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I suspect the phrase "globalise the intifada" will be hotly debated in the United Kingdom next week. And the heat may be worth it. South Africa kept a lid on "kill the Boer" by going legal rather than political. That avoided trouble, but also resolution. sigstat.substack.com/p/south-afri...

Random AP at what is effectively public wifi at the AWS Summit London. I'm trying to pretend I'm not impressed.

I feel like @nytimes.com and LinkedIn need to have a games coordination council. A numeric CrossClimb is nice, a graphic Connections is interesting. Both on the same day is just discombobulating.

Amazing to see how fast the markets swing when Donald Trump says "good and productive conversations" with Iran – without a breath of counterparty confirmation. In theory the there is pre-verification risk (of the US just plain lying) built into the *pricing*, but it sure doesn't show as *lag*.

When users revolt against your pricing strategy: "... more than 300 regular travellers trade tickets for trains between Folkestone and London, often ones purchased well in advance—to secure the very cheapest fares—but which are no longer needed." folkestonedispatch.substack.com/p/commuters-...

It takes guts to lead you (news-site) newsletter with a hot cross bun taste test. And editorial leadership more open-minded than the average. But if you follow the data, that is what some audiences want. They won't say it when asked, but their clicks speak for them, eloquently.

If you are watching for signs of AI recursive self-improvement, take note of OpenAI's latest claim on #FirstProof. It's been messy, and the proofs are still not validated, but it points to genuine novel discovery, potentially fully automated. www.thestack.technology/openai-tease...

We always knew AI would take over. We never knew it would be lobster themed. #OpenClaw

First government-level partnership deal in Africa for @anthropic.com it is is with... Rwanda. South Africa and Nigeria have a lot to learn from Rwanda's approach. It should be at a reputation disadvantage, but somehow it keeps getting the Western outreach. www.anthropic.com/news/anthrop...

The OpenClaw news today reminds me of this ancient* post by @commaok.xyz on building an app while shopping. The sub-head has haunted me ever since: "Creating is faster than searching". The realisation hasn't really broken beyond devs yet, but any day now commaok.xyz/ai/just-in-t... * 2-month-old

I love ads. Not only because they have largely paid my bills all my life, also at a philosophical level. But those damn Anthropic ads about AI and ads are living in my head. I may have to switch from ChatGPT to Claude for language work just to avoid thinking about the big picture a little longer.

In the late 90s, the CIA World #Factbook was indispensable. There weren't many comprehensive reference works freely available, and it came with rock-solid provenance. Now the source is untrustworthy, with the US going post-truth, meh, no big loss. www.cia.gov/stories/stor...

This is why writing columns rules. "Nobody was in an armchair, nobody was smoking a pipe, and I was probably the person closest to having a beard, but it works better if you imagine everyone sitting around in armchairs, smoking pipes, and stroking their beards." www.news24.com/opinions/col...

The first world is so weird. In Johannesburg, buildings are hijacked on an enterprise basis, with (non-owner) slumlords using violence and threats as a profit driver. London's equivalent is "rental arbitrageurs", who unlawfully sub-let and don't pay the rent. www.the-londoner.co.uk/claudio-is-s...

Gaining traction in Japan this week: some eye-popping results for LLMs on the Common Test for University Admissions. Lifeprompt has been running the experiment for four years. Gemini and Claude did pretty well, but look at GPT! Red means a perfect score. lifeprompt.net/news/w-j19fvl

Holy frigging hell. Chief Constable: [offers hallucinated intelligence] MPs: Is this AI? CC: Nope, Google. MPs: Google AI? CC: "We do not use AI." /time passes/ CC: ... but we do use "Microsoft Co Pilot" thing.... Erm, sorry? www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c3...

Today, for the first time ever, I seriously considered buying a small inflatable boat from a supermarket in order to use what was, as recently as Wednesday, a footpath. European weather is weird.

What should South Africa – specifically the GNU – do about Venezuela? Mpumelelo Mkhabela has nuanced thinking about that. I don't think the rest of the world cares about anything other than what comes out Cyril Ramaphosa's mouth. @news24southafrica.bsky.social open.spotify.com/episode/6Mqi...

It's not just me, right? I feel if you mean human models on a runway, you need to specify, otherwise you mean LLM.

On this day in 1965, Britain introduced the 70mph (call it 110kph) speed limit, to the outrage of sports car drivers. Which, judging by this BBC report at the time, skewed heavily towards women. Quite amazing to watch now, given today's social norms. www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-e...

Some of the best fast food, supermarket, and car companies do everything they can to guarantee franchisees get a great return. Because that is provably good for everyone. If you have to defend allegations you caused their suicide, you've fucked up. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

The horror!

My media literacy message remains "the media: not as bad as you think!" Simultaneously, we we need to arrange some field trips to Rwanda for editors. I'd go so far as to say it should be a statutory requirement.

I still firmly believe we're witnessing the end of American hegemony, first political and then cultural. But I could still spot three out of four famous Los Angeles street names in NYT Connections earlier this week.

Most of 2025: CENSORED BY ORDER OF GRU The paper version has a complete key that shows those are the "unconfirmed" attacks with preliminary classification. Even that, though, undermines excellent copy that makes a powerful point, before the chart makes it look like thumb-suck scaremongering.

