Today is a good day to build.
South Africa
Joined June 2026
- Tweets3.3K
- Following463
- Followers326
- Likes6.2K
Pinned Tweet
How's your Black October going? We're fine (promise), frantically patching everything we can get our hands on while every risk indicator in the world lights up. Also, the age of personal super-negotiators is here!
youtube.com/watch?v=5_yu50ES…
I understand the sky is falling and we’re in the middle of a worldwide everything shortage and everyone is panicking and not even SSL is trustworthy anymore but did it *really* have to break Mr Delivery this evening? Blank menus everywhere 😭
Really loving the stability of Microsoft Defender right now, at this particular moment in time, in the month of October, in the year of our Lord 2026.
Just gonna cycle this post near a South African audience and mention "farm murders" and "disbanded commando units" to see what happens.
Purdue University's IDEAS Lab built an autonomous drone that tracks runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
By running 3D LiDAR mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on-chip, it can weave under tree canopies and predict target movement through blind spots in real time.
Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue and edge AI.
Breaking news! The system built inside a computer as a combination of software and data can be precisely modified to alter its behavior in deterministic ways.
Probably not the breakthrough they're gonna want to advertise, though.
Just realized what my decades of experience in business systems is actually good for, and it's the exact same skillset that's been winning the day since we put computers to work: Persuading stakeholders NOT to do things 😂
There's a BRICS/wall joke waiting to be made here, but for the life of me I can't find it.
Your life is ultimately the balance of your circumstances with your agency.
I've seen too many people achieve too many things to believe that it's all a happenstance of birth. But I've also seen too many people give up because circumstances didn't prepare them for the work.
Sure, I’ll pitch in!
The entire notion that online conversations about AI safety are being fed raw and unfiltered right into pre-training is wrong.
So we can all relax 😇
I think we desperately need more people to critique popular AI safety work that is bad faith!
Unfortunately there's quite a bit of work that overclaims, or maybe even just got overhyped and misunderstood by the media and general population.
It's our duty as understanders to bring nuance and clarification in these situations. Otherwise we might end up with people saying that good AI behaviors are actually bad and this could be very confusing for future AI models in pre-training!
It takes 2nd-grader brainpower to compare the vehicle license number showing in the app, to the car you’re climbing into.
I don’t know what brainpower it takes to get scammed, but it must be terrifying.
Tourists arriving at Cape Town International Airport have allegedly been scammed out of R25,000 for a single cab ride by people pretending to be Uber drivers.
mybroadband.co.za/news/motor…
I should probably write something a bit more long-form here, but: yes. The teens are not wrong.
Right now, the dominant story is that AI is about to end things. Everyone is waving the red flag, trying to warn us of the dangers of “out of control technology”.
It’s a misdirect.
What’s happening is several orders of magnitude larger. It’s the second generation (third, even?) of connected humans in a globalised landscape, with complex interconnected economies.
War already changed: campaigns are now staged around election and market cycles. Impossible to imagine in 1942, our reality in 2026.
Education has changed: even without AI, tertiary eduction (and beyond) stopped being a guarantee of a better life quite a while ago. The systems remain brutally competitive, but produce a surplus of intelligence that AI is simply squeezing further.
National allegiance has changed: American gamers weeping about the loss of BioWare haven’t said much about it being part of Saudi Arabia’s diversification strategy. A cultural icon got nuked by a foreign power’s balance sheet.
The world of 2050 looks very different than the world of 2000, and it’s not just the gadgets: it’s civilisation itself.
I think current-day American teens are waking up to a world where being born American is no longer a guarantee of any advantage. H1-B is only part of the drama - the rest is that the “developing world” is catching up on every metric.
And that makes the story the most painful part, especially if you’ve gone your formative years with the belief that you wouldn’t have to compete for the world’s resources against billions of people someday.
I’d feel betrayed too.
This is exactly what it looks like when you start competing globally, but think you’re still only competing locally.
There are electricians buying houses on a single income in my area (literally, my next door neighbour), meanwhile you keep seeing posts like this.
I'm in my 40s. I'm a lawyer. My wife is a lawyer. We both work full time.
We cannot afford the house my parents purchased on a single electrician's income in their 30s.
We cannot afford the house my immigrant grandparents purchased on a single MTA bus driver's salary in their 30s. They had SIX CHILDREN.
For 30 years, politicians in Washington & their oligarch allies convinced regular people that this was just about avocado toast and fancy coffee.
In reality, this is end-stage capitalism. Everyone is stuck in place. It's impossible to buy a home. It's too costly to move. We work too much to have passion projects. We don't have enough savings to start our own businesses. We can't afford to go without healthcare to do it.
Thanks for writing this article @troy_closson. Would be very happy to discuss further.
nytimes.com/2026/10/25/nyreg…
