I’ve been doing plenty of writing on different platforms over the past couple of days.

Honestly, when I say a lot of writing, I mean a lot of writing.

I’ve written on LowYat, Reddit, Medium, everywhere. At the pace I’m going, I guess I seem like an Energizer bunny at times, but also possibly seeming like I’m crazy because the way that I write is that I talk to Siri and get Siri to transcribe every single thing that I say.

“Hey Siri!”

Anyway, that seems to be the reason that a lot of people are coming in from different places here and there – Welcome one, welcome all! So glad that you decided to be here!

Noun I think normally marketing should be a boring thing, but for me it’s actually been quite entertaining, and still with seemingly fit for moments that I am sure I don’t appreciate the full scope of just yet.

Probably the most random one of these instances was the way that I met Pang Sern, the admin of ChatGPT Malaysia, a new Facebook group that I started posting in over the past day and in which people have started to ask me to repost my writings from this blog (o.o)

I have been going on that self-promotion grind, shameless author as I am, and found myself at a Star article about ChatGPT featuring some guy who has nothing to do with ChatGPT but whose face was somehow plastered on the article…

Nice to meet you if you somehow end up seeing this, Yun-Han! LOL)

… To which Andrew Boey rejoins with the following epic comment:

To which, appreciating Andrew Boey’s epic comment, I rejoin with shameless self promotion ala here, only to realize that Pang also writes on Medium.

…Which then leads to even more shameless self promotion…

…Which then leads us here:

Okay, that’s a bunch of people.

Well, what can I say? Thank you for responding to my shameless self-promotion (and to the moments where I wasn’t self-promoting either… Were there any?!)… and I hope that it wasn’t just self-promotion with no benefits to you, the reader, because that would cause the entire house of cards to come falling down!

But now, some self – evaluation!

On my part, I do know on an intuitive level why it is that self-promotion generally isn’t appreciated – it’s one of those things that interrupts the flow of community in the name of furthering a specific person’s aim, an attempt to distinguish oneself from a crowd for whatever reason – it is natural for people to look at that with scorn: Who is this person, and why are they creating a ruckus?

Sorry if you found it annoying and rest assured I understand why; on my part though, it was one of those things that I had to do no matter what because I know that I have something valuable to share and that there is a mission that I am on – for which I must do my thing.

I just happened to be lucky enough that people have responded kindly so far and seem to enjoy my work, so I’ll look forward to creating more of it!

I’m thrilled that you’re here and that you enjoyed my writing (or perhaps you hate it and wish to strangle me? I’ll never know if you don’t comment!), and I’ll look forward to creating much more for you in the days to come 🙂

Till our next chat! (Literally this entire piece was narrated out to Siri while I was sitting in my chair, LOL)

– V

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

The things we like but are not good at.

In this world, as we pass through, we may realize that there are some activities that we deeply and truly love – little skills, hobbies, and occupations that pique our minds, hearts, and souls when we participate in them as an act of pleasure.  As we pass through the tides of time, though, almost inevitably we come to realize that simply because someone we enjoy something, that doesn’t mean that we are going to be good at it. In fact, that’s an understatement.  Why are we talking about good when actually we can be horribly, devastatingly, and world-changingly catastrophic at it?  Here the realization inevitably comes, almost as if it were the common heritage of humanity: Just because you like something, that does not mean that you will be good at it.  One might argue that a true passion is such that even if one isn’t good at something, that the passion should stay.  Even if you are a horrible dancer, that does not mean that you should despise dancing.  The words of an eternal Malay proverb come to mind, “Tidak tahu menari, memarahkan lantai.” They resonate through the core of our beings and remind us:  If you dance horribly, that does not mean that you should blame the floor.  In other words, our lack of skill is no justification for our preferences, which are shown superficial if being bad at them is our grounds for casting them away.  After all, are we not like the fox, that declared the grapes sour, purely because we could not reach them?  In a way, this may be true, but a reality is that in this world, skills are not necessarily their own reward, and imagining that they are is to neglect the realities of our universe in lieu of something all too idealistic, rarefied, and divorced from both the world and the way […]

It’s My Fault

When I think about life and all the things that I want to accomplish, I realize that there are many barriers that hold me back. No matter how I look at myself and everything in between, there’s an inescapable reality that comes to mind: “Somehow or another, if I look at any part of what I see, I can conclude it is probably my fault.” Whether this is true or not, it’s the feeling that I carry into life. If I didn’t do something, then I think it is my fault. If I did do something and it went wrong, it is also my fault. Almost everything that happens in this lifetime and to me is my fault. It’s a strange, liberating but also potentially harsh way of looking at the world – this idea that somehow or another you are responsible for everything that you experience. Trivially, this cannot be true for the simple reason that external affairs and things aren’t totally in control, But it’s definitely a liberating one. Like you, I am just another human being. I might have talked to certain people that you may find difficult to reach. I may do things that you may not expect, or otherwise consider conventional. But like you, I am human and in many ways I am weak. Across countless occasions, I can remember the ways I planned but did not execute, seek after things but did not cross the boundary as mistakes stretch out across time in the proof of time gone by, but things not done. I look at all of that and I accept it. This is all very different from what I experienced when I was a younger person. The idea of failure was unacceptable, and I would do everything in my power to fight against it. Now I’ve come to realize that the world is […]

