maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎

[Edwin Sifuna @edwinsifuna]

Talarico stole the @LindaMwananchi_ victory speech we were to give in August 2027.
It now appears the World Bank has gotten its hands on our plan.

#LindaKatiba

[Bloomberg @business]

Kenya allegedly spent $900 million more than it should have for a Chinese-built railway because of rampant corruption, fraud and graft https://t.co/m3ImGNT5lV

[Joel Jiranï @Kemboi67]

Someone compiled Kasongo's lies in just 2 minutes 😂😂.

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

Wow!

[Wole @wolefizzy]

They said African languages were too fragmented, too complex and too commercially insignificant to build advanced AI for.

We disagreed. So we built it.

64 languages. 166 voices. 3 billion parameters. ONE model.

Today, we are unveiling STORM-Ensemble 3.0, the most capable multilingual speech synthesis model we have built at PlotWeaver.

From Yorùbá, Igbo, Hausa and Nigerian Pidgin to Swahili, Amharic, Wolof, Zulu, Xhosa and dozens more, STORM-Ensemble 3.0 generates speech across 64 languages, with 166 distinct speaker voices.

Every voice you hear is generated by our model, not a prerecorded sample.

But the real breakthrough isn't the numbers.

It's what becomes possible when this technology is in the hands of people who can build with it.

-African filmmakers distributing stories across languages.
-Banks and telcos serving customers in their mother tongues.
-Education platforms reaching more children.
-Developers building voice AI products without starting from scratch.

We are not building AI for African languages simply to prove it can be done. We are building the infrastructure to make our languages commercially viable at global scale.

Next week, I will be speaking at the Commonwealth Business Forum in Antigua about unlocking the Commonwealth's creative potential. This launch is a practical demonstration of that ambition.

Africa must not simply consume the future of AI. We must build, own and shape the infrastructure that powers it.

Watch the video. Listen to the voices. Imagine what's possible.

Introducing STORM-Ensemble 3.0.

PlotWeaver. Build Once. Speak Every Language.

#PlotWeaver #STORMEnsemble #VoiceAI #AfricanLanguages

[Maurizio @themgmtconsult]

If you work at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture, EY, Deloitte, PwC, if you are an in-house consultant or an independent, you are witnessing the consulting industry being split in two.

I just mapped 60 core consulting skills (both hard and soft) against the impending threat of Generative AI.

The result is what I called the Consulting AI Threat Matrix, and it reveals which skills will be commoditized and which will become your ultimate competitive moat.

I plotted these skills across two dimensions (because I'm a consultant and I love a good quadrant 😅)

The dimensions are:

1) Modality of execution (Algorithmic vs. Interpersonal)

2) Environmental entropy (Deterministic vs. Ambiguous)

The findings are a wake-up call for how firms train their talent:

- The Commoditization Zone (Bottom-Left): Standard financial modeling, UI/UX, RPA, and slide generation are facing severe disruption. If your value is tied to synthesizing clean data in predictable environments, GenAI will do it faster.

- The Augmentation Zone (Bottom-Right): Cloud architecture, predictive modeling, and hypothesis-driven problem-solving. GenAI is your co-pilot here, but human knowledge and judgment is required to navigate the ambiguity.

- The Strategic Premium (Top-Right): Consensus building, crisis de-escalation, unbiased judgment, and executive storytelling. GenAI cannot read a hostile stakeholder or mediate a turf war between a CIO and a CMO. This is the human moat.

If you are a senior consultant, a manager, director, partner, or aspiring consultant, your career trajectory depends on migrating to the top right.

I put together a detailed 10-page paper breaking down exactly how these 60 skills were evaluated, the criteria for each quadrant, and how consulting firms need to restructure their training programs to survive this shift, plus what actions you can take to safeguard yourself.

Just ping me somehow (comment here or DM me) and I'll send you the paper.

All the best!

[Cogito, Ergo Sum @ItsMeGitau]

Pan-Africanist: Africa is poor because Europeans spent centuries exploiting our resources.

Normal African: Colonialism was exploitative. But who controls those resources today?

