Software dev and psychologist, keen on functional programming. Former neuroscientist. Game AI researcher at night. Petty dabbler of the cognitive arts. He/they.
Joined June 2012
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La donación de médula ósea salva muchas vidas. Por favor, lee esto y pásalo. Es muy poco intrusivo y darás vida a mucha gente.
fcarreras.org/es/donamedula
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Hoy he participado en la XIII reunión de la Asociación de Matronas de Madrid. He descubierto el papel que juega la matrona, más allá del embarazo y lactancia, a lo largo de toda la vida de la mujer.
En mi ponencia he hablado sobre SPI gestacional ➡️🧵
@NeurologiaHRI
@HospiLaPaz
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Breathe - Released 30 years ago today
The Prodigy HQ
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Se podrá criticar a la IA por muchas cosas, pero por el nivel de memes sobre el tema Jensen Huang desde luego que no.
Vamos con selección con los mejores del día, dentro hilo:
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
I wanted to prove FSD is safer than human drivers. Genuinely. I went to the data expecting to find the number everyone quotes: one accident per six million miles on FSD versus one per 670,000 for humans. Nine times safer. Case closed.
The claim cannot be made. Not "the data is weak." The comparison itself does not exist.
Start with the equipment. The "human driver" baseline is every car on American roads, and the average American car is over twelve years old. That baseline includes bald tires, worn brake pads, cracked mirrors, and drivers with no emergency braking, no blind spot warning, no lane keeping. A modern Tesla is a rolling sensor suite with the best crash-avoidance hardware ever sold to consumers. So I went looking for the honest comparison: FSD miles versus miles in comparable modern EVs with the same braking, comparable sensors, comparable warning systems. That dataset does not exist in any usable form. Nobody publishes it. Tesla certainly doesn't.
Then the miles themselves. FSD engagement is self-selected. Drivers turn it on in good weather, in daylight, on roads they trust it with. The owner's manual itself warns the system "may not operate as intended" in rain, snow, fog, and low light, which happen to be the conditions where humans crash most. So the FSD number is computed over the easiest miles in the newest cars with the richest, most insured drivers, while the human number absorbs every drunk at 3am and every teenager in a beater.
And it's supervised. Every mile in the FSD column had a human babysitter whose interventions, whose saves, get credited to the machine. The comparison isn't machine versus human. It's machine-plus-human versus human alone, with all credit assigned to the machine.
Darrell Huff described this exact move in How to Lie with Statistics in 1954: if you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing. Rolf Dobelli in "Art of Thinking Clearly" calls the other half of it the swimmer's body illusion: swimmers have great bodies because bodies select swimmers. Teslas crash less because new luxury cars with safety suites driven by affluent middle-aged owners crash less. Selection, not software. When Forbes decomposed Tesla's own 2020 report by road type, the Autopilot advantage shrank to about four percent, inside the margin of error. Tesla has refused every request since to release the breakdown.
So here is where I landed. I wanted the claim to be true and provable. It is neither provable nor disprovable with the data that exists. The honest sentence is "we don't know." Anyone who tells you FSD is statistically safer than humans is guessing. Anyone who tells you it's statistically more dangerous is also guessing. The difference is that only one of those guesses is attached to a stock price, a monthly subscription, and a man telling you the feature will be finished next year, every year, since 2016.
When someone quotes you the nine-times-safer figure, ask one question: compared to whom, driving what, in what weather, measured by whom? The silence is the answer.
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Some of my friends think AI will make it possible to build AAA games in just a couple of months. I think that seriously underestimates how complex game development is.
I often point them to game designer Liz England’s “The Door Problem.” It’s a great example of how much thought goes into game design. Making a good game still takes hard work and experience.
#gamedev #game
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The dogma of the last decade in computer vision is that all classical algorithms should be replaced by neural networks. This has been very productive but, counterintuitively, with the latest frontier models, I find myself sometimes turning back to classical methods.
If you have the training data, the dogma still holds. But there are situations where data is hard to get, there exist good classical algorithms for solving a problem, optimization methods are just better, or where some simple code just does the thing you want.
When writing code was time consuming and error prone, training everything made sense. Now, that a frontier model can code up and test solutions quickly, getting a solution through coding can be faster than gathering training data and training a model. Consequently, I think there will be more hybrid approaches that blend trained models and code.
We now have generic, high-level, planners that can execute sequences of lower-level tasks to solve large problems. These lower-level tasks may be solved by a neural network, a classical method, or specialized code written on the fly.
It never pays to be religious about technology. The future is probably hybrid. Pick the thing that works for you.
