Dashveenjit Kaur

After my time at Tech Wire Asia & TechHQ, I'm now Editor at TechForge Media and Contributing Editor at Digital News Asia. While at DNA, I am focused on the local tech scene, TechForge has 9 global tech publications under its belt, which I write for all.

50,000 engineers needed. 5,000 produced a year. New EP rules in June. SEMICON SEA 2026 opens in KL today and Malaysia's chip ambitions have a talent problem worth talking about. #SEMICONSea2026 techwireasia.com/2026/05/malays…

You are not the only one who has felt this very peculiar and unspeakable thing. Someone has already written it down. Someone sat alone with the same unbearable weight you are carrying right now and they survived it long enough to find words for it. That is what the whole of human literature is. Millions of people saying: me too, me too, me too…in the dark, across centuries, reaching forward through time to find you. You are not alone in this, you never were. The writers were always writing specifically to you. They just didn’t know your name.

Roald Dahl told kids that good thoughts shine out of your face like sunbeams. Forty-five years later, neuroscientists ran the experiments. He was basically right. Charles Darwin had a version of this idea in 1872. He wrote a whole book about it called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. He thought that showing a feeling makes you feel it more, and that the expressions you wear every day eventually settle into your face. A 2011 study at USC and Duke tested the first part on real people. They compared patients who got Botox to patients who got a different filler that doesn't paralyze the muscles. Then they showed both groups photos of strangers and asked them to guess the emotion on each face. The Botox group did worse. Your face and your brain are wired in a loop. Freeze one side and the other goes quiet too. There's a body version of the same effect. Years of stress flood the body with cortisol. Cortisol breaks down the collagen and elastin that hold your skin together. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology measured this on actual people. Subjects with sustained moderate stress had visibly more wrinkles, thinner skin, and slower healing than the mild-stress group. Years of furrowed brows etch the lines in. Years of clenched jaws change the shape of your cheek. There's also a longevity study from the University of Kentucky, published in 2001. Researchers scored 180 women's handwritten autobiographies that they wrote at age 22. Sixty years later, the ones with the most positive emotion in their writing were dying at less than half the rate of the ones with the least. By age 80, 60% of the unhappy group had died. Only 25% of the happy group had. And total strangers actually pick up on it. People can judge personality traits from a neutral photo of someone they've never met, with accuracy better than random guessing. The judgments aren't always fair. The face you've practiced for years still broadcasts something to a stranger in under a second. Dahl called it sunbeams. The technical version is uglier but it's the same idea. The expressions you wear most often reshape the muscles you use to make them. Cortisol from chronic stress breaks down the skin around those muscles. And you partly read other people's emotions by mirroring their expressions on your own face, so a face that can't move can't mirror well either. Your face is a thirty-year diary of what you've been thinking about.

Walk more. Walk for no reason. Walk to think. Walk to reset. Walk to learn. Walk to escape. Walk to get better. Walk to solve problems. It changes everything

China just mandated AI across its entire education system. UAE: done since 2025. India: rolling out from Grade 3. Singapore: teacher pipelines in place. Malaysia has half of SEA's data centre capacity and no national AI curriculum–yet. techwireasia.com/2026/04/ai-lit…

U Mobile hit 82.9% 5G coverage in 9 months—3 months ahead of schedule. Impressive execution. But there's a spectrum asymmetry question Malaysia's regulators need to answer. My latest investigation for @DNAsia 🧵👇 digitalnewsasia.com/business/u-mob…

I suspect the real reason for Singapore's opposition to a toll on Hormuz is not some high-minded devotion to international law, but because if it's set as a precedent and a toll were to exist on the Strait of Malacca, it would basically kill their current business model. See, geographically speaking, Malacca runs primarily between Malaysia and Indonesia - Singapore only controls a small stretch at the southeastern exit. Yet currently they capture most of the strait's commercial value through port services, bunkering, and transshipment: it's basically like them having the best "service station" on the world's most popular free highway. What the Hormuz precedent - if established - is all about is the revenge of geography: power given back to the countries that own the road, as opposed to those with the best rest-stop. Fantastic news for Malaysia and Indonesia (which is partly why you're seeing key Malaysian political figures, like Nurul Izzah Anwar, issue a highly unusual rebuke of Singapore over Balakrishnan’s remarks: x.com/amerhadiazmi/s…), but a big threat to a city-state whose entire economy is built on being the best service provider on what's largely someone else's waterway.