Pan-Africanist: African governments, technically. But Western corporations still benefit.

Normal African: Who signs the contracts with those corporations?

Pan-Africanist: Our corrupt leaders.

Normal African: And who receives the money?

Pan-Africanist: Our corrupt leaders.

Normal African: So why is your revolution always directed at London and Paris instead of the presidential palace down the road?

Pan-Africanist: Because you don't understand how neocolonialism works.

Normal African: Apparently, it works by making African presidents steal money and buy mansions in the countries they claim are oppressing us.

Pan-Africanist: You're oversimplifying centuries of systemic exploitation.

Normal African: Fair enough. Let's talk about solutions. How do we become economically independent?

Pan-Africanist: We must reject Western dependency and build African institutions.

Normal African: Excellent. Where should we start?

Pan-Africanist: Education, technology, infrastructure, manufacturing.

Normal African: Agreed. Why haven't we done that?

Pan-Africanist: Because Western powers deliberately keep Africa underdeveloped.

Normal African: So the West is powerful enough to prevent 54 African countries from developing, but somehow powerless to stop China, South Korea, Singapore and other former poor countries from industrializing?

Pan-Africanist: Their historical circumstances were different.

Normal African: Exactly. So perhaps we should study what they did differently instead of treating history as a permanent excuse.

Pan-Africanist: You sound like someone who worships white people.

Normal African: I thought we were discussing economics.

Pan-Africanist: Economics cannot be separated from colonial history.

Normal African: Neither can it be separated from present-day leadership, corruption, productivity, education and institutions.

Pan-Africanist: Africa needs leaders like Thomas Sankara.

Normal African: Sankara received formal education and military training through institutions established under French colonial rule. Should we acknowledge that too?

Pan-Africanist: That's colonial mentality. He used their knowledge against them.

Normal African: Wonderful. So we agree that knowledge is useful regardless of who introduced it?

Pan-Africanist: You're missing the point.

Normal African: I'm beginning to suspect the point is that everything good is African resistance and everything bad is European influence.

Pan-Africanist: We must decolonize the African mind!

Normal African: Can we first fix the public hospital?

Pan-Africanist: You cannot fix institutions without first liberating the African mind.

Normal African: The hospital has had no medicine for three weeks.

Pan-Africanist: That's the legacy of colonialism.

Normal African: The health minister just bought himself a new Range Rover.

Pan-Africanist: You really need to read more African history.

Normal African: And you need to read the Auditor-General's report.

[log4j @log4j]

i own a relatively new (2025) samsung tv.

i kept getting weirdly targeted ads.

i tried reversing the firmware but it was aes encrypted and no keys unless tear it apart and do uart/jtag magic.

zero days it is. root shell on new samsung TVs!

discovered PRIVACY HORROR. write up?

[Superman @thesupermannx]

This paper answers why confident idiots run the world.

Cornell University published a psychological paper that explains every terrible boss, every loud influencer, and every broken corporate hierarchy.

It’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”

they tested participants across logic, grammar, and humor to measure the gap between actual performance and self-perception.

And the results are wild.

participants scoring in the bottom 12th percentile consistently believed they were operating in the 62nd percentile.

they were not lying. they were literally incapable of recognizing their own incompetence.

the paper revealed a brutal paradox:

the exact skills required to master a domain are the exact same skills required to accurately evaluate your own competence in that domain.

if you lack the skill, you inherently lack the cognitive capacity to realize you are failing.

this creates a dangerous systemic loop.

the incompetent are blessed with absolute, blinding certainty. their brain protects them from their own ignorance, allowing them to speak first, demand authority, and never second-guess their decisions.

meanwhile, the actual experts suffer the exact inverse.

top performers in the study consistently underestimated their rank. because a task was easy for them, they falsely assumed it was easy for everyone else.

they hesitate. they obsess over nuance. they assume they have nothing unique to add.

we are biologically wired to confuse confidence with competence.

the loudest person in the room gets promoted, gets funded, and gets the microphone, not because they know what they are doing, but because they are physically incapable of seeing what they don't.

the only defense mechanism is building systems that stop rewarding absolute certainty and start demanding proof of work.

