Paloma Castellano

Passionate about tech. Investing in startups @wayra Spain.

[Paloma Castellano @bloodymary]

@toni_pn Mucho ánimo, Toni! Gracias por ser siempre tan auténtico y por compartir! Un abrazo enorme!

[How To Prompt @HowToPrompt__]

A toothpaste company has quietly killed the entire market research industry and nobody is talking about it.

Colgate published a paper showing you can predict real purchase intent at 90% accuracy by simply asking LLMs to roleplay customers.

And this is beyond insane.

If you ask an AI, "Rate this product from 1 to 5," it gives safe, middle-of-the-road garbage.

So researchers invented a method called Semantic Similarity Rating (SSR).

Instead of asking the AI for a number, they asked it to roleplay.

They gave the LLM a demographic profile. They showed it a product concept. And they asked it to write down its raw, unfiltered thoughts.

Then, they used a semantic model to translate those written thoughts into a numerical score.

The results are staggering.

Tested against 57 real corporate surveys and 9,300 actual human responses, the synthetic AI consumers matched real human buying behavior with 90% reliability.

They perfectly mirrored how different age brackets and income levels react to price changes.

And they provided detailed, qualitative feedback that was deeper and more critical than what actual humans wrote.

This destroys the economics of traditional market research.

You don't need to wait a month to see if a product will sell.

You can simulate 1,000 hyper-targeted customer interviews overnight.

You can A/B test pricing across every demographic instantly.

[Pablo R. (Root Rat) @root_rat]

https://t.co/4xy70nrsi1

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.

The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body.

His name is David Eagleman.

He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams.

Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since.

Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual.

You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open.

Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves.

This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed.

In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first.

Now sit with the implication of that for a second.

Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years.

If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight.

But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep.

Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense.

Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal.

They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise.

The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied.

The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you.

Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops.

So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly.

Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation.

A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium.

And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case.

Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep.

Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it.

For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all.

They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking.

The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream.

You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen.

Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

[George Sivulka @gsivulka]

https://t.co/fdKmCTuaUk

[Paloma Castellano @bloodymary]

@david_bonilla @davidbs Que grandísima persona! 😢DEP

[Juan Luis Hortelano @jlhortelano]

Muy interesante el proyecto https://t.co/Xr5a1g4vml que recoge más de 1.700 startups de YC que han muerto. Con post mortem superdetallados y quién resolvió después el mismo problema con éxito.
Además también ofrece un playbook para revivir esos proyectos (con una parte de pago), pero aun así, mucha valiosa información libre.

Posterous murió. Substack llegó después. Webvan no sobrevivió. Instacart sí. Y como estas, un montón.
Las ideas no mueren, evolucionan.
El timing y la ejecución sí importan, y mucho.

Hay más recursos parecidos: https://t.co/3tccfPf08x (todo lo que Google lanzó y abandonó), https://t.co/bxoS7z0tuT (400+ startups fallidas filtradas por industria y causa), o https://t.co/Bu0wdezucC (de pago, de Greg Isenberg, convierte tendencias de Reddit en ideas con demanda real).

Lo que me parece interesante de todo esto con el potencial que hoy nos ofrecen las herramientas de IA es que el coste de explorar esas ideas se ha desplomado.
Muchas fallaron por timing, no porque la idea fuese mala. La infraestructura no estaba lista, el usuario no había madurado, el coste de construcción era inasumible para un equipo pequeño.

Esas tres barreras han bajado mucho.

Me da que en los próximos años vamos a ver bastantes relanzamientos de ideas que murieron entre 2010 y 2020.
No copias. Adaptaciones con equipos de 2-3 personas como mucho donde antes hacían falta 20.
Estos "cementerios" son en realidad bancos de ideas con autopsias incluidas.

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

🚨: A petri dish of human brain cells just learned to play DOOM

[Crossmint @crossmint]

Announcing https://t.co/5iGRosL4dq. The open payment standard for OpenClaw agents.

There's no secure way for OpenClaw agents to pay for things. Until now.

Powered by @crossmint, @Visa Intelligent Commerce, @solana, @circle, and @stytchauth.

🧵👇

[Paloma Castellano @bloodymary]

@elwatto @cohnen En wayra también te acogemos encantado y ya cubres gran parte del ecosistema!

[Priyanshu Ratnakar @0xratnakar]

wake up babygirl, now news is written by chatgpt

[Paloma Castellano @bloodymary]

@playsparkapp Spark

[Elena Gómez Pozuelo @gomezdelpozuelo]

Solo 1 de cada 5 startups en España está fundada por mujeres. No es falta de talento: sobran ideas, pasión y coraje. Lo que falta es visibilidad y apoyo real.

En @Womenalia llevamos 4 años impulsando el Premio AxTodas, para dar luz a esas emprendedoras valientes. Este 20 de noviembre, en Valencia, celebraremos su talento.

https://t.co/RBAXIAVnt6

¿Me ayudáis con un RT para que llegue a más mujeres que merecen brillar? #AxTodas2025

[Paloma Castellano @bloodymary]

@toni_pn I know. Intentamos no meter la gamba, pero también la metemos de vez en cuando

[Paloma Castellano @bloodymary]

@toni_pn Me ha encantado, Toni. Más que optimismo (qué también), lo que se nota es la lucha y el no rendirse. Toda una lección vital. Gracias por compartirlo.

[Miguel Arias @mike_arias]

Segundo episodio de Close & Personal con @jmalvpal , un privilegio compartir su historia personal, los valores que han guiado su vida, momentos en los que tuvo que tomar decisiones difíciles y qué viene después

https://t.co/A5zjgiN2ry

[Alex Immerman @aleximm]

"The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup can get the distribution before the incumbent can build the innovation."

[Verbolario @Verbolario]

«Dimitir»; 13/jun/2025: voz n° MMMDLXXXV @rodrigocortes

[Paloma Castellano @bloodymary]

@kikollan le pregunté por qué eligió y esta es su respuesta:

[Paloma Castellano @bloodymary]

@joaquinmencia @pablo_ventura Lo lanzaron hace un par de semanas, aún no han asignado https://t.co/3xHYf6cIQw