Software dev and psychologist, keen on functional programming. Former neuroscientist. Game AI researcher at night. Petty dabbler of the cognitive arts. He/they.
Joined June 2012
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Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Why isn’t Spanish food more famous?! I’m on my fifth trip to Spain and the dining is amazing. I’ve had one (1) poor meal in those trips (a reheated pizza in a hotel lobby, so not really Spain’s fault).
The cuisine is as good as or better than the famed French & Italian. AND the prices are way lower.
I think it’s because
1) French & Italian have better marketing;
2) many foreign visitors - British, for instance - frequent “touristy” spots on the coast and get fed dumbed down versions;
3) it’s highly regional, so there’s no coherent national style.
4) it’s dependent on super-fresh local ingredients, which you can’t really translate to another country.
5) while the entrees and sides blow me away, frankly the Spanish desserts are pedestrian by comparison. That dings it a bit. Yeah they’re passable but not on the level of the rest.
We had “arroz caldoso de bogabante” which I’m told the restaurant mispelled on purpose. The rice is soupy ( different from paella) and there’s a whole lobster in there. We also had grilled alcachofa for starters.
What are your ideas or theories or experiences about Spanish food?
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
The year is 1854. Cholera is killing thousands in London. John Snow traces an outbreak to a contaminated water pump. Everyone blames bad air. Eventually cities separate sewage from drinking water. Clean water and sanitation will save more lives than almost anything medicine invents.
The year is 1867. Surgery is often more dangerous than the disease it treats. Joseph Lister starts cleaning instruments and wounds with antiseptic. Other surgeons ridicule him. Infections plummet.
The year is 1890. Your daughter has diphtheria. A thick membrane is forming in her throat, slowly suffocating her. The doctor injects a new antitoxin. She survives. A disease that killed tens of thousands of children will become almost unheard of in America.
The year is 1922. Your 14-year-old son has diabetes. He is starving to death no matter how much he eats. The only treatment is a starvation diet. The doctor injects insulin. His blood sugar falls. Children who would have died within months will grow up and have children.
The year is 1943. Your daughter has pneumonia. Before antibiotics, doctors could do little but hope. Now they give her penicillin. The fever breaks. Infections that routinely killed healthy adults become treatable.
The year is 1955. Parents are terrified of polio. Swimming pools close. Children become paralyzed. Some spend their lives in iron lungs. Jonas Salk develops a vaccine, tested in more than a million children. Within decades, polio disappears from America.
The year is 1960. Your wife is giving birth, and something goes wrong. A century earlier, she might have died. Now there are blood transfusions, antibiotics, safer cesarean sections, and anesthesia. Maternal mortality has fallen dramatically. Millions of women survive childbirth who otherwise wouldn’t have.
The year is 1978. Your blood pressure is 180 over 110. You feel fine. The doctor prescribes a pill. Clinical trials show that treating hypertension prevents strokes, heart failure, and death. You take it every morning. Nothing happens. That’s the point.
The year is 1980. The WHO declares smallpox eradicated. A disease that killed hundreds of millions in the twentieth century has disappeared from nature. Not treated. Not managed. Eliminated.
The year is 1996. Your brother has HIV. A decade earlier, the diagnosis was effectively a death sentence. Now doctors combine antiretroviral drugs. People who had months to live begin living for decades. Many will have near-normal life expectancies.
The year is 2014. Your father has hepatitis C. For decades, the infection has meant liver failure and cancer. Now he takes pills for twelve weeks. The virus disappears. A lifelong infection becomes curable in more than 95% of patients.
The year is 2019. Your daughter has cystic fibrosis. Her lungs are slowly failing. For decades, treatment meant managing infections and delaying the inevitable. Now doctors have a drug that corrects the underlying protein defect. Her breathing improves. Hospitalizations plummet. Predicted median survival rises from roughly 40 to more than 60 years.
