves and ending a horrible time in history. If Hitler said it, we’d guess it’s about killing millions of people, committing genocide, and bringing back slavery. Out of context, I would approve of that quote. But knowing Hitler said it, I’d refuse to believe anything good could come out of it.

Context matters. If a gangster says “let’s cut him up,” it’s probably to murder someone. If a surgeon says it, it’s most likely to save someone’s life. So please stop ruining people’s lives because you heard something out of context, or because something they did was shown to you without any context at all.

This trick works because our minds often react to words before we stop to think about who said them and why. Any journalist, or honestly anyone with an agenda, can use it on anyone, for any goal. So next time someone tries to convince you that a person is good or bad based on a single line taken from somewhere, ask yourself what came before it and what came after. That one question can save you from being fooled.

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Two days before the end of the world, he suddenly realized he had never truly lived.

His calendar was full, except for two untouched days.

He panicked. Restless and furious, he went to the angel of death to ask god for more days.

He shouted and cursed. He raged at the heavens and the earth. He screamed and made a scene.

The angel remained silent.

He clung desperately to the angel. He blasphemed and threw away his prayer rug. Then his heart broke, he wept, and he fell onto the prayer rug.

This time, the angel broke the silence and said: “Know this, you have just lost another day! Only one day remains. Come, at least live this one.”

Through his sobs he whispered, “But with one day… what can anyone possibly do in one day?”

The angel said: “The one who tastes the joy of living a single day has lived a thousand years. And the one who does not understand today, a thousand years will not help him.”

Then the angel poured the share of one day’s life into his hands and said: “Now go. Live.”

He stood there, stunned, staring at life glowing in the hollow of his palms. But he was afraid to move, afraid to walk. What if a drop of life slipped through his fingers?

He stood still for a moment. Then he thought: “When I have no tomorrow, what is the point of saving this life? Let me spend this handful of it.”

And so he began to run. He splashed life over his face, he drank it, he breathed it in. And he was filled with such ecstasy that he felt that he could run to the edge of the world, step on the sun, and beyond…

That day, he did not build a skyscraper. He did not own land. He did not gain status, but…

In that single day, he lay on the grass. He watched a ladybug.

He lifted his head and saw the clouds. He greeted strangers. He prayed sincerely for those who did not love him.

In that one day, he reconciled. He laughed. He felt light. He enjoyed. He overflowed. He forgave. He loved. He let go. And it was complete.

He lived that one day.

But in god’s calendar, the angels wrote: “he passed away, the one who had lived a thousand years.“

Erfan Nazarahar
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Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy. (As in the current jollity: What would happen if the Communists occupied the Sahara? Answer: Nothing—for 50 years. Then there would be a shortage of sand.)

William F. Buckley Jr.

In the weights

There’s a site called IN THE WEIGHTS that I came across through Kev Quirk’s blog post . It checks whether you’re someone who lives on inside certain LLMs.

Large language models encode their knowledge and reasoning through billions of numbers called “the weights.” The amazing capabilities of AI come through adjusting those weights to better represent world knowledge and tasks.

“In the weights” means that a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.

intheweights.com

The site also says this matters because, and I quote, “being in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence.”

So I had to try it.

Screenshot of intheweights.com showing Ali Reza Hayati as “in the weights” with 675 strength, top 5%, and model bars comparing LLMs’ recall of him. In the middle-top section it's written: "GEMINI 3.1 LITE SAYS AN IRANIAN FREE SOFTWARE ACTIVIST, BLOGGER, AND CONTRIBUTOR TO THE GNU PROJECT AND VARIOUS OPEN-SOURCE INITIATIVES."
A screenshot of intheweights.com results .

When I first typed in my name, it pulled up a bunch of different people, all with the same name as I have a common Persian name and surname. So I added phrases such as “Free Software” or “Blogger” to narrow it down and check if I actually live on in these LLMs. Turns out, I do.

Worth mentioning, the site itself doesn’t claim to be perfect. It openly admits that models can hallucinate details, mix up common names, and lose accuracy over typos.

Still, it’s worrying. These LLMs, these so-called AI agents, can identify you, learn about you, and quietly keep track of you, and there’s not much you can do about it. What worries me most is how cheap surveillance has become.

Countries used to pour huge amounts of money and resources into spying on people, keeping tyranny running, and forcing citizens into an unjust order people never agreed to. Now, all of that is becoming far too easy.

A handful of cameras across a city, wired up to a computer, and suddenly you know everything about everyone.

It’s a nightmare, honestly. Privacy, and the freedom to stay anonymous whenever you choose, are essential to real freedom and liberty. It’s a basic right, one that lets you raise your voice and speak your mind without the state shutting you down or silencing you.

Now these LLMs are being used to study you: every pattern you follow, everything you say, and everything you do. More than just learning about you, they’re designed to learn you, built and trained to track everything everyone does and says until they understand you inside out.

This same ability could keep people safe from terrorists, warn people of disasters, or help humanity become more creative, more productive, and more free. But it could just as easily be used to keep everyone in line, silenced, and scared.

It could go either way, and I really hope it heads in the right direction, towards a better future. Not one where a new kind of slavery is created, far worse than anything we’ve seen in the movies.

Danger of uninformed opinions

Have you ever seen a video of people talking or expressing opinions and you think to yourself “what kind of idiocy is this?” How dumb can you be to say such meaningless things? Certainly not dumber than you look.

You must forgive my language, as I’m writing this with complete disgust toward some people online. I can’t name them, and I can’t repeat what they said but have you ever experienced this? The feeling and the pressure inside to go and write about some random person, or sometimes rather famous people, and just express your utter disgust and aversion towards them?

And the worst part? People listen. They actually sit there, nod, and take it as gospel. Because the person saying it has a checkmark or a million followers on social networks, suddenly their word carries weight. It doesn’t matter if what they’re saying is completely detached from reality. The damage is already done the second it leaves their mouth.

I used to just ignore these, well because most of the time what they said didn’t affect me, but I learned that if you don’t rise to defend others, they won’t rise to defend you. It’s selfish but it’s, yet again, human.

But here’s the thing about ignoring it. Silence has a cost. Every time someone with a massive audience says something ignorant and nobody pushes back, that opinion starts to feel like a fact. It spreads. It gets shared, clipped, quoted, and before you know it, you’re arguing with someone at dinner who heard it from someone who heard it from that idiot online. That’s the damage I’m talking about. It’s not abstract, it’s very real.

I used to ignore them, but nowadays it bothers me a lot more than before. The fact that they have a platform to spread their idiocy, affect people, and seem reasonable, while being a complete idiot and ignoring the facts of the matter, is triggering me a lot lately. I’m so sick of this “I’m a celebrity so I have an opinion about everything” nonsense. You need education, you need facts, and you need actual information on the matter so you don’t spread your ignorance.

People underestimate how much this actually affects younger audiences especially. When a kid or a teenager sees someone they look up to confidently saying something wrong, something harmful, they don’t fact-check it. Why would they? That’s their idol. And that’s exactly where the real damage happens. Quietly, in the background, shaping how an entire generation thinks about something they never got the real story on.

You haven’t experienced it, you don’t know all the fact. I can believe your intentions are good but I won’t ignore the result of your idiocy. Your intentions are good, your outcome is the worst possible, sadly.

You can put back a movement, you can destroy years of hard work of people, and you can benefit the wrong people and damage a whole lot of people simply because you didn’t check what you’re spreading. It’s wrong. Please consult someone with the experience, someone with enough knowledge that will guide you to see the truth, or at least all sides of the matter.