fact or fiction

Is it fact or merely fiction? Fact or Fiction explores the myths and beliefs we hold about cyber safety, artificial intelligence, dystopian futures and our everyday gadgets.

Atomic Habits
Atomic Habits Works in the Book Mine Broke Because I Live in Peshawar With Loadshedding and 3 Cousins Atomic Habits. James Clear. 4 Laws. Make it obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying. Page 70: Environment is the invisible hand that shapes behavior. Design your space.
By Tariq Pathan 5 months ago in 01
Bitcoin Birthday 🎂💐
In 2013, someone told me to buy Bitcoin. “Just get a little,” he said. “You’ll thank me later. I laughed. Magic internet money? No thanks.
By Tariq Pathan 5 months ago in 01
Astral time travel
The silver cord didn’t look like a rope; it looked like a pulse of liquid neon stretching from the center of Elias’s chest into the infinite dark. Elias stood—or rather, vibrated—in the "In-Between." Behind him lay his physical body, tucked under a weighted blanket in a cramped London flat, breathing the rhythmic, shallow breaths of a deep trance. Before him lay the Tapestry, a shimmering vertical sea of golden threads, each representing a moment in the river of time. Most astral travelers were content to float through the ceiling and spy on their neighbors or visit the moon. Elias was a Chronographer. He didn't just want to see where things were; he wanted to see where they had been. The Anchor and the Leap He reached out, his translucent hand hovering over a thread that hummed with the scent of ozone and wet cobblestones. To travel physically through time was a mathematical impossibility that would tear atoms apart. But the soul? The soul was non-local. It was a witness, not a participant. With a sharp tug on his intent, the London flat dissolved. The silence of the void was replaced by a cacophony of shouting, the rhythmic clack-clack of horse hooves, and the thick, cloying smell of coal smoke. Elias found himself hovering five feet above Fleet Street. The year was 1892. He felt the familiar "Density Drag." Even as a spirit, the past felt heavy, like walking through waist-deep water. He watched a newsboy weave through the crowd, oblivious to the shimmering ghost standing in his path. The boy passed right through Elias, leaving a sensation like a sudden ice-cube down the back. The Paradox of the Witness Elias wasn't here for the history books. He was here for the Unseen Moments. He drifted toward a narrow alleyway, guided by a specific frequency he’d spent months calibrating in his meditations. He found her—Elara, a woman whose name existed in no census, yet whose face haunted the margins of a single daguerreotype Elias had found in a museum basement. She was sitting on a wooden crate, clutching a small, leather-bound diary. She looked up, her eyes narrowing as if she could sense a disturbance in the air. "Energy cannot be created or destroyed," Elias whispered, though he had no lungs. "But it can be felt." Elara shivered and pulled her shawl tighter. She began to write. This was the moment Elias had come to see: the recording of a lost discovery, a mathematical formula for "Spirit Resonance" that had been suppressed by the scientific elite of her time. He watched her pen fly across the page. He didn't need to steal the book; he simply needed to observe the ink as it dried. The Static Interference Suddenly, the golden thread beneath his feet began to vibrate violently. A low, rhythmic thrumming echoed through the astral plane—the sound of his own heartbeat. Back in the 21st century, his alarm clock was likely chirping, or perhaps a siren was passing his window. In the astral realm, this manifested as a Timeline Tremor. The cobblestones of 1892 began to blur into the steel beams of a 1950s skyscraper, then into the mud of a medieval field. "Not yet," Elias gritted his teeth, focusing his willpower on the silver cord. When you astral travel through time, you aren't just fighting physics; you’re fighting the universe’s desire to keep its secrets. The "Censors"—shadowy, formless entities that guarded the Tapestry—began to coalesce at the end of the alley. They looked like static on an old television, flickering shapes that blurred the edges of reality. The Return Elias committed the last lines of Elara’s formula to his memory—not his physical brain, which was miles and years away, but to his Aetheric Mind. The Censors lunged. They didn't have hands, but they had a way of pulling at a traveler's consciousness, trying to unravel the silver cord and leave the soul stranded in a "When" that didn't belong to them. Elias stopped fighting the Density Drag. He let go of 1892. He didn't fly back; he snapped back. The sensation was like being the pellet in a giant rubber band. The Victorian alley vanished. The Tapestry became a blur of light. The "In-Between" roared past him in a heartbeat. THUMP. Elias gasped, his physical lungs burning as they took in a deep, panicked breath of stale apartment air. His limbs felt like lead, four-hundred pounds of meat and bone pinning him to the mattress. He lay still for a long time, watching the morning light filter through his dusty blinds. Slowly, his fingers trembling, he reached for the notepad on his nightstand. The ink was modern, the paper was cheap, but the words were a century old. He had gone where no machine could ever go. He had stepped out of the "Now" and realized the ultimate truth of the Chronographer: Time isn't a line; it’s a song, and he had finally learned how to hum the chorus.
