Lax

Wits alumni | marketing cloud

[Lax @_Xihluke]

@vukosi Great stuff, congratulations Hosi!

[Redi Tlhabi @RediTlhabi]

Dear Mark. I assume you are a Saltzman, founders of Dischem. I do not know who your mother is. I have taken NO MONEY from her. The @Dischem Foundation supported good causes led by my previous employer @Radio702 . They also sponsored the Brain of 702. It was a partnership with a commercial radio station. Did your mother want our souls in return?Did your family think that was money coming to me personally? What money did your mother give ME, Redi? And when did I meet with her? Is this what you discuss at family dinners?

I am a big customer at Dischem and I assumed like any moral corporate citizen, the Foundation was set up for good deeds, not as a form of blackmail.

Perhaps @Dischem foundation should have made it clear to 702 management all those years that it supported good courses in return for MY obedience and silence on Israel's atrocities and war crimes. I'd have told them to go fuck themselves. And unless you and your mother can prove here, publicly, that I, Redihentse Tlhabi, took money from her, then you can also go fuck yourselves. And why is everything about money?

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

You've been asking for this one...

Now in preview: Codex in the ChatGPT mobile app.

Start new work, review outputs, steer execution, and approve next steps, all from the ChatGPT mobile app. Codex will keep running on your laptop, Mac mini, or devbox.

[N G U R I @Nguri__]

Jamais vu 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

BRAND AS A MOAT?

I’ll be honest - I struggled whether to include Brand in this list of moats.

I ultimately decided not to, because I think it’s too hard to measure, and in many cases the underlying brand strength is due to something something more fundamental — network effects, switching costs, or scale economies — that the brand merely reflects.

A strong brand is often the symptom of a real moat, not the moat itself.

The danger of counting Brand as a moat is that it flatters companies that are actually quite fragile. WeWork had a brand. Peloton had a brand. Both burned through goodwill the moment the underlying economics cracked. Brand without a structural underpinning is just reputation — and reputation is rented, not owned.

So I think about brand the way I think about customer loyalty scores: useful as a signal, dangerous as an explanation. When someone tells me a company’s moat is its brand, my follow-up is always the same 2 questions. (a) what built the brand, and (b) can that be replicated? That answer usually points to the real moat, or in many cases, reveals there isn’t one.

[Lusibalukhulu 🖍 @feziledhlamini_]

PLEASE REPOST:
I built South Africa's first black-owned electric vehicle company.
I have deployed 70+ EVs with Blue Chip Companies, Local SMEs and exported to the UAE.
I have invested R9.5 million of my own money over 10 years.
The IDC has given me R0.
They gave a white-owned competitor R69.9 million.

Thread. 🧵
@businessXplain @ParliamentofRSA @sedfa_dsbd @DSBD_SA @the_dtic @IDCSouthAfrica @PublicProtector @NAFCOCKZN

[Lax @_Xihluke]

@Cloud_Wine1 Lelapa

[MyBroadband @mybroadband]

Eskom chairman Mteto Nyati said the utility wants to sell excess electricity capacity to Bitcoin mining companies in South Africa.

https://t.co/s4bNFfQUCD

[Timon Wong @t31kx]

Claude Code: "You've hit your limit · resets 7pm"

Me from 5-6.59pm

[Natalie Brunell ⚡️ @natbrunell]

Everyone in the West debates Bitcoin's price.
In Africa, 1 Bitcoin = 5 jobs.

I sat down with @staffordmasie to understand why Bitcoin adoption in Africa looks nothing like it does here...and why that should change how you think about everything.

First 20 seconds of this show are a wake-up call 🔥

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Who is Stafford Masie? 2:25 What is Africa Bitcoin Corporation? 7:03 Africa's young population 9:21 Continental opportunity 10:48 Cash economies 13:25 Unlocking African potential 17:04 Is Bitcoin adoption in Africa real? 22:08 Broken money consequences 24:07 Circular economy effects 25:59 Biggest misconception about Africa

h/t mention to @aubreystrobel in the show for her amazing documentary!

[Perplexity @perplexity_ai]

Introducing Perplexity Computer.

Computer unifies every current AI capability into one system.

It can research, design, code, deploy, and manage any project end-to-end.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.

Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.

As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

[Koshiek Karan @iamkoshiek]

zero surprise young men are far behind the curve financially

trashy red pill content / bad hustle bro advice/ online gambling/ forex “trading/ porn addiction/ alcoholism/ poor role models/ limited education/ constant victimhood mentality

the downfall is largely self inflicted

[Malume Malusi @UncleCul]

These are the portions Tswanas dish out when you are a guest

[Cairo Mathebula @Cairo_Mathebula]

Vodacom Business loans, Woolworths personal loans, Checkers bank accounts.

No large scale job creating innovations - just financialisation.

We’re so far from fixing this unemployment issue.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

I'm so old I wrote that!

That's assuming it's the Windows version, which is the one I worked on. The Win9x game, art, and original code, were done by Maxis/Cinematronics. I ported it to Windows NT, converted the x86 asm to C, made it work on RISC, and so on.

Success has many fathers, and all credit should really go to the original designers... I'm just the fun uncle that brought it to the masses.

[Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh @SizweMpofuWalsh]

Lord, grant me the job security of an ANC politician.

[Mashudu Modau @Mashstartup]

May Work / Business Photo Dump? 📸🤝🏿

[Izwe Lethu @LandNoli]

'I was in the Apartheid army, posted in Mtubatuba 

The SA Black on Black violence was deliberately stoked, armed and maintained by Apartheid govt

To perpetuate the myth that Blacks can’t get along & need Whites 

Apartheid took existing rivalries & inflated them. We trained IFP Zulus to stoke trouble in townships with the other tribes 

Israel taught us because they used it to Palestinians for them not to unite & resist the Israeli occupation

We did the same thing”