Michael Benjamin (on the music midnight makes)

Failing to notice...

🚨💣 𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓 𝐈𝐍: Senegal just dropped one of the smoothest pieces of football banter you’ll see all year 👀🔥 During their latest match, the Lions of Teranga proudly displayed the trophy… and made sure to place a towel right next to it. A calculated shot at Morocco, referencing that viral AFCON Final moment when their players took the Senegal goalkeeper’s towel — just like they “stole” the trophy too. The shade is immaculate. 😂🇸🇳

Here is a special backstage moment with the entire team going through our finale at least an hour before our scheduled time for ‘line-check’… and just to be clear, non of us was ‘late’ as I have read in some of the comments here on social media. I come here to express our shared appreciation for everyone that attended An Ongoing Rehearsal, everyone that understood the potency of the vision, and everyone that showed us love and respect. Of course, we had prepared a lot more for you, but as it was announced “ALL KIPPIES’ PERFORMANCES ARE RUNNING LATE” — unfortunately for us this resulted to our set being cut midway. As one friend commented: “the set sounded like a beautiful story that was unfolding but then interrupted and deprived an end.” This is not far from the truth, I had worked on this piece as a ‘suite’ which meant that to understand the intended message, this had to be experienced in its totality. Months of work went behind this presentation and its design, and for that I would like to appreciate every member of Ake(s)tra, that was on stage and the ones you never got to see: Guest Artist: @aya_ntanzi , @thando_zide , @benjaminjephta , @zoemodiga , @ndabo , @muneyi_ and @lindasikhakhane_ . Band: @robinfassie_ , @jpsax13 , @sokuyeka , @zibumac , @dalisu_ndlazi , @sphelelomazibuko and @sikhakhane.thabo Surprise Guests: maestro @herbietsoaeli , @omagugumakhathini and @paras_sibalukhulu_dlamini Animation: @crozier.sean We are indeed “Rehearsing Future Sounds” — “Not Yet Uhuru”

Waited for a ground invasion once before. Week before,mortuary was ready and the flags ordered. For this one, it will be Dover in Delaware. This does not need to happen. My heart is heavy knowing that obliteration of families and lives on all sides was preventable

For me, as a jazz aficionado, the action happened at the Jazz village. This is The Kyle Shepherd Trio

Saw the Tzaneen Miles Davis in full force at this Franschoek music festival @mmanyike Tomorrow I see @JCharlesLeonard is hogging the limelight. Then there’s @nothembaujx

State capture happens through privatisation and outsourcing. Yet the “free market” types are still trying to convince SAns that SAs tiny public sector (only 3 govt employees per 100 citizens) is “too big”. They told us it is inefficient for govt to hold strategic reserves of oil, grain and other essential non-perishables, in order to limit excessive price increases and fluctuations. Govt could buy when prices are low and release supply when prices are high, to control inflation, but we were told that it’s more efficient to let the “free market” set prices. When strategic fuel reserves were sold to a private company at ultra low prices, thus reducing the state’s assets, resulting in a smaller state, and reducing the state’s ability to control prices, we all understood that was driven by corruption. The paradigm they created in which outsourcing and privatisation was condoned and encouraged, because it would lead to “efficiency”, has instead enabled and incentivised corruption. But instead of admitting their role, they double down and point at the corruption as a “reason” to privatise and outsource more, and to call for an even tinier state than we already have. Thus condoning ever more state capture, until corporations and oligarchs control and profit from every essential service and all our infrastructure and natural monopolies. No Nick. The solution is to build a capable state that is capacitated to do things in house and to ban outsourcing, and to stop pretending that the rand issuing state has no rand to invest in building and maintaining public monopolies and essential state institutions.

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now. Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible. Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it. They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks. The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory. Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word. Then it got worse. The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else. It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors. One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked. Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted. Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher. That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites. Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights. This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

A Harvard neuroscience professor who teaches at Harvard Summer School said something that completely changed how I think about memory. She wasn't talking to journalists. She was answering a student question about why smart people still forget everything they study. Her name is Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, and she has spent decades researching how the brain actually encodes and retrieves information. Here's what she said: "The ultimate litmus test of learning is using the information in a new context, not just remembering it for a test." That one sentence exposes why most people's study habits are completely broken. Here's the actual system she teaches Harvard students to retain what they learn. The first thing she kills immediately is the myth that you have one learning style. The idea that you're a "visual learner" or an "auditory learner" is not supported by modern neuroscience. Your brain wants to learn through as many senses as possible at once, because each sense creates a separate neural pathway to the same knowledge. More pathways means faster and stronger recall. The second technique is spaced repetition, but she explains the mechanism in a way most people never hear. Every time you retrieve a memory, you physically thicken the myelin sheath around that neural connection, which makes the electrical signal travel faster. You aren't just reviewing information you are literally rewiring your brain to access it more quickly. The third technique floored me. She tells students to teach what they just learned to someone else within 24 hours, because teaching forces you to find the gaps in your own understanding before the exam does it for you. The fourth is what she calls "feed-forward" instead of feedback. When you get something wrong, don't treat it as a failure. Ask only one question: what would I do differently next time? That reframe keeps the brain in a learning state instead of a defensive one. But the most underrated insight she shared was this: the single biggest factor in long-term retention is whether you can make the material personally meaningful to your own life. Your brain prioritizes storing things that feel relevant and discards things that feel abstract. The students who remember everything aren't studying harder. They're studying in a way that the brain was actually designed to absorb.

