I am Aditya, a software engineer, writer, and artist.
If you are confused on which new GPT model to use so you can get the best price -> performance.
All models below are GPT 6 family.
Luna (high) -> Luna (max) -> Sol (medium) -> Sol (xhigh) -> Astra (high) -> Astra (xhigh) -> Astra (max)
Source: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-sol-and-luna/
“I love you” and the act of love. Which one do you think goes first? Do I “love” you because I acted like I love you. Or I acted like I love you because I “loved” you?
How do you know which one drives which one? Does emotion come first and then the motion continues? Or you already swung in such motion that the emotion naturally exists now?
Someone can act all caring and kind without actually carrying a feeling of love at all. From the eye of an observer, the act of caring and kindness is indistinguishable from love. But the person doing that might not actually feel any love at all.
At the same time, someone can love someone but from the outside, the amount of care and kindness is not enough for an observer to say. “Yeah that is love”.
Or what about hatred? Someone can hate someone so much yet did not do any harm to that person.
Or someone can act rude and cruel to someone without carrying any hate at all.
There are studies about smiling. That if you smile, even without feeling anything, somehow that smile would make you bit happier. The motion of smile itself, can affect your emotion. Where smile is not the effect of happiness, but the cause of happiness itself.
So what if you kept saying “I love you” - and take care of that person, asking how was their day, what did they eat for lunch, remember what they like, tend to them when they’re sick. Are those affection the product of love. Or love is the product of that affection?
At which point that they converge into a singularity? That finally, motion and emotion can no longer be distinguished, and that each empower each other continuously like a perpetual heartbeats?
Human being imitates each other all the time. Babies learn by imitating adults. We learn when to smile, when to laugh, when to cry, when to say thank you, when to say sorry, when to be angry, and when to be happy - we’ve learned a lot of social behaviors through mimicry. Even though some are inherently biological. Like hunger, that in turns make you irritable.
So if you imitate an emotion, do a mimicry of “love”. Does it mean that the love is fake?
Maybe it explains why rituals are very common amongst humans. We repeat words, gestures, routines, and many other things. Because emotion is unreliable. Our feelings are fluctuative. We can be grateful and annoyed at the same day. We can love someone and still be angry with them. We can care about something and at the same time feel too tired to feel anything.
But motion is predictable.
You can make breakfast for someone even when you are annoyed with them. You can visit someone sick even when you don’t particularly like going outside. You still say thank you even when you don’t really understand why. Maybe you keep repeating this motions, so that the emotion will stop fluctuating on its own, and starts moving into the direction of the motion.
Though the opposite is also true. Motion can start become meaningless. You can say “I love you” everyday before it can’t be distinguished with “good morning”. You can say “sorry” repeatedly that the word no longer means something to you.
So maybe love is not just an emotion. If love is only an emotion, then someone who loves another person but never show it can still possesses complete love. Yet, someone who consistently takes care, protects, remembers, and sacrifices for someone - can still say that they don’t feel anything. Even though from the outside observer, they would describe those actions as love.
Maybe love exists outside emotion, and outside the motion. Or maybe it exists on both. Or maybe half in motion and half in emotion. Or maybe its up to anyone who with hearts to decide what is love anyway.
Emotion drives motion. Motion drives emotions. And we’re stuck in this loop, constantly turning things we feel into things we do, and turning things we do into things we feel.
AI is an equalizer. Or I would say, averagizer. I know it’s probably not a real word. But it seems to be a word that fits what AI is.
I have seen a fresh-graduate using AI to make themselves look like a decent software engineer, and they might produce decent code as well if they know how to direct it.
At the same time, I’ve seen an expert using AI to go further and beyond, like Terence Tao who discussed with ChatGPT about the Jacobian conjecture. My math knowledge is very limited, so when I read the chat transcript, I don’t even understand what’s being talked and why it’s even a breakthrough. But at least it gives me a chance to shout at ChatGPT “WTH IS EVEN THIS” “WHY ITS LIKE THIS” “YES BUT WHY ITS IMPORTANT” or something like that.
After 30 mins or so on trying to understand. AI has bumped my math knowledge by 0.01%. Because now I know more about polynomials. Maybe if I shouted louder, I’d bumped it by 0.02%. If I do it 1000 times, maybe my math knowledge would gradient towards 1% understanding. Do it 10.000 times and maybe my error rate on trying to explain this conjecture to a stranger would now be 0.1%.
Yet, I’ve seen people that were capable of writing, capable of thinking - using AI to dumb down their output. Before AI, their output was superior. A highly readable code, a nicely designed design patterns - now their output is bunch of top level exports inside 10 scattered typescript files.
For people that have lower than average numbers, AI will help them move up and reach the averages. For people that are higher than the average, AI will drag them down to reach the averages.