The year is 2026. Your doctor has ten minutes and a screen. Your blood pressure is high, so the tablet is for life. Your cholesterol is high, so another tablet is for life. Your weight is high, so she offers an injection. The drugs have side effects. Not everyone needs them. But clinical trials show that appropriate treatment prevents heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, and death.
None of these treatments is perfect. None needs to be.
For most of human history, parents buried their children, infections killed healthy adults, and childbirth killed young women.
Today, global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Child mortality has collapsed.
Medicine has made terrible mistakes. We should remember them.
We should also remember the hundreds of millions of people alive because somebody got it right.
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Still unemployed and getting increasingly worried about my situation. Any help finding a good, stable tech job is deeply appreciated!
I've coded for 30 years, since I was an eight-year-old. I was a CTO of a Y Combinator company. I'm a polyglot down to work in most languages.
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Se ha muerto el prota de una de las mejores historias que he oído nunca
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Patrick Stewart, who died today at 86, became Professor X and Captain Picard. As a boy, he watched his father beat his mother, and heard the doctors who came to help tell her it was her own fault.
In the video below, a woman thanks him for helping her survive her own abuse, and his answer brings the whole room to its feet.
He grew up in a poor mill town in England. His father came home from World War II a different man and turned his violence on Patrick's mother.
Every time the doctors and ambulance men came, they told her she must have provoked him, that it takes two to make an argument.
Decades later, Stewart learned from his father's war records that he had been suffering from severe shell shock that was never treated.
So he spent the rest of his life working for two charities: one for abused women, in his mother's name, and one for traumatized soldiers, in his father's.
He could have spent his life hating his father. Instead, he spent it helping others. Is that the kind of legacy that matters more than fame?
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026)
Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.
We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.
America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.
His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen.
Ian McKellen 29 October 2026
Photo: University of Huddersfield
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
It’s getting worse and worse.
New study shows experts completely surrender their judgments to AI, and they don’t even realise it.
Fifty professional analysts used Claude Code to analyse data and advise a fictional farming cooperative. They faced four analytical decisions, followed by a final policy recommendation.
Unknown to them, AI advice was experimentally manipulated to lean towards opposite directions.
The results are disturbing.
Across the four analytical decisions, experts chose the AI’s preferred option 86% of the time.
Afterwards, half of the experts rated the final recommendation as more their own than the AI’s, and only 15% mentioned the AI in any explanation.
Epistemia is reaching the experts: we risk outsourcing judgment while preserving the illusion of intellectual independence.
What could possibly go wrong?
*
Paper in the first reply
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
It's 2026. Your lab throws the biggest Halloween party to celebrate the Death of Mathematics. PIs are wasted in the coffee room, Phds and postdocs dance around a bonfire from obsolete preprints, even Reviewer 2 is having fun
And then the DJ (Fields medal) throws this banger 🎉
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
A gentle reminder to teams building agentic systems.
Have fun; enjoy the process of exploring novel architectures involving flashy new toys; learn new things along the way.
However
Don’t forget that you are building these things to solve a real problem. Your customers require results; they need value; they want solutions.
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Empiece con los pisos turísticos ilegales, hombre, que sí tiene las competencias. Le mandé un listado de 15.000.
🔴Almeida: "Si este Ayuntamiento tuviera competencias, me ponía yo a laa cabeza de la Policía Municial a desalojar la acampada de Sol" eldiario.es/politica/ultima-…
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
A high school girl in Mexico just won a gold medal for putting out fires with a speaker. It plays one deep, low hum and the flames die in about 5 seconds.
DARPA tried the same idea back in 2012 with a rig so big and clunky they never took it any further, and hers runs on a 12-volt battery and a speaker she can carry around.
Sound is just air being pushed back and forth. A low note at 30 hertz means the air around the flame is flipping direction 30 times every second.
Flames only exist in a thin layer where fuel vapor mixes with oxygen. Shake that layer hard enough and it keeps getting stretched thinner, the heat gets pulled away faster than the flame can make more, and eventually the flame rips right off the fuel. Whatever tears off is too cool to keep burning, so it just goes out.
