DK II

African | Entrepreneur | All for African production

[y @ysuckme]

The first thing you should buy with money is a lifestyle that allows you to think more clearly.

[DK II @mcdenford]

In simple terms, no one wants to be Africa - end users with no involvement in the ecosystem.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[DK II @mcdenford]

@hlope_mangaliso @BulawayoForever Except you didn’t check his figures but you already dismissed him like everyone commenting there. He is actually correct.

[DK II @mcdenford]

May reflection be upon us!

[Tinashe Mukogo @tmukogo]

54% of manufacturers sourced raw materials from outside the country.

Interestingly the main reason wasn't price.

It was shortages.

About 59% said unavailability in the local market was the issue.

Could this mean there are significant opportunities in manufacturing simply by filling what the local market isn't supplying?

Source: @czionline CZI Manufacturing Survey Report

[Pierre-Eliott Lallemant @pierreeliottlal]

We went from 0 to 2,200 paying customers in under a year by following @ycombinator's 15 rules:

1/ Do things that don't scale. Get your first 10 customers by hand.

2/ Launch now, not when it's "ready". A mediocre product in front of real users teaches you more in a week than 6 months of polishing in the dark.

3/ Charge from day one. If nobody will pay, you don't have a startup, you have a hobby.

4/ Talk to users every single day. The roadmap you need is sitting in your customers' heads, and they'll hand it to you for free

5/ Always hunt the 90/10 solution. For almost any feature there's a way to capture 90% of the value with 10% of the effort.

6/ There are only two real jobs: write code and talk to users. Everything else (conferences, press, VC coffees, corp dev calls) is fake work.

7/ You pick your customers as much as they pick you. 10 users who love you beat 1,000 who kind of like you.

8/ Growth is an output, not a strategy. Grow before product market fit and all you're buying is churn.

9/ Do less, really well. Pick one or two metrics and judge every task against them.

10/ Know if you're default alive. Paul Graham's question: on current growth and current burn, do you reach profitability before the money runs out?

11/ Don't hire until it hurts. Headcount is not progress, it's burn. Every great startup was embarrassingly small for embarrassingly long.

12/ Momentum is the only real moat in year one. Ship something every week, even something tiny.

13/ Every great startup is badly broken at some point. The game isn't avoiding fires, it's how fast you put them out. Again. And again

14/ Ignore your competitors. Startups die of suicide, not murder. In year one, the only company that can kill yours is your own

15/ Startups rarely die from running out of money. They die because the founders fall out. Brutal honesty with your cofounder is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy

Good luck !

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

A 21-year-old computer science student in Helsinki bought his first PC in early 1991 and immediately hated the operating system it came with. So he sat down to write his own.

On September 25, 1991 he posted a quiet message to a Usenet newsgroup announcing what he called "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU."

35 years later that hobby runs every Android phone on Earth, every supercomputer on the TOP500 list, the entire backend of the internet, the International Space Station, and SpaceX's Falcon rockets.

His name is Linus Torvalds. The hobby is called Linux.

Here is the story, because the man who runs the most consequential codebase in human history almost no longer needs an introduction inside engineering and still walks the streets unrecognized everywhere else.

Linus was born in Helsinki, Finland on December 28, 1969. He was named after Linus Pauling, the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, in Chemistry and in Peace. He joked he might also be partly named after Linus van Pelt from the Peanuts cartoon. His family was unusual. Both parents were journalists. His grandfather was a statistician. Another grandfather was a poet. The family belonged to Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. There are fewer than 30 people in the world with the surname Torvalds, and according to Linus, they are all related.

At 10 he started programming on his grandfather's Commodore VIC-20. By his teenage years he was writing his own assemblers, editors, and games. He served in the Finnish Army for his mandatory national service and rose to the rank of Second Lieutenant. Then he enrolled at the University of Helsinki to study computer science.

In early 1991 he bought a personal computer with MS-DOS and disliked it intensely. He wanted UNIX, the operating system he had used at the university. UNIX cost thousands of dollars. He could not afford it. So he started writing his own.

He posted the now-famous announcement to comp.os.minix in August 1991. He called the kernel Linux, a portmanteau of his name and MINIX. He released the source code under the GPL license. Anyone could download it, read it, modify it, and ship it for free.

Within a year hundreds of developers around the world were sending him patches. Within five years Linux was running web servers. Within ten years it had taken over the supercomputer market. Within twenty years it was running on most of the internet. Today every Android phone on Earth runs the Linux kernel. Every Chromebook runs Linux. Most of AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure runs Linux. Every Tesla runs Linux. Every SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule runs Linux. The International Space Station runs Linux. Every supercomputer in the world's TOP500 list runs Linux.

That was the first thing he built.

