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jaime silvela

@jaimes.bsky.social
26 followers 92 following 93 posts

movies, programming, math, overthinking Tech/math blog: blog.silvela.org

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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
All those discussions on avoiding Single Points of Failure, and then we depend more and more on personal mobile phones. Eh
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Just listened to the founder of a company I worked for say that planet surfaces are so yesterday, and we want a trillion humans in the solar systems so we can get 1000 Einsteins and Mozarts. Oh god.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Nolan did Oppenheimer again. When Odysseus looks in horror at the sacking of Troy, I half expected him to say “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”. Or maybe "I am shocked to find that gambling is going on in here."
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
I have fluctuating feelings about fonts, but I'm certain I love David Berlow's *Apres*. Alas, the webfont has bad licensing options. I find that *Curiosa*, by Henrique Beier (at Fabio Haag Type) is a charming sibling with very reasonable licensing terms.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
In 2035, finally the tech titans were satisfied that they had built a true God-level AI (GAI). They asked the AI: "How do we fix climate change?" The AI responded: "Phase out fossil fuels, install solar and wind, and invest in science and scientists. Bye now." Then it quickly self-destructed.
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rob pike @robpike.io · 30/06/2026
benjaminhollon.com/musings/stop...
benjaminhollon.com
stop asking writers about "AI"
Every time I tell someone new that I’m a writer, they pause for a moment, then ask the same question: “So, what do you think about AI?” This question has been sapping my motivation to write for years.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
As I watch bare chested guys walking in the park, they're thinking "the gym really paid off, look at that guy eyeing my pecs with envy." I'm thinking, "What a douche."
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WeRateDogs @weratedogs.com · 26/06/2026
This is Holly. Every day for the past 5 years, she picks out a stick and brings it to her favorite spot for “zen time.” While her stick may change, her routine never does. 13/10 (IG: hollythebluestaffy)
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
My web extension, Glareless, which helps protect your eyes, is now available for both Chrome and Firefox. sr.ht/~jsilvela/gl... Blog post on its development and motivation: blog.silvela.org/post/2026-03...
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
I've created a browser extension to help your eyes: blog.silvela.org/post/2026-03...
blog.silvela.org
Introducing Glareless, a browser extension that helps your eyes - Lost Among Notes
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ishmael @ishmael.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
incredible www.ft.com/content/f6eb...
The International Energy Agency is calling for people to cut oil demand by working from home more, flying less and driving slower, as the Iran war rocks global energy markets.

The agency says those measures, alongside steps such as sharing cars and switching to electric cookers, are needed to help with the “largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, which has pushed the price of a barrel of oil above $100.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
The unit of measurement will be the Altman. A kilo-Altman will be roughly the intelligence of a cat.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
You should set the sharpness of your monitors/TVs to zero. See why: blog.silvela.org/post/2025-12...
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
Awesome, MathJax 4 supports choosing fonts. STIX2 is a clear upgrade over Computer Modern.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Austra has a new album out, and there art thou happy
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The Onion @theonion.com · 25/06/2025
From The Archives: Trump Demands NATO Allies Match U.S. Commitment To Prioritizing Military Spending Over Healthcare theonion.com/trump-d...
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
Great typography news. At last these fonts have webfont files ... and quite affordable. Sitka is phenomenal. www.tiro.com/articles/mic...
tiro.com
License Microsoft fonts from Tiro Typeworks
Introducing the first tranche of Microsoft fonts available for licensing from the makers, Tiro Typeworks.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
I think that in 10 years we will look back with amazement at the credit given to Sam Altman et. al.
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Tim Krief @timkrief.com · 16/09/2025
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Osita Nwanevu @ositanwanevu.com · 07/09/2025
It's seeming likelier and likelier that AI really could eliminate a lot of jobs very soon. Just not in the way boosters have suggested. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...
Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?
The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.

