The Hours
The primary reason I made this website is to migrate my old blog posts from Facebook which I used to archive my stuff. No one really read it there and I grew to hate the website both because it is slop and second because it is slop.
Salieri is my pseudonym and for the longest time both the most ideal and most flawed versions of myself. Why try to be better when you can just say to yourself you will always be second best and that this is your destiny? Accept mediocrity and live your life. This changed over time because I have too strong of an ego. If you do not know who the original Salieri is, watch the movie Amadeus but it did not truly become my alterego until I played the visual novel Steins;Gate 0.
My real name and CV is here though if you are boring OR you are HR. But this is the other page, the one I would rather you read before we work together, or argue, or whatever it is you are here for. It is arranged by hour, because that is honestly how it varies.
Morning
I wake up somewhere between fine and not and that has very little to do with whatever happened the day before. There was a long stretch where I went to sleep hoping the next day wouldn't arrive. That passed, mostly. I mention it not as a triumph but as a calibration — nothing in my life caused it and nothing in my life fixed it, so if I am grey on a Wednesday you can stop hunting for the reason.
I hunted. I wrote a whole post about hunting.
Then coffee, which I make badly and drink anyway. I do appreciate good coffee, truly, but I do not care enough to truly put effort into learning how to make it good for myself at most days. I do care a lot when at a certain point I used to make it for my girlfriend but for myself as long as the coffee does its practical job of waking me up. It is fine.
The Metro
I am Egyptian, I live in Cairo, and I don't have an interesting relationship with it. I have the normal one, which is worse.
A defining experience on my psyche was in 2023 I had a visa, a funded ticket, a hotel, and a paper on al-Kindi accepted at a conference I had been working toward for over a year. At the last gate in the airport they asked me for a travel permit. I was holding the letter that defers my conscription to 2028, which was the wrong paper, and the right one comes from an office in Abbasiya, and the plane left without me. I wrote it down in Arabic that same week, while I was still useless with it.
You learn to keep copies. You learn which office, which floor, which hour of which day. You learn that the man behind the glass is not the problem and also cannot help you. I was always paranoid but after that I turned extremely paranoid. Not in the way that will annoy you where I will keep forcing you to check stuff. I won't. I won't depend on you in the first place. I do things myself. Only I am capable of foreseeing how shit goes bad because usually I am very unlucky in everyday small situations so I learnt to keep extreme caution. I am very lucky in big decisions in my life though, but that is a story for another day.
Regardless, I am not going to be wise about this part. A country that asks you for a document proving you are permitted to leave it does not get to wonder why the ones who can, do.
Office Hours
I build stuff for a living — associate product manager and then product manager at noon, the company and not the hour, which in a page organised like this one is an unfortunate coincidence. Since February I have also been building Pactful with a team that is better than me at most things: a hiring hub for blue-collar workers in Egypt, where agents call chefs and baristas and cashiers, find out what they actually want, and build the CV with them.
Philosophy people expect me to be slightly embarrassed about the job and they see I am being hypocritical (which they are right!). Product people expect me to be slightly embarrassed about philosophy and its lack of practical utility (which they are wrong!). I am not doing either.
I rush. I take the fastest path through everything, optimise the route, min-max wherever the system allows it and at work this mostly reads as a virtue even though deep down I know it isn't.
The Seminar
I am doing an MA in philosophy part-time, at the university where I did a computer science degree and then taught philosophy sections there for years. Metaethics and moral psychology, philosophy of mind and whatever AI is currently doing to it, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, early modern rationalism. The papers are all up. Philosophy saved my life at a certain point, not the readings or what I learnt from it, but philosophy's way of thinking. Of course, friends also take a big part in saving me, but philosophy comes first.
I like my philosophy like how I like my coffee. In any form. I am not practical or very opinionated. I wanted to be a rationalist for a long time and then I had a really long absurdist phase, they all passed and now I am truly agnostic. My expertise remains in Humean philosophy though.
Ethically, I am an Emotivist.
And there is God (sigh). Every paper I have written on it ends in the same place, والله أعلم or some format of it. Not going to say much more other than, we all should try our best and be good to each other.
After Ten
My first obsession was Sword Art Online light novels read off a phone, on a chair dragged next to the fridge because that is where the socket was, eight hours without standing up, starting at eight in the morning, in my third year of prep school. Everything since has been that with the subject swapped out. Obsession is the engine — discipline is necessary and passion is pleasant, but the hours that actually produce anything are the obsessive ones. I thanked that kid properly once.
So: games, anime, visual novels. I am a devotee of Re:Zero, Steins;Gate, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Check my MAL page for more on this, or my anime writing here.
I am also a huge fan of Davey Wreden, Bo Burnham, Exurb1a, Kanako Itō, and more.
Three in the Morning
Pop!_OS for work and for everything that is not a game, dual-booted with Windows for the games that still refuse to live anywhere else, and VS Code on top of that. My best friend put me onto Vimium at university and it has quietly outlasted almost everything else I installed back then.
My music is all local, in Musicolet, and I am a loud supporter of ReVanced for reasons that anyone who has opened a phone app lately can supply on my behalf. The agents and anything I need to keep somewhere live on Hetzner boxes.
This site is a few hundred lines of Node with a single dependency, rsynced onto a small server, and there is no more architecture to it than that.