Watching the English football with full stadiums and in South Africa, world champion Rugby with empty stadiums. High coverage vaccination in the UK allows fun to come back. Come on SA! Lets vaccinate so we can go back to exciting full stadiums and kick back the economy!

Some belated news and some timely news, on the latest with Automattic: ma.tt/2021/08/fundin…

Have I mentioned recently that we are hiring search and data engineering folks? It is great working at an open source company that is growing so well. #elasticsearch #opensearch #DataScience #lucene

No one in South Africa has died from getting a Covid-19 vaccine, shows a new report from medicine regulator the SA Health Products Regulatory Authority. dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-0…

JUST IN: Cabinet has approved #Covid19 vaccinations for all people of 18+ in SA as of tomorrow (Aug 20). gcis.gov.za/newsroom/media…

Just watched the latest Dune trailer and now I feel I have to re-read the book before it comes out!

Joe Phaahla: Everyone of 18+ in SA can from 2day walk in at a #COVID19 vaccination site without having registered on the #EVDS (they'll help you to register on-site), but remember, you will stand in a line for longer than someone who had registered at home, so try to register.

JUST IN: #VaccineRollOutSA stats: Fri, 20 Aug * 18+ have done their bit: We’ve done 57 067 more doses than on Thu—almost 250 000 in the past 24 hrs * 1. Jabs, past 24 hrs: 248, 873 (Thu: 191, 806) 2. Total doses: 10, 431, 124 3. Adults fully vaccinated: 4, 782, 071 (11.9%)

NEW: in the last couple of weeks there have a *lot* of new studies out assessing vaccine efficacy, many of which have touched on the question of waning immunity. Unsurprisingly, these have prompted a *lot* of questions. Time for a thread to summarise what we do and don’t know:

Personal news! I'm joining Hugging Face 🤗. It's a community creating transparent AI models that are now powering both private and public AI, so exactly where I should be to move AI forward from its very foundations. =) Thanks to Dina Bass for covering! bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

12 years on Twitter! Woah … #MyTwitterAnniversary

Personal ANNOUNCEMENT ✨ Happy to share the early release of my book on Machine Learning with Apache Spark. It contains 3 chapters, and new chapters, corrections, and updates will be released every month. Looking forward to your thoughts and how it can better serve your needs!

ML Engineers love to say "matrix factorization for recs? What is this, 2014?" and then spend a few million dollars building something worse

Today I'm announcing my new company, @usewaitroom where I will be leading the charge as co-founder & CEO. Waitroom is a short-form video platform for sequential 1-1 conversations. We have hosts like Tan France, Jimmy Wales, yoruk, Charlotte de Carle and more lined up for today!

DStv partnering with Disney+ may just be why saves them (for a while at least!)

A checkmark isn't cool, you know what's cool? Two checkmarks. tumblr.com/staff/70056414…

Come check out Tumblr! See if your Twitter username is available! tumblr.com/register/bird

Been on Twitter a while now! #MyTwitterAnniversary

It’s so perfect it feels orchestrated. Can’t wait for the Michael Lewis book and Aaron Sorkin film on this!