By Rogé KarmaThe capability-reliability gap might explain why generative AI has so far failed to deliver tangible results for businesses that use it. When researchers at MIT recently tracked the results of 300 publicly disclosed AI initiatives, they found that 95 percent of projects failed to deliver any boost to profits. A March report from McKinsey & Company found that 71 percent of  companies reported using generative AI, and more than 80 percent of them reported that the technology had no “tangible impact” on earnings. In light of these trends, Gartner, a tech-consulting firm, recently declared that AI has entered the “trough of disillusionment” phase of technological development.By one estimate, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla will by the end of this year have collectively spent $560 billion on AI-related capital expenditures since the beginning of 2024 and have brought in just $35 billion in AI-related revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic are bringing in lots of revenue and are growing fast, but they are still nowhere near profitable. Their valuations—roughly $300 billion and $183 billion, respectively, and rising—are many multiples higher than their current revenues. (OpenAI projects about $13 billion in revenues this year; Anthropic, $2 billion to $4 billion.) Investors are betting heavily on the prospect that all of this spending will soon generate record-breaking profits. If that belief collapses, however, investors might start to sell en masse, causing the market to experience a large and painful correction.The dot-com crash was bad, but it did not trigger a crisis. An AI-bubble crash could be different. AI-related investments have already surpassed the level that telecom hit at the peak of the dot-com boom as a share of the economy. In the first half of this year, business spending on AI added more to GDP growth than all consumer spending combined. Many experts believe that a major reason the U.S. economy has been able to weather tariffs and mass deportations without a recession is because all of this AI spending is acting, in the words of one economist, as a “massive private sector stimulus program.” An AI crash could lead broadly to less spending, fewer jobs, and slower growth, potentially dragging the economy into a recession. The economist Noah Smith argues that it could even lead to a financial crisis if the unregulated “private credit” loans funding much of the industry’s expansion all go bust at once.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
Scientific experts are the worst kind of experts, except for all the other kinds of experts.
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Osita Nwanevu @ositanwanevu.com · 28/08/2025
How long are we going to have to put up with mush like this? Frowns? Muttering? The humanity! Also, what do you mean ad hominem attacks were "just as harmful?" Surely they were more? Dreck elevated in the discourse so readily, you're not even expected to make the strongest version of the argument.
Too often, we saw views diverging from the board’s progressive slant meet with frowns, muttering and other subtle but unmistakably discouraging reactions. Less common but just as harmful were ad hominem attacks and overly emotional appeals to personal experience that frustrated constructive debate.
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Allison Morrow @amorrow.bsky.social · 23/08/2025
“The bubble bursting was never going to be one event, but a series of sentiment shifts against technology that has never proven its worth outside of specious hype” @edzitron.com
cnn.com
The AI vibe shift is upon us | CNN Business
Rather suddenly, there’s been a vibe shift around artificial intelligence, the tech that’s hypnotized Wall Street and inspired cultish devotion across Silicon Valley over the past three years.
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Trung Le Nguyen @trungles.com · 16/08/2025
It’s so stupid that all the “but what about fairness in women’s sports” people are always talking about Oh No What If Trans and never, like, paying women athletes more
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
@mailfence.com been getting no connection to mailfence, and a 503 "maintenance" message. What's going on? Is there some place I can check the status? Thanks
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Jenna @jennaonthenet.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
David Byrne came to my band’s show at a gay bar in Bed-Stuy and sang This Must Be The Place with us and I still haven’t processed it
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
Delightful story about a 17-year-old homeschooler who disproved the 40-year-old Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. She decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping the rest of high school and college. When she finishes, a PhD will be her first degree.
quantamagazine.org
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine
After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.
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CloudNativePG @cloudnativepg.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
In a mini-series on the blog we highlight the work of our maintainers, component owners, and members of the larger community. This week we meet @jaimes.bsky.social an experienced software developer & system builder, and a component owner for the project: cloudnative-pg.io/blog/contrib...
cloudnative-pg.io
Contributor Spotlight: Jaime Silvela
