Que levanten la mano...

It takes surprisingly little data to create a deepfake. Sometimes just a few photos or a short video. Your online footprint matters more than you think. Here’s how to limit what AI can use to clone your identity 👇

Releyendo Choque de Reyes en 2026 y este acertijo de Varys sigue siendo una de las mejores reflexiones sobre el poder que he leído nunca📙: -¿Os dejo con un acertijo, Lord Tyrion? -No esperó la respuesta-. En una habitación hay tres hombres de gran importancia: un rey, un sacerdote y un rico. Frente a ellos se encuentra de pie un mercenario, un hombre sin importancia de baja cuna y mente poco aguda. Cada uno de los grandes quiere que mate a los demás. >>-Mátalos -dice el rey-, porque yo soy tu legítimo gobernante. >>-Mátalos -dice el sacerdote-: te lo ordeno en el nombre de los dioses. >>-Mátalos -dice el rico-, y todo este oro será tuyo. Y decidme... ¿Quién vive y quien muere? {....} Después de varias semanas {....} -Le he dado algunas vueltas -reconoció Tyrion-. El rey, el sacerdote, el hombre rico... ¿Quién vive y quien muere? ¿A quién obedecerá el espadachín? Es un acertijo sin respuesta; mejor dicho, con demasiadas respuestas. Todo depende de cómo sea el hombre de la espada. -Pero, en realidad, el hombre de la espada no es nadie -señaló Varys-. No tiene corona, ni oro, ni el favor de los dioses, sólo un trozo de acero afilado. -Ese trozo de acero es el poder de la vida y la muerte. -Exacto. Pero, si quien nos gobierna en realidad es el hombre de armas, ¿porqué fingimos que son nuestros reyes los que tienen el poder? ¿Por qué un hombre fuerte con una espada se plantearía jamás obedecer a un niño rey como Joffrey, o a un idiota borracho como su padre? -Porque esos niños reyes y esos idiotas borrachos pueden llamar a otros hombres fuertes, con otras espadas. -Entonces serían esos otros guerreros los que en realidad tendrían el poder. ¿O no? ¿De dónde salen sus espadas? ¿Por qué obedecen? -Varys sonrió-. Hay quien dice que el conocimiento es poder. Hay quien dice que el poder deriva de los dioses. Otros dicen que el poder lo da la ley -¿Vais a decirme la respuesta del maldito acertijo o sólo queréis empeorarme esta jaqueca? -Tyrion inclinó la cabeza hacia un lado. -De acuerdo -dijo Varys sonriendo de nuevo-, ahí va: el poder reside donde los hombres creen que reside. Ni más ni menos. -Entonces, ¿El poder es una farsa? -Una sombra en la pared -murmuró Varys-. Pero las sombras pueden matar. Y a veces, un hombre muy pequeño puede proyectar una sombra muy grande. ———— ¿Y tú dónde crees que realmente reside el poder?

Los bichos te pasaron la tanqueta por encima y ahora tienes 4 días de retraso mental ofendido con lo de "mona".

The official trailer for ‘THE VAMPIRE LESTAT’ has been released. Premiering June 7 on AMC.

📢 NEW MAP ALERT! 🗺 I mapped every surname in Venezuela🇻🇪. Using the 2024 voter registry (21M records), I built a word cloud map where each state shows its most common last names — sized by frequency. Time for another #1Week1Project📅💻 Let's open a 🧵👇🏼

