Nation-building

Nation-building : Well, the reification is basically : you need to materially control underlying infrastructure. Implying, that you need to have a military. So it's NOT so much a different type of country, but WHO gets to be king in the new countries. And the answer here is simply "well since we're richer, let's see if we can figure out how to be kings". 

It's not that complicated. 

Network State : supervenes upon the network

The first popular reference that comes to mind, is this book that was used by some professors when I was in college : Guns, Germs, and Steel - which discusses *material precursors which led to the development of some societies to dominate others. It's been compared to the Network State because these books are both about social economy, and geopolitics.

I think the main criticism that the concept of a Network State attracts, is that it supervenes ( depends ) on the underlying *material network, the means of communication, so to speak. What this means is, a network state fails if the network fails. If geostates block physical infrastructure like undersea cables, or software infrastructure like BGP and its ilk, then there's only access to the network state via guerilla access to the network. 😛

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2026 July 26

Conjecture : Balajian network states are analytically trivial. 

The network state is simply a landless NGO seeking to be acknowledged as an ontological equal by GOs with both land and guns.

Once land is acquired, a network state is simply a traditional state. It's not clear how it would be easily recognised as otherwise by traditional states. 

For example, all traditional states could declare themselves network states and nothing would change. As soon as geospatial claims are made, it then becomes resolved the old fashioned way with a gun.

WTH is up with Network School?

This is for people outside Malaysia to understand the Network School kerfuffle that Balaji walked himself into like a juvey, though it may also be helpful to some clueless locals.

Network School : is basically a coworking space, cum tech incubator, run by a cryptobro who wrote a book on one of those run-of-the-mill "virtualised software thingy" projects, calling it a "network state" . Instead of a cryptocurrency governed by an decentalised NGO bank, the "thingy" is ostensibly a nationstate. What's a virtualised nationstate? Well presumably it merely does all the things any common nationstate does, minus having geospatial loci - that is, until it claims a rock somewhere, or buys one from anyone else.

The klutz move here is that Balaji ( regardless of any political connections ) explicitly used the copy ( word choice ) "tech zion", to describe this. He subsequently set up Network School in Malaysia, a nation that doesn't acknowledge the legal existence of Israel because ... for the most part, though of course not comprehensively, Malaysia's citizens hate the actions of the nationstate of Israel, and Malaysian politicians are more than happy to capitalise on this issue to rally support for themselves from time to time. 

A klutz move. A complete, klutz move.

Following a mid-term election cycle, where every possible issue that could be used to attack the federal government party was hauled up from the marshes, this then became a hot issue. Network School is built on a ( edit : figurative ) swamp - an artificial island and ecological disaster that has its own fascinating history in the economic development of the state of Johor. Incidentally the Johor Sultan is Malaysia's current Agung ( rotational king ), and state investments are tied up in the buildings where Network School is located.

Malaysians are understandably ( given what I've told you about them so far, even if you don't empathise ), pissed. They're even taking offense at the fact that Network School's marketing copy referred to it as located on an artificial island near Singapore instead of explicitly in Malaysia. Balaji seemed to be digging his own PR grave a little deeper by speaking as a businessman in curt public statements, instead of as a face-saving collectivist Asian. 

Where is all this going? Absolutely zero** Malaysian political figures want to touch this with a ten-foot-pole, given the stakeholders involved. The Johor state government, and prince, have both pointed to the Federal government as the decider of foreign policy regarding any possible "Zionist infiltrators" which might be in Network School. The Prime Minister has haphazardly announced that while previously, Israeli passports have not been recognised for entry to Malaysia, Malaysia now will actively seek to identify holders of Israeli passports regardless of their other passports, and deport them - with further warning that active IDF members will be imprisoned.

Klutz nuts, all around.

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Below are some extra-credit points that didn't make it into the article. 

- ** In case it is not clear : The buildings on the island are known as Forest City, and the history of this development is its own tragicomedy. Businesses profiting in Forest City are a tiny minority. The Malaysian masses that get hysterical about zionwords are more numerous by far, at least in representation. The politicians don't care - they don't want to get too close NOT BECAUSE THEY HATE BALAJI but because THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO MANAGE PUBLIC HYSTERIA. Malaysians culturally have HUGE THERAPY CONCERNS from past trauma and 70 years of political ragebait on : sovereignty, ethnic contamination, colonial influence, and their ilk. 

