e-nelson

god made humans, who made machines & computers. i'm obligated to love them all in that order.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@_welf @daylightco @supermirror_app Most paper-screens I've seen don't show colour, ie for reading illustrations.

Is this intentional or technological limitation

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@abdota I would imagine high value businesses and industries would foot most of the electric bill.

Home consumption is subsidised in many clines with anyway.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@Thazhigilla_ @Harrison2016730 Mytherapist . ng should have a good person you can talk to.

See, Paul in the Bible continuously passed tru bad experiences. Thought he didn't contemplate suicide but he had people to talk with. It's in the early chapters of Philippians.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Dutch computer scientist gave one lecture in 1988 arguing that programming is unlike anything humans have ever tried to do before, and the reason most software on earth is broken is that we are still teaching it as if it were a hobby.

His name was Edsger Dijkstra. He won the Turing Award in 1972. He invented the shortest path algorithm that every GPS on earth still runs on.

He wrote the paper that killed the goto statement in modern programming languages.

He spent 50 years quietly being one of the most consequential thinkers in the entire history of computer science, and he was in a very bad mood by the time he stood up at the ACM Computer Science Conference in 1988 to deliver the lecture that almost nobody at the conference wanted to hear.

The lecture was called On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science.

It is now one of the most cited papers in the entire history of computing education. It was filed in his archive as EWD1036, handwritten in his careful fountain-pen calligraphy because he refused to use a typewriter and famously refused to use email for the rest of his life.

The argument was simple and uncomfortable.

Programming, Dijkstra said, is a radical novelty. Not a new tool. Not a new skill. Not a faster version of something humans already knew how to do. A genuinely new category of intellectual activity that has no real precedent in the entire history of the human species, and our brains have not been built to handle it.

Here is what he meant by that.

When a programmer writes a line of high-level code and presses run, that single line might trigger a billion operations at the level of the silicon.

The ratio between the abstraction you are working in and the physical events you are actually causing is roughly one billion to one. No engineer in history before computing ever had to reason about a system spanning that kind of ratio inside their own head.

A bridge builder reasons about steel beams and the physics of weight. A surgeon reasons about organs and the physics of tissue. A chemist reasons about molecules and the physics of bonds.

All of them are working inside ratios of physical scale where the largest and smallest things they need to think about are within a few orders of magnitude of each other.

A programmer routinely writes one line that orchestrates a billion physical events on a chip, and is expected to predict the behavior of all of them in advance.

Dijkstra argued that the human brain was simply not built for this. Every intuition we have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years comes from a world of medium-sized objects behaving in continuous ways. Computing is the opposite. It is discrete, not continuous.

A program that runs perfectly a billion times can crash on the billion-and-first iteration because of a single bit. A single character missing from a line of code can take down a power grid. There is no margin. There is no graceful degradation. The system either works or does not, and the only way to know is to actually run it.

This was the part of the lecture where Dijkstra made everyone in the room uncomfortable.

He said the way computer science was being taught in universities was a quiet disaster. Professors were teaching programming the way carpenters teach woodworking. With examples. With metaphors. With analogies to things students already understood. Files are like folders. Memory is like a desk. A function is like a recipe.

Dijkstra said this was actively making it harder for students to think clearly. The whole point of a radical novelty is that there is nothing in your past experience to compare it to.

The moment you start reaching for metaphors, you are smuggling in old intuitions that do not apply, and those intuitions will betray you the first time you try to reason about a system the metaphor was not built to describe.

His exact line was this: the usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. And yesterday's vocabulary, he argued, was killing the field.

The reason most software is broken is downstream of this single misunderstanding. Programmers are taught to think of code as a craft. Something you get a feel for.

Something you pick up through practice. Something where intuition gets sharper with experience.

Dijkstra said this is exactly backwards. Programming is not a craft. It is closer to mathematics than to carpentry, and the moment you treat it as a craft, you guarantee that the software you produce will be full of the kind of bugs that craftsmanship cannot catch.

The fix, in his view, was to teach programming the way mathematics is taught. You should be able to prove your program correct before you run it.

You should reason about your code formally, the way a mathematician reasons about a theorem, not the way a carpenter feels their way through a joint. The students who learned this way, he said, would walk out of their classes with a kind of confidence that no amount of typing practice could produce.

The lecture was published in Communications of the ACM in 1989. The field did not listen. Universities kept teaching programming the same way.

Software kept getting bigger. Bugs kept compounding. By 2026, almost every piece of software on earth has known security vulnerabilities, undefined behaviors, and edge cases that nobody has ever proven safe. The doom that Dijkstra warned about in 1988 is now the default condition of the digital world we have built.

The deeper lesson is the one most readers miss the first time through.

Dijkstra was not just talking about software. He was making a much bigger point about how humans learn anything that is genuinely new. The instinct to translate the unfamiliar into the familiar is the most natural thing in the world.

It is also the single biggest obstacle to actually understanding something that has no precedent. If you keep reaching for analogies, you will never see the new thing clearly. You will only see your old framework projected onto it.

This is happening right now with AI. The same instinct that made people learn programming through metaphors of files and folders is making people understand large language models through metaphors of brains and people.

Almost every framework being used to describe AI in 2026 is borrowed from a previous domain. None of them quite fit. The few people who are actually building useful intuitions about how these systems work are the ones who have done what Dijkstra recommended forty years ago.