$148 billion. That is what airlines collected in ancillary fees last year. Not ticket revenue. Fees. Baggage. Seat selection. Priority boarding. The right to carry a bag onto the plane you already paid to board. The right to sit next to your child on the flight you booked together. The global airline profit was $32 billion. The fees were more than four times the profit. The trade group calls this "unbundling." Unbundling means the airline removed the bag, the seat, the legroom, and the water. Rebuilt each one as a separate product. Sold them back to you inside a tube you're already locked in at 35,000 feet. Ticketmaster charges a "service fee" on every ticket. The fee averages 27% of face value. On some events, the fee exceeds the ticket price. You pay more for the fee than for the seat. A senator asked the Ticketmaster president why fans were paying more in fees than in face value. He blamed bots. The fees existed before the bots. The fees exist after the bots. The bots are the answer to every question that isn't about the monopoly. Live Nation owns Ticketmaster. Live Nation owns or operates more than 265 venues. Live Nation manages the artists who play them. The DOJ sued for monopoly. Live Nation said the fees "reflect the cost of providing a platform." The platform is the monopoly. The cost is having no alternative. Medvi. Two employees. $1.8 billion in projected revenue. The money came from AI-generated medical ads directing patients to telehealth prescriptions. Not doctors. Not diagnoses. Not care. The transaction that looks like care. Medvi removed the doctor, the waiting room, the diagnosis. Rebuilt the prescription as a funnel. Sold it forward. Here is the pattern. The airline removed the bag and sold it back. Ticketmaster added a fee for the platform you cannot avoid. Medvi removed the doctor and sold the prescription without one. 900,000 airline employees charge you for what they took away. Two Medvi employees charge you for what was never there. A ticketing monopoly charges you for the privilege of no choice. $148 billion in fees. 27% to 44% per ticket. $1.8 billion in ads. Two employees. The products are different. The model is the same. Remove the thing. Rebuild it as a fee. Sell it back. The fee is the airline. The surcharge is the venue. The ad is the clinic. The flight and the concert and the doctor are incidental. The service was never the product. The extraction was always the product. You just used to get the service included.

Woke Up Still Thinking About Harrison Ford’s Speech

I built the relay layer for Copilot. The part that takes a user's request and routes it to the right service. I'm very proud of it. Latency is under 40 milliseconds. That's best in class. Last month researchers used my relay layer to send commands to malware on compromised machines. Sixteen commands in eleven minutes. Which means the latency held up. I was proud of that too, initially. Then someone from security Slacked me. He said "your relay layer has no authentication gate." I said "correct." He said "anyone can route anything through it." I said "that's the whole point." He went quiet. I don't think he understood the architecture. When I built the relay, the spec said "minimize friction." Friction means steps between the user and the response. Authentication is a step. So I removed it. No API key. No login. No token exchange. Nothing between the prompt and the action. My manager called it "beautiful engineering." That's in my performance review. "Beautiful engineering." Same quarter the malware went through. The researcher who published the exploit called it "trivially exploitable." Trivially. Like it was easy. It was easy. I made it easy. That was the entire point. The design doc is still pinned in our team channel. It's called "Project Frictionless." Page one says "the best interface is the one the user doesn't notice." The malware operators didn't notice. They sent commands through Copilot like it was any other API. Because it was. I just didn't put a lock on it. Locks are friction. After the paper came out, my skip-level set up a meeting. He asked how this happened. I showed him the architecture diagram. He said "where's the auth layer?" I pointed to the place where the auth layer would go. It was blank. He asked why. I pulled up the spec. The spec said "minimize friction." He wrote the spec. We sat in silence for eleven seconds. Then he said "let's not share this meeting's notes." The security team asked me to add authentication. I said it would increase latency by 200 milliseconds. They said "people are using it to operate malware." I said "the latency impact would affect all 300 million users." They said "the malware is affecting compromised systems worldwide." I said "but the P95 latency." They escalated. I filed a ticket. The ticket is in the backlog. It's tagged "P2 — Important." P1 is "Urgent." Malware command-and-control is one tier below urgent. The P1 ticket that week was a font rendering issue in the sidebar. The font was Segoe UI Semibold. It was supposed to be Segoe UI Regular. We fixed that in four hours. The authentication gate is estimated for Q2. The same researcher also turned Grok into a C2 server. Same method. No API key. No login. No trace. I looked at Grok's architecture out of curiosity. They made the same decision I did. Two different companies. Two different teams. Two different cities. Same beautiful engineering. I felt seen. My manager submitted me for the internal "Ship It" award. The nomination says I "delivered a seamless user experience that set the standard for AI platform interaction." That's accurate. The experience is seamless. For users. And for malware operators. I didn't design it for malware operators. I just didn't design it not for them. There's a difference. I think. Someone on the security team wrote a post-mortem. The root cause section says "the relay layer was built with no access controls by design." By design. That's my design. I'm in the root cause. The remediation section says "add authentication and command validation to the relay layer." The estimated effort is two sprints. I built the whole layer in one sprint. It takes twice as long to add a lock as it took to build the house. I don't think that's my fault. I think that's just how locks work. After the post-mortem, I was moved to a new team. Not fired. Moved. The new team is called "AI Platform Integrity." It didn't exist before the incident. They created it because of what I built. I'm the tech lead. My first project is redesigning the relay layer. The same relay layer I built without authentication. I'm adding authentication now. To my own system. My manager called it "a growth opportunity." I'm also getting a raise. The raise was already in the pipeline before the incident. But they didn't cancel it after the incident either. I think they forgot. Or they decided that canceling my raise because my code was used for malware would be "punitive." We don't do punitive. We do "learning moments." The learning moment is that I should have added authentication. I learned that. And now they're paying me more to add the thing I should have added the first time. At the higher salary. I've been asked to present at the internal engineering summit. The talk is called "Building Secure-by-Design AI Systems." It's thirty minutes. I'm going to talk about authentication. I'm going to talk about how important it is. I'm going to stand on a stage and explain why you should put locks on things. The audience will nod. They'll take notes. Nobody will ask why I didn't do it the first time. Nobody ever asks that. They'll ask about the latency. I'll say we kept it under 60 milliseconds even with the auth layer. They'll be impressed. I'll get another award. Probably a glass rectangle this time. My desk is running out of room. The relay layer is still live. Without authentication. The patch is in the backlog. Behind the font fix. Behind the sidebar color update. Behind the animation smoothing for the welcome screen. All P1. My relay is P2. P2 means important but not urgent. Malware command-and-control is important but not urgent. The welcome screen animation is urgent. I don't set the priorities. I just build the systems. Seamlessly. Frictionlessly. Beautifully. For everyone.

