it’s 2025 and building for the world has never been easier. when existing global solutions create a gap by excluding africa, resist the urge to build “for africa”. make it global from day one.

incumbents ignore the continent for reasons including but not limited to low gdp per capita, scarce growth capital, structural barriers to scale, etc. build only for africa and you’ll inherit these constraints. your ceiling is baked in before you start.

instead, leverage your unfair advantage: you understand what works in african markets. use that knowledge to design a solution that scales globally while working exceptionally well in contexts others overlook. use africa as your proof of concept for global resilience, not your total addressable market.

build for the world, informed by the gap.

i spent time in early 2024 with someone who frequently took notes on their phone using voice dictation. it was quite a thing to observe, as i’d always thought speech to text was shit. the inability to detect nuances in language, the frequent errors in or outright absence of punctuation. take a look at your average iphone voice note transcription to see what i mean.

however, this person was quite methodical with their approach. they read out the punctuations, including where they wanted to start a new paragraph, or put things in bullet points. i found it extremely fascinating - working one’s way around the obvious problem by way of adaptation.

i take a lot of notes. i am constantly pulling out my phone and typing out my thoughts, or writing out a reflection such as this one in my journal. while i admired the ability to be precise with dictation, i figured i will soon be able to leverage...

hollow and resonant, an empty barrel amplifies the slightest disturbance into thunderous din, while the full one, dense with substance, absorbs sound. the gunsmiths of yore could identify mis-loaded weapons by ear, and noisy kegs betrayed their vacuity to brewers. today, we’ve built the ultimate resonance chamber in our interconnected feeds, where the emptiest voices carry furthest, their algorithmic amplification mistaken for authority, and their volume confused with validity.

disturbingly, an entire generation is learning to mistake amplitude for depth of insight. chronically online and impressionable minds, hungry for understanding in an increasingly complex world, are being systematically trained that sophistication is weakness, nuance is indecision, and that the person shouting the loudest must know something they don’t. platforms reward this with engagement metrics, and...

tj holowaychuk is someone i will like to meet one day. when i discovered him in 2013/4, he was active in the nodejs community and was the creator of the express framework, the koa framework, and a host of javascript modules in use by tons of software developers today.

a few years later, he decided to take a step back from active open source development and started an uptime monitoring startup called apex.

earlier today, a friend reached out to ask what was wrong with my media server. before i could respond, they confirmed it was back up. i noted that i didn’t receive any downtime notification and remarked that this was a case for me to extend my homelab to the cloud - maybe a small digital ocean droplet, and use that to monitor my home network’s reachability from the outside world.

then i remembered apex. i visited the domain and saw that the website was unavailable. this led me to...

yesterday around half past 10pm, i took a break from a rebuild of atlas (more on this in a future post) to have a late dinner and received a dm from a friend who was sharing a humorous tweet that referenced me and my articulation. apparently, the tweet had gathered significant engagement which explained the fresh influx of followers and reactions on a thought i had shared earlier in the day.

a friend had shared some obliviously self-dishonoring perspective she came across on her timeline and was flummoxed. i remarked that there’s probably a straightforward explanation, saying i think because people can now have their foolish thoughts expressed with poise (thanks to a proliferation of large language models), those who previously perceived such articulations as being well reasoned will undoubtedly think it’s worthy of sharing. a few minutes later, i posted a version of my reply to my...

should large language models refer to themselves using first person pronouns? i just came across a tweet by uncle bob from 2 days ago arguing that this shouldn’t be allowed. while i agree in principle, i believe we are way past the rubicon now.

very quickly, amidst the ai hype of 2023 and especially 2024, it was inevitable that we will end up here - where chatbots routinely refer to themselves in first person as though they exist in the sense of the word. this is something that would have been brushed off as a gimmick by most a few years ago, but today, a lot of people have moved past (or outright skipped) the “prompting a statistical model” phase and have collectively deluded themselves into the “chatting with a friend”, or even worse the “opening up to my therapist” phase.

whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen. after all, at the core of it all, we are all matching...

okay so a bit of a preamble that may or may not have anything to do with the rest of the piece. some days ago, i read a tweet from dhh (which i sadly cannot find now) about how he takes out ~20 minutes to write something on his mind, publish it, and move on. it got me thinking on how much wasted cycles i spend ruminating on what (and sometimes, how) i want to write instead of just getting on with the writing. maybe this will take 20 minutes of my time, maybe it will take longer. but i’ll definitely revel in the payoff after i hit the publish button.

yesterday, while mindlessly scrolling through substack, i happened on a post whose title caught my attention - things that are none of your business. reading it reminded me of a term i wrote down in a draft doc about yet another article i was once moved to write but somehow haven’t gotten to finish or publish despite publicly berating...

around age 11, i discovered that touching myself in certain ways produced really pleasurable sensations. being the curious kid with internet access, i did what came naturally - research. i went online, read articles, found studies, and discovered this thing i was doing had a name: masturbation. even better, the data showed it was incredibly common, especially among young american males.

my findings made perfect sense to me; it felt good, it was natural, and apparently everyone was doing it. so one day at school, my friends and i were having one of those random knowledge-sharing conversations and i casually dropped it. something along the lines of: “hey, did you know a really high percentage of young men masturbate frequently? i do it daily too.”

the moment that followed was fascinating. everyone just… turned and stared at me like i’d said something completely outrageous. it was in...

After following Elon Musk almost religiously over the last 13 years, observing his gradual but stark personality shift from my initial perception of him has been fascinating. Since 2020, I started developing a theory to help contextualize my observations and now feel compelled to write about what I think is easily the most consequential case of audience capture in history. This will be a long one so, strap in.

At its core, audience capture describes the process by which social media users gradually modify their behavior to appeal to their most engaged audience members. While this phenomenon has been widely documented among influencers and content creators, its manifestation in someone of Elon’s stature and resources presents a unique view into how this dynamic can shape even the most seemingly independent actors.

Pre-2016: Elon Musk, the visionary engineer

In the years before 2016...