The sun you see right now exploded 7 minutes ago and you'd have no way of knowing. You'd still feel its warmth. Still see it in the sky. Still orbit it. For 8 minutes and 20 seconds, you'd live in a universe that no longer has a sun and have absolutely no way to detect the difference. This is because gravity also travels at the speed of light. If the sun vanished, Earth would continue orbiting the empty space where it used to be for the same 8 minutes and 20 seconds. Einstein proved this. The gravitational wave carrying the information "the sun is gone" propagates at exactly c. Light, gravity, and information all share the same speed limit. Now scale the paradox in this post. 90 light-years is nothing. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away. Every photograph of it is a 2.5 million year old snapshot. The entire galaxy could have collided with something catastrophic 2 million years ago. We'll find out 500,000 years from now. The James Webb Space Telescope routinely photographs galaxies from 13.4 billion years ago. Those galaxies no longer exist in any form we'd recognize. The stars burned out. The civilizations, if any, rose and fell billions of years before Earth formed. Webb is photographing ghosts. The deepest implication: "right now" is a local phenomenon. It exists only in the space you can physically touch. Beyond that, everything you see, measure, or interact with is a time-delayed recording. The further you look, the older the recording gets. There is no method, even in principle, to know the current state of anything beyond your immediate surroundings. The entire observable universe is a 13.8 billion year old museum where every exhibit is labeled with a different date and nothing is current.

exercise is a celebration of what you can do. not a punishment for what you ate.

Anthropic built a model so capable at hacking it decided not to release it. Instead it handed it to Apple, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia to patch the internet before someone else finds the same bugs. That's Project Glasswing @AnthropicAI artificialintelligence-news.com/news/anthropic…

I've been to Kazakhstan every year for the past 3 years. Planning my fourth trip. And every time I come back, the same thing happens. I show people photos, and they say, "Wait, that's Kazakhstan?" The country is the size of all of Western Europe. 2.7 million square kilometers. Ninth largest on Earth. It has a canyon that makes you think you're staring at Arizona (Charyn Canyon runs 80 kilometers), alpine lakes that hide entire forests underwater from a 1911 earthquake (Lake Kaindy), and the Altai Mountains, whose name literally means "Golden Mountains" in Turkic. Snow leopards still live wild in these ranges. Almost nobody visits. Iceland, 26 times smaller, gets 2.5 million international tourists a year. New Zealand, 10 times smaller, gets 3.3 million. Kazakhstan? About 1 million foreign visitors booked hotel rooms in the first nine months of 2025. The headline number of 15 million "visitors" is mostly neighbors from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia crossing the border. The country is catching on, though. Their global tourism ranking jumped from 66th to 52nd in a single year. They launched a "Neo Nomad" visa in late 2024 that lets remote workers stay for up to a year. Visa-free entry for 87 countries, including the US and EU. Tourism investment climbed 38% in 2025 to around $2 billion. The Altay region in this video covers nearly a tenth of the entire country. The country as a whole averages about 8 people per square kilometer. You can drive for hours through rolling green steppe and see nothing but horses. If this place were in Europe or had a nonstop from JFK, it'd be overrun tomorrow. Right now, you can stand in genuinely world-class scenery and be the only person there. That window won't last forever.

The best bit is when she said "I feel I am much more relaxed.." and it's just so relatable. How beautiful it is to be able to hold on to such a marriage, that brings you so much of peace and tenderness.

You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.

FIFA is running the World Cup 2026 without local organising committees. Three countries, 48 teams, 6 billion viewers. AI isn't supporting the operation. It is the operation. New piece on how #FIFA and @Lenovo are pulling this off 👇 artificialintelligence-news.com/news/fifa-ai-w…

China banned it from banks. Meta said fire anyone who installs it. Microsoft said don't run it on any work device. @openclaw's chaos is only the beginning. techwireasia.com/2026/03/opencl…

nobody talks about how genuinely wild music is at a fundamental level. an instrument disturbs air molecules. those molecules cross a room and reach your ear. your ear transforms that into electricity. that electricity shifts your consciousness. and without any coordination, without any shared culture or language, every single human society that has ever existed found their way to this. that is one of the most profound things about being human.

"we never hated cooking we hated the way it was stereotypically made obligatory on us to learn household "

Oh this was such a MAGNIFICENT weekend watch. I can go on and on about it, but all I'd say is, go, watch it.

ordinary life is beautiful, gorgeous, and that it will one day be a memory makes it more so

Neuroplasticity is proof that who you are is not who you must remain.