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lesiki

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Nairobi-based tech type.

meet.hn/city/ke-Nairobi

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Apple Vision 3 years ago

It feels like a missed opportunity that the current generation doesn't already do that. All the talk is that Apple have been exploring VR behind the scenes for a while, and the devices all have 2+ lenses.

It would have been quite cool for them to announce that all your iPhone 14 videos were actually recorded in 3D and ready for Apple Vision all along.

We would soon die out as a race due to population decline as we are well below the required rate of replacement in a diseased population

Isn't there a strong correlation between birth rate & child mortality? Most rich societies have slowed down their birth rate in large part because you don't need 5 kids in order to ensure 1 makes it to adulthood.

If we tolerated disease, we would probably increase birth rates to compensate for the spike in child mortality.

Agreed, I don't think the success of conversational podcasts precludes using the same platform for something like this.

Other feedback:

For this HN Recap, 20 mins daily is a bit long, a 5-10 minute version would genuinely be part of my daily routine.

1 chapter/section per story would be cool, so that I can skip stories I'm not interested in. I listen to podcasts through PodcastAddict on my phone but tested this on Spotify web at my computer, maybe this is already in there & I just didn't see it.

Echoing what others said - I'd love for the general vibe of the comments to be included in some way, I actually tend to spend more time in HN comments than reading the articles themselves.

Finally, I'm sure this is on your radar already, but IMO the big opportunity with AI-synthesized podcasts is personalized podcasts. For example, a personal Hacker News Recap RSS feed that knows the kind of stuff I upvote, or has me opt in to topics/tags when signing up.

Fully agree. I don't see why general intelligence implies or requires consciousness/feeling/etc.

We can probably create a tool with the ability to act independently and with super-human knowledge and judgement, but without feeling, emotion, or anything except a simulated sense of 'self' to ease our interaction with it. I suspect that we'll create that version of general intelligence long before we create AI with consciousness, emotion or a genuine sense of self or desire for self-preservation.

This looks really good! I'm a Meeter user so it's a real use case I have already spent time looking for solutions to.

I agree with other commenters though - I'd pay a one-time $10, but $10 per month seems unreasonably high. For perspective Meeter is free, and Spotify is $4 for a family of 4 (in my country).

Maybe it could be part of the bundle at https://setapp.com/ or similar? Or you could have a set-your-own-price monthly sub?

It is not. Source: African.

Unless of course you're comparing software developers' lifestyle to the refugees, nomads and slum dwellers? In which case $20k in San Fransisco is also balling out of control, when compared to the homeless guys living on your porch.

id rather make 20k in africa than 80k in europe.

You criticise the comparison then proceed to make a vacuous one yourself.

An anecdote to disprove your generalisation: I used to work in Europe (Reading, UK) and now work in Africa (Nairobi, Kenya) and can confirm that 80k in Reading would give me a far higher quality of life than 20k in Nairobi.

Africa and Europe are both large, diverse places, just no point making a statement like this.

I'm "double Bantu" - as a Kenyan I speak our national language Swahili, and I'm also from the Bantu Bukusu tribe of Western Kenya on my father's side.

This migration history is even more complex because the migration was in waves - Bantu who went to South Africa later migrated north again, meeting Bantu who were already there from earlier migration. You can tell this from the fact that some southern African languages have closer linguistic relationship to some East African ones, than they do to other Bantu languages in their region.

My dad (Bukusu of Western Kenya) once met a gentleman from the Venda tribe of South Africa, and they conversed in English for an hour until the South African got a phone call that he answered in Venda. My dad understood practically every word that was said on the phone, and they each discovered this tribe they'd never heard of before had more language overlap than their neighbouring Bantu tribes back home.

It's fascinating if you consider just how big an area we're talking about, and how much opportunity existed for other languages to wipe out Bantu dialects. I'm no linguist but I think Africa has a propensity for multilingualism that has kept these tribal dialects alive, and aside from DNA this gives the strongest evidence of the past migrations of Bantu people.

Well, the point of the analogy was to illustrate the business model.

I think there's room for a spotify model in writing. As a consumer, instead of a centralised platform, I'd like it to be an integration on the various websites I get content from.

I.e. the normal internet with it's various publishing engines, but paywall automatically bypased, ads automatically disabled and producer automatically credited & paid because I'm signed in to my 'servicename' account.

jQuery 3.0 Released 10 years ago

Just last week I started a new project, injecting some firebase-backed functionality into a squarespace site, and I used jQuery.

I use it for the same reason I use lodash when I could do everything it does in vanilla js: because it's a slightly more dev-friendly API.

Much like the PHP community, jQuery's community has earned it a reputation as a hacky tool for people who don't understand where jQuery ends and Javascript begins. However, it didn't become popular by accident, and in competent hands, it still has its benefits.

FrontlineSMS/SIMLab,

Nairobi, Kenya.

Looking for Senior Devs, Chief Engineer (lead dev), BA, and leads for some upcoming projects.

We build tools that let people set up automated SMS messaging systems, at any scale but targeted towards small- to medium-scale organisations. Our most notable users are NGOs all over the world, who use FrontlineSMS to communicate with people who couldn't be reached by any other means of electronic communication.

Our dev office is in Nairobi, Kenya, and we're looking for Senior Developers and a new Chief Engineer to head the dev team.

The dev work is mainly Groovy/Grails web development, with some Android work of late. We open-source what we can (https://github.com/frontlinesms/), and contribute to the Grails project and its plugin ecosystem. Our office is in the same building that houses the iHub, Ushahidi, Brck, Mfarm, and other leading Nairobi dev startups.

If you fit the bill and like the idea of living in Nairobi for a few years, please check out the links below.

http://www.frontlinesms.com/ http://www.frontlinesms.com/connect-with-us/jobs-and-interns... http://dev.frontlinesms.com/jobs/

info at frontlinesms.com

I think the point is that whatever slowdown the use of Accessor pattern introduces will actually be a lot smaller than 2X, which is useful information when deciding whether to discard the great benefits of using the Accessor pattern that others have mentioned.