<<back to home Reflections on PalantirPublished: October 15, 2024 (Substack link)Palantir is hot now. The company recently joined the S&P 500. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest. For long-time employees and alumni of the company, this feels deeply weird. During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home The Serendipity Machine (Notes on Using Twitter)Published: 2024.01.20 (Substack link) Twitter is one of my favorite software tools in the world. (I know it’s called “X” now, but it’ll always be Twitter to me.) I did not know what a "jhana" was before Twitter. I made various COVID-related decisions in January 2020 because of threads on Twitter. I met 100+ people through Twitter, many of whom are now good friends. Random famous people have invited me to dark smoky rooms f...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home Notes on Puzzles Published: 2023.07.11; Substack version 1. I mostly don’t play chess anymore — it’s too addictive, and tends to take over your brain in a way I don’t like — but one habit I’ve retained is solving puzzles. It’s a mental warm-up, a way of occupying my brain when I don’t want to mindlessly scroll. Along the way, I came across a fantastic book called Think Like A Super-GM, by Michael Adams and Philip Hurtado. The authors take 100 or so chess puzzles...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home Newsletter I’ll be sending occasional updates and short pieces via newsletter from now on. You can subscribe by entering your email below.| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home PrinciplesLast updated: 2023.10.02 A cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others. They always sound like clichés. In any case, these are a few things I’ve learned from experience and that I try and keep in mind. Think about what makes you ‘imbalanced’ as a personality, & do things where this gives you an edge.Once you are ok with people telling you ‘no’, you can ask for whatever you want. (Make ...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home Advice That Actually Worked For Me Published: July 4, 2022. Substack version I’m a big fan of “advice posts” and productivity guides. A small, but meaningful, upgrade to your daily routine is worth a lot in the long run. So here’s my contribution to the genre. 1. Maximize your baseline energy levels. There is the obvious stuff: figure out a personal exercise practice and do it at least five days a week (I like running). If you don’t, you’re just leaving a bunch of p...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home Other Reading ListsI’m always after reading recommendations, particularly for books that aren’t commonly read. Here are some good reading lists from around the internet. If have one you think I should include, please DM me on Twitter! John Berger’s list of the 10 greatest essays Tyler Cowen’s favorite books Chinese History by Tanner Greer Cultural Anthropology by William Buckner Shalizi’s reading lists on, apparently, every topic Roman History by Razib Khan Brian Eno...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home How To Understand Things Published: July 1, 2020. Substack version I. The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved. I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home Video Games are the Future of Education Published: June 21, 2020. Substack version My real education as a teenager was: Books I chose to read myself Learning to program computers (taught myself)Video games (found them myself) Maths (school)#1-3 happened despite formal schooling, not because of it, something Paul Graham says here: This suggests the following conclusion: 1. The things you learn by yourself stick; the things that are “taught” to you do not stick. The fundament...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
<<back to home NotebooksA place for rough notes. They’re not edited, they’re not even meant to be read. 9. Start with the least pleasant taskJuly 26, 2020 I’ve always thought it was smart to do the most fun thing on your todo list first. The idea is that you are naturally drawn to certain tasks, so you do them first, gain momentum, and go on to tackle less pleasant tasks. In practice, though, what seems to happen is that the less pleasant tasks just pile up. I have tasks on my list t...| Nabeel S. Qureshi