- Balaji has paused investments in Malaysia, claiming 100 MM MYR down, and 500 MM MYR planned. No receipts. And he's demanding fair business guarantees. He hasn't really broken any big laws, though the city council has thrown the book at him for doing unrelated activities in a "management office" which is what all coworking spaces in Malaysia tend to register as. "Diplomatic immunity" is not what is being demanded - rather, there is a demand that the government will endorse the business as legit, in order to reduce future "swatting" inconveniences which may occur randomly whenever Malaysian politics deems it politically gainful to cause a scene and soil the Malaysian government. [ It's like if I want to open a hotel in your taman, I sure as hell need a letter from the chairman of the HOA saying "this business ok one, please don't call the police in every time you want to make the HOA look bad". Of course, there's limited control the HOA (PMX) can exert, so if the residents keep attacking the HOA by swatting the hotel ... of course la the hotel operator is going to sell and exit the taman. ]

- The first public figure to address the trending furor about Network School was the Muar ( in Johor ) member of Parliament, who holds the record for having been the youngest full cabinet minister when he was 25. He's also the founder of MUDA a fledgling youth party which lost its state assembly seat in the recent Johor state elections. Extremely popular with the aunties. You have to read all about him. Another string is that this chap rose to power as a personal assistant to Mahathir, before leaving to found his own party. 

- There is a cute history of Mahathir attacking Johor by limiting Forest City's profitability. It is of course not clear if that party is involved in the current campaign to defame Network School. Lol

review : kedukaan sebangsa malaysia

Kedukaan sebangsa Malaysia, adalah perasmian pemisahan antara bangsa dan negara. Daripada bangsa yang disesatukan dengan negara, terjadilah kepelbagaian bangsa, yang antaranya ingin menjatikan keutamaan sesetengah bangsa dalam pendirian negara, sambil menegaskan kekurangan bangsa lain pada kesejatian itu. Entahlah abad bila benda ini mencapai keselesaian muktamad.

kita semua syaitan 😎 / Arendt x Malaysia

Malaysia agak kotor, dalam politiknya. Bila Kerajaan dan Pembangkang berjuang, terpenyetlah kancil seperti :

- orang asli

- warganegara minoriti

- pelarian yang dijamui

- warga asing yang mesra dengan mana2 pihak kebencian yang senang dikambinghitamkan

- dll

Bagaimanakah orang biasa yang kesayangan dengan rumahtangganya dan alim dengan mana2 agamanya boleh terjebak terjadi peralatan perjuangan gajah? Carilah penterjemahan video ini dalam bahasa kefasihan anda!

https://youtu.be/bpV2Yi9zQMM? si=gFnpVy7VDTF9_x3f

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"Book" review :  life and work of Hannah Arendt. I found this as a throwaway link to spam on social media, linking the famous "banality of evil" meme, to how Malaysians are talking about Rohingya and Israeli issues.

Then I actually listened to the cast, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Arendt's entire life is a jihad about thoroughly Malaysian issues : ethnic identity, minority-majority interaction, power vs. violence, opiated masses, and the role of informed, active, participants in democracies.

If I was a teacher, I'd encourage students of politics, society, and so-called critical thinking, to (a) list out all the analytical terms mentioned in the cast, (b) explain what Arendt meant briefly, then (c) apply the terminology to show relevant specific examples from Malaysia in 2026. Give it a go, could be super fun for some of you.

It's a YouTube video, sorry, and quite lengthy but manageable in one sitting at 2x speed - given some foreknowledge of 20th Century European political thought. Try to ignore the LLM-ese, not-A-but-B-s, if it bugs you, as there are quite a few of those.

leverage i. e., economics

Before bed, a friend asked about my studies, as people do. Everyone is looking for leverage. But most folks don't regard uncertified knowledge/skill as a form of leverage, so they may not appreciate why I am a student. 

I often explain my career as being a matter of killing time since 2004, when I figured out how human consciousness can be quantified, and then ran out of more important things to look into. It is equivalent to saying, I already have a lot of leverage, and I need large extrinsic incentives to move me where most people may be moved by smaller incentives.

That is why I am largely absent from commerce - I live in a poor, dumb, country, so there are limited incentives to do commercial things. The comparative advantage of being here, is to pursue the study of non-commercial things, like the anthropology of poor people, and academic subjects available anywhere on earth, such as maths. 

logic without semantics?

More precisely, I think, logic is a property of language ( semantic systems). So it is meaningless to talk about logic outside of semantics. The same would simply be physical progress, without extrinsic meaning. 

social life x study time

Life gets really weird when you decide to be that guy who'd give up 15 hours/week of socialising for 1 hour of extra time to study weird problems - compounded over 2 decades. I guess the wager is that everyone has friends, but no one has succinct explanations to rudimentary questions like, which version of the fundamentals theories, of language and maths, and the total syllabi of universities, is most reified in terms of standard physical theory? So I would like to better understand the questions, than go over more special cases of the general human condition which is rather trite in and of itself. 

common legal asymmetry in Malaysian speech laws

Hamka posted about, discussion of hell and the fates of differently religious people, and how each person commented or concerned themselves with each other's business. 

