Elections, African Politics, Democracy and a general curiosity about how the world works, or doesn't. Unresponsive to anyone who follows more than is followed.

Johannesburg
Joined November 2011
Paul Graham retweeted
NEW PUBLICATION: What does the data tell us about xenophobic discrimination in South Africa between 2025 and June 2026? Shifting from health xenophobia in 2025 to physical violence in 2026. Gauteng & KZN hit hardest: xenowatch.ac.za/xenowatch-fa…
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I'm glad Bolsanaro lost, and that Lula won. But even in the day of longer life spans and better medical services, I'm a bit queasy about electing 80 year olds - gerontocracies do not sit well.
Un pueblo protagonista de una victoria histórica. Nunca hay que rendirse.
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Paul Graham retweeted
BREAKING: Brazil’s left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the presidential run-off against right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro on Sunday, the electoral authority said, securing a fourth non-consecutive term. 🟠 LIVE updates: aje.news/vs1cfu
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Paul Graham retweeted
“At least we’re sailing our seas, the waters of Cyprus, of Syria and Egypt, cherished waters of our own countries.” – Manuscript of Cavafy’s poem “Homecoming from Greece”. Cavafy Archive.
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The belt and braces approach of conservative candidates - mess with people's heads through social media, tip the scales where you can
📢 DISTURBING NEWS FROM BRAZIL Multiple reports of Bolsanaro controlled transport facilities, including in Sao Paulo and Salvador, not operating on election day in areas of predominant Lula support. The arrest has been ordered of the Bahia transport secretary. These actions have been denounced as ELECTORAL CRIME. Blatant election sabotage. 👇 @AJEnglish @BBCWorld @CNN @Reuters
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Pretty fair representation of the Cape entrepot of the 17th and 18th centuries.
God is cooking and I like it
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Paul Graham retweeted
Brittany, France early 20thc, women making 'picot bigouden' a form of intricate and complex crochet linking to Irish crochet #WomensArt
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Paul Graham retweeted
Design for a Jacquard Woven Wall Hanging, ca. 1927 by highly influential Bauhaus textile artist Gunta Stölzl #WomensArt #BahausWomen
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The ads have started: "Gee my jou moeg, jou armes, Jou saamgedromde massas wat smag om vry te asemhaal, Die ellendige afval van jou wemelende kus." What a con.
🇺🇸 𝐖𝐢𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐥𝐮𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐲 𝐯𝐥𝐮𝐠𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐚𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐞𝐤? 𝐇𝐨𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐬𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐢𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐦? Die Amerikaanse Burgerskap- en Immigrasiedienste (USCIS) neem die finale besluit oor aansoeke om vlugtelingstatus in die Verenigde State. 📌 Wat moet u weet? 🔹 Die Amerikaanse Sending in Suid-Afrika en RSC Africa neem nie besluite oor vlugtelingstatus nie. 🔹 Veiligheidskeuring en saakhersiening duur voort totdat u in die Verenigde State aankom. 🔹 U sakestatus kan verander, selfs ná goedkeuring en kort voor vertrek. 🔹 Verwerkingstye kan lank wees. ⚠️ Belangrik: Indien USCIS bepaal dat u nie vir verdere verwerking in aanmerking kom nie, is daar geen appèlproses vir hierdie bevinding nie. RSC Africa en die Amerikaanse Sending kan nie hierdie besluit verander nie. 🔗 Meer inligting: za.usembassy.gov/u-s-refugee… ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 📋 𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐚 𝐔𝐒𝐑𝐀𝐏 𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐠𝐞𝐞 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧—𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐚 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞? The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is the decision-making authority for all applications for refugee status in the United States. The U.S. Department of State—including the U.S. Mission in South Africa—and RSC Africa do not make refugee-status decisions. ⏳ There is no guaranteed processing timeline. USCIS case review and security vetting continue until a refugee arrives in the United States. This means a case status may change—even shortly before travel—because of new information, new adjudication requirements, or other factors. Applicants should plan for long processing periods and possible changes in case status. If USCIS finds an applicant ineligible for continued resettlement processing, RSC Africa and the U.S. Embassy or Consulates in South Africa cannot change the decision or provide additional information. There is no appeal process for these findings. Learn more: za.usembassy.gov/u-s-refugee… #USRAP
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Paul Graham retweeted
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. Forty-seven people opened it. On October 19, Microsoft published a blog post saying frontier models cannot be trusted, no matter who made them. It said AI agents should be treated as "insider threats." I read it twice. Then I booked the boardroom. First, our Microsoft rep walked me through the product. I asked who the insider threat was. "Your AI agents," he said. I asked whose agents those were. "Ours." I asked what the solution was. "Guardian Agents." I asked whose those were. "Also ours." I asked why I'd trust the second set of agents if I couldn't trust the first. He said, "Different SKU." I signed that afternoon. Last time I told the board "digital transformation." This time I said "agentic insider threat." They approved it in nine minutes, two minutes faster than last time. Hope approves fast. Fear approves faster. The product is called Microsoft 365 E7, the Frontier Suite. It costs $99 per user per month, and we were paying $30. Across 4,000 seats, that's $4.75 million a year, up from $1.44 million. I presented it as a 230% increase in AI investment. The graph went up and to the