Phares Kariuki

Accelerating cloud uptake in Africa | Cloud, Tech, Startups | Building @pureinfra |

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

Political Economy in Kenya https://t.co/gnbqewqLWQ

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

This interview by @SajVayani is a deep dive into the coffee business in Kenya https://t.co/xUqPA5Ipe7

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

@Shad_khalif The issue is that the road was meant to have asphalt finishing, which ameliorates these concerns. Concrete roads are never meant to be left without an asphalt layer (safety etc). The expressway has asphalt, but the underlying base is concrete…

[Dennis Kioko - KeNHA Unmarked Bumps Hitter @denniskioko]

"I hate tall buildings" Nairobians will need to be as wealthy as the billionaires of San Francisco to have the city afford their fantasies

[Ivar The Boneless @roomthinker]

One of the older kids in the hood asked me the other day what the point was of being honest and doing the right thing (not doing assignments with ChatGPT, not lying, not stealing, not using company/public funds on yourself, not promising nonsense in 6 months' time, etc).

Because, as far as they could tell, there is plenty of evidence that it is precisely the people doing these things who come out on top. If anything, those on the straight and narrow are on a path of pain, inconvenience, and loss.

I thought about it for a minute and then said rather than give a canned, cliche response, let me take a few days to think about it, because, to be honest, I too am struggling to be OK in a world where unashamed scoundrels are the ones running the show, leering at us daily from podiums

[am.will @LLMJunky]

This is crazy. The shai hulud exploit is embedding itself in Claude and VSCode to re-execute itself, even after the original packages have been uninstalled.

I'm never installing anything ever again.

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

@jeffm2020 @denniskioko He’s right. We have prioritized cars over human movement. Many countries in the world now have vehicular traffic using bridges and tunnels. Not the pedestrians. Boston destroyed an elevated highway, replaced it with a tunnel.

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

@GathogoBMwangi AI workloads require orders of magnitude more power. New projects are all in the GW- the announcement is still on the Microsoft website. It’s fairly simple to verify. Microsoft announced it with G42.

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

Is there anyone who sells galangal in Nairobi?

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

Is there anyone who sells galangal in Nairobi?

[Tanay Padhi @tanaypadhi]

how did Allbirds pivot to AI compute hardware before the shoe company literally called ASICS

[Evan @StockMKTNewz]

Shoe company Allbirds just announced that it's planning to

- Sell all of its brands and footwear assets
- Rebrand the company to Newbird AI
- Use a $50M convertible financing facility to "acquire high-performance GPU assets"

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

This is a symptom. Kenya generally doesn’t prioritize social spaces.

[The Kenyan Vigilante @KenyanSays]

The "Park and Chill" culture in Kiambu has evolved from a pandemic-era necessity into a major social trend where revellers gather in open green spaces to relax by their cars.

This movement is particularly popular along Kiambu Road and the Limuru tea zones, driven by a desire for affordable, scenic alternatives to traditional nightclubs.

[Mwafreeka @Mwafreeka]

Iko Nini Studio ROBBED! Help Us Identify Robbery Suspects!Iko Nini Podcast is offering a Ksh 100,000 cash reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the three men who robbed our studio and stole 2 cameras.

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Mark Twain

@bashirhalaiki @manukisiangani

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

@Trackmann2 Thanks man. Found myself down that same rabbit hole.

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

Are Expensive Knives ACTUALLY Worth It? https://t.co/d42OVTdzk4 via @YouTube

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

@_Aa_wuor Which is only good for us... in 2003, a 64kbps link (yes, kilobits per second) was around 64,000 KES monthly. We have come a long way. The internet will keep getting cheaper with more investment in the sector.

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

This is not accurate. Most content is now consumed locally. This is why datacenter infrastructure is important. Meta, Netflix, Amazon, Google etc all have caches locally. So the international links are not being hit as frequently as before.

[Sholla Ard 🇰🇪 @sholard_mancity]

Kenyans are about to learn a VERY expensive lesson about “cheap internet.”

Savanna ISP is offering:

100 Mbps - KSh 2,000
1 Gbps - KSh 10,000
And everyone is excited.

But let’s slow down and think.

Right now in Kenya, 100 Mbps of stable fibre is around KSh 4,500 - 10,000.

So when someone comes at 2,000, you shouldn’t celebrate first...

You should ask questions.

Because the internet is not printed out of thin air . Also, the internet business is math.

They don’t own submarine cables or most of the backbone.
So they’re buying bandwidth.

Wholesale bandwidth is roughly $1-$5 per Mbps.
Do the math:

1 Gbps = 1000 Mbps
Even at $1, that's ~$1000 (~KSh 130,000)

Now explain how that becomes KSh 10,000 to you.

Exactly.
So what’s really being sold here?

Oversubscription.

You’re being sold “speed” that assumes you won’t actually use it when others are. And they know it.

And this is how it usually plays out:

Months 1 and 2:
Everything is likely to be fast.
People will be tweeting “game changer 🔥”. You will see hashtags here to get more people to join

Month 2 going forward:
More users join.
Evenings will start dragging. Your YouTube will start buffering a lot.

Month 3 going forward:
Now the reality hits:
- Peak hours, e.g., in the evening, feel slow
- Speeds jump up and down
- Some sites are fast, others struggle
- Random downtimes start appearing

Not because they’re evil.
Because math always wins.
This model works beautifully… until too many people sign up. The model is advertised as a success, nice, etc., to bring in more people to join, and eventually, everything hits the end.

Then performance becomes the hidden cost.
And suddenly that “cheap internet” doesn’t feel cheap anymore. Suddenly, you are stressed, you have to buy more data, and spend even more.

If they pull it off, I’ll admit I was wrong.

But if you’ve seen this industry before, you already know where this is heading.
Go ahead and subscribe, but also retain a backup.
Just don’t act surprised later.

Bookmark this.

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

@_Aa_wuor Even if they aren't fully at 1gbps, the amount of bandwidth is an order of magnitude higher than anyone else. It's a step in the right direction.... JTL has already done something similar. 1gbps from them is 30k, these prices are coming down and that's good for all.

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

So if Netflix, YouTube, Instagram etc don’t hit the international links and many other websites are using the CDNs (Amazon, Cloudflare etc) that are all in Kenya, we can actually justify significantly lower prices for higher bandwidth

[Phares Kariuki @kaboro]

A lot of this content is now available at the various exchanges. A lot of work over the last two decades has gone into increasing the quality of local hosting infrastructure and local traffic exchange by the likes of @kixp_support