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One Date, Two Destinies: A Book Release

Hello, everyone!

Happy Malaysia Day to all of you who are from Malaysia!

On another and related note, those of you who know me probably know that I am a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew. 

Well, that’s a bit of a small understatement. I mean, it would have to be for someone who was somehow so moved that he decided to write an entire book about Lee Kuan Yew, which is by the way exactly what I did. 

This Malaysia Day, 16 September, I’m very happy to announce the release of “One Date, Two Destinies: Lee Kuan Yew and the Birth of Malaysia and Singapore”, at a (Malaysia Day) discount!

Pick it up here or here:
https://victortanws.gumroad.com/l/september16th 

Also, here’s a sample that you can have a look at to preview the contents!

One-Date-Two-Destinies-Lee-Kuan-Yew-and-the-Birth-of-Malaysia-and-Singapore-SAMPLE-1Download

This was a fun project to engage in, writing about the entire track of Lee Kuan Yew’s history from his birth up until the end. 

I think it is crucial to look back at the past to understand history better, and this is one of the first things that a person will understand, I think, if they look just a little bit beneath the surface of Malaysian history and that which we call Malaysia. 

I don’t think that there is quite a project that is like this, but I think that it was an extremely fun one – It contains many of my own personal reflections about Mr. Lee and the role that he played in Malaysia and Singapore, and in our shared history together, one that was born from a time of what can rightfully be called trauma. 

I hope that you will find it meaningful and valuable for your own personal development and growth even as you reflect on these stories. 

Thank you for your support in advance if you would like to purchase the book!

Yours, 

V.

Lessons

I’m lying down right now with my eyes closed, trying to rest while releasing a couple of thoughts. I’ve been watching a ton of videos about vibe coding and how people create apps and take part in a dream. I think I have a bit of a picture of what is happening along the way, and some ideas for apps.

The context is that I built a couple of apps in the past couple of days:

  • Slap Mania, which is fun, and you can access it at slapmania.org.
  • Vibe Coder Simulator, which is exactly what it sounds like: a simulator of vibe coding.

I want to make this into a big game, but I think I don’t have enough resources. There are a lot of other things that need to happen along the way, and I’m just not sure how to make those things happen.

Believing in yourself is a little bit easier if you have evidence for why it is that you should believe in yourself and stuff like that. Of course, it’s not easy, and there is an aspect of reality in that, because really, the world doesn’t owe you anything. That makes things interesting but also difficult.

Having said that, I’ve really been making a lot of different things, and by any measure or standard, the level of output that I’ve been coming up with is crazy and insane. Most people would not be able to imagine it. It is the fruit of immense productivity, even if I am lying down.

That all begs the question: what is this really all for? To release part of myself into the world, to let myself become happy and satisfied with everything? That’s where moments like these come in, where I reflect on what’s been happening about our place in this world. That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot more about recently, even as time passes and as I read, reflect, think back on things, and pass them through the prism that is my mind.

Caught on a million different things, I don’t know how long this life is going to be sustainable for. I know that, in many ways, this loop needs to be something that I navigate much more credibly, more healthily, with better and more intelligent steps. I’m lying down here complaining about this because I know that I am not enough. That’s not something that I’m saying to any individual person, but rather just to the world at large as an expression of my own ego.

I look at myself and think to myself that I have been found wanting. I don’t feel a lack of confidence in any way, but I know internally that there’s a lot more that has to come out, that needs to happen, and that requires my role to be present, coordinating, planning, and just making it happen.

For what it’s worth, there’s a lot of learning here, although there’s a lot of wastage.

You have no idea how much AI credit I have wasted, how much money I’ve taken out and burned effectively in the name of developing these new types of understanding. I suppose that we could call them the tuition for this heightened awareness, though it doesn’t make it any less painful.

Having said that, it definitely feels like I’m growing, even if not everything points in that general direction. I look forward to what that all means, to being able to better thrive in this world, and to letting these feelings give birth to something better than they had inherited before.

The Violence We Do To The World

I’ve been reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition recently and it is truly a fascinating book. It distinguishes work, labour and action from one another – Something that you might think is trivial or unimportant, but that as it turns out is really quite important for understanding how human beings but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about is this idea of the violence we do to the world through the work of our hands.

Here Arendt’s definition of work is relevant; work is what we do, homo faber as we are, to create a world that lasts beyond us, something distinct from our labor, something durable.

When Arendt describes work, she doesn’t just describe it as a process of creating things ex nihilo – the way that a god might – out of nothing; rather, human beings create things out of that which was already given to the world we take timber and ore as resources from earth’s natural growth process and from within its bowels transform it through our efforts into something that was not on earth before and in so doing take the finitude of the world and fashion it for our own ends in an act of rebellion an act of violence, some might say.

I think about the industries we have, and how often we work purely for the sake of our biological needs, yet how because we conflate work with labor, work becomes our highest ideal in few other places.

I see this most saliently in the global AI consumption situation, where thousands of us are casually using tokens on a massive scale to power artificial intelligence models that are run on carbon-consuming computers that produce true simulated machine intelligence computations that stretch beyond the limit of any individual’s human capacity – a form of violence that we are doing to the world.

I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, but I can see that this is a form of violence that I had not seen so clearly before. There are many things that I have to say about this and plenty of thoughts, but I can already feel myself returning to the life process that is sleep. One of those things I’ve become a little more in touch with as I began reading this book. Well, until tomorrow then.

Slapmania

One of the most fascinating sports I’ve ever seen in my life is the sport of professional slapping. My first exposure to this wonderful art, travesty, or disaster (whatever you like) came when I first saw Charles White Jr’s slapping playlist on YouTube.

Ever since, I’ve watched the odd slap master episode with a mix of strange fascination and slap happy joy.

It is with that collection of feelings that I am pleased to introduce you to Slap Mania, a little game that I moseyed up to train those of you who seek the high points of slapping and the holy grail of the title of Slap Emperor.

You’ll find it here!

Feel free to let me know what you think and share it with your friends.