My comment :

Saya rasa ada sesetengah orang Malaysia tak senang kerana mungkin boleh disabit bawah undang kalau asyik mengucap "orang islam akan pergi ke neraka", walaupun orang yang kata "orang bukan islam akan pergi ke neraka" tidak boleh disabit semata2nya. Ketidakselarian in memang selalu jadi hal dalam hati orang bukan Islam di Malaysia. 

corporate games

Skill and preference. I consider myself good at games, but I have little intrinsic interest in most games. Whereas, I have friends who love games, but don't seem to know how to play. 

-

If you don't want someone else to lose, then if they want you to lose, you are undefended and will lose faster

So in a competition :

1. Wanting to win, is the same as wanting everyone else to lose, except when it helps you win.

So either you get with the program. Or quit

Because everyone else needs you to lose due to rule 1.

how software engineering should be taught

How SWE degrees should be taught : 

You would have to look at industry best practices in the last 36 months, then make kids cram it all in y1. Then spend y2 and y3 updating what they prototyped AS INDUSTRY CHANGES. All while surveying the theoretical side of things. But this approach is rarely taken. 

hand coding vs delegation

Responding to Laurie Kirk's prompt.

Well hand programming is slow because the translation from head to hand is slow. If neural link lets me go 200 lines a minute, i think i'd be happier. In lieu of that, delegation seems like a fair trade off. 

qualities of a policy maker

Kian Ming took an interview https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1DPMt4AgLF/

I agree. But the order is reversed. Structurally 

1. Empathy motivates the activism to solve a problem, or you end up chasing incorrect problems.

2. Resilience provides you with some ability to progress regardless of intellect. 

3. Intellectual curiosity makes you better than anyone who only has the first two. 

A subissue of empathy is rhetoric/charisma. Not knowing what people care about, undermines the ability to address what they care about most, first. That's why skill in communications depends less on orderliness and more on not pissing people off. Knowing when to intentionally piss people off is also dependent on empathy, to know what pisses them off the most. 

Malaysian politics : usually boring

I think Anwar only won 2022 because of collective incompetence of MN, and BN before that. Hence PH has never had a strong majority. Ever. 

I don't think it's fair to say any PMs before Non were very good either. Fair, at best. So between past and future mediocrity, I think the best option is always to rotate incumbents out.

While I have deep interests in economics and anthropology in general, I have limited interests in official politics. So my comments on this tend to be briefer than those of my friends who write for a living. 

philosophers in AI : hype

Class of 05 here. In my time, philosophy professors and almost all others as well were just plain bad at explaining how all the academic divisions integrated into a single cohesive architecture. I would have dropped out after sophormore year if I wasn't being paid to go to school.

Today, everyone is still broadly unable to coherently narrate how conscious human experience is quantifiable and thus the currency which denominates all human activity in terms of concrete data types. While I hope civilization will soon agree on how this language works, I remain rather skeptical that hurling humanities majors into branding and communication ( read : PR, IR, marketing ) roles iw going to help us get there. 

Business will be done. Not necessarily making us all smarter. 

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I think the sooner someone popularises the notion that any human can sit down and figure out how to analyse 100% of their first-person experiences into a finite set of sensory data types, the happier I'll be

what makes people join political parties

Probably analogous to what makes people vote. A comment i wrote earlier this week on Helmy's wall.

"Ada pelbagai strata minat politik. 

- tahap pop culture / entertainment 

- tahap jati diri ( hidup, mati, suka, benci, dll )

- tahap pembinaan ( masyarakat, ekonomi, negara )

- diupah je

Mana ii satu pun cukup bagi merangsangkan seseorang keluar undi."

goals and purposes

I have been depressed by stupid people, at least since I was 3. There is a photo of me as evidence, writing the word "ikan" on a blackboard from right to left, because I thought it was stupid of everyone to do it only in one way, without symmetric agnosticism. All in, I think I should be quite proud of myself for not bothering to be a full-time pleb ( though I am always happy to be a pleb for suitable wages ). I also always tell myself to be nice to plebs, perhaps since that was my upbringing in a religious household. Politics has its uses. All said and done, I think I turned out pretty well, as a hardened opposer to ornary people who have all sorts of conservative preferences. We only get to make small changes in the world. I do wish I was smarter at maths though, because not getting it done is one of the main distractions I have from spending more time playing pleb games and having more friends. Not yet that time in life, and maybe never. Such is life ... 

wear blood proud

On whether folks should make fun of dead wreckless drivers. 

1. No personal offense. 

2. Objectively they deserved their fate.

3. Objectively, no human has control over their decisions, and is a product of their environment. Therefore by failing in past opportunities to protest to the point of our own cost, that the government should create an environment where 2. is not possible, well then, all of us and our forefathers are responsible for the deaths. 

4. Get used to wearing blood. It's a better look than wearing it but saying it's not there. 😎