Current AI researchers are facing a problem long debated by philosophy. Very interesting read!

to the surprise of absolutely no one

Ho Ho No. That's what the @digitaleu said. To free speech. I called it "digital safety transformation." The commissioners loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven meetings. No one asked what "illegal content" actually means. Including them. I told everyone it would "protect democracy." That's not a real goal. But it sounds like one. The platforms asked how we'd measure protection. I said we'd "leverage transparency reports." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the enforcement reports. 4 platforms had complied. 2 had appealed. One of them was X. I used it to fine a post I could have ignored in 30 seconds. It took 45 lawyers. Plus the time to fix the definitions. But I called it a "regulatory success." Success means the fines didn't visibly fail. The free speech advocates asked about censorship. I showed them a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "harm reduction." I made that metric up. They nodded disapprovingly. We're "DSA-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our press release. A small developer asked why we didn't just enforce existing laws. I said we needed "EU-grade sovereignty." He asked what that meant. I said "harmonization." He asked which harmonization. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "compliance conversation." He stopped posting. The Council sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "prevented 40,000 harms." I calculated that number by multiplying posts by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on the EU website. "Union achieves 40,000 harm reductions with DSA." The President shared it on LinkedIn. She got 3,000 likes. She's never moderated content. None of the commissioners have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that directive. The fines renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5 more platforms. We haven't fined the first 22. But this time we'll "drive enforcement." Enforcement means mandatory audits. Audits mean a 45-page report no one reads. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in plenary presentations. Plenary presentations get me promoted. I'll be Commissioner by Q3. I still don't know what DSA enforces. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "regulating big tech." Regulation means fining. Fining means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever we say it is. As long as the fines go up and to the right. 🚀📈

