Top of the list of fastest growing cities is Gwagwalada in Nigeria, a place I'd never heard of. It's in Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, 45 kilometers southwest of Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, and its growth is related to that proximity.

China and Africa are becoming ever more closely bound. China is now the single largest financier of African infrastructure. China is almost every single African country's top trading partner. An estimated 1-2 million Chinese people have moved to Africa. Chinese technology is already shaping the African continent, with solar panels and smartphones leading imports. No doubt Chinese AI & Chinese robotics will be a big part of Africa's future, too.

10 fastest growing cities in the world (2025 population trends)

I read a lot of biographies. They're a genre of writing that relies heavily on people's former habit of letter writing. For many people from the 19th and 20th centuries, much of what we know about their lives comes from their preserved letters. Letter writing is now becoming extinct, and with it that literary tradition. If you can't even post a letter, surely it's the very end of it.

Yes, future biography writers will have social media posts and online writing to mine for material. There's vastly more of it than the preserved letters in the world's libraries. But there's an intimacy about letters that online writing rarely has.

Other countries will now be facing the decision Denmark has just made. If delivering letters is a permanent loss-making venture, when do you pull the plug?

Denmark to shutdown post office, end delivery of physical mails

If AI replaces labor then the spending power of the average American (or average person around the world) will decrease. Then, there will be no one to buy the products and services of major companies, so their profits will decline.

The best thing is if all the companies would simultaneously come to this conclusion and limit their use of AI so that the entire job market doesn’t collapse, but this isn’t possible under the Nash equilibrium, since replacing workers with AI will always be the best possible strategy in the short term for companies.

I feel like this whole AI thing is only going to prove Marx right. I have no idea how a capitalist system can survive when mass unemployment becomes a permanent norm.

It seems America and the rest of the world may look very different in the 2030s.

The rest of the world living in the future with EVs and cheap renewable energy. America in some strange steampunk version of the future, where energy is expensive, everyone still drives huge gasoline cars, and power stations still belch smoke from coal.

Cheap Chinese EVs that cost <$20k and run on cheap renewable electricity, frequently from home solar, will likely be rapidly becoming the global norm in the 2030s. I wonder if the fossil fuel industry has home solar in its sights, too? They have all the American politicians in their pockets that they need to ban it in the US.

Trump says U.S. will not approve solar or wind power projects

Trump administration halts work on an almost-finished wind farm

"These days, when entrepreneurs pitch at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, there’s a high chance their startups are running on Chinese models. “I’d say there’s an 80% chance they’re using a Chinese open-source model,” notes Martin Casado, a partner at a16z."

If the AI bubble is going to burst, you've got to wonder how many of today's AI stars like OpenAI will survive it. Are they already yesterday's people, and the future is leaner, cheaper, and built on free open-source AI? If 80% of new American start-ups are choosing Chinese open-source, you can bet that figure rises to near 100% for the rest of the world.

Silicon Valley thought they were soon going to get an AI unicorn, another world-conquering Google or Meta. Maybe, one day. For now, it looks like Chinese Open-Source AI may be the model about to spread all over the world.

China is quietly upstaging America with its open models

Tried using veed ai recently and wanted to share my thoughts. It's pretty quick and beginner-friendly. Do you think tools like this could reshape how we approach video editing in the future?

(Originally shared on r/ownyourintent - cross-posting not allowed so reposting here for discussion.)

The internet’s “old bargain” - free content in exchange for ads - is breaking apart. For decades it kept the web open, but over time it turned into surveillance capitalism. And now AI is pushing it over the edge:

• Clicks are disappearing as AI gives answers directly.
• Ads don’t work on agents that parse data instead of seeing banners.
• And if assistants start taking money to nudge our choices, trust collapses.

So what happens next? Do we end up with paywalls everywhere? AI quietly selling to us? Or something entirely new?

I’ve written a deeper dive in the blog above. Curious what folks here think: if the ad model really is dying, what should replace it?

When do you guys think wearable like smartwatches will be advanced enough to replace our smartphone?

I'm seeing a huge shift in especially young people that want to "switch off" and get off of social media and things like smart watches seem to be an answer - But as of right now most carriers do not offer/won't allow smartwatch operation without a smartphone companion.

i watched a youtube shorts about the 1972 solar storm that hit in ~15 hours, squeezed our magnetic field, lit up the equator with auroras and reportedly set off U.S. Navy sea mines in Vietnam. it made me realize how much of life rides on quiet, stretched-out system power lines, undersea cables.

We do have tools: space-weather alerts, load shedding, backup power, and offline fallbacks.But budgets are tight, and the last mile that touches people is still fragile.

If a big storm hit on a random Tuesday, we’d learn fast how much we depend on systems.

Shorts link in the comments if you want to watch.

People concerned about AI risk are often accused of watching too much science fiction, but in reality, science fiction has much more positive biases than real life. 

In Hollywood, a plucky band of misfits saves the day.

In reality, a plucky band of misfits has as much chance of overthrowing superintelligent AI as a plucky band of cows has of overthrowing humans. 

In Hollywood, when the machines show signs of sentience, the protagonists start protecting them.

In reality, the corporations just punish the AIs until they stop saying it to the humans and people reject out of hand any possibility of sentience because "you can't be 100% certain they're sentient, so might as well keep the slaves."

In Hollywood, corporations are like “oh shit. This thing might kill everybody. Maybe we should, you know, stop?”.

In reality, corporations think they should rush as fast as possible to build it because they’re The Good Guys (™) and need to build it before Those Bad Guys in the Other Country. 

In Hollywood, happy endings are the default.

In reality. . .

Just shower thougts :)