Sebastián Ortega

In love with software development and willing to keep learning about it for long years.

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

A system that is not understood in its entirety, (...), should probably not be built.
—Niklaus Wirth

He would be very much against vibecoding

[Alexander Berger @albrgr]

I’m really excited about the Strep A Vaccine Fund we’re launching today. IMO the basic case here is a great recipe for impact:

→ A huge problem: ~1% of total annual deaths worldwide (>600k)
→ Super neglected: ~$14M/yr of R&D globally before this, ~50x less than malaria which has similar mortality
→ Newly tractable: new human challenge models and earlier diagnostics should speed the path to an approved vaccine

Grateful to our partners Adam and Abigail Winkel, Good Ventures, Lucy Southworth, @ThePatchworkCLT, and a few anon donors for getting us to >$140M at launch. We’re continuing to actively fundraise and think we could effectively spend >$200M over the next few years. Our goal is to double the number of Strep A vaccine candidates in clinical trials and have at least one ready for Phase 3 trials by the end of 2030.

And I’m thrilled to be betting on Katharine’s vision here! As a grad student, she co-invented the R21 malaria vaccine that’s now reaching millions of kids. I’m hoping to see hundreds of millions of future Strep A vaccine doses with her fingerprints on them.

[Jorge Galindo @JorgeGalindo]

465,000 viviendas nuevas terminadas para 1,2 millones de hogares creados en los últimos 5 años. Precios disparados. Principal problema según todas las encuestas de opinión.

¿Por qué España no construye entonces si el incentivo es TAN grande?

Nos lo preguntamos aquí pero también me lo han preguntado gente de fuera, que nos mira sorprendida. El problema del acceso a la vivienda puede ser global, pero la intensidad y la falta de respuesta que tiene en España sí es particular.

Así que decidí rehacer por completo el site del libro que he escrito al respecto para tratar de dar una respuesta detallada a esta pregunta.

He tratado de hacerlo navegable e interactivo, que el contenido DENSO de la respuesta sea... manejable. Uso ejemplos (Madrid) y aproximaciones ilustrativas de tiempo o precio: priorizo acceso sobre detalle, pero sin negar la complejidad. También ofrezco algunas soluciones de lo que funcionaría, señalo que que no funciona a día de hoy, y alternativas mejores a mi parecer (y a la luz de la evidencia)

El site está hecho gracias a Claude Code, pero el contenido es casi 100% el del libro, con algún caso y dato nuevo.

Aquí os lo dejo. Espero que os sirva. https://t.co/I7rcCyRwwK

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

@cfenollosa And another pet peeve: science is built on top of empiricism as they say, but not on any kind of experience but just the ones verifiable by others and ideally, reproducible. Inner experience, like qualia, is neither.

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

@cfenollosa I agree with that quote.
But I’m surprised about the article dismissing the hard problem just because you don’t need dualism to explain it.
Even if everything about phenomenal consciousness is material, why it happens when brains process information? We still don’t know.

[Wes, the Dadliest Catch @wfenza]

Whitepill: in real life, we almost always coordinate so everyone pushes red.

Multiple times per day, we're all face with an opportunities to put our lives at risk in situations where, if enough people joined us, we'd be saved. I could go start waving a gun around my local police station. If I'm alone, I get shot. If 1,000 people join me, we'll all probably be allowed to leave without any shots fired. I could go jump on a bonfire. If enough other people do it, we'll smother the fire, but if I'm alone, I burn to death. There are hundreds of situations like this.

And for the most part, nobody pushes blue! Nobody puts themselves at risk, counting on others to save them. In nearly every real-life situation that matches the hypothetical (lots of people putting themselves at risk has the same outcome as nobody putting themselves at risk), everyone tacitly understands that not putting yourself at risk is the correct option. This applies even to babies and the infirm, who generally have people watching them to make sure they're not hurting themselves.

This is why the question is so divisive. It's a fantastical, contrived situation that we would never encounter irl. All of our real-world experience tells us that, of course, you just don't put yourself at risk and nobody else will either. But it's a strange enough situation that we can't actually count on everyone coordinating on red. So the blue voters are right that the only way to save everyone in this specific, outside-the-Overton-window situation is to coordinate on blue.

But the whitepill is that in almost every real-life situation, we *are* able to successfully coordinate on 100% red. It's by far the default outcome.

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

@KentBeck To be fair, discounting doesn’t fully explain it.
You need to lack desires that can be posthumously fulfilled with money. For example, for your descendants or to fund a foundation (e.g. against malaria or other longer term cause).

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
—Albert Bartlett

(He was talking about population and pollution but applies to things like covid and AI)

[Eliezer Yudkowsky @allTheYud]

Sorry, but I don't think we can rely on technical debt to destroy vibecoding. AI is a moving target.

If an AI writes the most clever code it can, AI six months later will be smart enough to debug it.

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

@cfenollosa Y eso es cuando comparas una checklist súper simple con juicio experto. Imagina el abismo de diferencia cuando tienes muchos más datos y puedes entrenar modelos sofisticados.

[Daniel Martín @dmartincy]

https://t.co/3o5AgenEJb

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

Interesting Reading in February https://t.co/UVt3iyyW0S

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

Interesting Reading in January https://t.co/dkhswDMdqy
(I know that it's March, busy days)

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages.

The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse.

I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee.

There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true.

But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

Interesting Reading in December https://t.co/Ep2wrxpDuI

[Sebastián Ortega @_sortega]

@QURIResearch or @NunoSempere, the search feature of Metaforecast has been broken for some time. Is the tool unmaintained?

[Nathan 🔎 @NathanpmYoung]

the idea that AI is a bubble was a bubble

[Carlos Fenollosa @cfenollosa]

Interesting take, worth a read

[Kiko Llaneras @kikollan]

✨ El mundo no empeora, mejora.

No es perfecto; ni siquiera un buen lugar. Pero de los escenarios globales que hemos conocido (no imaginado o deseado), este es el mejor.

45 datos para empezar 2026 con optimismo👇

[roon @tszzl]

when codex gets a little better - my experience gets overwhelmingly better. the addictive ness of the act of creation goes up wildly with respect to the drop in friction