britone mwasaru

Thought it would be great to keep track of articles/stories I am currently reading. I hope you do find some interesting stuff here. The order is that the latest read is at the top.

• Some ways of looking at books https://philocrumbs.substack.com/p/some-ways-of-looking-at-books
• “Autopsy, means to see for oneself. It invites the human being to a humble inhabiting of a situation in order to speak from a place of experience, observation and encounter. Within “autopsy” are notions of a naked, visceral going deep to witness and access unseen perspectives that reveal another facet of the truth about the human condition.” https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2018/03/22/reading-our-ruins-post-colonial-stories-that-float-from-afar/
• “Agency and passivity are at the core of human thought and experience. They are there too in the most basic of our grammatical structures: most verbs have both active and passive forms because sometimes we do things, and sometimes things are done to us. The Iliad is indeed a great tale of derring-do, but it is in equal measure a tale of passivity – suffering – and it explores how we can respond when things are done to us.” Homer and the Power of Story-telling
• “The patriotic working people of Kenya, together with their allies across Africa and the world, must begin to think and act beyond personalities—toward a new horizon of solidarity, justice, and dignity. This demands ideological clarity, organizational renewal, and moral courage. It requires us to build movements capable of confronting imperial domination not only in its external forms but also in its internalized expressions: corruption, dependency, and the commodification of life itself.” Historicizing, Interrogating, and Critiquing Raila Odinga’s Ideological and Political legacy https://www.pambazuka.org/Raila-Odinga
• Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom https://newcriterion.com/article/fyodor-dostoevsky-philosopher-of-freedom/
• Crito https://sites.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/crito.pdf
• Dear Dr. Joyce Nyairo
• “Localhost tracking” explained. It could cost Meta 32 billion. This is the exact reason I don’t have any of Meta products installed on my phone, they have zero regard for users’ privacy.
• Making the Image: Che Guevara by René Burri
• “We know that reading enables a certain self-consciousness, sharpening our sense of who we are and what we are doing. At the same time, it enlarges the imagination, nourishing our power to come up with alternatives to how we might think or live otherwise. For literature to do its work of intellectual emancipation, however, a prior freedom is needed: the freedom to read in the first place. Wresting that freedom from a world that doesn’t want you to study, think, or imagine even in extreme circumstances, as de Jesus’s story shows. Even so, Woolf’s dictum is as true as ever: “Intellectual freedom depends on material things.”” The Freedom to Read
• Locke and Hume on Consent
• Extrajudicial Mandates: Will The Law Ever Protect The Poor?
• How to Spot Bullshit: A Manual by Princeton Philosopher Harry Frankfurt (RIP)
• Millions on the African continent can’t fully benefit from the AI revolution
• “Hug Machine”
• Poked in the Eye
• Ancient town and its manuscripts face ravages of the Sahara
• How Coffee Fueled Revolutions—and Revolutionary Ideas
• Datasets as Imagination
• “In the neighboring villages of Alahalli and Chilukavadi, one Indian startup is testing a new model. Chandrika works for Karya, a nonprofit launched in 2021 in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) that bills itself as “the world’s first ethical data company.” Like its competitors, it sells data to big tech companies and other clients at the market rate. But instead of keeping much of that cash as profit, it covers its costs and funnels the rest toward the rural poor in India. (Karya partners with local NGOs to ensure access to its jobs go first to the poorest of the poor, as well as historically marginalized communities.) In addition to its $5 hourly minimum, Karya gives workers de-facto ownership of the data they create on the job, so whenever it is resold, the workers receive the proceeds on top of their past wages. It’s a model that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the industry.” https://time.com/6297403/the-workers-behind-ai-rarely-see-its-rewards-this-indian-startup-wants-to-fix-that/
• For the past 11 years photographer Mihaela Noroc has been traveling the world, photographing women and listening to their stories. Her goal is to show that beauty is much more than what we usually see in the media. https://www.theatlasofbeauty.com
• A series of visual portraits symbolizing the limitations and failures of artificial intelligence in reconstructing and interpreting my culture and identity.
• Galileo’s Testing Communications
• The Churchill Mandela Effect – A Resurrector of Careers, Scar Mkadinali
• “But it’s not sexy to say, ‘We need more teachers.’ It’s not sexy to say, ‘Hey, we need better buildings.’ What is sexy and exciting are these ‘amazing’ tools,” he said. https://restofworld.org/2025/ai-teaching-tools-kenya-teacher-shortage/
• The Boston hippies who developed technologies that Silicon Valley wouldn’t dare to make
• Matching Hypothesis
• Why most countries are struggling to shut down 2G
• Pluralistic: Apple’s encryption capitulation
• Living Like Weasles
• Statement of Teaching Philosophy 
• a poetics of refusal
• Android Supply Chain Validation Cheat Sheet
• When Disappearing Messages Don’t Disappear: the ‘dark’ side of (macOS) notifications
• Did you know about Instruments?