[Yarchi @undefinedKi]

This might be the most useful paper on AI agents this year.

A team at Wavestone AI Lab took apart Claude Code, Codex and 9 more and found the 7-part blueprint every good agent is built on.

Their definition: an agent is a model plus a harness. All 11 agents build the harness from the same 7 parts. Only the size changes.

> Loop: Mini-SWE-Agent is a plain while loop. OpenHands logs every event so a run can be replayed

> LLM layer: one prompt template on one side, 29 provider profiles on the other

> Tools: some agents only have bash, the biggest has 43 typed tools loaded on demand

> Memory: from keep-the-whole-history to notes the agent maintains across sessions

> Safety: from a simple step limit to policy rules plus a reviewer model plus an OS sandbox

> Orchestration: Aider skips sub-agents on purpose, others fork them with their own context

> Extensions: hooks, skills and MCP. SKILL.md is in 9 of 11, MCP in 8

The paper ends with a 90-line harness covering all 7 parts, a solid starting point for your own.

Key pages:

> p.4: the 7-part map
> p.12: the 3 loop types, with Claude Code and Codex as examples
> p.53: why none of them use frameworks or embeddings
> p.67: 18 design recommendations
> p.71: the 90-line harness you can copy

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

Wild

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We're publishing our most detailed threat intelligence report to date.

It covers how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them.

We disrupted every operation in the report, and used the lessons from them to strengthen our safeguards. Where appropriate, we also shared what we found with authorities and other AI companies.

These cases are not typical: we’re highlighting some of the most sophisticated misuse we’ve seen. But they’re especially important to discuss, because they show us where AI misuse is headed, where our safeguards work, and where they need to improve.

We’re publishing this report so others can spot the same activity on their own platforms, and so we can give the public a clearer view of how emerging threats develop.

Read the report: https://t.co/0EJUnYEgfz

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

@EmmanuelMotelin Graphs exist for a reason

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

I have a newfound respect for @Bose products after my earbuds went through a full wash cycle and came out unscathed. Either amazing product, or my @LGUS washing machine isn't doing as thorough of a job!

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

@RealDonKitheka This needs to be GDP per capita for an apples to apples comparison, otherwise not very impactful

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

@sagarakelvin2 btw besides the press release and pictures, has anyone seen this Collins guy alive? Seeing different reports of him being dead last September.

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

@SeyMonicah 🥲🥲🥲👀👀👀🫠🫠🫠

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

@ntvkenya Why would media go along with this clearly fake narrative? Can you do your jobs for once that the govt has failed at. Interview the guy, get details...the devil is always in the details. This poor guy doesn't look like he's ever hurt a fly. A distraction and clearly staged

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

@WilliamsRuto @rigathi This is such a big waste of time and resources! A bus stop 🥲 woii

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

@DrAlfredMutua @WilliamsRuto I'll just leave this here 😄😄

[brian obra @just_obra]

•we shall not forget•

My faith in a generation willing to speak up for themselves and willing to stand up for the betterment of their own country, has been restored. My faith in the sovereignty of the people has been restored.

Yet, my heart bleeds most for those that never made it back. They will not be a statistic, but a legend that I will speak of for generations to come.

I am proud of my people, and for as long as I stand, I shall play my part…The revolution SHALL be televised.

Track: Ambia - Billy Black
Thank you @billyblackKE for making music for the soul.

WE SHALL NOT FORGET.
🇰🇪✊🏾♥️🤍🕊️

[maisha 254 | our special circus 😅🤎 @maisha_254]

this is too heartbreaking 💔#JusticeforJune25Heroes

[Larry Madowo @LarryMadowo]

EXCLUSIVE: CNN watched as Kenyan security forces shot dead at least 3 protesters outside the Kenyan parliament on Tuesday.

I saw Ericsson Kyalo Mutisya, 25 dancing in white overalls. Shots rang out shortly after that and I saw his body. He wasn't the only one