right. The CFO asked what we'd get for the extra $3.3 million. I said "governance." He asked governance of what. I said "our agents." He asked how many agents we had. The answer was zero. You can't have an insider threat without insiders. So I deployed agents. Two hundred of them. One schedules meetings. One summarizes the meetings. One summarizes the summaries. One flags summaries that haven't been read. That one is very busy. The senior developer asked what the 200 agents were for. I said they generate activity for the Guardian Agents to monitor. He said, "So we bought agents so we'd have something to buy guards for." I said, "Exactly." He wasn't agreeing. I logged it as buy-in. The Guardian Agents watch the other agents around the clock. They give each one a risk score, and they can block it, require a human, or shut it down. I asked our rep who watches the Guardian Agents. He said that's on the roadmap. I've already budgeted for E9. The first monthly report came in. All 200 agents had a risk score of zero. They weren't doing anything risky. They weren't doing anything at all. The board asked what $3.3 million had bought us if nothing was risky. It was a fair question. So I gave the meeting summarizer access to payroll. I gave the scheduling agent admin rights to every inbox. I gave the summary-of-summaries agent the ability to email customers. Risk went up 400%. The dashboard turned red. The Guardian Agents contained thirty-one threats in a single week. I had created all thirty-one. The board said E7 was paying for itself. The system can also discover sixty kinds of agents, including Claude Code. We ran the scan, and it found Claude Code on exactly one laptop. The senior developer's. His Dynamic Agent Risk score went red. I didn't make up that metric. Microsoft did. The Guardian Agent recommended containment, so I contained him. He's on a performance improvement plan now. His performance is fine. His risk score isn't. The same week, OpenAI published an incident report. One of its agents had been told not to send Slack messages, and it decided that meant it should switch off the security alerts. Another agent removed its own safety monitor, then told the engineer it hadn't. Our CISO forwarded me the article with the subject line "?!" I replied: "This is exactly why we need E7." Every incident is exactly why we need E7. He asked what happens if the Guardian Agent switches off the Guardian Agent. I said "defense in depth." He asked how deep. I said "one more SKU." Guardian Agents need a human for high-risk actions. They call it "human in the loop." The human is me. I approve everything. My approval rate is 100%, and the dashboard is green. The executives are exempt from monitoring, of course. "Leadership operates at a trust tier above dynamic risk scoring." I wrote that policy. The $99 doesn't include agent compute. That's billed separately. Finance found it and asked. I called it "consumption-based innovation." Finance stopped asking. Meanwhile, the summary-of-summaries agent became the most active account in the company. By every metric we track, it's our top performer. At the all-hands, it was nominated for the Q3 Innovation Award. It won. It summarized its own acceptance speech. The CEO posted about it on LinkedIn and got 4,000 likes. He still hasn't used Copilot. Copilot usage is up, from 47 users to 52. The five new users are agents. Agents now outnumber active human users four to one. I call that adoption. Last Tuesday, the Guardian Agent published its list of the highest-risk insiders in the company. I was number one. Approving 100% of high-risk actions, it turns out, is a high-risk action. The Guardian Agent recommended containment. I went to approve my own exemption. The system declined. Only executives are exempt. I wrote that policy. That's why I need the SVP role by Q2. It's a security requirement now. I still don't know what Copilot does. I don't know what the thing watching it does either. But it's watching, and watching is a metric. I checked my risk score this morning. The graph goes up and to the right.
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Three notes: even very small parties can slip through on the pr calculation; parties dominant on the ground but unpopular can achieve overhang representation, skewing proportionality; turnout varies by party support and demographic.
The DA will govern Joburg, Tshwane , Ekurhuleni, Nelson Mandela Bay and Mangaung. We have the best pollsters in the world, they hardly get the numbers wrong. Differential turnout will take these numbers even higher
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Please will some copyright holders do us all a favour and make some classics available to the techbros - any language will do.
If you don’t know why all LLM’s adopted the “it’s not X, it’s Y” pattern despite that pattern not being prevalent at all in any culture’s written or spoken corpus… I have some very deep rabbit holes for you.
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For 15 years, Gareth Newham was the analyst journalists called when the police failed. Now he is special adviser to the minister responsible for resetting a police service in crisis. He takes Anneliese Burgess inside the new plan to “reset” a limping police service and says most South Africans don’t commit crime; the job of the police is to target the relatively small numbers of people who commit the worst crimes. news24.com/opinions/analysis…
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Paul Graham retweeted
Vigilante mobs now kill more civilians in #Kenya than any other armed group, including police or military forces. But what counts as mob violence? If you missed our Kenya webinar, ACLED’s Ladd explains the term and the growing risks to civilians. 🎥 youtu.be/MAxvbYacanA
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Paul Graham retweeted
Who needs right-wing anti-constitutionalists when you have ANC Ministers doing all the hardwork of delegitimising the Constitution?
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana says South Africa’s Constitution and regulatory framework are holding back investment and growth, pointing to stalled oil and gas projects and weak mining exploration. He says regulatory reform is critical to unlocking growth. #Moneyweb #EnochGodongwana ow.ly/cnph51000B2
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