• Hikvision and Dahua Facilitating Genocidal Crimes in East Turkistan
• How to Beat the Odds
• A brief history of Directory Services
• The Dying Web
• The shift we need to stop mass surveillance
• A Global Green New Deal: Into the Portal, Leave No one Behind
• Native mobile apps are optional for B2B startups in 2024
• How AI can keep disappearing languages alive
• Chinese Social Media Platforms Fail to Control Racism Against Black People: Report
• The Hybrid Architecture of Kinopio for iOS
• E-bike battery fires keep climbing in NYC – New York City firefighters responded to 267 fires caused by faulty lithium-ion batteries in 2023 — about 20% more than in 2022
• Why Are Tech Reporters Sleeping On The Biggest App Store Story? – pretty much why I have never had interest in building mobile app, gate keeping by the two major mobile app store (Play and App Store)
• Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
• Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI
• The Boy’s Own Internet: Aaron Swartz and the myth of the boy genius
• 🌻 audience of one
• Scammers Have Found An Easy Way To Clone Fingerprints
• “The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture. The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were. And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.” https://www.garbageday.email/p/paying-to-use-a-site-you-cant-use
• What does it mean when fewer people die?
• A Life Offline
• ARIA: Betting on science
• Every generator is a policy failure
• Saloni Dattani: Peer Review, Division of Labor in Science, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders
• Ugali Consumption along Class Lines : Policy approaches to reduce maize dependency https://christinegatwiri.substack.com/p/ugali-consumption-along-class-lines
• Being basic as a virtue – https://nadia.xyz/basic
• A Philosophy of Subtraction – How the Ethereum Foundation drives innovation through delegation https://joinreboot.org/p/a-philosophy-of-subtraction
• Some Things I think https://collabfund.com/blog/thoughts/
• On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961
• Sheng: Why it matters – https://www.hinya.net/opinions/2019/2/28/sheng-why-it-matters
• The Food Safety Tax: Why getting good food from the vendor next door matters – https://christinegatwiri.substack.com/p/the-food-safety-tax-why-getting-good
• Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05754-w
• Irresponsible data? The risks of registering the Rohingya – https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2017/10/23/irresponsible-data-risks-registering-rohingya
• Advocacy and Empathy Avoidance: One of the biggest impediments to changing society is getting people to care about our issues. Empathy avoidance is everywhere, the question is: how do we face the problem? https://snowden.substack.com/p/advocacy-and-empathy-avoidance
• Language is not enough: What LLMs can – and can’t – do for lab automation https://erikaaldendeb.substack.com/p/language-is-not-enough
• Death of the podcast – https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/04/death-of-the-podcast
• “The decline of walking has another consequence, one of scale. It disembodies our everyday life, where we exist no longer on the scale of our bodies, but on that of the machines that we depend on to take us from one place to another.” a requiem for walking – https://arshia.substack.com/p/a-requiem-for-walking
• “ChatGPT, or any other generative AI, will be the result of personal and public data that has been gathered by large tech monopolies over decades. This gives them an unfair advantage compared to smaller companies attempting to achieve something similar. This data will also be used in the dehumanisation process in various sectors as generative AIs become more efficient at tasks where humans are no longer needed other than to monitor the AI.” Privacy a casualty in race to develop generative AIs https://frontline.thehindu.com/society/unreal-and-unsettling-privacy-a-casualty-in-race-to-develop-generative-ais-like-chatgpt/article66579941.ece
• Tech’s Risks on Non-English Platforms -https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/techs-risks-on-non-english-platforms/
• What kind of Digital ID do we actually want? – https://digitalfutures.space/deepdive/digital-id/
• making decisions – https://katiewav.substack.com/p/making-decisions
• Budding Free-ness in a Catastrophic World – https://cameronnajafi.substack.com/p/budding-free-ness-in-a-catastrophic
• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993  by Toni Morrison 
• boring lives finding surprise in the boring, sculpting meaning from stone
• Why East Africa Is Facing Its Worst Famine in Decades
• Apps Won’t Solve the Mental Health Crisis
• The Myth of the Socially Conscious Corporation
• A Romp through Database History
• Do You Know How to Behave? Are You Sure?
• Why haven’t markets disciplined public finance management practices in African states?
• Is it important to have friends?
• friendship