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Put a heart ❤️ next to a coding problem, and Claude & GPT write recursive code 100% of the time (0% baseline). They also can't tell you why!
Excited to share “A Heart Means Recursion” from my summer at @GoogleDeepMind, on how VLMs read & communicate with visual symbols. 🧵
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When you torrent, you join a swarm. Every peer in that swarm can see every other peer’s IP address, that’s how the protocol works. It has to know where to send the pieces.
Anti-piracy firms join swarms for popular titles and log every IP that connects, with a timestamp. It’s automated, which is why it took just two days.
The firm sends starlink the IP and timestamp. Starlink checks which customer had that address at that moment and forwards the notice. Resellers like sasktel say they don’t hand your identity to the rights holder unless a court orders it. starlink’s policy says repeat violations can lead to “service-related consequences.”
Piracy or not your ISP can see:
Every domain you connect to (DNS lookups, and the site name in the HTTPS handshake)
every IP you talk to
when you’re online and how much data you move
what kind of traffic it is. Bittorrent has a recognisable pattern even when it’s encrypted
HTTPS hides the page and what’s on it.
Yes use a VPN but it doesn’t make you invisible it only changes who can see you. Your ISP sees one encrypted tunnel to a VPN server. The swarm sees the VPN’s IP. The VPN provider now sees everything your ISP used to see. you’ve swapped who you trust.
Your ISP has always had the logs. Paramount just showed you they get used.
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> be Sam Zeloof
> decide that making computer chips shouldn't require a billion-dollar factory
> turn your parents' garage into a semiconductor laboratory
> start making individual transistors while still in high school
> then attempt something almost nobody has done at home
> manufacture an actual integrated circuit from scratch
> in 2018, build the Z1 with six transistors
> not buy a chip, not assemble a kit
> actually manufacture the silicon chip yourself
> use chemicals, furnaces, microscopes, and ultraviolet light
> build your own machine to print microscopic patterns onto silicon
> because commercial photolithography machines can cost millions
> finish the entire first chip using 66 steps
> then go back and make something 200 times more complex
> build the Z2 with 1,200 transistors
> use salvaged equipment and machines he repairs himself
> even buy a broken electron microscope for $1,000
> a machine that originally cost $250,000
> design chips, fabricate them, and test whether the transistors actually work
> all from a garage in New Jersey
> for perspective, Intel's first commercial microprocessor had 2,300 transistors
> Sam is using technology inspired by the semiconductor industry of the 1970s
> his chips aren't competing with modern processors
> he's proving that making silicon isn't exclusively a billion-dollar industry's privilege
> imagine what happens when more people can build their own chips
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Why isn’t Spanish food more famous?! I’m on my fifth trip to Spain and the dining is amazing. I’ve had one (1) poor meal in those trips (a reheated pizza in a hotel lobby, so not really Spain’s fault).
The cuisine is as good as or better than the famed French & Italian. AND the prices are way lower.
I think it’s because
1) French & Italian have better marketing;
2) many foreign visitors - British, for instance - frequent “touristy” spots on the coast and get fed dumbed down versions;
3) it’s highly regional, so there’s no coherent national style.
4) it’s dependent on super-fresh local ingredients, which you can’t really translate to another country.
5) while the entrees and sides blow me away, frankly the Spanish desserts are pedestrian by comparison. That dings it a bit. Yeah they’re passable but not on the level of the rest.
We had “arroz caldoso de bogabante” which I’m told the restaurant mispelled on purpose. The rice is soupy ( different from paella) and there’s a whole lobster in there. We also had grilled alcachofa for starters.
What are your ideas or theories or experiences about Spanish food?
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The year is 1854. Cholera is killing thousands in London. John Snow traces an outbreak to a contaminated water pump. Everyone blames bad air. Eventually cities separate sewage from drinking water. Clean water and sanitation will save more lives than almost anything medicine invents.
The year is 1867. Surgery is often more dangerous than the disease it treats. Joseph Lister starts cleaning instruments and wounds with antiseptic. Other surgeons ridicule him. Infections plummet.
The year is 1890. Your daughter has diphtheria. A thick membrane is forming in her throat, slowly suffocating her. The doctor injects a new antitoxin. She survives. A disease that killed tens of thousands of children will become almost unheard of in America.
The year is 1922. Your 14-year-old son has diabetes. He is starving to death no matter how much he eats. The only treatment is a starvation diet. The doctor injects insulin. His blood sugar falls. Children who would have died within months will grow up and have children.