I still remember the arguments that you can't make money from free software, that open source is inherently unsustainable. (With a lot of that coming from Microsoft...) After Confluent, IBM will have spent well over $50 billion on OSS acquisitions since 2018 www.thestack.technology/ibm-to-buy-c...

This turned into the hook for today's @news24southafrica.bsky.social column. The apparent involvement of a South African legislative party in sending mercenaries to fight for Russia is no big deal in Washington, but you'd better believe Brussels is watching. www.news24.com/opinions/col...

South Africa gets angry if you call it a Russian ally. It has told Ukraine it can be a neutral mediator. ALSO, one of the parties in the legislature apparently paid to send (probably unwitting) mercenaries to fight for Russia. With deep involvement by the immediate family of a former President.

AI electricity use is a legitimate concern, but projecting current intelligence-per-watt forward without assuming massive efficiency gains is just barely short of a factual mistake. And requires a fundamental misapprehension about how both hardware and software has pretty much always evolved.

You can put Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk in a pink bikini, via a simple "twinning" LLM attack to bypass filters. ChatGPT5.1 is not falling for it right now, but this is Perplexity's take. Original report is based on Nano Banana Pro. anthonymattas.com/articles/twi...

Credit to Google.org for going public on its $1m gift around AI to Tel Aviv University (TAU), when its parent is already taking internal pain for selling war-enabling service to Israel. If you could get a "quietly" into the headline, it would run harder. Seeming unapologetic is a lesser PR evil.

Wednesday: Naver (basically S.Korea's Google) buys Upbit (basically S.Korea's Coinbase) with promises to converge AI and Web3 and change the world with hot-shit tech. Thursday: Upbit loses $30 million in what sounds like an old-fashioned bypass hack.

Japan is like an idealised version of what's happening in parts of Europe, the tension between rising xenophobia and the shortage of workers in the short term, and falling birth rates in the longer term. More acute all around. But the impact is almost identical: flashpoint politics, and populism.

Castro double-dipped on the political gains. Gaddafi used it as a tool for extortion. The US made it part of everyday politics. And then planes full of Palestinians arrived in South Africa – which is fundamentally vulnerable to coerced migration. www.news24.com/opinions/col...

The UK's Nuclear Regulatory Review, out today, cites two (2) reasons you have to go build-baby-build on nuclear power: * electrification of stuff like cars as part of de-carbonisation * AI That's the only new demand driver it anticipates, and ranks way below geopolitical instability in importance.

Voice is still expensive and complicated compared to text. But I think the tech space in South Africa is missing out on finally cracking aliterate users. And voice-first should be very politically palatable. www.itweb.co.za/article/oped...

"I don't do drugs, but if the 'just say no' campaign was used on me, maybe I would." - (Sadly a Chatham Rule conversation, so I can't attribute.)

Hating on "AI" (in reference to some stupid video-clip generator) is starting to irk me approximately as much as complaining about "the media" (in reference to one outlet). Do you meant the AI that might solve antibacterial resistance? That is reducing grid energy loss? Then be more specific.

"...indicators that many [thieves] are only interested in Apple iPhones." iPhones hold value better, sure. But given Apple's tight control of both hardware and software, there's a case to be answered here: where is the vendor? Is it tracking the data, and making a plan?

Every LLM I use does much better when asked for "succinct" rather than "short" or "brief". This, in my experience, is also true of human writers of every kind. Interesting work to be done, here.

Not sure if this now makes me a royalist. But looking at the British royal family's place in UK society recently, I find myself arguing that other countries can do with a bit of that. As long as the costs are strictly contained. www.news24.com/opinions/col...

Google and OpenAI effectively have infinite money. Apple and Anthropic and Meta aren't far behind. I'm deep into the Google ecosystem, with a bit of apple. Yet, as a wildly promiscuous LLM user, Perplexity is still my go-to answer engine. Starting to think we don't need to worry about monoculture.

Mobile phones begat battery development that massively accelerated renewable energy. There seems a decent chance AI will do the same for carbon capture, because data centres that can't wait turn to LNG – but can't defend doing so. And have, effectively, infinite money to address that tension.

Remarkable to listen to analysts talk about Donald Trump's statements (in this case on Nigeria) with the same language Christians use about the Old Testament: it's true but don't take it literally, it meets the morality of the audience, influences through description though it sounds like command.

All the noise is about AI. But it is striking how 2025 is becoming the year in which the IT sector comes to grips with the encryption disaster that is quantum computing. This week: Cloudflare says it is about to start experimenting with a neat way to prevent server impersonation.

One way to think about it: like any good employee, LLMs works towards their metrics – and if you have bad metrics, you get bad output from, eventually, bad employees. Some good stuff happening in benchmarking, though, which could help significantly. www.science.org/content/arti...

Tactical proposal for countries with low birth rates: get younger people into family-friendly social spaces before 9AM Sundays. Instead of sleeping off Saturday night, get late-20-year-olds where the toddlers – fresh from a good sleep, managed by parents not trying to juggle work – are being cute.

Gemini is the one top-end system I effectively get for free, and until this week it ranked way, waaaaayyyyyy below Perplexity and ChatGPT in use. Then integration with Google Docs got good, and suddenly I'm using it to answer a lot of questions about my work and financials I never thought to ask.

First time back in Manhattan for a couple of years after hanging around Europe, and I've figured out what feels wrong: too few bicycles. Elsewhere they have grown into predatory flocks you had better keep an eye on if you like your limbs unbroken. Here they are few, and furtive.