By Bakhtt menn5 months ago in 01
From Vision to Reality: How Director Andreas Szakacs Shapes Modern Storytelling
In an era where digital content is produced at overwhelming speed, audiences are increasingly selective about what they choose to watch. Visual spectacle alone is no longer enough—viewers are drawn to stories that feel authentic, emotionally grounded, and meaningful.
By Andreas szakacs5 months ago in 01
Stop Performing Night . Content Warning. AI-Generated.
I spent thirty years asking the wrong question. It was "What do people want to hear?" Not "What do I actually think?" That small shift changed everything. And it happened in a cluttered apartment kitchen at 11:47 on a Tuesday night.
By Tariq Pathan 5 months ago in 01
Kali Is Calling. AI-Generated.
Kali Yuga, and That Strange Feeling You Can’t Ignore Lately, a lot of people feel it—something is off. The world feels louder, faster, more chaotic… but somehow emptier at the same time. Things that used to make sense don’t anymore. People feel disconnected, even when they’re constantly connected.
By Sandy Rowley6 months ago in 01
A Practical Guide to Finding, Treating, and Eliminating Bed Bugs for Good
You wake up with itchy red marks on your arms. At first, you assume it’s just a mosquito bite or a skin reaction. But then it happens again. And again.
By Jamal Moore6 months ago in 01
How to Never Get Angry Or Bothered By Anyone
You'd pitch something, he'd go quiet, and then right when the conversation moved on, he'd say the exact same thing with slightly different words and everyone would nod at him. Every time it happened, I felt this slow, hot climb start somewhere around my chest and move up to my jaw. I spent probably two years quietly furious at this person. Two years. I'd replay meetings in my head at 11pm. I'd draft mental arguments. I'd feel this low-grade irritation every time I saw his name in my inbox. And the kicker? He had no idea. He was completely unbothered, going about his life, taking credit for things, presumably sleeping fine. That's the thing nobody tells you when someone gets under your skin: you're the one paying for it. They're not. You are. That realization doesn't make the anger go away on its own. But it's a useful place to start. Here's what's actually happening in your brain when someone pisses you off. Your nervous system doesn't distinguish very well between a physical threat and a social one. When that driver cuts you off, or your mother-in-law makes that comment at dinner, or your coworker takes credit for your work, your amygdala the part of your brain that handles threat detection fires up. It's the same system that kept your ancestors alive when predators were real and immediate. A surge of cortisol and adrenaline follows. Your thinking narrows. You're no longer a nuanced, reasonable adult; you're a creature trying to neutralize a threat. This is not a character flaw. It's just how the hardware works. The problem is that most of the "threats" we encounter today aren't physical. They're symbolic. Someone dismisses your idea and it doesn't just feel rude it registers, somewhere deep and fast, as a challenge to your status, your competence, your worth. A family member presses a familiar button and it's not just annoying—it's activating a wound that was probably there long before they came along. That's why the anger feels so disproportionate sometimes. You're not just annoyed at the driver. You're annoyed, and also your body briefly treated it like a survival event, and now there's chemistry in your bloodstream that needs somewhere to go. Understanding that won't stop the reaction. But it will help you stop identifying with it so completely. The question isn't really "how do I stop feeling angry?" Anger is useful information. It tells you that something crossed a line—real or perceived. The question is: how do you stop letting other people live rent-free in your head for days, weeks, sometimes years? The answer has to start with something uncomfortable, which is that when someone bothers you, the thing you're reacting to isn't entirely about them. It's about you. Not in a blame-yourself way. In a this-is-useful-information way. Think about the things that get under your skin most reliably. Not just the annoying ones the ones that linger. The ones that make you lie awake replaying a conversation. There's almost always a pattern, and it usually traces back to something you care about very deeply, or something you fear might be true about yourself. If someone calls you lazy and it rolls off you, great. If someone calls you lazy and you're still thinking about it three days later, that's worth sitting with. Not because they were right. But because the charge had somewhere to land. My former coworker got to me so deeply not just because what he did was unfair it was but because there was a part of me that worried I wasn't assertive enough, wasn't visible enough, wasn't making my mark clearly enough. He became a mirror for an anxiety I already had. His behavior was the kindling, but I was the dry wood. This isn't a reason to excuse bad behavior or stop advocating for yourself. It's a reason to get curious instead of just reactive. There's a concept in psychology called the "emotional regulation" process, and one of the most effective strategies in it is something called cognitive reappraisal—basically, changing the story you're telling yourself about what happened, before the emotional response fully locks in. It sounds clinical. It isn't. Here's a real example. Someone cuts you off in traffic. The automatic story is: that person is an aggressive idiot who doesn't respect anyone. The adrenaline follows that