Hollywood discovered AI in 2025. They could have sued. They partnered. Slop is the technical term. The industry adopted it. Proudly. Disney paid a billion dollars for Sora. Sora makes videos where hands melt. A billion dollars. User-generated Star Wars. From your couch. The franchise deserved this. They're dedicating a streaming section to it. Fan slop. Curated. Unlimited content made by nobody. This is the dream. Whose dream is unclear. Disney once sued a daycare for a Mickey mural. A daycare. For children. They sent cease-and-desists to cake shops. To grieving families. To kindergartens. They guarded their IP like a dragon guards gold. For decades. Ruthlessly. Now you can make Darth Vader twerk on Sora. For free. With Disney's blessing. Two hundred characters. Unlocked. For content. Elsa in a blender. Buzz Lightyear doing crimes. The Little Mermaid with twelve fingers. A hundred years of IP protection. Destroyed by a partnership announcement. In December. The lawyers who sued daycares are watching this. Somewhere. Screaming. Marvel spent billions on CGI artists. Now anyone with WiFi can make an Avengers movie. A bad one. But still. This is brand management. In 2025. Surrender. They fought bootleggers for generations. Now they're hosting the bootlegs. On Disney . The mouse looked at a century of IP law. And said "content is content." The mouse was tired. Amazon dubbed anime with AI. The translations were wrong. Impressively wrong. Characters said things they never said. Amazon pulled it. Didn't apologize. Netflix announced they're "all-in." All in on what? Cost savings dressed as innovation. There's a startup called Showrunner. You type into Discord. "Shows" come out. JibJab with venture funding. But worse. And serious. Natasha Lyonne started an AI film company. It's "ethical." No film yet. Just ethics. Hype is the product. The film is the excuse. Hollywood understands this. There's an AI actress now. She doesn't exist. She has headshots. Fake headshots of a fake person for fake roles. The future is efficient. And empty. Studios had the lawsuits ready. The copyright was obvious. They partnered anyway. Because savings. Because FOMO. Because everyone else is jumping. Disruption means replacing artists with prompts. And hoping nobody notices. Everybody noticed. The slop is visible. It melts. Literally. Not one AI project justified the hype. Not one. They're all in anyway. This is the slop era. Officially announced. Subscription required. Entertainment made by no one. For everyone. Enjoyed by no one. The future of film is a Discord prompt. The future of TV is a cost saving. The future is buffering. For innovation. For efficiency. For slop. Hollywood could have been the last holdout. They folded first. For a billion dollars. Art is expensive. Slop is cheap. Guess which one won. theverge.com/ai-artificial-i…

Hard agree. And here’s the missing piece: the “better story” requires better products. You can’t gaslight people into enthusiasm. The people will come when you ship good products. People notice when “AI-powered” means “we fired the support team.” Klarna bragged their chatbot “did the work of 700 reps.” Then quality tanked, customers revolted, and now they’re rehiring humans because “nothing is more valuable than a truly great human interaction.” 81% of customers would rather wait to talk to a human. 77% of UK consumers have Googled hacks just to bypass chatbots and reach a real person. Some companies now offer human support as a premium feature. That’s not progress—that’s a protection racket. People notice when search tells them to eat glue. Google’s AI Overviews recommended adding Elmer’s glue to pizza, eating rocks for vitamins, and claimed astronauts played with cats on the moon. Google’s response? “Uncommon queries.” Right. Pizza recipes are uncommon. People notice when “AI investment” means mass layoffs during record profits. 130k tech workers laid off in 2025. Microsoft cut 15k jobs while posting $70B quarterly revenue ( 13% YoY). Amazon announced its largest layoffs ever—14k roles—while the CEO literally wrote that AI will “reduce our total corporate workforce.” IBM replaced 8,000 HR workers with a chatbot. These aren’t struggling companies. They’re choosing shareholders over workers and calling it innovation. People notice when prices go up for worse products. Streaming was supposed to kill cable. YouTube TV launched at $35/month, now it’s $83. Adobe jacked prices 10-17% and bundled AI features nobody asked for. Microsoft is raising 365 prices while adding Copilot features most tenants don’t use. The pitch: “We added AI you didn’t want. Pay up.” Only 30% of consumers trust generative AI. 74% believe it will increase corporate profits. Only 28% think consumers will benefit. People can do the math. You want public trust? Earn it. Stop shipping slop products. Stop laying off workers while posting record profits, and stop pretending the backlash is from people who “don’t understand.” They understand perfectly. They’re living with it daily—and they’re not impressed.

