InfoSec PhD. Data analytics, security, world politics, economy & science. Strictly personal views here. RT != endorsements
Puerto Rico
Joined January 2010
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Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
AI 2027 has been updated. With Astra we were five weeks behind the curve, with the mysterious model 4 we are now six weeks ahead.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
Data centers are the closest thing to a municipal money printer for funding infrastructure and schools and the slopulist political opposition is evil.
Data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia: “We get $1.2 billion a year in local tax revenue, about 40% of all of our tax revenue...on 3% of our land”
Buddy Rizer, the county's economic development chief, explained how “data center alley” grew:
“We would have never looked at having 55 million square feet of data center, 230-some buildings. That was not the plan. The plan was to utilize the fiber loop, the internet exchange, to utilize a reclaimed water line, and buildings that were already built. That was the plan, right? And so that made a lot of sense.”
“But, you know, fast forward, today we are largely dependent on that. We get $1.2 billion a year in local tax revenue, about 40% of all of our tax revenue. And while that looks overwhelming, data centers take only about 3% of all of our land in the county. So it’s quite a return on investment. You know, 40%, $1.2 billion, on 3% of our land.”
RT @foundmyfitness: Just 3 grams of creatine a day improved several measures of cognitive function after four weeks.
The most consistent i…
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
To reiterate a simple but useful heuristic:
The entire Democratic Party economic policy platform can now be accurately predicted by the simple methodology of looking at what Hugo Chávez was doing a couple of decades ago as Venezuela started to spiral
Please prepare accordingly
ALT Socialist Hugo Chávez Destroyed Venezuela's Power Grid. Now the Regime Hopes Private Capital Will Rebuild It. https://reason.com/2026/08/05/socialist-hugo-chavez-destroyed-venezuelas-power-grid-now-the-regime-hopes-private-capital-will-rebuild-it/
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
The only oil not flowing through the Strait of Hormuz at this point is Irans!
Iran has released its demands for opening the Strait of Hormuz:
-Permanently end all hostilities against Iran and all of its regional proxies.
-Lift the US economic sanctions on Iran and release all frozen Iranian assets.
-End the US blockade of Iran and pay compensation for the war damages.
-Finally and most significantly withdraw all US forces and airforce from around Iran.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
Esto es para mearse de la risa: Los socialistas que trabajan para independizar a Puerto Rico y convertirnos en ciudadanos de la nación puertorriqueña, se quejan de la ciudadanía americana de segunda clase en el territorio. Los que quieren la igualdad para los extranjeros ilegales y lamentan la falta de igualdad para los boricuas en la Isla, no aceptan los 4 reclamos plebiscitarios de los puertorriqueños exigiendo la estadidad y el trato igual. Pura hipocresía woke
.@ZohranKMamdani addresses escalating ICE raids in PR:
“We will not stay silent while our Puerto Rican neighbors, who are so often treated as second class citizens, are targeted.”
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
Jenna Ortega's new movie played in 880 theaters on Thursday, and the average theater sold about one ticket the entire day.
It made $17 per theater. A regular adult ticket runs around $13 this year, so you can picture how empty those rooms were. This movie has Amy Adams in it too, and the financing documents Deadline saw put its direct cost at $44.3 million.
Sony quietly stopped reporting the grosses a few days ago, which is about as close as a studio gets to admitting a movie is dead, but Thursday's number got out anyway.
So how did the director take it? Taika Waititi went on Instagram on Halloween, posted the film's 78% audience score, and called critics "sad lost souls" who were irrelevant and obsolete. He said he doesn't read reviews, he listens to the people.
Problem is, the people checked out before any critic said a word. Deadline reported the movie's tracking six weeks before release was in the low single digits, which is industry speak for basically nobody planning to go. That was before it premiered in London and before the reviews came in at 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. Sony saw the same numbers and cut the release from about 1,900 theaters down to 880 two days before opening.
And the people had already gotten their way once. Waititi's original cut ended the way Kazuo Ishiguro's book ends, which is sad, and a source close to the test screenings called it a bummer. So in April 2025 they brought Ortega back and reshot it with a much happier ending. Test scores went from 83% positive to 87%. They rewrote the ending of a Nobel Prize winner's novel for four points, and the audience still stayed home.
Ortega was supposed to save it. Wednesday made her one of the biggest young stars in the world, and the smaller release was basically a bet that her fans would carry the movie. Exit polls found people under 25 made up just 19% of the opening weekend crowd.
Honestly, the warning has been out there since 2010. The last big Ishiguro movie, Never Let Me Go with Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, made $2.4 million in the US. His books win prizes and sell to readers, and Hollywood keeps finding out the hard way that none of that turns into ticket sales.
Klara is an Artificial Friend, built so a lonely kid never has to sit by herself. On Thursday night, across 880 theaters, most of the people who came to see her did exactly that.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
The claim that data centers are a large drain on the nation's water does not hold up. Its just false.
In 2024, large U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 19–23 billion gallons on site (Han et al., 2026). For scale, that’s about 4% of the 532 billion gallons U.S. golf courses applied for irrigation that same year (GCSAA, 2025).
The golf figure includes recycled water, and the data-center figure covers on-site consumption only.
There are so many false statements about data centers that, given better knowledge, must be labeled as lies.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
Another Data center myth: rising energy cost. More specifically, the idea that data centers are the main reason electricity prices are rising across the US.
