Isa Umar

🤲🏾

The guy who helped build React, the most popular workaround for the browser's layout engine, just said the workaround isn't sufficient and built the replacement himself. Cheng Lou's resume is the context that makes this announcement hit different. He worked on React at Facebook. Created ReasonML and ReScript. Built Messenger's frontend. Now runs Midjourney's entire UI stack on Bun. Every single role was a fight against the same enemy: the browser's rendering pipeline. Here's why this matters beyond the engineering flex. The web was built to render documents. Static HTML, flowing text, pages you scroll through. CSS layout was designed for that world. Then we started building applications inside the document renderer: spreadsheets, design tools, messaging apps, AI chat interfaces. Every one of those applications has to ask the browser permission to know how big text is. That question triggers reflow. Reflow locks the main thread. At 60fps you get 16 milliseconds per frame. Spend those milliseconds on layout recalculation and the user sees jank. The industry's answer for the last decade has been to work around the problem. Virtual DOM (React) batches the writes. CSS containment limits the blast radius. content-visibility skips offscreen layout. FastDOM separates reads from writes. Every solution accepts that the browser owns text measurement and tries to call it less often. Cheng Lou's answer: stop calling it at all. Measure text in pure TypeScript. Skip the DOM. Skip CSS. Skip reflow entirely. Zero layout passes. The performance improvement, per his demo, is categorical. 0.05ms versus 30ms. Zero reflows versus five hundred. The person who understands the browser rendering pipeline better than almost anyone alive just built the tool that makes part of it unnecessary. That tells you where application-grade UI is heading.

big question is, what kinds of effective change can the states effect in isolation of the center? what can you do when the macros are stacked against you

what’s the per capita water consumption in northern nigeria

A South African doctor became the first in history to cure a man's deafness using 3D-printed ear bones

For those wondering what Nokia actually does these days…Every time you use a modern smartphone, be it an iPhone/a Samsung/an Oppo, you are likely paying a hidden tax to Nokia. Nokia owns 20K+ patent families, including the foundational math for 4G, 5G, & the upcoming 6G. In 2024-25, Nokia won massive legal battles against Chinese giants like Oppo & Vivo, forcing them to pay royalties for every device sold. Nokia is a global IP fortress. They do not need to build the phone; they just need to own the idea of how the phone talks to the tower.

This needs to become illegal. It is data collection + intimidation of existing employees + stock market manipulation + HR pretending to be working. Literally nothing is good about it and it damages the social fabric a lot.

The official take home package of a Governor is about ₦8M annually. That is ₦32M in 4 years. If party nomination fee is ₦100M (excluding money for campaign and election day), it means we actually expect politicians to steal when elected. Politics have become too expensive.

@Interimhandler 🤝

@modibbo__ wow, that’s interestingly put. yes I usually refer to these things that way, like you said, as an identity

Had a tiny internal shift. A realisation of sorts. The fact that you’ve always delivered is not some leeway for you to not deliver this one time. It is a reminder that you absolutely must deliver this time, regardless of the challenges/constraints.

You launched this war by slaughtering Iranian schoolgirls.

There is always a tweet.

Never seen anything quite like this story…

persians

@Interimhandler hiran tebutin mai shayi

they gave an economic sciences nobel prize in 2019 to an economist that came up with the mindblowing idea of actually testing and experimenting in the field, instead of using popular economic models. 🙏🏾what were they doing all along? arm chair analysis?

Israel was caught red handed firing ballistic missiles at the US military base on Diego Garcia Israel- not Iran Makes you understand 9/11 a little better, doesn't it?

It is well! Mass exodus of the skilled to the west and in return Naija gets failed asylum seekers and criminals. Again, it is well.

Invest radically in Education. Vocational centers. Hospitals. Potable water. Revive industries. More than half of your problems in the North will vanish. All these come with a purposeful leadership. The one that is characterized by selflessness and foresight.

@SBayero dishing out geopolitical insights since ‘13 🫡

Iran knows exactly what this will cost and they’ve prepared for it. This isn’t reaction, it’s strategy. The ripple effects will reshape global politics and energy markets for years.

The money that remote workers are not spending on transport, they are spending it on fuel.