Juan Soliveres

[Arild Oppheim @OppheimArild]

Når du trodde EU ikke kunne bli verre.. joda det blir verre for alle.

Nå må alle som selger noe til et land i EU betale for innpakningen av varer de sender. Det gjelder uansett hvor liten business du har.

Hvis du ikke følger den nylig innførte loven så risikerer du selvsagt heftige bøter.

You gotta love EU 🤡

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

We all see that Putin is now relying on one last thing: constant missile attacks. He has ballistic missiles. So we need anti-ballistic capabilities.

We’ve done a lot to defend against drones, and our interception rate is above 90 percent. That is a serious achievement. We are also defending against cruise missiles. But Russian ballistic missiles remain a problem, and we need an answer to that problem.

Our anti-ballistic coalition – all the countries that are part of it – must demonstrate full capability and deliver real results – better this year.

By this winter, we should already see concrete outcomes from our joint work on anti-ballistic defense.

From a speech at the 35th UDCG meeting. (1/3)

[Pedro Olazabal Herrero @olazabal_pedro]

Este gráfico de @JesusFerna7026 me encanta porque es más visual que la TFR o CFR. Aquí (con ayuda de Claude y datos de HFD) la evolución en mujeres nacidas en 1960 hasta 1973.
Con un 20% de mujeres sin hijos, es complicado llegar a 2,1 (necesitas más familias numerosas que de 2).

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

How has the Spanish economy performed over the very long run?

To answer, I use Leandro Prados de la Escosura’s (@LdelaEscosura) data on real GDP per capita from 1277 to 2024. I express Spain’s figure as a ratio to Britain’s, since Britain was the first economy to achieve modern economic growth, from around 1660, and has been the leader, or close to it, ever since.

Spain, within its present borders, was prosperous in the Late Middle Ages, well ahead of Britain, then a peripheral corner of Europe. The Black Death and its aftermath hit Spain harder, and by 1360, the two economies had converged.

That parity held until 1600, when Spain began a long decline, in absolute terms (on the eve of the French Revolution, it was barely above its 1600 level, after a deep slump in between) and in relative terms (Britain pulled steadily away). The standard explanations, the Habsburg wars, and the serial bankruptcies run into one problem. They can account for the poor performance between 1550 and 1650, but not for the stagnation between 1650 and 1789. 140 years of stagnation is far more than wars and debt under the Habsburgs can explain.

The series also shows that Spain did not benefit from its empire. That is a problem for every theory tying colonies to modern growth. At most, one can argue that colonies were a necessary condition for takeoff (I do not believe even that, but leave it for another day). One cannot argue that they were sufficient.

The period from 1789 to 1936 was no kinder. The economy grew a little, and Spain built a modern but unfinished liberal state. Yet it never closed the distance to Britain. It is hard not to read the period from 1789 to 1936 as a national failure and the Civil War as its final consequence.

The recent efforts of some historians to paint those years in brighter colors strike me as unfounded. Spain did not fail at modernization as badly as China, but it did not succeed. A deeply corrupt dynasty, closed and incompetent elites in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, and an economic policy built on intervention and protection (by 1920, Spain was the most protectionist economy in the Western world, so much for the friends of protection) together made the country a basket case.

A cruel civil war left Spain at its historical low, with just 31% of the British GDP per capita. The foreign visitors who arrived in the early 1950s found a poor, backward country.

Policy in the first twenty years of the dictatorship was awful. Autarky was not so much imposed by the Allies as chosen. Spain’s rulers, using their quasi-fascist Weltanschauung, believed growth would come from state intervention, closed markets, and unorthodox fiscal and monetary policy.

Then, in 1959, policy changed. Spain adopted a more orthodox fiscal and monetary policy and opened to foreign investment and trade. The results were spectacular. For forty years, Spain grew briskly and became the modern country it is today. By 2001, it had reached 77% of British GDP per head.

But the internal contradictions of two things eventually became binding: the growth model launched in 1959, and the political regime created by the 1978 constitution. By 2024, Spain had slipped back to 74% of British GDP per head. This is worse than it looks. Britain itself has done poorly over the past twenty years, and losing ground to a weak performer is a bad sign.

Spain stands at a crossroads, economic and political. The country’s foundations no longer work, but its political and business elites have failed to understand this fundamental reality. A good grasp of its economic history helps make sense of its present predicament.