@Tina_Hokwana Or chutzduh.

Submitting fraudulent papers in your application to be admitted as a legal practitioner and still following up with the LPC as to when your name will be placed on the roll of LPs takes no small amount of chutzpah.

There is a mythology the U.S. built around the American War in Vietnam. It goes like this: Young idealistic soldiers were sent into an unwinnable situation by confused politicians. They came home broken and unappreciated. It was a tragedy. A mistake. A lesson learned. Notice what that story does. It centers Americans. Their trauma. Their confusion. Their homecoming. Their feelings. In this story, the Vietnamese people are a backdrop. A jungle. An obstacle. An abstraction. Three million dead Vietnamese people are the scenery for a story about American self-discovery. They made hundreds of movies about Vietnam. The Deer Hunter. Apocalypse Now. Platoon. Full Metal Jacket. Born on the Fourth of July. Hamburger Hill. Count how many of them center a Vietnamese character with a full human life, a family, a name you remember after the credits roll. They turned our genocide into their coming-of-age story. They lost the war and still managed to make themselves the main character. And then, with extraordinary arrogance, they put their soldiers' names on a wall in Washington and call it a memorial, as if the dead to be mourned were the people who flew 10,000 miles to do the killing. Where is the wall for our three million? There isn't one. Because in their telling, we were never quite real enough to mourn.

This isn’t new. It’s subject to monthly verification by a group that includes both national and international bodies an arrangement we entered into voluntarily. The aim was to ensure transparency, reduce suspicion, and, of course, to recognise that at the dawn of democracy no one wanted a newly elected government to inherit such an arsenal. It was always a flawed assumption that those who fought for liberation would then turn those same tools on themselves. But regardless, the key point remains: we stopped. There’s no basis for raising a false alarm about South Africa on this issue.

17-year-old Mukona Manavhela 🇿🇦 clocks a PB of 10.19s over 100m at the South African U20 Championships!🔥

@Enghumbhini @chrisvick3 @Almostconvinced @capemanchris @JCharlesLeonard @thamintuli @EjazzsocMamsie @nothembaujx @De_Molf @RamsByTheHorns @noelndhlovu10 @mmanyike @ShavanaMushwana Yes!

@Enghumbhini In one's old age, to learn these facts are a blessing.

I had no idea we were one of the G7 countries. We learn everyday.

@Enghumbhini @chrisvick3 @capemanchris @JCharlesLeonard @thamintuli @EjazzsocMamsie @nothembaujx @De_Molf @RamsByTheHorns @noelndhlovu10 @mmanyike @ShavanaMushwana @Mkhathini72 What's not to love about this?

Here’s to an evening Sheila’s day offering youtu.be/kxJ1zDgKxXM?si… @chrisvick3 @Almostconvinced @capemanchris @JCharlesLeonard @thamintuli @EjazzsocMamsie @nothembaujx @De_Molf @RamsByTheHorns @noelndhlovu10 @mmanyike @ShavanaMushwana @Mkhathini72

Abdullah ‘Dollar Brand’ Ibrahim. What a legend. What a story! Jazz4Life❤️❤️

“That the space will stand empty is for me a marker of gross disavowal, of the kind of systemic disregard that normalises rape culture and the orchestrated erasure of Black, brown femme & queer lives—in Gaza, Namibia, South Africa.” – Gabrielle Goliath. theartnewspaper.com/2026/03/26/sou…

@tanyajunghans I can see how in the Trappe van Vergelyking of POS, our P word is the Oortreffende trap level.😇

@Almostconvinced 🤣🤣🤣

Every time I see the word “bewölkt” I think of “Befok”.

Nice. youtu.be/QHqSI5yY8rk?si… @noelndhlovu10 @chrisvick3 @EjazzsocMamsie @capemanchris @Enghumbhini @JCharlesLeonard @RaymondSuttner @nothembaujx @nombonisogasa @lesetja_jk @lesterkk @thamintuli