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Today is Remembrance Sunday and requires us to pause and reflect.
I especially loved this part of the reading. “God grant to the living grace, to the departed rest, to the Church, the King, the Commonwealth and all the people unity, peace and concord. Amen
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Popped into St Clement; told the bartender to make me a fun cocktail. He says what’s the first drink that comes to your mind, I said whiskey. And he goes, “just because you said whiskey, I’ll make you a Treacle”. 💯
A few weeks ago, I left my job to go all in on something I kept seeing: great Web3 teams losing deals because nobody could find a clear, credible answer about them.
So I’m building @OnbrandLabs
At the Solana @hackerhouses in London until the 12th, then Breakpoint. Come say hi!
When it rains, it pours!
Not just PHP. Node.js has also announced security releases for October 21, with HIGH-severity vulnerabilities affecting its 26.x, 24.x and 22.x release lines.
If you run either stack in production, keep an eye on official advisories and apply patches promptly.
Security maintenance doesn't stop at your application code. Your runtime matters too.
Node.js advisory: nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerabi…
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What exactly is going on? @Railway has paused deployments practically all day. The same thing happened yesterday!
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I like it when people boldly tweet abhorrent stuff like this instead of keeping in their hearts. It gives me an opportunity to preemptively block them. I never want to read anything that your evil mind conceives ever again.
Many people have tagged me to this news. I have gotten a lot of questions in my mentions. I understand why the punishment feels too severe for you.
We live in a secular society where matters of the flesh are seen as private issues. It is normal to struggle with this news. I get where you are coming from.
First of all, I want you to separate a regular sin of fornication from the specific details of this event.
Think of it this way: Think about a highly classified military installation or a sovereign border zone. If you trespass into a regular private farm, you get a warning or a fine.
But if you bypass security warnings and trespass into a restricted military black site where the sign clearly says Lethal Force Authorized, the guards will shoot to kill.
You are not being shot because walking is a crime. You are facing lethal force because you intentionally breached the ultimate red line of the state. The integrity of that boundary is more important than your life.
This is the reality of what happened here. This is what the Haram of Mecca is. It is not just a city. It is the most sacred sanctuary on earth. It is a divine sanctuary with extreme boundaries. You can hunt an animal anywhere else in the world, but in the Haram, you cannot even point at a bird to scare it.
You can clear a forest in your country, but you cannot pluck a leaf or uproot a plant in the Haram. You cannot carry a weapon. You cannot pick up a lost item on the floor unless you are actively looking for the owner to return it.
There is also a deeper theological nuance to this. Mecca is a spiritual amplifier. We are taught that one prayer in the Haram is worth a hundred thousand prayers anywhere else. But that scale does not only weigh good deeds. When you bring a major sin into the very heart of the sanctuary, the weight of that sin is equally magnified.
If this exact act had happened in a private hotel room outside the Haram, or other non-sacred places in Saudi Arabia, the punishment would have been entirely different. Islam conceals sins done in private human weakness and standard laws of jurisprudence would apply.
But when these individuals, identified as Nazrul Islam Abdul Basir and Siti Akhtar, bypassed thousands of hotel rooms to bring a sexual act right into the public mosque, that is public defiance.
It is an intentional desecration of the sanctuary. It is an open rebellion against the boundaries set by the Creator. The law is built to protect the sacredness of our spaces.
If the ultimate sanctuary is not fiercely protected, the religion loses its core boundaries. The ruling is very severe, yes. But it is there to ensure nobody ever thinks of defiling the house of God again.
Allah knows best.
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This is a fantastic piece of writing!
If you love words and/or are amused by the theatrics of the orange man, you will read to the very end.
I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.
I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.
We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.
It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.
Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.
287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.
We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.
Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.
A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.
And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.
People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.
So who did we give it to?
An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.
She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.
The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.
Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.
It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.
But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.
That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.
We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.
He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.
Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.
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“Keep building, keep shipping, the future is unknown”.
Echoing your thoughts from yesterday. @nkaysyout
I kinda feel bad for all those Nigerian / African gaming studios that spent years building and seeing a "random person" kick it out of the park.
They either spent years trying to make the perfect game, or assumed GTA 6 taking forever to launch made it justifiable to take forever to Launch.
They insisted I did not understand.
Or thought copying Angry Birds and calling it "Angry Ọkụkọ" made it local and unique.
I don't know much about gaming but I know 3 things.
1. Don't take forever to lunch.
2. Games are about game play, not graphic fidelity.
3. The success of a game as with music is kinda unknown. So you rapidly iterate and allow time and chance takes care of the rest.
Keep building. Keep shipping. The future is still unknown.
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It doesn’t matter how many times you were right on paper. It doesn’t matter how well you can read the signs.
The only question that matters is what you did with the thesis.
Did you go all in on your convictions? Did you bet the whole house on black?
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I'm gonna need to take my advice here in a bit. On the matter of conviction: the key metric is whether you are willing to go all in on your conviction!
If you win, you are brave; if you lose, you are reckless. Either way, you'll learn a ton and have a story to tell.
A lesson from Elon to all of us as we head into to the next phase of the bull run.
Being right means nothing if you aren’t willing to bet on your convictions. The only question that matters is this— when you were right, were you bullish enough to bet the whole damn house on it?
Did you bet it all on black?
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This is a good development, but it doesn’t even begin to the scratch the surface of what’s required, just, or conscionable.
We need to go beyond uplifting the individual child and recalibrate our values. The individual child shouldn’t need a stroke of providence or a moment in the spotlight to have a fair shot at life. I can still remember how emotional we all were when Samuel was discovered while scavenging scrap metals
There are 10s of Yazid in that mining site, thousands across Niger state, and millions like him all over Nigeria.
What happens to them? How will they get a decent education? Will they ever be able to drop their mining shovels, hawking trays, or begging bowls?
Senator Mohammed Sani Musa CON has granted international scholarship to this young boy Yazid, who was interviewed in the mining site, where those victims that died were arrested.
Yazid is a 100 level student of a private medical collage here in Minna, whose ambition is to become a medical doctor.
Senator Mohammed Sani Musa has taken the responsibility to sponsor his studies abroad and ensure that his vision has become a reality for him and his family.
Nigeria continues to fail her children.
Every time something like this pops up, it breaks my heart.
There's absolutely no logical reason in the universe that boys this young, in a country as blessed as Nigeria, should have to face such hardship just to survive and then witness such injustice while hustling for their daily bread.
"We are not into illegal mining... Niger State Civil Defence Corps don't have the right to shoot at us... We are under 18, and we are not allowed to be taken inside a cell... Heat cannot kill a gold miner..."
Following the deaths of miners in Niger State custody, a witness has called for justice and a full investigation.
The UK doesn't seek confrontation.
But together with our allies, we stand ready to defend every inch of @NATO territory.
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