Ignacio Castro

Would be curious to read it if you find something interesting in that direction!

My thinking was that works using that perspective might have some insights, rather than this being an answer to the question

Trump Rages at ‘Deranged Bum’ Nobel Laureate in Late-Night Meltdown The president went after economist Paul Krugman in an irate Truth Social post.

Well, this is flattering. I may add "Deranged BUM" to my profile

www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump...

Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations – Wikimedia Foundation UPDATE: On Monday, 11 August, the High Court of Justice dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations. While the decision does not provi...

Breaking: the court ruling in Wikipedia's legal challenge to the Online Safety Act categorisation regime has just been handed down. The court dismissed Wikipedia's challenge. This is bad. This is very bad. wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/08...

Interesting. I struggle to see empire's large scale infrastructures (eg, transport, sanitation, irrigation) having no clear effect. If it is through population increase rather than individual wellbeing, it would be hard to disentangle child mortality from incentives to smaller families

The Atlas of Economic Complexity by @HarvardGrwthLab Visualize global trade data and economic growth opportunities for every country

Product Complexity Index might partially approximate what you are looking for atlas.hks.harvard.edu/rankings/pro...

Science department returns third of global R&D fund to Treasury - Research Professional News Exclusive: Over £128m in unspent budget returned as International Science Partnerships Fund enters “new phase”

ICYMI @sophieatrpn.bsky.social revealed on Friday that DSIT has returned £128m of its £337m global R&D fund to the Treasury, having failed to spend it in time

Against expectations, though, the International Science Partnerships Fund will keep its ODA element, despite the govt cutting aid spending

Another attempt to take @theonion.com out of business

After declaring them terrorists and just before occupying Gaza city

El hijo trumpista de Sarkozy tiene sed de política Louis Sarkozy, de 28 años, tiene el gen de la política y ha heredado de su padre una considerable habilidad dialéctica. El hijo del expresidente francés y de Cecilia

No se acaban nunca.

El hijo trumpista de Sarkozy tiene sed de política www.lavanguardia.com/internaciona...

Take TACO for a ride, Moscow style.

Side-lining Algeria as raison d’État/d’être :)

Opportunity: Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim Youth Mobilisation Lead - People vs. Big Tech Join Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim. Be part of a European youth campaign to make social media safer, healthier and more supportive!

Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim / @peoplevsbigtech.bsky.social is looking for a Youth Mobilisation Lead.

If you're under 28 and into tech justice, this is a great group of people working on promising projects!
peoplevsbig.tech/campaign/you...

Regardless of whether crypto is vapourware or not, companies in the productive economy raising funds to buy crypto instead of producing is an alarming sign. If biotech would buy real estate to be more financially attractive instead of research and deliver biotech, I would say the same.

The Algeria-Morocco-Spain gasoduct closed a few years ago. May be more related to regional tensions than to a "vision for the future of energy"?

AI + crypto crash, super double bubble combo

Moving investment from the real world into the ether: "154 public companies have either raised or committed to raise a combined total of $98.4bn in order to buy crypto." Smells like a bubble, sounds like a bubble, walks like a bubble...

Exclusive: Rubio orders US diplomats to launch lobbying blitz against Europe's tech law President Donald Trump's administration has instructed U.S. diplomats in Europe to launch a lobbying campaign to build an opposition to the European Union's Digital Services Act, which Washington says stifles free speech and imposes costs on U.S. tech companies, an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters showed.

EU, double down on DSA. Make them lobby the EU case against the US governament.
www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

ÚS-Morocco military ties increasing soon. I bet.

AI bubble? "Sujetame el cubata"

How much of Gaza is left standing? Analysis by independent researchers reveals the scale of the destruction

“The studies imply estimated [Gaza] life expectancy has fallen by more than 35 years, to ~ half the pre-war figure. In percentage terms…bigger than…during China’s Great Leap Forward; in absolute terms it is similar to the one in the Rwanda genocide” www.economist.com/interactive/...

£9 billion on Microsoft products despite being a surveillance machine in Palestine www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a..., being unreliable and subject to US influence www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/m..., and being too dominant in the cloud market www.reuters.com/legal/litiga... How smart is that?

"Perhaps the most challenging intellectual puzzle in this
design space is to discover parts of mechanism that
really can be divorced from policy — which, in other
words, actually are value-neutral." In the AI-content tussle era, this remains true though groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publicat...

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

Tussle in the cyberspace redux blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-i...

This is a very interesting paper (HT @older.bsky.social & @philippmarkolin.bsky.social). I need to sit on some of these thoughts a little longer, but here's a first approximation 🧵 of reactions — in no particular order and without much filtering.

Nice analysis! "Social simulations" on platforms might be useful to stress-test platforms structure and reason about its changes, a bit à la Netflix's Chaos Monkey.

A policy for the use of LLMs in government is much needed 👇

Putting aside the debate about the value that LLMs may provide, there are strong arguments that politicians, or others in senior leadership or policy setting roles, should not be using public cloud-based LLMs. 1/

"crypto companies that have benefited from the president’s staunch support of the digital assets industry have given the biggest boost to Maga Inc.’s coffers, contributing at least $41mn, or about 20 per cent of all donations"