For people that know what they’re doing, and use AI to expand their thinking capacity - like Terence Tao; will be able to move up above the average.
It’s just how an LLM is inherently. They are trained to guess the most probable token given the previous tokens. And what’s the most probable one?
The average.
A friend and a colleague of mine shared a podcast about how AI will soon make the world a grim place to live in.
And then my Balkan’s friends told me that que sera sera, whatever will be, will be. I think they’ve lived enough to see the world goes up and down. The sky turned gray and red. Or when it turned blue again and business continue as usual.
Maybe I am speaking from a privileged position. I never went to war, nor lived through crisis, or even when I do, I was shielded from such things. So I tried as hard as possible to see the world from their lens too.
The lens from my colleague as he was worried about AI, and their self-research and self-improvements rate, how it will rapidly accelerate destructions. The game theory and race to the equilibrium. How Anthropic and OpenAI seems to be the one eagerly trying to replace themselves with AI.
“We’re building a self-improving AI so we have the best AI” - and it seems software engineers are always the one who wanted to replace themselves so they can finally put their laptop down and move to remote areas and live as farmers. Until they discover that they can maximize their crop yields and starts engineering their farm. Guess with what? I think AI again.
And I tried to see the lens from someone who can just say whatever will be will be. I think now I have two lens, one on each eye. Where I can see how the world might become a worst place to live, and that whatever will be will be anyway. But I am just a person who have astigmatism and need prescription glasses. Whatever lens I wear, I’d see blurs and ghosts anyway.
There’s an image that I am particularly fond of. An image of me sitting under the blue sky, surrounded with flowers and butterflies, even though I find butterflies scary due to Spongebob episodes that I watched when I was a kid. And I sit there, with sharp grass blades piercing on my skin. Which actually make me rarely sit on grass in real life.
But that image goes against what I usually do in real life. In real life, I went to a coffee shop, no flowers in sight. Or when I do see one, it dropped on the ground, I’d pick it and slide it under my watch so I can see flowers whenever I check my watch.
I don’t particularly enjoy the heat under the sun, or the sharp grass blades piercing my skin, or the emptiness of such vast meadows. Even the thought of me needing to drive for hours to reach the mountains and hike - is probably something that I don’t really like.
But that image, that goes against what I truly am, is something that I am truly fond of.
There’s a war happening somewhere. Haze that covers my nations, flood that sweeps my lands, corruptions that happens right and left. The world tried so hard to give me lens so I can see chaos out of everything.
But I only have two eyes. So when I either kept switching in between lens to see everything for what they truly are. Or I stacked all of the lens the world gave me, until its as thick as Pinokio nose when it lies. Or maybe for me, its not that my nose grows as I gather these lies. But the lens on my eyes, it keeps getting thicker.
Now I barely know which are the truth and which are lies anymore. My eyes has been stacked with too many lens I find it hard to see. Everything seems to be reduced to an average. Show me the world in red and blue, and when I kept stacking the lens, I think what I can see is now gray.
So maybe gray is the lens that we all use to see the world now. Bleak. Bland. But gray is still a color too.
Or maybe its time for me to remove all of that lenses. When I do, I can see that the sky is blue, and that I still rest under the same tree. I can hear the birds singing, and the butterflies flutter on my ears. I can feel the sharp blades touching my skins.
Is that blue sky something that I truly see? Or its just a dream? Or its a lie that now I have begun to believe? Have I truly removed all of my lenses?
I rest, until the day I don’t have to open my eyes.
This article is originally written in Bahasa Indonesia. OpenAI’s o1-mini is used to translate the article into English. Original article can be read here
The most beneficial investment is charity, because through charity Allah will increase our wealth, and it becomes a form of gratitude for the blessings of Allah. All of the Prophet’s companions, peace be upon him, who were wealthy were known for their charity, which perhaps cannot be measured by today’s standards.
The reward that Allah gives us through charity is far greater than the percentages promised by human investments.
This does not mean that investing is prohibited, but remember that there is something more virtuous.
This article is written to explore what investment options are generally available today and can be directly accessed by individuals. It is written by studying sources from:
If there are any mistakes, may Allah forgive me.
Mutual funds are investment instruments that pool funds from various investors to be managed by an Investment Manager. In their operation, there are four main parties: Investor, Investment Manager, Issuer, and Custodian Bank.
Lack of Direct Ownership: Investors do not obtain direct proof of ownership over the Issuer’s business, which can be detrimental if losses occur.
Compensation System: The compensation system of the Investment Manager and Custodian Bank is based on a percentage, which contradicts the principle of fixed wages in Islamic sharia.
An example of a compensation calculation that causes the Investor to incur significant losses:
In this calculation, the Investment Manager and Custodian Bank will take a commission of 10% of the investment value each year. Regardless of the profit or loss of the Investor and Issuer, the Investment Manager and Custodian Bank will always receive a 10% commission.
