Ayo

[Rufybaba @Rufyb]

I am afraid, this does not fly, in my opinion.

If you deliberately establish a “first-name” culture, it should apply broadly, including to senior leadership, unless the policy explicitly carves out the board (by the way, imagine setting a culture and it is not starting from the top).

Yes, non-executive directors occupy a different governance position from employees and executive management, but their unique position within the company does not inherently exempt them from the first-name policy.

If a company says “we operate a first-name culture. Irrespective of seniority, employees address one another by their first names”, then having an unwritten exception “but obviously you don’t call a director or person xyz by their first name” undermines the philosophy behind the policy.

After all, the purpose of a first-name culture is usually to reduce unnecessary status signaling, make senior people more approachable and create a less hierarchical working environment.

If management wants the convention to be “first names for everybody below the board, formal titles for directors”, then say so.

It is highly problematic when the written or communicated policy says one thing while an invisible hierarchy says something else.

What is all these talk about “wisdom”, “culture”, etc.? If those things indeed were a big deal, why the performative stunt of “first-names policy”?

Or why is no one directing the “wisdom” yarn to TOE that the young lady is still very young, maybe inexperienced, and does not understand yet how things ideally work, and so you do not come off as conflicting what the laid-down principle is publicly?

If the irritation comes from “I am way older and way above you in status”, was that not considered before setting a policy? You all didn’t know that?

You import the form of an institution without accepting the behavioural implications that give the institution meaning. The company gets to present itself as having a flat, progressive culture without senior people actually surrendering any of the status markers associated with the old culture.

This is how we bastardise concepts and principles.

If the organisation is not comfortable with the consequences of that philosophy, there is much cleaner solution… “Simply don’t adopt the policy”.

Be hierarchical. Be formal. Require whatever title or whatever conventions you consider appropriate.

I wouldn’t call TOE by his first name too, but that’s me. But saying “we are on a first-name basis here” and then humiliating someone doing that is an inconsistency that is worse.

At the heart of it, this really speaks to a broader problem of weak institutional culture and “big-manism ” in the corporate world, where formal policies supposedly apply to everyone until they clash with status and hierarchy.

“Can you call Aliko or Femi Otedola by their first name?” Let them not implement first-name policy if it would be an issue or if the “cultural context” is that very strong (and that would be perfectly fine).

Institutions should be stronger than personalities. Let’s quit all that performative nonsense.

[Mayowa @Mayoveli]

Investment in people must come before these consumptive/leisure infrastructure projects. These somewhat ambitious African politicians often invest in certain types of infrastructure and grand projects as though they plan on importing people from elsewhere to maintain, operate, and use them. It doesn’t work that way.

You have to invest in people; efforts have to be made to rewire their mentality through quality education and sensitization, and to improve both their earning capacity and income so they can afford, maintain, and fully utilise these things. Otherwise, any massive infrastructure leap without a commensurate shift in mentality is little more than surface dressing, and it is bound to fail.

A good politician must also understand markets, because politics has a great deal to do with how markets function. How do you build infrastructure on this scale when the people expected to use it lack the mindset to maintain it, are too impoverished to afford it, and lack the economic capacity to sustain it? How do you expect great outcomes from that?

In the end, what you get is another white elephant.

[Kalu Aja @FinPlanKaluAja1]

There was no right environment for Dangote. The man took significant risks at scale; that's all

In 1980, Dangote was among many who imported and stayed close to AGIP.

There were many more powerful than Dangote, including a guy who supplied food to ECOMOG in Liberia. There is another who built a house of gold in his village and donated Millions of dollars to an American university. Where are their factories today?

Only Dangote invested capital in that cement economy early on. At scale. I have receipts

Dangote had zero cement plants when OBJ announced his import substitution policy. What were Ashaka, WAPCO, BCC, Eagle Cement, and CCNN doing that allowed a first-time manufacturer of cement to build more scale than them?

