Umar فاروق Qureshi

A masterclass on ‘how to speak’ by MIT professor Patrick Winston - 15 key lessons

🤣OMG! Hilarious new take on James Bond for modern London. That sitar got me.

Our CFO asked me to "audit" our software subscriptions last week. He sent me a spreadsheet with 200 rows. Slack, Zoom, Jira, Notion, Trello, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. He wanted me to survey the team to see which tools were essential. I told him: "Surveys are for people who care about feelings. I care about OpEx." I deleted the spreadsheet. Instead, I logged into the corporate Amex portal and reported the card as lost. Every single auto-renewal in the company failed instantly. I call this "The Scream Test." It’s simple Darwinian procurement. If a tool goes down and nobody runs to my desk screaming within 4 hours? We didn't need it. The Marketing team was at my door in 10 minutes begging for Adobe. We renewed it. The Sales team was crying about the CRM in 20 minutes. We renewed it. But here’s the interesting part. The HR department’s "Employee Wellness & Engagement Portal" ($12,000/year) has been down for six days. Not a single person has noticed. I didn't just save money. I quantified the exact value of our corporate culture. It is zero. Stop auditing. Start unplugging. If it’s important, they’ll scream. If they don't scream, it’s just noise.

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

How to know if a child is pretending to be asleep.. If he were really asleep, his arm wouldn't fall

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Here's how you know someone is highly intelligent✅

0% equipment, 100% talent

Luckily we had planned for that and we have a plan that will quadruple our capacity to roughly 35 terabits/second! We are adding three more cables! Two of those would have been added last year. But geopolitics esp Houthis activity in the seas has seriously delayed them. These cables are: SeMeWe6: Its coalition partners include Microsoft and Transworld. This is expected to be operational 2027. Africa 1: Its coalition partners include Etisalat PTCL etc. This is also expected to be operational 2027. 2Africa: This is a really long extremely ambitious cable touching over 3 billion people whose consortium partners include Facebook and China Mobile International, which must make for hilarious political offsite conversations for when they meet. This has landed already but will be operational approximately October 2025. This will give us a critical buffer. As bandwidths are costly you do not activate all bandwidth at once. You activate a basic amount and then add more as your needs grow but we should be doing fine on internet capacity for Pakistan by October and definitely by 2027. Just keep your fingers crossed that consortiums can cut deals with Houthis.

The existing 6 cables bring a total of 9+ terabits/second capacity into Pakistan which is Pakistan's total available internet capacity. Pakistan's need is around 6 terabits/second so we have enough capacity for our daily needs. Obviously capacity is further handed down to ISP's and goes through long haul and metro networks etc adding a lot of complication to optimally delivering it so it may not seem we have so much excess capacity but generally we all get what we pay for in terms of our packages. Geography also plays a part. You need long haul to get to mountains which is very expensive and they would be better served by Starlink satellites. Now unfortunately a few weeks ago AAE-1 went down near Oman under 4 km of Arabian Sea. This is our biggest cable probably carrying 3 terabits/second. So now we are running neck and neck with capacity and country need. So there will be hours you will feel the pinch. Worse as some servers are optimally placed according to some cables those will be a few more hops away slowing their response. Basically increased latency. One cable being down should not slow the country down though. So much economic risk. What can we do?

Pakistan Internet Cables primer Pakistan has currently 8 operational cables bringing internet into the country of which 6 are undersea and 2 are overland. Undersea cables belong to a large consortium with a local partner in Pakistan who all share charges according to use. They cost around $25,000 a kilometer so are not cheap. Our two overseas cables are the two routes of Pak-China cable whose route is estimated as information about them is very scarce.

@mxcaltrz @sophasnain speaks volumes about priorities ....

@sophasnain @ufqureshi 😔

@detoxdaniel was just thinking today, while our smart watches monitor health, and have GPS, and with their widespread users, how would it pan out if they became micro weather stations for a large data model. Perhaps for now only feed temperature and humidity data when outdoors

Everywhere I look, I see an Apple watch or some health device. I think it's great for world health. Do you currently wear a smart watch/ring?

From a 1979 IBM presentation

@Rainmaker1973 L8

@rogueonomist @murtazawahab1 Friend saying: Corruption free water .... so clean and transparent

@murtazawahab1 boss pls fix کافی حالات خراب ہوگئے ہیں آجکل ٹورونٹو کے

Google was founded in 1998 1997:

Every moment of our lives, whether we realize it or not, we’re answering these three questions – and if we’re not careful, they take control of us. ⚠️ 👁️🤔