story. But what if before you've committed to the rage you briefly considered: maybe they just got a phone call that someone they love is in the hospital. Maybe they're in the middle of a situation that has nothing to do with you. You don't have to believe the alternative story fully. You just have to introduce enough doubt to interrupt the certainty that fueled the anger. Because here's the thing about anger: it runs on narrative. The moment you're less certain the story is true, the charge starts to drain. This is different from telling yourself to "calm down," which is both ineffective and slightly patronizing advice to give yourself. You're not suppressing the emotion. You're questioning the premise. Now let's talk about the harder cases—the ones where cognitive reappraisal feels like trying to put out a bonfire with a damp cloth. The family member who knows exactly which buttons to press, because they installed most of them. The coworker who has dismissed your ideas in meeting after meeting. The friend who somehow always makes you feel like you're doing life slightly wrong. With these people, you've often got history, and history means the reaction is automatic and fast. By the time you'd even think to reframe anything, you're already eleven steps into the familiar loop. What works here is less about in-the-moment tricks and more about doing work before the interaction. There's a practice borrowed loosely from Stoic philosophy and reinforced by modern cognitive behavioral approaches—of mentally rehearsing difficult situations before they happen. Not in an anxious, dread-filled way. More like a quarterback studying tape. If you know Sunday dinner involves a certain family member who comments on your career choices, you don't have to show up cold. You can think, ahead of time: this will probably happen, and when it does, I don't have to defend myself. I can let it land and let it go. This sounds passive. It isn't. Choosing not to engage is not the same as being steamrolled. It's recognizing that most of the time, defending yourself to people determined not to hear you is just burning your own energy in a fire they started. Viktor Frankl, writing about surviving the Nazi concentration camps, said something that has stuck with me since the first time I read it—that between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is your freedom. He was writing about incomprehensibly extreme circumstances, but the principle scales down. There is a moment, however brief, between what happens and what you do with it. The whole project of emotional regulation is about expanding that moment. It gets longer with practice. That's genuinely true, and it's also genuinely hard. Let's be honest about what "never getting bothered" actually means, because if you take the title too literally you'll either fail or become a robot. You will still feel flashes of irritation. You'll still occasionally want to say something cutting back. You'll still lie awake once in a while replaying a conversation that felt unfair. That's being human. Trying to eradicate all of it is its own trap it just turns into suppression, which research consistently links to worse emotional outcomes down the road, not better ones. The real goal is disproportionate reactions to nothing that lasts. It's the difference between feeling a flash of irritation and then moving on, versus carrying a grievance around like a stone in your shoe for a week. The practice is not about becoming numb. It's about building a gap between feeling something and being consumed by it. One more thing that nobody talks about enough: the people who bother us the least are usually the ones we feel secure around. And the reason isn't that those people treat us perfectly—it's that when we feel secure in ourselves, other people's behavior loses most of its power to destabilize us. This is the unsexy truth underneath all the "don't let them get to you" advice. It's not a technique. It's not a breathing exercise. It's doing the ongoing work of building a relationship with yourself that isn't constantly up for renegotiation every time someone is careless or unkind or thoughtless. That work looks different for everyone. For some people it's therapy. For others it's journaling, or meditation, or finally having an honest conversation with someone they've been avoiding, or just spending more time doing things they're good at. It's not glamorous. It doesn't come with a before-and-after photo. But it's the actual foundation. When you know who you are and you're at some basic peace with it, the guy who takes credit for your ideas is just annoying. Not a referendum on your value. When you're not secretly afraid of the thing someone's implying, they lose their leverage over you completely. I did eventually stop being bothered by that coworker. Not because he changed he didn't and not because I had some cathartic confrontation. I stopped because I started paying attention to why his behavior bothered me so much, and I found the anxiety underneath it, and I worked on that instead of working on resenting him. And then, somewhere along the way, I saw him do his thing in a meeting and I just... watched it happen. Noted it. Thought, vaguely, there he goes again. And turned back to my notebook. That's the whole destination, really. Not cold indifference. Not fake zen. Just a quiet, practiced ability to let someone else's behavior be their business, not yours. It won't happen overnight. It didn't for me. But each time you catch the reaction before it runs away with you, each time you get a little curious instead of a little consumed that gap Frankl talked about gets a little wider. Wider is enough.
