Trying to stay rational. Tweets are personal views.
Johannesburg
Joined December 2010
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Nothing to do with higher minimum wages and draconian employment laws that make it super unattractive to risk hiring people ?
The lead character out of an Ayn Rand novel. Expect even more people to flee New York.
Mamdani: Today, I am proud to announce a collection of essential staples that will be predictably 30% cheaper at all five of our city-run grocery stores. This core set of goods will include all fresh produce, meat, and seafood, along with 20 other essential items like cheese, milk, and bread.
Here's how it will work. Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks. The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations or sticker shock at the checkout line—not for our seniors living on fixed incomes, nor for the parents who rely on a regular supply of apple slices to keep toddler tantrums at bay.
We don’t use Nuclear more because of GreenPeace’s massive anti nuclear propaganda (well that and German prime ministers in the pocket of Russian gas companies). It’s outrageous given how Green it is compared to the alternatives.
Facts matter retweeted
Ok let’s just deal with the big numbers here so everyone can find themselves.
4 billion litres of water sure sounds like a lot, right?
Wrong.
Cape Town uses almost 400 billion litres of water annually. So this is 1% of usage, except it’s not because data centres need water in the same way a car needs water to keep cool. You seldom need to top the water up unless you have a leak - same here.
In fact if you do a back of envelope calculation you’ll find that even in a bad rainfall year you’d be able to harvest 25 million litres of water off of the roof of such a structure. In a good one that number is closer to 60 million litres - more than enough to top up the system to account for losses.
Ok but surely one third of all of Cape Town’s electricity is a lot?
Yeah, it is except nobody building a data centre is going to rely on Eskom to power sensitive data which has to have an uptime of 100% and near zero risk of loss.
Anyone building such infrastructure is going to rely on their own power generation and storage with Eskom as a backup not a primary source. This is not specific to South Africa either - globally data centres are being built in this way.
As it happens all human development uses resources and “damages” the environment depending on how you view that term. Funny thing is you never see these arguments made against public transport or sports stadiums all of which use tons of water/electricity and change the environment. It’s only private sector development which gets the ire of people like this.
We would all be well advised to remember Thomas Sowell’s quote when considering such issues ~ “there are no solutions, only trade offs”.
Cape Town just approved 2 new data centres so big, they’d cover 14 rugby fields. And Capetonians are not happy…
The data centres measure 120 000m2 of development, planned for the King Air Industria site near Cape Town International Airport.
Here's what we know so far:
• The Cape Town Municipal Planning Tribunal approved the land use application from King David Country Club, the landowner
• The plan rezones 3 erven into one General Industry zone and removes an old limit that kept floor space under 300 000m2
• A small land swap with the City (involving a substation) is part of the deal
• US company Equinix is set to build the facilities
• Estimated needs: up to 174 megawatts of electricity and 4.4 billion litres of water a year for cooling
The application didn't spell out exactly how much water or power the centres will use, or what their greenhouse gas emissions will look like. For a city that came within a hair of Day Zero water droughts and a country that's lived through years of blackouts/loadshedding, you can understand why citizens are concerned.
Some see it as essential digital infrastructure and investment for Cape Town. Others argue that approving a project this size without answers on water and energy demand is putting the cart before the horse, especially with scarce resources already under pressure. Groups opposing the approval say the public deserves those numbers before a project like this gets the go-ahead, not after.
From what I have learned, there are currently 4 large data centres proposed for Cape Town. If approved, they will consume 34% of our electricity.
There is also a 400 megawatt facility planned for Durban, proposed to be the largest in SA. This will consume 25% of Durban's electricity.
Many countries are declining to build data centres, with the USA lobbying against building them. Switzerland is building their alternative to big tech AI called Euria. It runs on renewable energy, and the heat that the servers generate is recycled into 6000 homes in Geneva.
What do you think about the newly approved data centres for Cape Town? Let me know in the comments.
Image: the site where the data centres are to be built. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
Google morphing slowly into Microsoft 🤣
it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ultra. oh agents? you do that in spark actually. no, not gemini api managed agents, that’s different. for coding use jules. unless you mean the agentic ide, that’s antigravity. no, that’s the old antigravity, download the new one. actually gemini cli is being deprecated, use antigravity cli. no the flash model is smarter than the pro model. unless you need pro. if it’s video, use flow. no, flow uses veo. no, nano banana is images. actually that’s in gemini now. unless you’re in search, then it’s ai mode. no, research is notebooklm. anyway it’s all very simple.
Sigh. It isn’t even able to turn on track changes for you. UI nowhere close to Claude word plugin either. Quite astounding how they are botching this.
We're making a big change to the Copilot experience.
Agent Mode is generally available and now the default across Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
As models become more capable, we’re bringing that power to where real work happens, right in the canvas.
The power of a spreadsheet as an example is its spatial representation of information. What sits next to what, what feeds what. Give an agent that canvas to reason over, and a single prompt can reshape the model, the bridge, and the narrative at once.
Read more: microsoft.com/en-us/microsof…
Guess my hunch was correct 🤣🤣🤣
You simply cannot make this up.
I saw @satyanadella’s post hyping Copilot in $MSFT Word, so I replicated his exact demo workflow in my own environment.
- Had ChatGPT generate an investment memo
- Opened the Copilot pane in Word
- Used the first prompt verbatim: “turn on track changes and tighten the executive summary”
Copilot happily generated a redlined version…
…inside the chat box.
The actual document? Untouched.
How is this possible? 😂
Hilarious. This is just the beginning. It’s going to be a bumpy ride for New Yorkers.
Less than the footprint of a single wind turbine. This plant would power around 500 x more homes as well. 24/7. No batteries.
Still not in South Africa though 🤷♂️
Starlink's high-speed, low-latency internet is now available in Montserrat! 🛰️🇲🇸❤️ → starlink.com/montserrat
🚨Very aggressive response to a reasonable question. Followed by a pivot of the convo to “Well there’s lots of demand for the shares”. This clip may end up being one for the ages if things go pear shaped.
How can OpenAI with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments? (Source: @BG2Pod )
Sam Altman: “First of all. We’re doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer. I just, enough. I think there's a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares. I think people who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever, that would be thrilled to buy shares. So I think we could sell your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter about this very quickly. We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value. There are not many times that I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times it's appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous OpenAI is about to go out of business. I would love to tell them they could just short the stock, and I would love to see them get burned on that. But we carefully plan. We understand where the technology, where the capability is going to grow and how the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate. We might screw it up. This is the bet that we're making and we're taking a risk along with that. A certain risk is if we don't have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue or make the models at this kind of scale.”
Satya Nadella: “And let me just say one thing as both a partner and an investor. There is not been a single business plan that I've seen from OpenAI that they've put in and not beaten it. So in some sense, this is the one place where in terms of their growth and just even the business, it's been unbelievable execution, quite frankly. I mean, obviously, OpenAI, everyone talks about all the success and the usage and what have you. But even I'd say all up, the business execution has been just pretty unbelievable.”
Facts matter retweeted
Argentina under Javier Milei in 2025:
GDP growth 5.5%, one of the fastest in the world
Inflation down from 211% to 32%
Poverty rate down from 42% to 32%
Sorry Comrades „economists“, free market works, and it works really fast.
Congratulations @JMilei