Detailed Calculations:
Year 1:
Year 2:
Year 3:
In this case, the one most disadvantaged is the Investor, while the Investment Manager and Custodian Bank always profit.
Because of this, there is an injustice occurring in this investment process. Does this injustice make mutual funds considered entirely haram, or is the investment contract itself halal but there is injustice on the part of the Investment Manager and Custodian Bank separately? I do not have sufficient knowledge to provide a more accurate conclusion.
Fatwa DSN-MUI No. 20/DSN-MUI/IV/2001 on Guidelines for Sharia Mutual Fund Investments
Stocks are proof of ownership of a company’s capital that can be traded in the capital market.
Therefore, as long as the company is halal and there is no speculation through short-selling, investing in stocks is permissible, God willing.
“Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden usury.”
(Al-Baqarah: 275)
Fatwa DSN-MUI No. 40/DSN-MUI/X/2003 on Capital Markets and General Guidelines for the Application of Sharia Principles in the Capital Market
Bonds are debt securities stating that the issuer borrows a certain amount from the bondholder and has an obligation to pay interest periodically and repay the principal at a predetermined time.
Conventional bonds involve elements of riba (usury) due to the interest set at the beginning.
“O you who have believed, do not consume usury, doubled and multiplied.”
(Ali Imran: 130)
Time deposits are bank deposit products where withdrawals can only be made at specific times based on an agreement between the customer and the bank.
By depositing money in the bank, the bank will use that money to generate profits, and the customer will receive profits from the interest provided by the bank.
Banks typically offer customers the option to deposit funds for a specific period, promising interest based on the amount and duration of the deposit.
Both types involve riba because the bank guarantees the safety of the funds and provides interest to the customer.
Fatwa DSN-MUI No. 03/DSN-MUI/IV/2000 on Deposits
Savings Plans share similar characteristics with Time Deposits, so their sharia rulings align with those for Deposits in Islam, meaning they involve riba.
Investing in gold is generally done by purchasing physical gold, storing it, and selling it when the price increases or when needed.
Transactions involving gold must meet the following conditions:
“Gold for gold, silver for silver, … must be equal and hand to hand (immediate exchange).”
(Hadith narrated by Muslim)
Investing in property is generally considered halal in Islam. Property is purchased, held, and sold when its value appreciates.
“And Allah has permitted trade.”
(Al-Baqarah: 275)
P2P lending involves direct transactions between investors and borrowers, even if facilitated by a platform.
In Islam, lending is a social act and should not be used for profit-making purposes.
Therefore, P2P lending involves riba because it entails lending money with the condition that it will be returned with interest.
“Allah destroys interest and gives increase for charities.”
(Al-Baqarah: 276)
Sukuk are bonds issued by the Indonesian government based on sharia principles. The government offers to sell an asset, such as land; the buyer then leases the land back to the government, and the government pays rent. There is an agreement that the government will repurchase the land at a predetermined price.
Such Sukuk arrangements resemble ‘Inah sales, where:
Example:
Calculation Flow:
The seller effectively gains an additional Rp 50,000,000, which can be categorized as riba.
Government Securities (Surat Berharga Negara or SBN) are securities issued by the Indonesian government. Similar to bonds, the owner of SBN receives a return plus interest.
Conventional SBN involves elements of riba.
Law No. 19 of 2008 on State Sharia Securities
The status of cryptocurrency in sharia is still debated. Some scholars permit it under certain conditions, while others prohibit it due to elements of gharar (uncertainty) and speculation.
It is safer to avoid cryptocurrency because it falls into a gray area (syubhat).
Spot forex trading is permissible in Islam. However, forex trading with margin or leverage systems is generally considered haram because it involves riba and gharar. The high level of speculation tends to lead to its prohibition.
Fatwa DSN-MUI No. 28/DSN-MUI/III/2002 on Currency Trading (Al-Sharf)
ORI functions similarly to bonds, where the owner receives returns plus interest.
Conventional ORI involves elements of riba. The sharia-compliant alternative is Retail Sukuk issued by the government based on Islamic principles.
Fatwa DSN-MUI No. 69/DSN-MUI/VI/2008 on State Sharia Securities
Based on the analysis of various investment options from an Islamic perspective, some choices that are generally considered safest and in accordance with sharia principles are:
When considering these options, it’s important to remember key principles:
It’s crucial to conduct thorough research, seek advice from Islamic finance experts, and stay updated with the latest fatwas and decisions from trusted Islamic scholars or institutions like the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI).
This article is intended to help understand the commonly available investment options today and their positions based on sharia principles.
Wallahu a’lam bish-shawab — May Allah enlighten us about what is not yet known.