Michael John Duys

The best way to learn to do a thing is to do the thing.

Having just been in a number of different countries over the past 5 weeks, among them the UK, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece and Spain, it’s amazing how entirely different the lived experience is, walking the streets, meeting and talking to locals, from some of their political leaders, their parties and policies. Just nice, warm and lovely people all going about their day with genuine goodwill and warmth to all, versus certain polarising beliefs and ideologies peddled among the political class. Not sure why this chasm exists but it begs the question about politicians being elected officials, versus being representative of the true zeitgeist and hopes of a nation?

@abelmike Lovely!

32 years between these 2 pics. A lifetime ago. As a great friend of mine observed the other day (in kinder words) when it comes to the ageing process, Sara is red wine, and I’m white wine 🫣🤣 Putting that aside (assuming I can) what struck me most about this innocent pic, taken in 1994, it was the birth of our new democracy in South Africa, and we were young and newly in love (still are TG 🙏). But we had no idea what lay ahead for our country, and certainly not our relationship. A few years later, Sara became an MD’s wife at just 25 and I was 32. Outrageously young to have all that responsibility, not just to be leading a large agency that needed a turnaround strategy, but also to have been leading the most famous advertising account in the country for the previous 5 years. So when I looked at this pic, it took me back to knowing how little we knew then. About each other, about our futures, about where South African was heading and everything in between. Only 2 things guided us. Hope and Faith 🙏🙏 Both served us incredibly well. Wouldn’t have changed a thing ❤️ Don’t look for certainty as it’s never on offer. Be guided by Hope and by Faith, and then work really hard at ensuring they deliver.

🇪🇺🇺🇸 Europe must not rearm America. 1. Europe’s rearmament already supports nearly 200,000 American jobs. 2. Nearly 48% of Europe’s major arms imports come from the US. Washington’s strategy is to make Europe spend more while preventing it from pursuing an independent foreign policy. Europe must use its new defence budgets to build European weapons, European supply chains and European strategic independence. The EU and the UK form the world’s second-largest economy. A continent of this size has no excuse for military dependence.

🇪🇺Europe is choosing economic decline to protect obsolete national regulations. Only 15.7% of Draghi’s 383 competitiveness recommendations have been fully implemented. Another 41.3% have advanced only partially. The insistence of national governments on retaining control over services regulation is a disgrace that ultimately works against their own citizens. The most important reforms remain incomplete, especially services integration, which could add around 0.3 percentage points to Europe’s annual GDP growth A genuine services union would help Europe close its financial and competitiveness gap with the US Europe will continue losing ground in productivity, finance, technology and GDP while national governments preserve outdated regulatory barriers.

Germany has launched one of the world's best open-source AI models. Soofi S, made by the Soofi consortium, is a 30B parameter model fully trained in Europe and tops the ranking for open-source AI. Huge moment for Europe, and finally some competition for Chinese open-source AI.

"These children are getting to grow up – it’s truly awesome": Four children with terminal brain cancer have been saved by an experimental cell therapy. #Echobox=1784052112-4" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">newscientist.com/article/253363…

Even the most time-sensitive items can usually wait 60 minutes, and by make something, I mean anything. You just need to feel like you’ve pushed a millimeter ahead in some creative direction. The psychological difference between zero acts of creation and one act of creation, no matter how small, is impossible to overstate. If you’re lucky, sometimes that one idea, one sentence, or one shitty first draft can turn into something bigger. But the point is to be able to say to yourself, even for five minutes, “Hark! I am a creator, not just a janitor of bullshit! Here is proof that I can—and will!—do more than just manage minutiae… ” We all spend time on the struggle bus. At the very least, this mantra has helped me to find a window seat when it’s my turn. When in doubt, try it out: make before you manage.

Death be not proud 🥹, Rest in perfect peace Liqobo🙏🙏🙏

Denzel Washington says his mom made sure fame never changed him or got to his head "I thought I was hot stuff. I came home, it was early on in my career, and I knew I was a movie star. I came to my mother in the beauty shop and I said, 'Ma, did you ever think it was gonna be like this?' She said, 'What did you say?' Right then I knew I was in trouble. So she started calling me 'Superstar.'" "'So you're Superstar? I tell you what, Superstar. Go in the back, Superstar. Get that bucket and that squeegee and some soap and water and hit those windows. Superstar, when you're finished, Superstar, grab the mop and mop the floor down. Wipe it all the way down, Superstar. Have you finished wiping it down? Are you in the back, Superstar? Get the roaches out. Clean all the bottles.' I got the message."