DARPA's report put a number on how little it takes. Once the air at the flame is moving about half a meter per second, which is barely a breeze, the flame goes out, and pretty much any pitch can get there if you crank the power high enough.
Low notes just get you there way cheaper, because a speaker moves a lot more air on each push when the pitch is low. Two engineering students at George Mason figured this out by trial and error in 2015. They started with super high pitches, 20,000 to 30,000 hertz, and all the flames did was shiver. It only worked once they dropped down to 30 to 60 hertz, which is basically the bass on a hip-hop track.
Ángela Karime's build is a 12-volt battery, a frequency generator, an amplifier and a speaker, tuned to 30 hertz. She named it Vortex Tech and talks about it shooting out little rings of air, and that's real physics. When loud, low sound gets pushed through a narrow opening, the air curls up into rings like a smoke ring, and those rings carry a puff of air way farther than the sound would get on its own. In her tests it put out small flames from about 2 meters away.
She went through five prototypes and over 100 tests in about a year, and she says it's put out burning wood, flammable liquids, electronics and cooking oil.
The cooking oil one is a big deal. Throw water on a grease fire and it flashes into steam and flings burning oil all over your kitchen, which is exactly the kind of fire where you'd want something that doesn't put anything into the pan.
Now, sound can't cool anything down, so a big fire sitting on red-hot fuel can come right back the second the speaker shuts off. The George Mason guys worried about the same thing in 2015, and it's why this is still a prototype for small flames and the red extinguisher under your sink isn't going anywhere yet.
Space might end up being where this matters first. Up there water floats off in blobs, while sound works the same with or without gravity, and acoustics researchers have already published experiments on fighting fires with sound on spacecraft.
She's still in high school, and she's already working on a version that spots a fire and puts it out by itself. The gold in Indonesia also came with a special award that gets her into another international competition.
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
🛑IMPORTANTE🛑
Busco trabajo de manera urgente, tanto en #València como en #Madrid. De forma presencial o remota.
Mi situación es crítica en estos momentos y necesito encontrar algo cuanto antes, ya que no dispongo de ingresos en estos momentos.
Se agradece un retuit. ¡GRACIAS!
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Today we lost Walter Koenig.
Some thoughts about a fine actor and an exceptional human being...
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Por aquí os dejo mi charla online "Nuevos juegos para nuevos jugadores: Estrategias y diseño de la industria del azar para la Generación Z", para @FadJuventud (financiada por el Gob. de Cantabria, Consejería de Salud, D.G. de Salud Pública):
youtube.com/watch?v=_6NhfxIv…
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
I will talk about Lynx, my Erlang/Elixir to Lean compiler for writing laws and proofs about your Erlang/Elixir programs today at @CodeBEAMio’s lightning talks!
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Our team @GoogleDeepMind is hiring 3 PhD Student Researchers for 2027 to work on exciting, cutting-edge projects focused on understanding, evaluating, and aligning frontier AI agents and multi-agent systems. Signal your interest here forms.gle/2onGFBnyk7MaCdJn8 and spread the word!
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Working on a federated machine learning archictecture that combines inferences from small transformer models with a loss function at the federated level. We are encountering gradient explosion. Any good reads on normalization and gradient clipping in federated architectures?
Javier Torres full support to 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
¡Ya está terminada la versión corta de mi actualizada reel! Editar es renunciar. Desde luego me ha costado reducir de 14:30 minutos a 4:30. Pero aquí está la selección de proyectos y planos de #VFX en los que he trabajado.
Mi filmografía completa:
imdb.com/es-es/name/nm358244…
¡Ya tocaba! Al fin he actualizado mi #reel con una selección de algunos de mis planos y proyectos favoritos. Esta es la versión extendida que ofrece una visión amplia de mi trayectoria en #VFX, mientras continúo trabajando en una edición más breve:
youtu.be/gic_j-hdBLk?is=uPk5…