The truth is those established names said it's just another policy that will end in eight years and refused to invest significant CAPEX

Same for Banking: Jim Ovia, Tony Elumelu and Fola Adeola had zero banking footprint until IBB did the banking reforms. What were First Bank, UBA, Afribank, and Savannah Bank doing to allow these young Turks to build banking capital?

Back to Dangote, there were more than 30 licenses to build refineries in Nigeria, and as far as I know, only one refinery (diesel refinery in Delta) was built before Dangite built his; at massive scale.

Was Dangote the richest man in Nigeria before his cement abd refinery? Hell no. There is a very wealthy Nigerian today who was dealing directly with foreign heads of state, owns oil tankers, and is very, very close to AGIP, even this current government. Why didn't that guy build a refinery? In Nigeria, and get oil allocation? Because it's hard work

The folks close to power today are interested in extracting, not investing. They are seeking government contracts to build roads and import stuff thats why we won't see another “Dangote”

Look at the vast opportunities in Nigeria; as basic as growing tomatoes or breeding cattle, has significant investment happened at scale? No, everyone is importing PMS

In 10 years, Dangote alone could deliver more Exports, CIT, and VAT to Nigeria than others combined. Think about that.

If you are not ready to invest locally at scale, thrn Dangite will

Now he has Norway cash, watch him spend

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Adetunji @kingadetunji_]

@tokunbo_wahab That’s an astonishing level of excuse from any public office holder. All I asked is to learn from Netherlands. Be humble to accept feedback and resign if you can’t do the job that you are paid to do. You still have a lovely family and a retirement plan to fall back on.

[Alex Onyia @winexviv]

I've spent the last several months researching, travelling, and studying why countries like Singapore, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada and Finland built some of the world's best public education systems.

One thing became clear:

Nigeria doesn't just have an education problem. We have a school management problem.

Today, I'm releasing a white paper that proposes a new way to transform our public schools, keeping them publicly owned while introducing world-class management and accountability.

This isn't about politics.

It's about giving every Nigerian child the opportunity to attend a world-class public school.

I hope this sparks one of the most important conversations our country has had about education.

Read it. Criticise it. Improve it. Share it.

If we get education right, we change Nigeria.

Here is the link https://t.co/EViU52FKFi

[John A De Goes @jdegoes]

"LLVM of databases"

Such projects were not feasible before AI.

But now you should expect extremely ambitious projects to succeed.

We're changing software forever.

[Glauber Costa @glcst]

I am excited to announce that we are officially writing a new version of Postgres. In Rust - and creating the LLVM of databases in the process.

In the span of a year, we have rewritten SQLite. Keeping the compatibility, increasing its feature set. MVCC, Types, (Live) Materialized Views, among other things. In the process of doing that, we have realized: At the end of the day, what makes SQLite special is that it compiles SQL to a database-specific bytecode. So why can't we compile *Postgres* to the same bytecode?

Turns out we can. I ran an experiment called pgmicro as a way to prove this hypothesis, and it works very well. It is time to make this official, and put the weight of Turso behind it. We shall give the world a modern take on Postgres. Wire compatible, but built on a new architecture.

We have already heard of others wanting to extend this. MySQL? Redis? the sky is the limit. What can we do if we do for databases what LLVM did for compilers? To prove how powerful the SQLite bytecode is, we are actually running DOOM compiled to the unmodified SQLite instruction set. And because Turso runs natively in the browser, you can play the game in your browser. With the database executing it.

Read the full story below! 👇

[Alex Onyia @winexviv]

This is the sickbay and a classroom in a public school in Abia State.

19 more like this are currently being built, and education is completely free.

Education is taking back its place in our society.

[Dennis Hong @dennisihong]

Coding is most of the LLM TAM, and half of that TAM is inefficiency. The models burn tokens generating garbage code and redoing it. Nothing else burns tokens like this. Deflate the waste away and there's not much left to sell, until physical robots.

[Tunde Obadina @TundeObadina1]

Protectionism doesn’t necessarily help African producers grow. Too often, it does the opposite: by shielding firms from international competition, it weakens the incentive to innovate, invest, and reduce costs.