The year is 1943. Your daughter has pneumonia. Before antibiotics, doctors could do little but hope. Now they give her penicillin. The fever breaks. Infections that routinely killed healthy adults become treatable.
The year is 1955. Parents are terrified of polio. Swimming pools close. Children become paralyzed. Some spend their lives in iron lungs. Jonas Salk develops a vaccine, tested in more than a million children. Within decades, polio disappears from America.
The year is 1960. Your wife is giving birth, and something goes wrong. A century earlier, she might have died. Now there are blood transfusions, antibiotics, safer cesarean sections, and anesthesia. Maternal mortality has fallen dramatically. Millions of women survive childbirth who otherwise wouldn’t have.
The year is 1978. Your blood pressure is 180 over 110. You feel fine. The doctor prescribes a pill. Clinical trials show that treating hypertension prevents strokes, heart failure, and death. You take it every morning. Nothing happens. That’s the point.
The year is 1980. The WHO declares smallpox eradicated. A disease that killed hundreds of millions in the twentieth century has disappeared from nature. Not treated. Not managed. Eliminated.
The year is 1996. Your brother has HIV. A decade earlier, the diagnosis was effectively a death sentence. Now doctors combine antiretroviral drugs. People who had months to live begin living for decades. Many will have near-normal life expectancies.
The year is 2014. Your father has hepatitis C. For decades, the infection has meant liver failure and cancer. Now he takes pills for twelve weeks. The virus disappears. A lifelong infection becomes curable in more than 95% of patients.
The year is 2019. Your daughter has cystic fibrosis. Her lungs are slowly failing. For decades, treatment meant managing infections and delaying the inevitable. Now doctors have a drug that corrects the underlying protein defect. Her breathing improves. Hospitalizations plummet. Predicted median survival rises from roughly 40 to more than 60 years.
The year is 2026. Your doctor has ten minutes and a screen. Your blood pressure is high, so the tablet is for life. Your cholesterol is high, so another tablet is for life. Your weight is high, so she offers an injection. The drugs have side effects. Not everyone needs them. But clinical trials show that appropriate treatment prevents heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, and death.
None of these treatments is perfect. None needs to be.
For most of human history, parents buried their children, infections killed healthy adults, and childbirth killed young women.
Today, global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Child mortality has collapsed.
Medicine has made terrible mistakes. We should remember them.
We should also remember the hundreds of millions of people alive because somebody got it right.
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
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Still unemployed and getting increasingly worried about my situation. Any help finding a good, stable tech job is deeply appreciated!
I've coded for 30 years, since I was an eight-year-old. I was a CTO of a Y Combinator company. I'm a polyglot down to work in most languages.
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Se ha muerto el prota de una de las mejores historias que he oído nunca
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Patrick Stewart, who died today at 86, became Professor X and Captain Picard. As a boy, he watched his father beat his mother, and heard the doctors who came to help tell her it was her own fault.
In the video below, a woman thanks him for helping her survive her own abuse, and his answer brings the whole room to its feet.
He grew up in a poor mill town in England. His father came home from World War II a different man and turned his violence on Patrick's mother.
Every time the doctors and ambulance men came, they told her she must have provoked him, that it takes two to make an argument.
Decades later, Stewart learned from his father's war records that he had been suffering from severe shell shock that was never treated.
So he spent the rest of his life working for two charities: one for abused women, in his mother's name, and one for traumatized soldiers, in his father's.
He could have spent his life hating his father. Instead, he spent it helping others. Is that the kind of legacy that matters more than fame?
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SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026)
Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.
We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.
America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.
His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen.
Ian McKellen 29 October 2026
Photo: University of Huddersfield
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Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
It’s getting worse and worse.
New study shows experts completely surrender their judgments to AI, and they don’t even realise it.
Fifty professional analysts used Claude Code to analyse data and advise a fictional farming cooperative. They faced four analytical decisions, followed by a final policy recommendation.
Unknown to them, AI advice was experimentally manipulated to lean towards opposite directions.
The results are disturbing.
Across the four analytical decisions, experts chose the AI’s preferred option 86% of the time.
Afterwards, half of the experts rated the final recommendation as more their own than the AI’s, and only 15% mentioned the AI in any explanation.
Epistemia is reaching the experts: we risk outsourcing judgment while preserving the illusion of intellectual independence.
What could possibly go wrong?
*
Paper in the first reply
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It's 2026. Your lab throws the biggest Halloween party to celebrate the Death of Mathematics. PIs are wasted in the coffee room, Phds and postdocs dance around a bonfire from obsolete preprints, even Reviewer 2 is having fun
And then the DJ (Fields medal) throws this banger 🎉