Blog on Omar Niorah

Still Here: A Fitness App That Expects Me to Fall Off

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:34:40 +0400

I know exactly how my fitness attempts end, because I’ve run the experiment many times.

It goes like this: high motivation, then two or three months of excellent training. Then work gets loud. I sleep badly for a week. One session doesn’t happen, then two. The plan still says Tuesday: intervals, and now it’s also silently saying you’re behind. So I plan to restart properly on Monday. Some Monday, months later, I do.

Every Machine Was Slop Once

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:12:37 +0400

An experiment. Earlier today I wrote a short thought by hand, about a hundred and fifty words, the way I’d say it out loud. Then I gave it to an AI and asked it to turn that thought into a full blog post. This is what came back. Judge it however you like. That’s the point.

There’s a word doing a lot of work right now: slop.

AI-generated writing is slop. AI images are slop. AI music is slop. Human work, by contrast, has substance. It’s a tidy line, and it lets a lot of people feel safe on the right side of it.

I Built a Multiplayer Typing Game in a Weekend and Wrote None of the Code

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:00:00 +0400

On Saturday I had a one-page idea for a game.

By Sunday it was live at keyboardwarriors.online with:

real-time matchmaking and private rooms
accounts, match history and a weekly leaderboard
seven fighters, six arenas, music and sound effects, all generated by code: no art files, no audio files
a pixel-art sprite editor, with an AI that checks every drawing before anyone else sees it
a marketplace with its own currency
an admin panel, an audit log, and a Discord announcer
an anti-cheat that listens to the rhythm of your typing
a logo

I wrote none of the code. I built it pair-programming with Claude Fable 5.1, Anthropic’s AI, in Claude Code. I made decisions, argued, playtested, pasted API keys, and lost a lot of typing duels.

I Taught My Computer to Play Tetris 99 by Lying to a Nintendo Switch

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0400

I play a lot of Tetris 99.

I am decent at it. I am not “win the lobby” decent.

So I had a perfectly reasonable thought:

What if my computer played it for me, on the real Switch, pressing the real buttons?

Three days later I had:

a robot that finishes in the top 10 against 98 real humans
an Arduino that introduces itself to Nintendo hardware under a false name
a Tetris coach that draws on top of my own live games
three confident theories about why things were broken, all of them wrong
soldered exactly three header pins, badly

This is the story, with drawings.

eTRIx: Roboteering

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

eTRIx: Roboteering

Restored and Annotated — 2026 Edition

A note about this edition

The original manual is preserved substantially as it was written in the late 2000s — voice, jokes, strange capitalization, iPods, movie references and all.

The annotations are new.

They come in four flavors:

2026 CORRECTION — something in the original is factually wrong.
2026 CAVEAT — the intuition is useful, but the literal explanation goes too far.
2026 UPDATE — the technology, history or context has changed.
2026 ASIDE — present-day Omar cannot resist interrupting younger Omar.

Reality-First Pedagogy

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A pedagogy of curiosity, agency, productive struggle, and understanding through direct encounter with the world

1. Purpose

Reality-First Pedagogy is an approach to learning built around a simple premise:

People understand deeply when they first encounter a meaningful problem, feel the need to solve it, and then acquire the knowledge, tools, language and abstractions required to make sense of it.

Instead of beginning with terminology, theory, definitions, or a prescribed sequence of content, the learner begins with something real:

Driving Toward Infinity

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Drive Toward Infinity

What if singularities aren’t failures of physics, but clues about what comes next?

So apparently I wasn’t finished.

I published a piece about the recent Navier–Stokes singularity result and ended up going down a particular rabbit hole.

The basic thought was this:

If an extraordinarily successful physical theory predicts infinity, perhaps the interesting question isn’t:

How do we get rid of the infinity?

Maybe it’s:

What assumption broke immediately before we got there?

Navier–Stokes Broke. Good. Now What?

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Navier–Stokes Broke. Good. Now What?