In a mini-series on this blog we highlight the work of the community. Today we meet Jaime Silvela, experienced software developer and system builder and CloudNativePG component owner.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
@newsweek.com From last week, based on interviews with Yann LeCun, David Eagleman, and me. The three of us could be described as AI realists, and have devoted our lives to AI and understanding intelligence. www.newsweek.com/2025/07/04/a...
newsweek.com
What AI really can do now: 6 lessons for harnessing artificial intelligence
Newsweek interviewed a remarkable constellation of experts through its AI Impact series. Here are 6 lessons you can actually use, based on their experience.
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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
I promise you this GOP Senate bill is worse than you think 1) Biggest wealth transfer in American history 2) ~Trillion dollar cut to Medicaid 3) Nursing homes shutting down 4) Kills solar industry, raising prices 5) Grid blackouts Thread #TheyWantYouDead @thunen.bsky.social @mkblyth.bsky.social
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Mad Scholar Frights @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · 29/06/2025
This will put a grin on your face
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Nash @radiodeadair.com · 11/06/2025
Deep Blue is 30 years old and was capable of defeating chess grand champions. It could be housed in a single cabinet. ChatGPT spans untold data centers devouring massive amounts of electricity and it got its ass whipped by an 8 bit gaming console from the 1970s.
extremetech.com
ChatGPT Lost a Chess Game to an Atari 2600
And on the 'Beginner' difficulty level, too.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
I created this artisanally ... via imgflip
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Knuth is always inspiring: > Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email...
www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu
Knuth versus Email
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
@symbo1ics.bsky.social Feliciano fonts on your radar? Has a new iteration of Merlo out, and it's phenomenal, and cheap! Up there with Heldane, but renders better on Windows / Linux. felicianotype.com/typefaces/me...
felicianotype.com
Merlo Original – Feliciano Type
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
Today's new blog post on how the hype around each of Generative AI and Humanoid Robots is driven by similar pressures, with some slight differences in emphasis. rodneybrooks.com/parallels-be...
rodneybrooks.com
Parallels between Generative AI and Humanoid Robots – Rodney Brooks
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I often call this one to question.
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rob pike @robpike.io · 22/02/2025
Repost if you have tinnitus.
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Zalatoy @zalatoy.com · 13/02/2025
Teletrabajo
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The Life of Sharks @thelifeofsharks.com · 06/02/2025
You’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a shark.
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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 21/11/2024
Hello, I wrote a new talk that is ultimately about how misery is a dumb strategy egoless.engineering
egoless.engineering
Egoless Engineering
It turns out misery is a shitty proxy metric.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 18/05/2024
I went to grad school at Columbia in the 2000's and could not be bothered to go to commencement. Instead, a few friends made our own graduation gowns and had our own ceremony at Battery Park. Today this is a proud memory.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 13/05/2024
Coding is like running: those who are still doing it in their forties are the ones that actually liked it.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 05/05/2024
Was thinking of taking a writing class. Looked at MasterClass, and they have Malcolm Gladwell in there teaching. Wonders never cease.
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The Life of Sharks @thelifeofsharks.com · 02/05/2024
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Linotype Pilgrim @symbo1ics.bsky.social · 07/04/2024
Hat tip mietek
Cartoon of two programmers solving a jigsaw puzzle. Freckled man labelled "Dynamic typing" is yelling "Done!" with his hands gleefully raised, but his jigsaw is not solved, only arranged in a rectangle—because, in a unityped language, the pieces are square and can be used anywhere. 

To his right, a man labelled "Static typing", whose jigsaw is not finished, is looking unimpressed with an eyebrow raised at his colleague. His pieces have interlocks as in an ordinary jigsaw, and some are correctly placed.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 25/04/2024
My favorite quote from Sense and Sensibility was written by Emma Thompson for the 1995 movie adaptation, and not by Jane Austen. Huh.
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 20/04/2024
My hope is that the slog that is Dune 2 will encourage people to watch the David Lynch version
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jaime silvela @jaimes.bsky.social · 19/04/2024
My typography mania seems to have subsided. I've settled on Carot Mono, Graphik, and Arno Pro. I wonder what my next feverish obsession will be.
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