By Shahzaib 6 months ago in 01
Never Explain Yourself — It Signals Weakness
You've handed the other person the frame. You've acknowledged that your actions require their approval to make sense. And that acknowledgment is a tell. Niccolò Machiavelli understood this before almost anyone put it into systematic thought. Writing in the early sixteenth century, surrounded by the wreckage of Italian city-states that had crumbled under weak princes and naive administrators, he was not interested in how power *should* work. He was interested in how it *does* work. And what he observed, again and again, was that the appearance of strength mattered as much as strength itself sometimes more. In The Prince he wrote: "Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you." What he was pointing at wasn't mere vanity or political theatre. He was identifying something structural about the way humans process authority. Most people will never inspect your reasoning closely. They will never audit your motives or weigh your logic against competing evidence. They will read your posture. They will read whether you seem certain or uncertain. They will take cues from how you carry the weight of your own decisions. When you explain yourself without being asked or when you over-explain after being challenged you are broadcasting uncertainty. You are, in effect, saying: I'm not sure this decision can stand on its own, so I'm going to prop it up with words. That's the psychology underneath it, even when the words themselves are intelligent and the reasoning is sound. There's a particular kind of person who never seems to stop justifying themselves. They're in every organization, every family, every room. Something goes wrong and before anyone has even framed a question, they're already explaining cataloguing their intentions, listing the variables they couldn't control, constructing a verbal alibi. The explanation may be entirely accurate. That's almost beside the point. What they're communicating, underneath the facts, is anxiety. And anxiety, in any social or professional hierarchy, is contagious in exactly the wrong direction. It moves downward. It undermines. Machiavelli's ideal prince did not operate this way. The prince Machiavelli envisioned was someone who understood the difference between being and appearing and who actively managed both. The fox who recognizes traps and the lion who frightens wolves: these were his two archetypes for political survival. Neither the fox nor the lion pauses to explain why it moves the way it moves. The fox is elusive by nature. The lion is formidable by nature. The explanation would only diminish both. Abraham Lincoln took considerable criticism throughout his presidency that he simply absorbed without public rebuttal. His Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, had once called him a "long-armed gorilla" and "a damned fool" before being appointed to the cabinet. When told about it, Lincoln said nothing in reply and kept Stanton in the role because Stanton was the best man for it. He didn't issue a statement. He didn't demonstrate magnanimity by announcing he had forgiven Stanton. He just acted. The silence around that decision was itself a form of power — it was total indifference to the insult combined with total confidence in his own judgment. Stanton, for his part, stood weeping at Lincoln's bedside the night he died and called him "the greatest ruler of men the world has ever seen." The silence had done what no explanation could have managed. Napoleon Bonaparte was obsessive about the image he projected, and his famous *Bulletins de la Grande Armée* — the official dispatches he wrote after battles — were masterclasses in selective framing. When he lost, the losses were minimized or recontextualized. When he won, the victories were vivid and total. He was not explaining himself to his soldiers or his subjects; he was defining reality for them. The distinction matters. Explaining is reactive. Defining is active. Napoleon knew that if he allowed the narrative gap to open if he left space for others to frame what had happened the vacuum would fill with doubt. So he didn't leave a gap. He moved first, with certainty, and certainty is not a thing you can explain your way into. You have to project it. The psychological mechanism here is well-established even if rarely named directly. When someone challenges you and you immediately respond with explanation, you are engaging in what amounts to an implicit concession that their challenge has standing that it deserves a response, that your position requires defense. The challenge gains weight from the fact that you took it seriously enough to answer it. This is how seemingly reasonable, intelligent people get pulled into debates they should never have entered, defending decisions that didn't need defending, justifying positions that were perfectly solid before the justification turned them fragile. Machiavelli was not advising princes to be arrogant or stupid. He was advising them to be strategic about where they spent their credibility. Credibility is not an infinite resource. Every time you explain yourself, you are drawing on it. Sometimes that's worthwhile a key negotiation, a moment of genuine persuasion where the other person's understanding actually matters to the outcome. But most explanations are not this. Most explanations are social reflex, an anxious habit dressed up as transparency. The prince who explained every decision invited scrutiny of every decision. Scrutiny, once invited, doesn't stay in the places you intended. It spreads. Machiavelli observed this in the trajectory of rulers who over-consulted, over-communicated, and over-justified: they trained their advisors and subjects to expect justification, and once that expectation was established, the absence of justification became its own provocation. The habit of explaining had created