A million-dollar maths problem, a small army of AI mathematicians, some very angry vortices… and why I think the singularity might actually be the beginning of the interesting part.

So.

Apparently Navier–Stokes has been solved.

Or possibly solved.

Or very convincingly claimed to be solved and currently being stared at suspiciously by mathematicians, which is probably the more responsible way of saying it given that this all happened, what… four days ago?

You should be TEN people in ONE

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:48:00 +0400

You Should Be Ten People in One

I think a fully formed person should be ten people in one.

The Citizen. The Logician. The Philosopher. The Adventurer. The Lover. The Protector. The Scientist. The Artist. The Warrior. And somewhere among them, the one who decides who should speak.

The mistake we make is thinking that maturity means becoming one consistent person with one coherent philosophy applied across every part of life.

Is a Coin Flip Really Random?

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0400

We use coin flips as the almost universal example of randomness.

Heads or tails. 50/50.

Need to make a decision? Flip a coin.

Need to explain probability to a kid? Flip a coin.

Need a source of randomness? Well… flip a coin.

Except I’ve been thinking about this lately:

Is a coin flip actually random?

I Just Wanted to Check the Battery: Rooting and Resurrecting a Galaxy A71 from Linux

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had a Samsung Galaxy A71 5G lying around.

It’s not particularly new. It’s not particularly valuable. And, before I factory-reset it, Samsung had been periodically warning me that its battery was deteriorating.

After the factory reset, however, the warning disappeared.

Which made me curious.

Had the battery magically healed itself?

Obviously not.

So I started poking around.

My original plan was extremely reasonable:

Check the actual battery health and see how much life the internal flash storage has left.

Lock in Dad

Wed, 13 May 2026 05:43:04 +0400

Lock-in, Dad!

I gotta f’in lock-in for real! My boys are teens now and will be looking at me to set a great example for them!

My First Post

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:35:22 +0400

Introduction

This is bold text, and this is emphasized text.

I should get used to MD.

My Adventures to Liwa Oasis

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

My Adventures to Liwa Oasis

Chapter 1: Introduction (Emotions with a Jacket)

It was about 1:15 PM on a lazy afternoon. We had had a very lucky five-day stretch of vacations and I had decided I was going to go all road-tripping on the bike. But then the safer, wiser me decided against a five-day marathon since I didn’t really have the cash to support myself in case my bike failed me and I had no other form of transportation.

So on the fourth of those five days, whilst sitting at home, I realized that it SUCKS! I mean, I had just killed four days without having me a little adventure.

I then remembered a place called Liwa Oasis somewhere near Abu Dhabi. I quickly Google-mapped it and charted out my route and how I was planning to head there.

Here was the plan: I would ride up to Liwa, reach in about four hours, or so I assumed, and then spend the entire day with just me and the oasis. Or at least how I envisioned the oasis to be. And the next morning I would ride back happy that I had had my little adventure.

So I began packing my bag: the usuals, nothing fancy. Two kuffiyes, a big knife, matchsticks, a torch and some other “survival” stuff. I can’t really remember the stuff.

You know, I didn’t want to have to cut my hand with a pen knife like in the movie 127 Hours, just in case I got stuck somewhere.

Oh, I forgot to mention: I had decided to write about it when I had come back but never got the chance. It was actually so intricate. There were so many emotions I had felt at that time, so many thoughts, feelings, victories, fears that arose during those 13 hours, that deciding to write about it was in itself a fear.

I didn’t want to do the trip an injustice.

So I never did write about it, thinking it’s better left as part of my subconscious memory.

The reason I did start to write about it was because I remember seeing a map of the journey I had charted out after I had reached home and, for a weird reason, I reminisced about it. Then I thought to myself, that was a f’ing brave journey and, well, decided to write about it.

And I had already given it enough time to sink and be a part of me in the way I want it to be that no amount of bad writing can mess with the core of it.