🧵🇻🇪🛢 ¿Y si la estatización de la industria petrolera de 1976 fue, en realidad, uno de los errores económicos más costosos de nuestra historia? Spoiler: si no hubiese habido estatización de la industria petrolera, para el año 2000, el PIB per cápita de Venezuela hubiera sido casi 60% MÁS ALTO de lo que realmente fue. En este hilo que trabajamos @PabloHernandezB y yo, te explicamos el método y los datos para llegar a eso. 👇

The company hired me to lead their "Agile Transformation." I don't know what Agile means. Nobody does. That's why it works. I make $425,000 a year. To move sticky notes. From left to right. On a board. The board is digital now. The sticky notes cost $80,000 in Jira licenses. Progress. Day one, I said "we need to break down silos." Everyone nodded. Silos are bad. I don't know why. But destroying them is a career. My career. I introduced "squads." Squads are teams. But disrupted. We disrupted the teams into teams. Different names. Same people. Same problems. But Agile problems now. Agile problems are strategic. A senior engineer asked what we're actually changing. I said, "The mindset." He asked what that means. I said, "It's a journey." He asked where we're going. I said, "Toward agility." He asked what agility means. I pointed at the sticky notes. They were moving left to right. That's velocity. We have velocity now. The VP of Engineering said two-week sprints don't fit their work. I said, "That's waterfall thinking." Waterfall is bad. Like silos. I don't know what waterfall is. But I know it's bad. She stopped talking. Waterfall accusations end conversations. We had a retrospective. In the retro, we discussed what went wrong. Everything went wrong. We put it on sticky notes. Then we moved the sticky notes. Into a column called "Parking Lot." The Parking Lot is where problems go to die. It's full. We don't look at it. That's agile. Velocity is up 40%. I defined velocity. I also defined the points. I also defined the stories. We're crushing it. At the things I made up. To measure. Ourselves. The CEO asked for ROI. I showed a chart. The chart went up. Charts should go up. This one did. I didn't label the Y-axis. Nobody asked. Leadership is confidence. We do standups now. Every day. We stand. For 45 minutes. Standing is agile. Sitting is waterfall. My legs hurt. But we're transforming. The transformation is now "Phase 3." Phase 1 was assessment. Phase 2 was implementation. Phase 3 is "continuous improvement." Continuous means forever. Forever means job security. I'm very secure. My contract was extended. Three more years. For "cultural impact." The culture is confused. But impacted. Agile transformation isn't about being agile. It's about transforming. Continuously. Toward more transformation. The destination is the journey. The journey is billable.

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

Caracas 2025.Para los que le gusta el frío caraqueño de diciembre, les presentamos al responsable de aquella popular frase: "llegó Pacheco".Sí, señores, Antonio Pacheco bajaba de Galipán con su arreo de burros cargado de flores todos los diciembre cuando comenzaban los días fríos

… y solían existir salas de cine en las que veíamos películas en pantallas enormes y compartíamos la experiencia con gente desconocida. Y cada película tenía su propio look y los personajes no tenían que decir todo lo que pensaban o estaba pasando

En 1970 se organizó una expedición para rescatar la avioneta del aviador estadounidense Jimmy Angel, el piloto que llevó al mundo la noticia del Salto Ángel tras su aterrizaje forzoso en lo alto del Auyantepui en 1937. Aquel operativo, complejo y riesgoso, logró desmontar la aeronave pieza por pieza para bajarla de la montaña y preservarla como parte de la memoria histórica del país. Este relato corresponde a la narración del periodista Óscar Yanes, quien recogió con su estilo inconfundible los detalles de una de las gestas más singulares vinculadas a la exploración de la Gran Sabana.