When firms are protected from international competition, they can earn healthy profits without investing in the technology and productivity improvements needed to reduce costs. Consumers pay higher prices while innovation slows.

Local producers can become trapped in a comfort zone: why go through the trouble of adopting new technologies if you can make profit simply by exploiting the price gap created by the government's protectionist policies?

The argument that infant industries in developing countries need protection to enable their development underestimates the importance of incentives and the tendency of protected producers to engage in rent-seeking by lobbying to preserve their privileged position.

Countries whose local industries have successfully become globally competitive have not only increased their share of international markets but have also benefited domestic consumers through lower prices and higher-quality goods resulting from greater productivity.

[Tunde Obadina @TundeObadina1]

As elsewhere in the world, the Nigerian government faces trade-offs between the interests of producers and consumers. High local prices resulting from tariff protection tend to benefit domestic producers, but at the expense of consumers, who would otherwise benefit from lower prices driven by international competition. For poorer households, higher prices can translate into reduced food security and, in extreme cases, going hungry.

The argument that tariffs are a necessary short-term protection for infant industries is often justified on developmental grounds, but it is questionable for two main reasons. First, while governments inevitably make policy choices that have distributional consequences, economic policy should be consistent with the principle of equality before the law, meaning that the state should avoid granting entrenched privileges to particular groups of producers at the direct expense of consumers. Second, in Nigeria’s case, decades of high tariff barriers have produced little evidence of sustained productivity growth or internationally competitive production.

Trade protection is not a substitute for productivity. It does not address the structural constraints that inhibit productivity growth—such as inadequate infrastructure, limited technological adoption, and regulatory bottlenecks—while imposing higher costs on consumers, including the most vulnerable members of society.

[Greptime @Greptime]

Nice surprise: GreptimeDB is now available as a one-click VPS Docker deployment on Hostinger. @Hostinger

It's great to see more platforms making open-source observability infrastructure easier to self-host — especially for developers who want full control over their metrics, logs, and traces without SaaS-style pricing.

https://t.co/XsBLct28TV

[Oo Nwoye @OoTheNigerian]

This was written 13 years ago. It paints a very ugly picture and we either come to terms with it, or not.

Nigeria is bottoming out. A nation where the dream is to run away from it, or where the symbol of in country success is creating your own imprisonment (Guarded from point A to B in your amourd G wagon, with armed convoys following, like you are a prisoner, to ending your day behind high fences and layers of security, taking the names of visitors, like you are in prison. Of course, you gleefully cycle in Monaco once you are let out of prison occasionally.

This cannot be the trajectory of the next generation. God forbid!

Let me quietly log out of here before I spoil my week.

[Oo Nwoye @OoTheNigerian]

Lagos. A sophisticated slum. Bottom barrelled elites do not understand the fundamentals matter.

You want to host F1 and mimic MET Gala but you do not have numbered streets or pipe borne water.

Quick to line up PJs bought with our common wealth, but a grand total of 0 cities have an integrated public transport system.

If Nigerians themselves weren't somehow many, loud and and uniquely dogged, we do not rank above Liberia.

But hey.. What's all the fuss about, after all someone was able to capture a street in Japan that was flooded with what was cleaner than Lekki borehole water. And it lasted for all of 5 mins.

Nigeria can disgust me at times. I regret so many times that I care too much about the place of my fore bearers.

[Kalu Aja @FinPlanKaluAja1]

Import substitution involves replacing imports with local production.

Its benefits are clear: creating local jobs, strengthening the currency, and boosting industrialisation.

This policy has proven effective in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Vietnam, and Tunisia. However, it can only succeed if the local economy is capable of producing, and industries cannot operate without reliable electrical power.

This means that import substitution remains just a wish in Nigeria, rather than an actual policy.

Economically, nothing significant will happen for the majority of Nigerians without improvements in power supply and affordability.

I know this.
You know this.
The leadership knows this.

[Apostle Michael Olowookere @myk_da_preacher]

Lagos Calabar coastal road= 750km
China rural roads built= 16,000km

Cost of coastal road= $11 billion
Cost of the china rural roads built= $12.1 billion

Time of project execution for coastal road = since March 2024 till date
Time of completion of china rural roads= 4 months.