Mensa – A Small Reflection

Today I thought I’d write a brief blog post on Mensa, the organisation that I’ve been a part of for the past couple of years. It’s been a long time since I really thought about this, but a lot of things have really changed.  As Carl Jung once said, “We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know everything–but at most that is only a pretense. At bottom we never know how it has all come about. The story of a life begins somewhere, at someparticular point we happen to remember; and even then it was already highly complex. We do not know how life is going to turnout. Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only bevaguely hinted at. The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago, as a youngmedical student, and it seemed to me miraculous that I should not have been prematurely annihilated.” I joined Mensa when I was a teenager of 17. Insecure, lacking identity, and wanting to try something new.  Imagine my joy then when I took the test scored a pretty decent score and ended up joining the Society, finding it to be a safe harbor for myself in a strange world. I thought it was a natural thing to do – to find myself a spot where somehow I wouldn’t feel so alone, to be in the presence of people who were the brightest in the world, who could change that world and make it a better place. There you […]

The Future of Writing: How Automated Speech Recognition Will Transform Your Writing

In the modern world, creating documents is a fundamental part of almost every profession, and they are key to a variety of tasks: communicating ideas, formalizing agreements, sharing information, reporting progress, instructing, or preserving records. Whether you’re working in business, education, healthcare, law, or creative fields, the need to produce written content is pretty much everywhere — whether you’re creating a PowerPoint deck, writing a report, or crafting a script either for a YouTube video or for an episode of a TV show, you’ll definitely have to sit down and begin writing to bring out your ideas. But as you may know, writing isn’t always easy. In fact, it can be tedious and painstaking, imposing challenges upon your body that are difficult to deal with, such as carpal tunnel syndrome and the stresses of sitting down for long periods of time. Thankfully, it’s a challenge that has a solution: Automated Speech Recognition (ASR). ASR is a technology that historically hasn’t been the best at reporting down what people say, but it has remarkably improved although the best of it is something that still evades the modern and widely available voice assistants on iPhones and Android phones. However, nowadays apps like Wispr Flow and also MacWhisper work effectively and allow dramatically more accurate and longer transcriptions that serve niches such as creating subtitles, as can the ChatGPT app on your phone along the way, which you can download on iOS or Android, Which allows you to use your voice to interact with your devices in ways that have historically not been possible and that also transform the way that we use our technology and therefore interact with the world. Let’s dive into why. While some of you already know that I started using Wispr Flow recently, I’ve actually been using a range of different transcription tools as part of the suite of different apps that make life simple and […]

Wispr Flow: The Future of Voice-Activated AI Transcription

In the past couple of decades of human history, I can remember the seminal inventions that shaped our human existence so profoundly that somehow or another, whether we realized it or not, our lives had changed. Of these inventions, the most immediate that I can point to is Google, the search engine that made it so we could see the entire world. Beyond that, I’d say Facebook, the social media app that connected the world in a strange technological network.  The next one of these and probably freshest in people’s memories is ChatGPT, the tool that showed us the power and usefulness of generative AI, highlighting for us both the revolution of this new technology and also heightening our fears that one day robots would take over all of us. Well, I firmly believe that the next one is here, and its name is Wispr Flow. Download it here!  But what exactly is Wispr, and why are you asking me to download this?  Well, I’m glad you asked. What is Wispr? Wispr is an AI transcription software, but it is not just any transcription software. It’s a transcription software that activates at the touch of a button.  You can use it in any text field and begin transcribing what you are saying by nothing more than a touch of a button and then speaking into your microphone, which ends up creating transcriptions like this, and even intelligently paragraph what you are saying while at the same time minimizing redundancy by fixing mistakes for you on the fly, based on your writing style, yielding transcriptions like this. What does it cost? The software itself is free to use for up to 2,000 words in the course of a single week if you choose to use the Flow Basic plan.  On the other hand, if you use Flow Pro, which most of you probably will. […]

Meeting Tun Dr Mahathir

Today I had a conversation with Tun Dr Mahathir.  This is the kind of conversation that a person doesn’t normally have. I don’t expect that many people will have it or many people would have had it. Given everything that has happened so far, it’s far from clear that many other people will be able to have it, and so I know that it is a rare and wonderful privilege.  I remember clearly all the things that happened. I showed up in a GrabCar to the Perdana Leadership Foundation, ten minutes before our 9:30 appointment.  Walking in to the picturesque building, there I saw our very first national car in blue – the Saga, brought forth from one of Tun Mahathir’s pet projects.  As I looked around, I saw that the place was grand – the paintings of prime ministers depicting Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Razak, Tun Hussein Onn, Tun Mahathir, and Tun Abdullah – the gallery – the chandeliers and carpeted floors broken only by gorgeous wooden balustrades that led a curved staircase up into an open space. I stood there spellbound – I had not expected a place of such beauty.  As I looked around, I realized that I had arrived early and it was not time for my appointment yet. But before long, my contact Adam called – and so with bated breath, I walked into the room where I would meet Tun Dr. Mahathir.  In the morning, I had watched Khairy Jamaluddin and Shahril Hamdan’s interview of Tun Mahathir on 2X, paying attention to the questions that he had asked and all of the things along the way, which was also interesting because incidentally I’d also met both of them just the other day at a book launch featuring Kishore Mahbubani – How strange fate is and how the world seems to connect everybody in short order.  […]