In 2005 the proprietary version control system the Linux community had been using, BitKeeper, revoked its free license. Linus was furious. He sat down and wrote a replacement in 10 days. He called it Git. The first commit was on April 7, 2005. Today Git powers GitHub, GitLab, and the source control of every major software organization on Earth. Every line of code at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Microsoft flows through Git. Every AI model on the planet is versioned with software a Finnish engineer wrote in less than two weeks.

He won the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for engineering. He won the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 2014. He completed his master's degree from Helsinki along the way, with a thesis titled "Linux: A Portable Operating System." He moved to the United States, became a citizen, and now works from his home in Portland, Oregon, employed by the Linux Foundation.

A Finnish student announced a hobby project on a message board in 1991.

His code is now in every pocket on the planet.

He still writes most of his important communication on the Linux kernel mailing list.

[Carlos Lopes @LopesInsights]

OMG! "Continental integration” is becoming the excuse used to justify arrangements that pull in the opposite direction. 🌍Nothing says “supporting African integration” quite like negotiating yet another EPA with a handpicked mini-bloc of 4 island states while Africa is trying to build a single market under #AFCFTA 🙃

From colonial borders to overlapping RECs to bespoke trade deals, fragmentation apparently remains the gift that keeps on giving. Now add separate rules on services, investment, procurement, IP and digital trade with selected countries, creating yet another layer of regulatory patchwork across the continent.

#EPA #TradePolicy

https://t.co/DUkr5ZRxJo

[DK II @mcdenford]

@baba_nyenyedzi Far from the madding zviganandas

[Lucas Beyer (bl16) @giffmana]

Trevor was making a joke in reference to anthro, but jokes on him, ...
Intel's compiler *did* intentionally generate worse code for AMD, called the "cripple AMD feature".

[DK II @mcdenford]

“Reparations”

[Ritik Bhandari @bbhandarii]

Korea had no coking coal, no iron ore, and the WB advised against it

Park built it anyway with reparations money from JPN and put ex-general Park Tae-joon in charge, who framed the project as repaying a national debt

POSCO became one of the world's most efficient steelmakers

Sometimes you just gotta do it

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life advice: When you're feeling overwhelmed, there are only two things you should do... get organized and get to work. The rest is just noise. Peace is found in progress.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

The older I get, the more I realize the power of always having something on the calendar you're excited about. It can really be anything. Difficult physical challenge, big project, fun trip, ambitious goal, whatever. It creates energy and gets you through the lows. Life hack.

[DK II @mcdenford]

Statement said by the slave masters in those ships!!

[Blxckie🥷🏽 @Blxckie1__]

There is a payday for a nigga that doesn’t stop trying.

[DK II @mcdenford]

Direction lost!
#FIFAWORLD26

[Rimsha Bhardwaj @heyrimsha]

An engineer from Charlotte, North Carolina sat down in the spring of 2000 to write software for guided missile destroyers in the United States Navy. The ships needed a database that did not require a system administrator on board.

So he wrote one himself. 26 years later that database, SQLite, runs inside every iPhone on Earth, every Android phone, every Mac, every Windows machine, every major web browser, every airplane cockpit avionics system, and most of the cars built in the last decade. It is the most widely deployed software in human history. He still maintains it from his home in North Carolina.

His name is D. Richard Hipp. Most people call him Richard.

Here is the story, because the engineer behind the most replicated piece of code on the planet is a man almost nobody can name.

Richard was born in Charlotte on April 9, 1961. He grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta. He graduated from Stone Mountain High School in 1979 and went to Georgia Tech, where he earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering by 1984. He spent three years at AT&T Bell Labs working in Unix and C. Then he went back to school at Duke University and earned a PhD in Computer Science in 1992. His dissertation was on spoken natural language dialog processing under Alan W. Biermann.

He could have stayed in academia. He told one interviewer the market for PhDs was saturated with better qualified candidates. He started a software consulting company instead. He married a musician and author named Ginger G. Wyrick in 1994 and renamed the firm Hipp, Wyrick and Company.

Then in 2000 he picked up a contract through General Dynamics to write software for the US Navy. The target was the Aegis class guided missile destroyer. The original system ran HP-UX with an IBM Informix database backend. The whole stack required a database administrator on board. The Navy did not want a database administrator on board. Richard's job was to make the database administrator unnecessary.

The design goals were simple. The database had to be self-contained. It had to run inside the application. It had to have zero configuration. It had to be transactional and reliable. It had to require no separate process. It had to be small.

On August 17, 2000 he released SQLite 1.0. He wrote it in C. The whole thing fit in less than a megabyte. The license he chose was the most extreme one possible. He released the source code into the public domain. No copyright. No royalties. No restrictions. Anyone could use it for anything forever.

The decision changed software history.