They have set down the old vocabulary. They have looked at the new thing on its own terms. They have accepted that the radical novelty is radical for a reason.

You are not slow. You were taught a discipline as if it were a hobby. The cruelty is real.

The fix is still available.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@thecomfeed Things you should not let an AI do...

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@AutomationKing0 My thoughts too

https://t.co/rgqEBWpvq5

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@SpiricocoNg This is nor deconstruction.

We find in Acts 17 Paul reasoning among the councils in Athens.
We don't find other apostles condemning him at such.

However, it's interesting that Paul spent little time there...

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@SpiricocoNg He shared the essence of the gospel and let them be.

I find Apostle to have done just the same.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@SpiricocoNg ... He shared the essence of the Gospel among the philosophers, who "spend all their time discussing the latest ideas" then left (v18, 33).

v 23 is also striking as Paul addresses the matter of "unknown God" which Apostle and Mr Maponga touches on during the podcast.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@NigerDeltaEngr Which HMO supports colonoscopy?

[Simon Thazhigilla Simon🇳🇬 @Thazhigilla_]

I am Nigerian, and right now my dream is bigger than me.

Only about 4.5% of medical literature globally are represented on Black skin.

That means millions of Black patients are learning from systems that barely look like them. Medical students study diseases on skin tones that are not their own. Doctors are trained with visual references that often fail Black bodies.

That gap has consequences.
So I am deciding to build towards changing it.

I’m starting with a book.
But the larger vision is far beyond that. I want to help build software and medical visualization tools that make Black medical representation impossible to ignore.

This is not just about diversity aesthetics, this is about accuracy, education, visibility and better healthcare outcomes.

One day, I want a Black child studying medicine anywhere on earth to see themselves fully represented in what they learn.
And I believe we can build that future.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@lovefromlaure @omoalhajaabiola Does he have a cold email course?

[Vic 🌮 @VicVijayakumar]

Started being actively involved again and treating the AI like it’s an adversary and I got my groove back.

So- I tell the agent in a terminal what I want it to do. I go make a latte. When I come back it's generated about 800 lines of code with passing tests. This would have taken me hours.

I open up an IDE to look at the files. I tell the agent it’s an idiot. I ask what the fuck it's doing, it’s making some stupidass overly defensive assumptions. "You're right to question me." It deletes 400 lines.

I keep reading. I ask more questions. "I made incorrect assumptions." We're down to 200 lines.

I run an ai code review. The reviewer agent identifies a bunch of issues that sound very bad. Instead of telling the agent to handle it I read and reject them outright. None of this shit will happen because despite all the context you’ve been given you don’t actually understand distributed systems.

Final PR is 190 lines, including tests.

This looks good. You are much better when I remember you're just autocomplete than when we both pretend you’re intelligent.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@asemota It all began here 😂

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@JosephineAvid Also, you can eat those once in a while, just buy at a good place. The prices there are way off.

Especially the cashew nuts and chicken.

HINT: not the malls.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@7a7zz I have not used the desktop app yet, but the Web app is a great midpoint between performance and familiar UI for me.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@wenu777 @oku_yungx You must've been saving this pics for this exact moment.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@Joe_brendan_ https://t.co/HVsOmcul1O

Nigeria has a long way to development.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

Been watching this channel on YT where a Brirish couple is currently driving across Africa.

I saw smooth stretches of inter-city roads in Cameron the Congo and I felt bad for Nigeria.

Clean stretch of tarred roads across the jungle, but Nigeria is yet to build Asaba to Benin.

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

Been watching this channel on YT where a Brirish couple is currently driving across Africa.

I saw smooth stretches of inter-city roads in Cameron the Congo and I felt bad for Nigeria.

Clean stretch of tarred roads across the jungle, but Nigeria is yet to build Asaba to Benin.

[Joseph Brendan @Joe_brendan_]

Just incase you want to Japa and someone is advising you not to because country go soon senge menge

here is the reality

- I think if you chose not to japa, then you should be ready to build here. doing a civil service job or any job at all where you don't apply yourself, will bite you. JAPA

- If you chose not to Japa, remind yourself again. NOBODY will fix electricity in 10 - 15 years. So, its either you stay back with that mindset or cut out. JAPA

- Nigeria is plagued with insecurity. the south west is being threatened by Islamic extremism already and if people don't start dying and going to prison, especially the extreme Imams, the west will become Yobe soon. The North? give it 10 years because of Sudan, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Somali.

- The insecurity in the south and east will increase when the Yahoo boys who are druggies stop seeing money for drugs. You don't know what anybody can do for crack. Go Wuse Zone 4 go see people dey drop camry for crack

- Roads? errrrrrrr that one may improve.
- Education? who knows
- Healthcare? errrrrrrr maybe

Am I saying Nigeria won't develop and leave third world status? No. We will

But the next 10 - 20 years is for building and ownership.
If you are not ready to build, suffer, own and risk dying, then my dear, Japa and contribute with your remittance.

No let anybody gaslight you.
Better look at the realities and choose a side

[e-nelson @enelsonhere]

@MrSam_UJ @afrisagacity The system of politics practised in most African states today was also imparcted by the West. Is that system also a scam?

When answering, consider that the same system has evelated the Weat but stagnated Africa.