Nick Twinamatsiko

English is still the most beautiful, versatile, logical, poetic and wonderful language in the whole world. I speak six languages. Many writers from many other languages say this about English. Because it has been perfected over millennia of discourse, poetry and debate.

Writing is a privilege of the rich, not a profession of the unemployed.

AI-writing is bugu bugu. A few months ago, many Ugandans were posting AI-generated content on this app. Most of them have since stopped. The LLMs didn’t run out of words; the prompters ran out of prompts, or they simply got bored.

If you can't write it on the timeline, don't write it in the DM. There are no secrets as poorly kept as those kept on the Internet. I've been saying this for years.

UK Society of Authors launches logo to identify books written by humans not AI theguardian.com/technology/202…

Very many people talk about the importance of training ourselves to use AI. But I think training ourselves to focus -- to concentrate on a task for hours -- is even more important than training ourselves to use AI. And one of the most effective ways to build focus is to read a book, preferably a physical book.

Two of the key determinants of the performance of students in national examinations are the academic ability of the students and the competence of their teachers. The name of the school, the category of the school (whether private or public), the age of the school, etc., are really secondary matters. Entry grade can be seen as a proxy of academic ability. The equivalence is imperfect since performance at the previous stage was a function of the abilities of teachers and some other things, rather than solely of innate ability. But if we treat the entry grade as a proxy of academic ability, then we can predict that the higher the entry bar, the better the grades that will be achieved at exit, whatever the name or age or ownership or location of the school may be. In the past (up to the 90s), there were very few secondary schools that attracted the best candidates, and it's not surprising that there were equally few secondary schools that got the best UNEB results, year after year. The top ten schools were always predictable, and that's because it was always those schools that admitted the kids that got the best grades at the previous levels. Today, there are more kids that get 4s  than can be admitted to the 10 schools that excelled in the 90s. These top performers are now distributed to scores of schools, spread across the country, many of them private, and that's why, these days, there are scores of schools that compete with, and often outcompete, the schools that perennially filled the top 10 slots from the 1960s to the 1990s. The other key determinant of performance is the competence of teachers. In the 20th century, good teachers were few, and the top ten schools could leverage their reputation and facilities to poach the few good teachers from neighbouring schools. Today, the competent teachers are very many, with universities churning out thousands every year, and even the newly founded private schools can retain some really good teachers as long as they have the ability to pay them. These two key determinants considered, it is, in this day, not as important as it was in the 90s to enrol your child in the famous "traditional schools" of yestercentury, if the goal is good grades. There are scores of schools now in which kids can get 20 points as long as they have the requisite innate ability. Teacher competence is now widely distributed in schools. In fact, a recently established private school in an upcountry town may even have a better maths teacher than all the 10 schools that were academically dominant in the 1990s.

It doesn't really matter how long the chase takes. It doesn't really matter whether or not you will reach the goal. What really matters is to keep going, to keep chasing, to keep pressing, straight ahead. The words of welcome won't be "well done good and successful servant" but "well done good and faithful servant." All you have to do is keep the faith.

In our year we were 5 students offering literature and around 21 students doing arts.

*competition

AI cannot write books, or even articles, that are heavy on original thought. What's more, the people who will use AI to write will, in the process, lose the capacity for original thought. If you are an original thinker, AI cannot be your competiton unless you begin using it.

We are meant to give attention rather than hoard it. We just have to make sure that the things we give it to are worth it. Particularly important in the social media age.

If you don't see the top boys' schools on this list, it is probably because their candidates for the subject were in single digits.

The A-Level sections of many of the top schools may soon have no arts students. They have stiff cut-off points for A-Level admission, and nearly all the students who can achieve those cut-offs are unwilling to do arts. It seems this is more heavily pronounced in boys' schools than in girls' schools, since girls, for some unclear reason, tend to have a strong affinity towards arts, even when sciences are equally accessible to them. One headteacher of a top boys' school told me that he has resorted to the affirmative action of lowering cut-off points for those willing to do arts. If the normal cut-off is, say, 8As, he may say that those with 6As and 2Bs can also be admitted as long as they are willing to do arts. He says it would be wrong for a school as prominent as the one he heads to have no arts students in A-Level.

@photonisdead Oscar Wilde wrote this first, in 1891.

all art is a self portrait of the artist

I actually hope the former Miss Uganda becomes the next Makerere University Guild President. There is a false and weird idea that the attributes needed to be Miss Uganda somehow preclude those needed to be the Guild President of an institution like Makerere University.

Steinbeck -- perhaps unwittingly -- captured the essence of the gospel in this sentence. The more Christians understand that Jesus's sacrifice removed the need for perfection, the better they become, i.e., the less the pressure we feel to be perfect, the more we grow in goodness.

It may seem a bit ironic, but the only way to grow a book-reading culture in Africa is to publish non-intellectual books. As a writer, I would never invest my time and talent in a Mills-and-Boon kind of novel. I believe I was given the talent for a higher purpose. But, as a publisher, I would be happy to receive manuscripts of that sort since I know that they match the intellectual levels of even the best educated Africans.

When you regularly post on social media for 16 years, you acquire a sharp sense of the content that resonates with most people. That acquisition of the sense of the pulse of society is, perhaps, the best advantage of posting for a long time on these apps. If I read a book manuscript, I am now in a much better position to judge its commercial viability than I was 16 years ago. That's because I have acquired an intimate understanding of the Ugandan mind and its literary taste. I have written some posts that have gone extremely viral, and I have written others that have drawn silence, and, in the process, I have learned the dietary preferences of the Ugandan mind. Posting on social media for a long time, and on a variety of subjects, is, frankly, the best way to grow as an editor of a commercial publishing enterprise. The second best way is to simply observe (even from a "ventilator") the responses to the posts of other people. You will still acquire a sense of popular tastes, but the difference between this approach and the first approach is almost similar to the difference between learning about a business from class (or by walking down the street) and learning it by actually running a business.