SQLite spread quietly. Mozilla adopted it for Firefox. Apple put it inside iOS. Google put it inside Android. Microsoft started shipping it inside Windows. Chrome, Safari, and Edge all use it. Photoshop uses it. Skype used it. Every major operating system you have ever touched runs SQLite somewhere underneath. The Airbus A350 uses it for flight software. Every Boeing 787 has SQLite onboard.

By 2026 SQLite was estimated to be running on more than 1 trillion devices. It is the most replicated piece of software ever written. Richard has personally turned down what is almost certainly hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties over the past 26 years by keeping it public domain.

The SQLite team is tiny. Richard and a small group of core contributors. He maintains a separate version control system he wrote himself called Fossil. He maintains a parser generator he wrote himself called Lemon. He maintains a diagram language he wrote himself called Pikchr. He is a member of the Tcl core team and has been for over 25 years. He answers questions on Hacker News under the username SQLite.

The project's public commitment is to support SQLite through the year 2050.

A Christian engineer from North Carolina wrote a small database for missile destroyers and released it for free.

It is now running inside every device in your house.

[Tai Lopez @tailopez]

Marcus Aurelius was right when he said the crowd will forget you no matter what you do. So the only real question is whether you spent your years chasing their approval or actually living for yourself.

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

Actor William Fichtner explains how the lowest point of his career, long before his success, became the turning point that kept him going:

He shares a moment from his early days in New York when everything he'd worked for felt like it was slipping away.

"I think I was 30 years old and I was in New York and I hit the end of the road. I ran out of money. I had no commercial residual. I had nothing."

After a few years of scraping by, a little money in theater and a few residuals from commercials, he had to go back to waiting tables. And it crushed him to compare himself to everyone he'd come up with:

"I felt like I was falling backwards and I was 30 now. Everybody that I knew I graduated college with [had] a company car and I was just... it was depressing."

He describes the morning he went to ask for a brunch shift at the White Horse Tavern in the West Village, a place he knew people went to:

"I woke up. I was brushing my teeth. I started crying. I really was. I was walking that street going, 'Just, it's all right, man. It's all right. You're not falling backwards. You're not going off the end of the earth.'"

On the walk, it got worse before it got better. He passed someone from his past:

"I passed a guy that I hadn't seen in a couple of years that was like kind of like an old friend. And I said hi to him and he walked by and he just kind of looked at me like he didn't recognize me. It was horrible. It was just horrible."

Then he walked into the restaurant, and the manager met him with hostility, telling him he was on the schedule the day before, hadn't even started, and was already fired.

But instead of breaking him, it freed him:

"I said, 'Thank you.' I walked out of there. I said, 'I have absolutely nothing right now and I'm feeling so good and I'm not working at your f****** restaurant today, buddy.'"

He went home to find a place to re-energize. Looking back, that brutal day became a great one:

"Just great, great day."

The lowest point can feel like proof you're failing, but sometimes it's just part of the process. Years before his success, that morning could have ended his career. Instead it became the turning point that kept him going.

[DK II @mcdenford]

Like Africa making policies against imaginary neo-colonialists!

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is extraordinarily rare.

In fact, according to a key figure in the German business community (who is a dear friend of mine), it's unprecedented.

An op-ed, two pages, centerpiece, in Germany’s most important economic newspaper (the Handelsblatt) that begs the German establishment to stop looking at China via the prism of propaganda. And it's by their Shanghai bureau chief - not some outside contributor.

The title is "The China debate cannot continue like this!" and the article makes the case that it's suicidal, from a German and European standpoint, to keep reducing China to false caricatures rather than facts.

In effect it's rubbish in, rubbish out: if you tell people lies about China - whichever direction they go (anti or pro) - then obviously the policies that come out will be rubbish, designed for a mirage of a country that exists only in people's imagination.

Needless to say, this is absolutely music to my ears because it's literally the main point I've been making in my advocacy around China for now almost 10 years. Some are finally seeing the light...

I also believe, as I argued in my article "Are Western media turning China-friendly?" last year (https://t.co/Xg1hoSRtNy) that this type of coverage was bound to happen, and there will be more and more of it.

Why? For a very simple structural reason: China is now too powerful to coerce. The West, and Europe in particular, just don't have the leverage anymore. Which means that if you tell China to do something and they don't want to, they just won't do it. Period.

In this situation, incapable of coercing, your only remaining choice is... convincing. And what do you need if you want to convince someone? Well, you need to understand them: understand how they think, how they behave, what drives them, what they actually want.

In other words: the moment coercion stops being an option, not only does propaganda stop being useful, it begins to be actively harmful as genuine understand becomes a strategic necessity. Reality is finally becoming profitable again.

Which means, if you're a journalist reading this and you're peddling some of your usual lies, describing China as some sort of cartoonish dictatorial dystopia that's simultaneously on the verge of collapse yet a "threat" to the whole world (in short, if you write on China for The Economist or the FT), be on notice: the real threat to your country isn't China. It's you.