anyone accepted/attending from here?

@feruza_dev

Defended thesis.

@feruza_dev

Calling undergraduate students from Central Eurasia in the US!

We're lauching Silkroad Fellows. Applications are open and you can apply until June 15th through our website – silkroadfellows.com

What is Silkroad Fellows ?
it's a fully-funded summer fellowship for US-based university students from Central Eurasia. you spend the summer in Silicon Valley working on a real project inside the Silkroad Innovation Hub — and walk out with mentorship, a network, and real experience.

What is included:
→ 6-week fellowship in Silicon Valley
→ housing, weekday lunch, mentorship in Silicon Valley, all covered

Who are we?
we are Silkroad Innovation Hub – a Silicon Valley-based organization based a few minutes from Stanford and Sand Hill Road. Learn more at silkroadinnovationhub.com

🎓 Eligibility
Undergraduate university students based in the United States from Central Eurasian countries:
🇦🇿 Azerbaijan, 🇬🇪 Georgia, 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan, 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan, 🇲🇳 Mongolia, 🇹🇯 Tajikistan, 🇹🇲 Turkmenistan, 🇹🇷 Türkiye, 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan

🗓️ Key dates
- june 15 — application deadline
- june 30 — decisions
- july 15 — program begins
- august 30 — program ends

🌐 apply now / learn more: silkroadfellows.com
❓ questions: nilufar@silkroadinnovationhub.com

I write this sitting at San Francisco International Airport, waiting for my two checked bags to appear on carousel 6. My entire life, packed into two suitcases. Joan Baez's 500 Miles is playing in my headphones. It feels fitting.

School ended a week ago, and it still doesn't feel real. It's as if I'll surely be back on campus in September, right? As if a week of graduation festivities never happened. The thought of starting all over again is genuinely terrifying. I always entertained the idea of taking gap years, or dropping out to start a company -- sometimes out of existential crisis, sometimes just to annoy my friends. Now that it's actually over, I realize how much I took that experience for granted.

Just a bunch of twenty-somethings, living together on a beautiful campus full of castles that most people travel to photograph their most important days. Princeton was a generous, caring mother that was cruel at times, though of course in a loving way. Deadline after deadline came with our rigorous curriculum, and we could do nothing but whine. A perfectly cooked range of meals, with dessert always waiting, was somehow never quite up to our expectations. We would gather to drink and philosophize, briefly turn into little Marxists to debate how a seventy-year-old professor, who probably has a dozen Nobel Prizes, was doing it all wrong. It was one of the more effective procrastination methods, because at least you wouldn’t feel too bad about taking that extra late day to submit an assignment when you'd just had an extremely intellectual discussion. (Perhaps I should speak for myself on that one.)

Some days were filled with doubt. Others, you felt like you could change the world in the blink of an eye. I think it was a great success. Not because I got perfect grades or met every deadline, but because I was lucky enough to surround myself with incredibly kind, smart, and ambitious people who genuinely cared. And because I had the space and the time to be bold, to be unconventional, to take risks. It was a privilege.

It was all worth it. Every conversation -- be it fun, tearful, full of laughter, or full of discomfort -- I would do it all over again.

Four years flew by. College ended on a random Tuesday afternoon, followed by exhausted seniors scavenging for extra boxes to pack up for the next big thing. It was time to say goodbye to my second home. It'll be alright -- I’ve done this once before.

If you're in the Bay Area, let's connect and have a heart to heart, because I need new friends.

@feruza_dev

I've also started posting on twitter for a broader audience. If you'd like to tag along:

https://x.com/Feruza_mkva

@feruza_dev

A homeless lady stopped me asking for change, saying she hadn't eaten for days. I didn't have cash (haven't held any in years), so I felt bad and offered to buy her something nearby instead. I was in a rush, and the closest place was McDonald's. She responded with, "I'd rather starve than eat processed McDonald's."

Earlier, I bought a homeless guy pizza and a small dessert from Whole Foods, only for him to tell me he doesn't eat meat, dairy, gluten or sugar. perhaps, he had genuine health reasons.

But still. This is the Bay Area for you.

@feruza_dev

Yasin Ehsan, San Franciscodagi Powell St Hacker House asoschisi, hozir Toshkentda. Ertaga, 15-iyul soat 20:30 da “Getting into Y Combinator and a16z Speedrun” mavzusida meetup o‘tkazamiz.

Unda dunyoning eng nufuzli akseleratorlariga qanday kirish mumkinligi, ariza topshirish jarayoni va amaliy tavsiyalar haqida suhbatlashamiz. Meetup homiysi — Numeo.

Shoshiling, joylar soni cheklangan! Tadbirda qatnashish bepul, meetup ingliz tilida bo‘ladi.

Meetup language: English.

Manzil: IMPACT.T Technology Hub / Bogibo’ston st. 186

Ro’yhatdan o’tish: https://forms.gle/Nz8fAnfuBbYHkxn39

@paiziev24

It's been two months in the Bay Area.

One observation among many is that people are on a mission to optimize every fiber of their existence. The premise of artificial intelligence was that we'd win back time and gain our freedom, but now we're busier than ever. We can't afford to lose a minute. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that societies are built to live that way. If anything, I know for a fact that the human brain can only focus for about four hours a day according to some science podcast I was listening to on my train ride, because I felt guilty simply doing nothing. Now that I'm out in the real world, I've been paying more and more attention to it. Thumbs constantly scrolling, eyes moving rapidly to catch a glimpse of one thing before another arrives. Hands -- with no mobility left in them, I imagine -- typing away, postures that look painful to hold. I have yet to see a friend group or a family talk to each other straight for even thirty minutes without stealing a glance at their latest iPhone with its ridiculously large camera lens. It's an undeniable reality.

And at this point, it's practically a requirement. If you're not automating your existence by building agentic loops and graphs while maximizing your Claude session, then what are you doing? If you're between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two and are not yet a founder who has raised a five-million-dollar seed round, or haven't just joined a frontier lab, seriously, what are you really doing? It surely is exhausting to be present in the Bay Area in an era like this. But I've realized that focus and discipline are the single greatest things you can learn. How to withstand the persuasion imposed by the greater, outer world and still see clearly what you're here for and what you really want. To know whether that dream is really yours. The ability to listen to your gut and prioritize. Because everyone will have an opinion on how to live your life for you. Believe me when I say this: everyone. Even the neighbor you didn't know existed, two blocks down the street. There's nothing wrong with listening to the more experienced, but taking it to heart is another story.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am very much for having aspirations and goals. It's one of the reasons I'm here. But who defines how that is measured? To some, making the most of it might mean winning a Nobel; for another, it's simply building a family. But again, how do you truly know when a goal is your very own? We all find meaning and purpose in different ways, but one thing is certain: the current trend of making it a requirement to optimize for the best of the best seems to be taking our focus away from the things that would genuinely make us happy. The constant need to optimize every moment steals the real happiness you'd feel in ordinary ones. Perhaps we're in the "good old days" at this very moment. Maybe it's the human condition. To strive to optimize, to always want to achieve more and more. But who's to say?

Lately, I've been giving myself space to simply do nothing. To be bored. To find joy in the most mundane parts of life. Most of my Caltrain rides to San Francisco are spent in silence, looking out the window, observing the busy lives of every city that starts with San and the nature that comes in between, observing my thoughts as they dance around. In my mind, you can't compare the spark of happiness you get from spotting a group of cows, who sometimes seem to be spotting humans right back, staying behind without breaking eye contact, to anything else. It's a particular kind.