A third grader just scored a 5 on AP Calculus BC. The system that trained him contains no LLM. The core is a knowledge graph one man spent 250 hours encoding by hand, two minutes per edge. The platform is Math Academy. Its "AI" is an expert system that routes each student through nearly 3,000 math topics, from 4th grade arithmetic to the math behind machine learning. Every node, every prerequisite link, every weight was placed manually by a team of mathematicians. The weights alone took Justin Skycak a full month: 1,500 topics at the time, roughly 5 prerequisite links each, 2 minutes to estimate each one. 8 hours a day of pure encoding, done before ChatGPT existed to ease the load. Why go through that? Because the graph unlocks mastery learning, the closest thing education research has to a cheat code. In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that students with one-on-one tutoring perform two standard deviations above a regular classroom. The average tutored kid beats 98% of the lecture hall. Nobody could afford a tutor per child, so the finding sat in journals for 40 years. A prerequisite graph with a mastery gate is the workaround. The system always knows the exact next topic a specific kid is ready for, drills it until proven, then moves on. Zero time spent waiting for 29 classmates. That waiting is most of school. A year of classroom math is roughly 150 hours of instruction, and the majority goes to pacing, review, and re-teaching. Strip it out and a motivated kid covers six grade levels in one calendar year. The origin makes it better: this grew out of a math program at Pasadena High School where 8th graders were passing AP Calculus BC, back when the founders were still hand-grading the whole thing. The most effective education AI running today is a graph a few humans built by hand, one edge at a time.

Introducing NEO’s 25 Degrees of Freedom, tendon-driven hands — nearing or surpassing human-level dexterity, strength, speed, and reliability. For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips.

british members of parliament looking to change parliamentary rules to allow count binface to appear in the house of commons as a trash bucket if he defeats nigel farage. seems sporting.

U.S. based humanoid robotics company @1x_tech has just unveiled their new tendon-driven robot hands with 25 degrees of freedom (DOF).   • Made in USA • Tendon Drive Ratio: 5:1–15:1 • Wrist Dexterity: 3 DOF • Backdrivability: Fully backdrivable • Tactile Sensing: Pressure + location + slip • Finger Force: Up to 45 N • Wrist Torque: 17.75 Nm • Position Accuracy: ±0.2 mm • Waterproof Rating: IP68 • Reliability: >2 million cycles "These hands are designed to do something fundamental: remove the hardware ceiling on what humanoid robots can actually do, and make data the only barrier to capabilities. By matching or surpassing human hands across the dimensions that matter, they ensure our AI models are no longer limited by dexterity. NEO can now perform virtually any task a human can do with their hands– with the precision, adaptability, and gentleness required for real-world environments."

This is possibly the best example of guerrilla marketing by an airline all year - SAS - Scandinavian Airlines😍

@bscholl This is a foundational principle of smart manufacturing smaller units tied together are better than large monuments. Allows for flexible and resilient production systems it also allows for shorter lead times and ultimately allows for a closing matching if supply to demand!!

If you’re making a new gas turbine, how big should it be? Decades ago, the computing industry figured out that large arrays of blade servers were both cheaper and more reliable than a small number of expensive mainframes. Yet the energy world is still largely powered by gigantic “frame” turbines that are hard to make and difficult to install. I think the future of energy—particularly for off-grid “behind the meter” generation —is small modular production. But how small should you go? If you go too small there is a big loss in efficiency (due to things like higher relative blade tip losses). But there’s a sweet spot in the 40-50MW range where the turbine has most of the efficiency of a gigantic unit yet is also much more manufacturable and deployable. This is the sweet spot is in total cost per unit energy, inclusive of capital expenditure. This is why Superpower sits at the ever magical 42MW.

🇨🇳China has the most aggressive expansionist economic policy in the world. In 2025, China recorded a total trade surplus of nearly $1.2tn. Its surplus with the EU reached €360.6bn. Its goods surplus with the US reached $202.1bn. India’s trade deficit with China reached $99.2bn. ASEAN’s deficit with China reached around $276bn. China’s objective across Asia-Pacific is to turn future multi-trillion-dollar economies into dependent markets for Chinese industry. China also accounts for around 57% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s official bilateral debt. If China monopolises the Asia-Pacific and builds structural dependence across Africa, the global balance of power will become unsustainable.

Most people have no idea how BIG the Congo is. Joburg to Cape Town is 2 hours. It feels like forever. The flight from Kenya to Ghana is 6 hours. 3 of those hours was JUST THE CONGO. Nothing but GREEN the entire time. They call it the lungs of the world for a reason.

A lot of people on the left are very enamored of an economy where 40% of the workers are basically Uber drivers

Not only did Belgium mock Trump on the field by doing his stupid dance, but they also did it in the locker-room after the World Cup victory.