[Juan Soliveres @juansoliveres]

https://t.co/Mv4v8SkznJ

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Rings topology

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

The moment of one of today’s Russian strikes on Kyiv.

I can see that fewer and fewer people are reading news from Ukraine. I understand that on a Sunday morning, people don’t want to read about war. They want to sleep a little longer, drink good coffee, and sit in the sun. I understand that. The algorithms on X limit content about war, destruction, and suffering. You have to make an effort to even see this information.

All of this is understandable on a human level. But unfortunately, if you remove Putin and the war from your information feed, they do not disappear from reality.

Putin is a sadist and a maniac. He is a threat to all of humanity.

There needs to be active resistance. News from Ukraine needs to be shared. People need to keep their focus.

Despite a sleepless night, I’m still here. And I’m grateful to everyone who continues to stand with us.

One day, we’ll drink morning coffee together in a beautiful, peaceful Kyiv.

[okazakitomohiro @oo_kk_aa]

ニャッキの伊藤有壱さんにお声掛け頂き、コマ撮りの展覧会に一作家として参加しています。私はコマ撮り分野ではない場所から活動をはじめて、デザインの視点でのコマ撮りに取り組んできましたが、今回初めてコマ撮り界の本丸の方々とご一緒でき嬉しいです。今6年目のマッチ撮影素材等を展示しています

[Jason @mytechceoo]

Employee got put on a TIP (Token Improvement Plan)

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

Visualizing James Jamerson’s legendary bassline on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (credit to Vulfpeck)

[Cosmos Archive @cosmosarcive]

Why are there no green stars?

As they burn hotter, stars shift:
red → orange → yellow → white → blue...

But green?

Never! This stunning animation shows the blackbody physics trick; our eyes see white when the peak hits green.

[clanker whisperer @technoascetic]

@madaomoshiroi I love this demo, which shows that laminar flow is reversible

https://t.co/6CZZVKpSms

[Magnetic Norse @MagneticNorse]

I wonder what they do when they're not observed

[The Scientific Lens @LensScientific]

A method of drawing infinitely many touching circles

Credit: Matt Henderson

[𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚆𝙷𝙸𝚃𝙴 𝚁𝙰𝙱𝙱𝙸𝚃 @thewhiterabbit]

Finally 👏👏👏

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

When Copernicus proposed heliocentrism in 1543, it was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model - a system refined over 1,400 years with epicycles precisely tuned to match observed planetary positions.

It took another 70 years before Kepler, working from Tycho Brahe's unprecedentedly precise observations, replaced Copernicus’s circles with ellipses - finally making heliocentrism empirically superior.

Terence Tao's point is that science needs a high temperature setting. If we only fund and follow what's most state of the art today, we kill the ideas that might need decades of work to surpass some overall plateau.

[Bo Wang @BoWang87]

This is really cool (and wild):

Scientists simulated a complete living cell for the first time. Every molecule, every reaction, from DNA replication to cell division.

The paper (Luthey-Schulten et al., Cell 2026, https://t.co/PXxXWKC8yp), just out today, used JCVI-Syn3A — a synthetic minimal bacterium with fewer than 500 genes. A 3D+time simulation of the full 105-minute cell cycle: DNA replication, protein translation, metabolism, division. Every gene, protein, RNA, and chemical reaction tracked through physical space.

It took years to build. Multiple GPUs. Six days of compute time per run.

And this is the simplest possible cell.

A human cell has ~20,000 genes. It lives in tissue. It interacts with neighbors. It differentiates. It responds to drugs in ways that depend on context we haven't fully measured.

Mechanistic simulation of the minimal cell costs 6 GPU-days for 105 minutes of biology. You cannot scale that to human cells. The complexity isn't 40x harder. It's exponentially harder.

This is why the field pivoted to data-driven models. You can't hand-encode the regulatory wiring of a human hepatocyte. But you can learn it — if you have the right perturbation data collected across enough diverse biological contexts.

The two approaches aren't competing. Papers like this generate the ground truth that future ML models need for validation. But the path to a clinically useful virtual cell runs through foundation models, not through scaling up mechanistic simulation.

Amazing work!

[Jaime Gómez-Obregón @JaimeObregon]

Para renovar el pasaporte hace falta llevar el DNI a una comisaría de la Policía Nacional.

He preguntado en la Policía Nacional si puedo identificarme ante la Policía Nacional con la app MiDNI de la Policía Nacional.

Me han dicho que no sirve. 😂