Justin Stanford

@haroonmeer @Replit Replit with agent 4 is so good

My 9 year old vibed a @Replit app that we now use to track our weekly padel matches. With individual logins, one side submits scores and the other approves it. So much of this makes my head spin. She has no idea (or care) about its language/servers/architecture but.. it’s live on the internet, deployed with a domain and usable. She doesn’t know how we used to provision servers and configure the db and.. but also, I wonder if that will be necessary knowledge for her again..

Cape Town BNPL start-up Happy Pay raises R86-million in seed funding techcentral.co.za/cape-town-bnpl…

VALR is your global partner for institutional-grade crypto asset services. We have the privilege of serving nearly 2,000 corporate and institutional clients now. We've built infrastructure to help banks, asset managers, remittance providers, fintechs, insurers, and other institutions seamlessly enter the world of internet-native digital assets (several of the largest financial institutions in Africa are integrating with us now). Please get in touch so we can serve you. The world (of finance) is changing so fast and I've never been more excited about what we're building for our customers and the world. Join us. valr.com/en/business

@chamath Everyone in South Africa that can afford it is installing home solar power systems. By 2025 there was ~7 GW of rooftop PV capacity, around 5% of national supply. It has grown 400% since 2021. Demand for grid electricity continues to trend down. techcentral.co.za/rooftop-solar-…

China added more solar capacity in 2025 than America has installed in its entire history. That's the most important energy chart you'll see today. And 2025 was also the first year when small-scale distributed solar pulled in more investments than utility-scale solar farms globally. Considering that the U.S. has hundreds of GW stuck waiting for grid connections, the conditions are aligned to start putting solar + storage on every American home. My research team put together a Deep Dive on solar, if you want the full breakdown. Here’s the link: chamath.substack.com/p/solar-deep-d…

I did a 40 hr and then a 70 hr social media fast. I’ve come to believe that social media is pollution.  Not a vice or guilty pleasure. It’s closer to water toxins, air pollution and microplastics. Social media has been on my mind because I can feel how bad it is for me. For my health and agency. I am a professional rejuvenation athlete. For five years, I’ve engineered my life around biological renewal and the elimination of decay. After hundreds of experiments across food, sleep, exercise, therapies, and toxins, I’ve developed both data and intuition about what strengthens or degrades my system. I can viscerally feel that social media is bad for me.  It erodes my autonomy and increases cognitive entropy. Like other toxins, it accumulates. You can’t unsee or unfeel what you’ve consumed. It settles into mental tissue like heavy metals, producing chronic low-grade inflammation.  Evidence suggests even after you stop scrolling, attentional fragmentation and emotional priming persist. Your thoughts begin to mirror the algorithm’s incentives. Independent cognition quietly erodes and you don’t notice the loss. Time away and getting lost in deep focus is the only remedy. When something erodes your agency, the rational response is elimination. The problem is, elimination isn’t realistic. “Just put the phone down” is as practical as telling someone in 19th century London to stop breathing coal smoke. You need to know what’s happening in the world, be in touch with your friends and be part of the tribe. That necessity is what allows companies to harvest your emotions, intellect and time for their profit. You are their raw material they exploit. Then in an ironic twist, the system gets you to exploit yourself by engineering an environment where it takes more effort to stop than to continue scrolling.  Pollution exposure by default. What specifically makes social media toxic is that value and poison are inseparable by design.  You go to hear from friends and you leave an hour later absorbed in outrage that serves no biological interest of yours. The water is real. The lead is in the pipes. The performance metrics (likes, views, etc.) bleed you of independent thought. They create quantified social proof, triggering ancient hierarchy reflexes. You no longer evaluate signal from noise; the engagement metrics do it for you. Like all toxins, the damage is cumulative. We live inside the exposure long enough that it feels normal.  The 40 and 70 hour social media fasts did that for me. Gave me just enough separation to feel and diagnose the poison. The obviousness of it feels like when I went to India and saw their humanitarian crisis of air pollution which no one sees anymore. So what do we do? Neither platforms nor individuals are likely to change on their own. AI may be the countermeasure. An AI layer between you and the feed. Filtering rage, removing vanity metrics and translating sensationalism into calm, factual language. Preserving signal and eliminating noise. I want social media to become a longevity intervention, not a longevity threat. I never want to see the raw feed. I want an AI agent to read it for me, strip the engagement metrics that hijack my judgment, filter the rage, and return only what I actually came for. Every generation faces its pollutants. When cholera spread through London's water, the answer wasn't telling people to drink less. It was building filtration. The same logic applies here. Best next move is to design the filter to avoid being the raw material.

The covers come off @FlyCloudline - very cool! supersport.com/rugby/news/dd8…

Introducing a simpler way to invest in crypto on VALR. Meet the VALR10 Crypto Bundle. With one tap, get instant diversification to the top 10 crypto assets on VALR by market cap.

We are pleased to announce the listing of SPYx, enabling our users to gain price exposure to the SP500 Trade now: valr.com/en/exchange/SP…

SA’s VALR completes Proof of Reserves audit by blockchain security firm Hacken disruptafrica.com/2025/10/20/sas…

Just paid my @DStv bill with @VALRdotcom pay. Crypto payments are now all around you. Very soon, nearly all QR code payment types will be supported by VALR.

SA’s VALR pioneerings tokenised real-world assets in Africa disruptafrica.com/2025/07/25/sas…

Ever clicked a CAPTCHA without thinking? 🤔 It could be a trap. Fake ones like ClickFix spread malware, steal data & install ransomware. Stay alert: bit.ly/3GY41Uf

Leading South African Exchange🇿🇦, @VALRdotcom, and @moonpay Announce Integration to Enhance Global Crypto Access This partnership enables VALR to support 34 fiat currencies, including: * KES (Kenyan Shilling)🇰🇪 * NGN (Nigerian Naira)🇳🇬 among others. bitcoinke.io/2025/06/valr-a…

My annual letter just dropped… 2024 edition! -- Returns and Performance Summary -- Fed Loses Influence Over Markets -- AI Becomes Our Sputnik Moment -- President Trump's Comeback -- Rise of New Media -- Portfolio Update Link: chamath.substack.com/p/2024-annual-…

Nice to see @4DiCapital portfolio company Wasoko included on the Soonicorn list..!

I am always surprised to see that some people still believe in LLMs producing AGI/ASI, and it being around the corner. The past two years have been the first time I have ever been called a pessimist (I disagree)! But I expect everyone to mostly agree within 12–24 months. People will downplay how much they believed in god-like AI. They will move the goalposts and say that what they meant was something like “the AI can do most mindless tasks on the computer.” They will use mindless paper-shuffling tasks as examples. AGI is possible, and future AI models will be wonderfully great. Products that change how everyone in the world is living their lives are going to be built. I am very optimistic that we are going to have multiple iPhone moments—the kind of products that rewrite history. But it won’t be sentient LLMs.

SA’s Sensor Networks secures landmark partnership with global geyser giant Ariston disruptafrica.com/2025/03/10/sas…

Black Friday is here! 🛍️ Avoid social media shopping scams with tips to stay safe. Read more: itnewsafrica.com/2024/11/how-to… #BlackFriday #Cybersecurity #ESET

1 million users - a very exciting milestone for VALR! Will write a longer thread about this soon...

Happy Pay reaches 150,000 users, raises R32 million in funding South African fintech company Happy Pay has raised $1.8 million (R32 million) in pre-seed funding, it announced. Happy Pay specialises in buy-now-pay-later solutions. mybroadband.co.za/news/banking/5…