announcing pivotal ☀️
a new universal-workspace model for agent harnesses [Github]
obaid’s longer thoughts
politics + systems + economics + markets + binary technologies + innovation + sciences + futbol + overton window/pop culture this is very prone to change as I add, drop more interests
Latest posts
How I got into YC by hacking it
tldr: I uncovered Y Combinator was scoring 100k+ founders around the world through Paxel, I broke it (possible easter egg) + found a vulnerability that let anyone forge and push any score to their ranking database, courtesy of an unvalidated hmac
So I’ve hacked Paxel as part of my YC Startup School 26’ application
Update: I’ve since rewritten this into a cleaner, complete writeup post-patch with a reply from YC too! — How I got into YC by hacking it.
built a rival to the world’s largest fanfiction platforms — alone, at 17, on a $5/mo droplet
co-authors: Obaid, Opus4.8 this post is an experiment in parallelizing the power of LLM research with telling my own story, something I've found surprisingly difficult to do. if this works (in terms of telling my story the way i want to), expect more the narrative outside blocks is all mine, and within all Opus 4.8 Prologue Since I was 7 years old, I’ve been an avid reader. When I look at how old…
Em dashes, jargon, and the dead humanity theory — jotbook page 8
1. I took 2 years of Arabic classes as a kid, and one of the first rules of grammar I found alien to my English/Urdu-developed brain then was, ironically, the em dash.
My foray into video editing
“video-editing” is a very modern phenomena. “film” has existed for a long time, but it was by definition a series, any series, of pictures that conveyed a story. captured through camera, drawn through animation or whatever.
What to work on, and balancing spontaneity vs structure — jotbook page 7
1. This might sound truly self-presumptuous, especially coming from someone who has not proven himself the way I think I need to, to say these things: But I see so many people around me with incredible talent working on incredibly difficult tasks, but I see their work leading to a black hole in an AI-first future. My intuition on this has been built from extensive observation and careful…
Aesthetic, art, and what the “overton window” means — jotbook page 6
1. I feel like we’re at the edge of the cliff, entering into a artistic renaissance. Already the world is seeing so many hand-drawn and “imperfect” aesthetics popping up as all other kinds of traditional ones seem to have been mastered and the market flooded.
The Arts Council of Pakistan has a database of 20k+ attendees and full write access completely exposed. Right now.
Update: Around 2pm on February 23, the old API keys were discovered revoked and the database locked down. Some time on February 24, the database was opened up again with Row-Level Security (RLS) enabled, although some vulnerabilities were as I found still present: ones that could make it very easy to crash or upset their systems, but not any that expose their 20,000+ attendees; so I’m ending this…
Leash your dopamine intake, and how ego == insecurity — jotbook page 5
1. I think the most valuable upskill a highly-ambitious person from my generation can make is understanding the role of dopamine, the receptors, and what causes its release in our brains. Training that to align with our goals is the most important challenge of our time.