a dependency. That's the trap. Deliberate ambiguity as distinct from mere silence is a different tool, and a subtler one. Elizabeth I of England was brilliant at this. When pressed on the question of marriage and succession, she refused to give a direct answer for decades, keeping her suitors and her court in a permanent state of uncertainty. Her ambiguity was not confusion; it was strategy. By never fully resolving the question, she retained the leverage that a clear answer would have dissolved. Machiavelli would have recognized the move immediately: she was keeping her options open while letting others exhaust themselves trying to read her. The explanation she never gave preserved a power that any explanation would have collapsed. The same principle operates in far more ordinary contexts. A leader who announces every decision with a full rationale trains their team to negotiate with the rationale rather than the decision. People don't just accept the decision; they probe its logic, looking for weak points, because the leader has invited them to evaluate it. A leader who announces decisions with evident confidence and minimal commentary trains their team to engage with the decision as fact. Neither approach is inherently right for every situation. The point is that over-explaining is never neutral — it has consequences that most people haven't thought through. There's a version of this idea that gets misunderstood as a license for arrogance or contempt, and that's not what Machiavelli was describing. He wasn't saying that a prince should be deaf to counsel or closed to information. He was extremely clear that good counsel was one of the prince's most valuable assets. The distinction was about when and where explanation serves you versus when it weakens you. Seeking good information is not the same as explaining yourself. Consulting advisors in private is not the same as justifying your choices to the crowd. The confusion between these things is where bad advice on this topic tends to come from. What Machiavelli actually identified was the theater of power. In that theater, the audience doesn't need your script. They need to believe in your authority — and authority, unlike expertise, cannot be established through argumentation. You can argue someone into agreeing that you're right. You cannot argue someone into believing that you're powerful. Belief in power comes from the projection of certainty, from the consistent alignment between what you say you'll do and what you do, and from the visible absence of need for anyone else's approval. Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico is worth reading in this light. It's a political document as much as a military history, and its rhetorical genius is in its tone: calm, precise, third-person. Caesar doesn't explain his decisions with emotion or defensiveness. He describes them as if recording facts. His confidence is embedded in the grammar itself. He is not asking the reader to approve of what he did. He's simply reporting what happened. The implicit message is that the decisions required no justification they were obvious responses to obvious conditions, seen clearly by a man who sees clearly. The whole text is a masterclass in projecting competence without plea. None of this means that silence is always the move. Silence in the wrong moment — when clarity is genuinely needed, when trust depends on communication, when a team is paralyzed without direction is not discipline. It's negligence. Machiavelli wasn't advocating for leaders who were cryptic to the point of uselessness. He was advocating for leaders who understood that every act of communication either builds or erodes their authority, and who made conscious choices about which they were doing. The habit most people need to break is the reflexive one: the automatic reach for justification whenever they feel challenged or uncertain. That reflex is powered by anxiety, and anxiety to return to where this started is the thing you cannot afford to broadcast. When you feel the pull to explain yourself, the first question to ask is not *what should I say* but *why do I feel the need to say anything*. The answer to that question is almost always more useful than whatever explanation you were about to give. Machiavelli wrote in a world where the wrong perception could get you killed, deposed, or exiled. The stakes in most contemporary situations are lower, but the mechanism is identical. People are reading you constantly, and what they're reading most closely is not your reasoning. They're reading your confidence. They're reading whether you seem to need something from them reassurance, approval, permission to be right. Stop giving that read away. The most powerful thing in most rooms is the person who has nothing to prove and acts like it.
By Shahzaib 6 months ago in 01
C-Section Kit: A Complete Guide to Surgical Essentials and Maternal Care
A C-section kit is a vital collection of surgical instruments and sterile supplies used during a cesarean delivery. A Cesarean Section, commonly known as a C-section, is a surgical procedure performed to deliver a baby through incisions in the abdomen and uterus. This procedure is often necessary when a vaginal birth may pose risks to the mother or baby.
By Bushra Rajpoot6 months ago in 01
The Interview Was Never About the Job
I needed that job. Not just wanted it. Needed it. Three months of unemployment had drained my savings, my confidence, and almost my hope. Rent was overdue. My phone was on its last warning before being disconnected. Every day felt like a countdown to disaster, and I was running out of time.
By Farooq Hashmi6 months ago in 01
iPhone 17 Air Apple’s Bold Step Toward Ultra Thin Innovation
iPhone 17 Air: Apple’s Bold Step Toward Ultra-Thin Innovation A Sleek, Powerful Alternative Redefining Premium Smartphone Design in 2025
By Farooq Hashmi6 months ago in 01