Search Here ….

Tags

Academic integrity AI AI Detectors Artificial Intelligence Asia School of Business ChatGPT ChatGPT Malaysia ChatGPT Plus Education Entrepreneurs and Startups Malaysia Entrepreneurship Gardens Google GPTZero IGCSE Malaysia Malls Maps72 Microsoft Midjourney MIT MrMoney TV OpenAI Pavilion Plagiarism Plagiarism checkers Poe Quora Sam Altman Software development Technology Turnitin Udemy Writing
Uncategorized

Epic week

Victor TanPost a Comment

It’s been a very tiring week, but a very rewarding one as well.

Spoke at a conference yes, and now that’s in the past – what did it leave behind? A whole ton of new connections, memories, friends, and a ton of gratitude for people like Daniel, Richard, the mentors that’ve come by, the people who’ve shared knowledge with me, and the people whom I will work with as well.

It feels strange that this is the kind of thing that I’ve been missing out on for a while, but it also feels deeply like it was timely – a period of coincidences whereby things have just started to align with each other along a pattern that I can’t fully say that I understand but that perhaps Johann (hi if you’re there) might call “Manufactured Serendipity”.

It looks like a lot of great things have been happening to the people around me, and I’m pretty glad for that – also, maybe the sample space is skewed, but I’ve met some really great people who as it turns out are pretty down to earth and chilled out in many different ways that I’ve to learn more in days ahead, but that also carry fires within that I realize that I wouldn’t have seen if I’d maintained the facades and the lack of humility that characterized my earlier days.

When I look to the sky and to the world, I see how much more there is to learn – how infinite the seeming expanse before me.

The time is not infinite – far from it; it is quite limited, and I am but a single human unable to absorb it all.

But I will keep on trying, looking forward to what the world will bring – knowing fully well that it has brought good, and that it will continue to do so. This was truly a life-changing week, and just know that if you saw me and you met me this week, just know that you’re all some of the many reasons that I felt inspired this week by the sheer wave of talent and inspiration that constantly surrounds me 🙂

Thank you for being there and following my journey, and I’ll look forward to bringing you more in the days ahead!

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Winds of Change

To almost anyone who knows anything about me, it might seem strange that I’m taking such an interest in politics recently – I transitioned so suddenly from Pathways To Excellence to suddenly talking about so many different controversial topics and ideas that somehow your feed is now filled with a range of YouTube videos that hopefully are a little bit legible. I get it – you feel like I’ve changed as a person. You know what? I probably have – but maybe not in the way that you might have expected. I think I was always interested in politics, for one thing, and that somehow meeting the smartest people of my generation and of the next generation was the way that I managed to allay my discomfort with Malaysia – a systematically broken, thoroughly divided society when you look at it beyond the enclaves and the confines of everyday reality; it was somehow easier to fill up the hole in my heart whenever I thought about this place and how I had my lot connected to it with the feeling that somehow, even if the place were to be a dumpster fire, at least we had all of these talented people. But soon, this bandaid, had to be taken off, as all bandaids eventually have to be – and so it was, as I faced reality, with a single and enduring rip. At some point, I realized that talent on an individual level is not the solution to this country’s problems, and moreover that it is not necessary for me to solve them – but only to play to my internal conscience. It was I think at that point I saw Malaysia for what it really was, and what I would create from then on out.

What I Would Do Differently From The Madani Government (In Managing Speech Online)

As some of you may know, I have recently been making a range of videos about topics that I think are important for Malaysia to discuss, namely the 3 R’s. Recently, the user ​⁠@coldsunflares asked me on my YouTube channel and my video about the penunggang agama Rayyan Wong who recently accused PMX and our Agong of eating in a non-halal restaurant about what I would do differently from the Madani Government when it comes to regulating what some may call extremism or penunggang agama.  It was quite a thoughtful comment, and I reproduce it here.  “You mentioned the government’s inability to deal with these kinds of issues, which for the most part, is true. However, how would you propose they deal with it? Because any time the government decides to take these so-called “decisive action”, they are labelled as “draconian, stifling freedom of speech” among other things. On one hand, the government is hard pressed to take these measure because of their history of championing reforms, equality and civil liberty, but on the other are those “from the other side” who hides behind the guise of freedom of speech (without decorum) to spread malicious statements, as is evident from multiple recent incidents, i.e. China flag issue, mandatory Halal cert, etc. We are bursting at the seams with people who point out the problem, but not so much people who can come up with a feasible solution to these issues.” The comment I wrote was too long for the margins of the comment window, and after I had written it I realized – it was too long even for the YouTube post window, so here it is in full blog entry glory.  Response begins:  I think even now, the Madani government is having huge problems with actually portraying itself as a compassionate government – but I feel that this is because […]