I just say let me let you know.

Never did I think anybody would be worse than Buhari. Tinubu's Government is a tragedic disaster this nation might not recover from in decades to come.

[Siddharth Singh @siddharth3]

Yes, 43°C in India feels different to 43°C in Europe. Allow me to explain.

1. Europe is much more north on the planet, compared to the tropical location of India. For example, Paris is even north of Toronto in Canada. In India, the sun hits from the top. In Europe, it hits at an angle, and significantly longer summer days can yield strong solar loads through the course of a day. So the sun feels different.

2. India’s air pollution (suspended particulate matter) dulls the sun a bit. The sun feels sharper in Europe due to the clear skies, while pollution in India scatters and dissipates heat differently.

3. The recent heat waves in Europe have been accompanied with very low or zero winds. The leaves on trees don’t have a hint of movement. So it feels suffocating in a different way. In India, the warm winds and humidity might have different effects.

4. Europe has historically been cooler, so its buildings have been designed to remain warm in winters, while Indian buildings are designed to remain cool in summers. For example, stone or tiled floors in India dissipate heat quickly in summers, but also mean that you can’t walk bare feet in winters. Meanwhile European households might have wooden floors that don’t feel cool in the summers. Some European cities also have black roofs as a norm, which trap heat.

5. Much of Europe has had very limited number of warm days through history, so air conditioning is not a norm. Why would households invest in ACs when it crosses 25°C (minimum) for less than 7 days a year? New York has 4-5x more frequent warm days than Paris, for example. But that’s now changing. As it gets warmer, the case for ACs is obvious.

6. Much of Europe values aesthetics and public spaces a lot. So buildings associations oppose ugly heat-blowing external AC units facing the streets. This is why European cities are the most beautiful and walkable on the planet. Would you sit down to have wine and pasta on a street side cafe if an ugly AC unit was blowing hot air onto you? But of course, it’s too hot during heat waves now, so buildings associations will be forced to relent and change their rules. (You can also find some examples of some activists or institutions opposing ACs for climate change reasons, but I think that has a much smaller impact on decisions than actual building rules).

But the ultimate reality is this: as heat waves get hotter and longer, ACs will become the norm in Europe as well. Most offices and shopping centres are already air conditioned. Households are increasingly purchasing them too.

And the other reality is that Indians suffer a lot from heat waves too, even at 43°C. We just don’t report human interest stories the same way. Many don’t have ACs, live under tin roofs, and are hit by a constant stream of hot AC exhaust air from neighbours. We all need to prepare better for our respective heat waves.

[Taiwo_junzi @taiwo_junzi]

- Never run into fatherhood prematurely!!!
- Never father a child with a whore!!!
- Never raise a child with money obtained through dubious means!!!
- Never give birth to more children when you have not even made provisions to give the one child you have a much better and holistic life than you had!!!
- Never cheat in front of your kids!!!
- Never smoke in front of your kids!!!
- Never hit your wife, it impacts your children in ways you’ll never understand!!!
- Never embark on any hustle that takes you away from your children for years and reduces you to their cash cow!!!
- Never forget to honour your own father!!!
- Never think money is all it takes to be a good father!!!
- Never invest so much in your kids that you forget to prepare for your own retirement!!!

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

1. Je n'ai jamais dit que les LLMs étaient inutiles ou n'avaient pas de valeur commerciale.
2. Mais beaucoup de technologies sont utiles et à haute valeur sans être particulièrement "intelligentes"
3. Les LLMs sont essentiellement inutiles et sans grande valeur pour ce qui est du pilotage de processus industriels ou de compréhension de données continues, de haute dimension, et/ou bruitées.
4. Il y a énormément d'applications de haute valeur dans le pilotage de processus industriels ou de compréhension de données continues, de haute dimension, et/ou bruitées.
5. A long terme, l'intelligence, la compréhension du monde, et la capacité à planifier est ce qui compte vraiment.