Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

My book, A Blow to the Head, in which I reflect on my own experience of the violence of white supremacy and the complexities of repair, is on the Longlist for the #Canex Prize for publishing in Africa.

What a surprise, and what an amazing honour!

✅

Time flies. I remember Zohran as a little boy with tousled curls, cute as a button, the pride and joy of Mahmood and Mira. They must be beaming

Of soos ons in Afrikaans sê, 'n stervis.

Well it totally is 🦆🦆🦆

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Congratulations!

S.F. author temporarily banned on Facebook after writing about L.A. riots San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit’s Facebook page was temporarily shut down after she posted an essay on the Los Angeles protests.

Nice look for you, Facebook! Thanks, hometown paper! And more thanks to the people who advocated for the "permanently disabled" status of my account there to be overturned. www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen...

Top Google exec says AI will rival humans in just 5 years and predicts we’ll 'colonize the galaxy' in 2030—but he draws the line at robot nurses 2030 will be “an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy,” Google DeepMind CEO says. Bill Gates and Marc Benioff have shared similar predictions.

Presumably he knows that Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away, so "travel to the stars by 2030" is close to being literally impossible. So he's speaking metaphorically - what's it a metaphor for?
fortune.com/2025/06/06/g...

Tis ever so, during crackdowns.

The 'revolution' were actually monarchists until the last moment, wanting the King to overrule parliament. Check it out.

ratio'd

New Zimbabwe permit court showdown looming At the heart of the matter is the question of whether the minister or Parliament can change the status of the permit

ZEP holders have won another court victory against the Minister of Home Affairs, but their legal battle to stay in South Africa is far from over.

Read groundup.org.za/article/new-... by Tania Broughton

I worry that recommendation algorithms may be getting too good.

Read the article. The books are not from them, the tool is

Next: we initiate the people of Manchester into the mysteries of football

True of much of Marxism, poststructuralism and mainstream economics. Also, according Sabine Hossenfelder, theoretical physics. The interesting work is often at the margins, with the people working between traditions, at the frontiers of disagreement.

So coal has been replaced mostly by other fossil fuels?

What's the other 51%?

Yes. A prescient film.

I have seen it. I always thought it was a perfect metaphor for the Reagan presidency

who, ronald reagan?

For Millie, the meaning of life is chicken bones scavenged from a building site. Tastier than any food offered by her human.

Zapiro

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I will be canceling my @backlisted.bsky.social subscription until I hear this has been sorted out

Welcome back

Mr Macron always wants to geopolitics

Fact-checking the half-truths and duplicity in Ramaphosa's newsletter President Cyril Ramaphosa is in the habit of addressing his ‘fellow South Africans’ through a virtual newsletter. The latest edition glosses over a plethora of ills.

Fact-checking the inaccuracies, half-truths and duplicity in the latest Ramaphosa presidential newsletter: www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/...

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