My Wrong Assumptions About Destiny and Getting Old

As Reinhold Neibuhr once famously said… I reflect on this quote a lot more than I should, and every single year it means something slightly different. I rather like my interpretation this year and the thoughts that have come out from it, and so I share them here. When I was a child, I had a whole list of ideas of what people must be like as they grew older. Older people were richer because the universe made them so – they were married because their partners were brought into their lives; they were fatter because a divine ordinance made their bodies expand; things happened automatically because they were simply ‘meant to be’. I now see that a lot of this was wrong-headed, and came about because of intellectual laziness that I no longer consider valid. As time passed, I saw that things were not so simple. People became rich because they worked for it either hard or smart – they got married because they had relationships with people, romantic and then sexual, that they decided to make into family ties; they were fatter because they were often sedentary as part of a modern condition; things could happen because of chance, but in all likelihood people could steer the ship far more effectively than they could give themselves credit for but even then lose themselves in the comforting soma of a ‘fate’ narrative. Well, comfort is a beautiful thing. In some instances, it’s even necessary. After all, there are lots of things in this world where what you believe and what I believe are opposed, but circumstances are uncertain and neither of us might be right – in this situation, how should we think and navigate the world? It would be easy for one person to conclude that well, because fate is a thing, it doesn’t matter what we do – […]

Letting Go Of Presumptions

There’s a very liberating feeling that comes about when a person lets go of all the things that they felt used to hold them back – a sense that maybe things are easier to do, a feeling that nobody is restraining them. That’s definitely how I’ve felt about making content recently, even as I make things that not everyone may agree with or things that people may feel are controversial. Some people say that it’s dangerous, and maybe that’s true, but the way I think about my content is that I should make content that is true to myself, to what I believe in, and what I’m fighting for – and that if there is a social aspect to what I do and choose to create, it is that it should reshape society in an image that I want it to be reshaped in. I find it odd that I didn’t use to think this way – that somehow or another it always felt difficult to say what I truly wanted to say, that my voice was somehow caught inside a metaphorical throat filled with narrow passageways and constant blockages, refusing to allow what came from within to be expressed. Moving ahead seems a little easier now, and it is something that I will do. Looking forward to sharing more with the world soon 🙂

Making Every Minute Worth It

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how time is finite. The moments that we have on earth, the memories that we have, the seconds that flow by… Everything is finite. You think that the moments will roll and everything will come and go infinitely – but it’s not true; all of it is part of a set of flowing sands flowing through glass crevices into a pile that lies down below, and whether we like it or not, these moments will one day all fade away as we hit inescapable limits, bound by biology, time, and energy. We have all the reason to make every minute worth it. Every ounce of energy earn something. Every part of our minds, our cognitions, our planning yield some sort of meaningful and measurable benefit to our happiness, our joy, our wallets, and everything in between. As the year comes to an end, it’s strange to see – my energy has multiplied, my peace has come closer, and I am moving forward faster than I ever have, with so little compunction or fear that it’s interesting to watch someone who seems to be of a different body and mind than the person who had been here before. There are many good things that I feel about who I am and who I will become, and I look forward to seeing where things will go 🙂

Doc.new

Just discovered the doc.new shortcut, and it’s lifechanging.  All you do? Go to Chrome, and type in “doc.new” into the address bar, and poof – here you are, with a brand new Google Document. Why do I even know this? Because I use Google documents every day, and I like to make things just a little easier for myself so I don’t get the excuse of saying that I didn’t do things because they were too cumbersome or too difficult.  Here, I was trying to get a shortcut to create a new document and I was looking for the easiest possible way to do it – a way of enabling me to do things more easily, in more refined a fashion, in more simple a way to make things happen and develop. Docs.new is one of the most elegant things I’ve discovered this entire year, and it’s a shock that that realization came in nothing more than a single search for the shortcut and a single phrase typed into a keyboard. It makes me wonder how many other instances of this exist out there in our strange universe.