The national price data through 2025 do not support data centers as a blanket explanation for rising US power prices.
Inflation-adjusted retail electricity prices across all customer groups were 3% above 2019 levels nationwide and fell in 29 states (Berkeley Lab/Brattle, July 2026).
In the PJM region, however, data centers are contributing to higher costs for securing enough power at peak demand. The independent market monitor estimates that data-center demand added $6.27 billion to capacity-market costs for 2028/29 and $29.4 billion across four auctions (Monitoring Analytics, October 2026). These are modeled wholesale costs. How much reaches households depends on utility contracts and rates.
The impact of data centers on electricity prices varies by region. In some states with substantial data-center growth, inflation-adjusted average prices have fallen.
The claim that data centers are a large drain on the nation's water does not hold up. Its just false.
In 2024, large U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 19–23 billion gallons on site (Han et al., 2026). For scale, that’s about 4% of the 532 billion gallons U.S. golf courses applied for irrigation that same year (GCSAA, 2025).
The golf figure includes recycled water, and the data-center figure covers on-site consumption only.
There are so many false statements about data centers that, given better knowledge, must be labeled as lies.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
THE FERMI PARADOX HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED
for sixty years you have been sold a mystery. the universe is huge, the stars are old, somebody should have called by now, and the silence demands an explanation.
three researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford went to check the arithmetic under the product.
what was in the old packaging: one number plugged into each slot of the Drake equation. a single value for the share of planets where life starts, a single value for the share where intelligence appears. point estimates.
the trouble is that our knowledge of those quantities is smeared across orders of magnitude. you cannot be uncertain by a factor of a billion and then write down one number for it.
so Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord fed in the whole spread of the uncertainty instead. they ran it twice, once from their own reading of the science, once from the range of published estimates in the astrobiology literature.
the output:
> probability we are alone in the Milky Way: from about half to near certainty
> probability we are alone in the observable universe: from about 40 to 85 percent
at those numbers the silence stops being strange. nothing is missing from the sky. no paradox left to explain, and no Great Filter needed to explain it.
i went in expecting to find the trick, because a paper that deletes a famous problem usually has one. what i came out with is a complaint about method. one number written where a range belongs, repeated for sixty years.
the fine print, and i am the one insisting on it. these are probabilities under the distributions the authors picked, so change the assumptions and the numbers move. the paper measures how little we know and it does not prove that nobody is out there. what it takes away is your right to be surprised that nobody has called.
link in the comments
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
Normies think AI is an image generation service that drinks water through a big straw and speaks in Ebonics. Benefits like coding, research tools, replacing chemical pesticides with pest-killing light and cancer detection don’t even cross their minds.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
Democrats are preparing investigations into major U.S. companies, with Apple, Meta and businesses linked to Elon Musk among the early targets, following the party’s victories in both chambers of Congress, according to the Washington Post
House Democrats are examining Trump’s use of Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot to help plan the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The Washington Post says that Apple could face scrutiny over its hosting of tracking apps used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Meta is being targeted over NDAs imposed on local governments during data centre development
Corporate executives and lawyers are preparing for congressional investigations, with law firms holding emergency meetings and offering advice to companies with close ties to the Trump administration.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
i don't think people realize how quickly we're getting to the point where AI can do actual scientific research basically without humans
yesterday Nature published a paper about an AI-run laboratory in China that autonomously does DNA synthesis, amplification, sequencing, among other experiments. more than 11,000 experimental steps with over 20 different instruments
the humans are basically there to refill the reagents and maintain the equipment
at the same time Anthropic published research where Claude helped a team discover and determine the structure of a bacterial-virus vault particle, searching through 15 BILLION protein sequences and doing the computational analysis
just think about where this is going
AI comes up with an experiment, robots run it, instruments return the results, AI interprets them and proposes the next experiment. repeat
once that loop becomes reliable enough and generalizable, scientific progress is no longer bottlenecked by how much research humans can personally do
scientific discovery is becoming scalable
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
JUST IN: U.S. scientists have discovered that the effectiveness of using a nuclear explosion to deflect an asteroid could vary by nearly 500% depending on which side of the asteroid is targeted.
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories developed a new computer model to simulate how X-rays from a nearby nuclear detonation could vaporize an asteroid's surface, generating enough force to push it off a collision course with Earth.
The findings, published in the scientific journal Icarus, reveal that an asteroid's irregular shape has an enormous influence on how it responds.
In one simulation, targeting different sides of the same asteroid produced changes in velocity ranging from 0.8 to 3.9 millimeters per second, a nearly fivefold difference.
The researchers also developed an algorithm more than 1,600 times faster than previous methods, allowing them to simulate complex asteroid shapes with far greater detail.
The research could help scientists determine where to position a nuclear device if humanity ever needs to deflect a dangerous asteroid.
Research can be found here: sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
ALT Image Credits: Itokawa: By ESO, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=170826264. Bennu: By NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona - Public Domain. Golevka: By NASA/JPL - NASA - Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Public Domain.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
1. US business sector productivity growth was 2.1% over the year ending 2026 Q3. That's solid.
2. If you think of trend productivity growth as ~1-1.5%, we running +0.5-1pp higher at the moment. Again, that's good news.
3. For perspective, at the height of the dot com boom (1999-2000), productivity growth was running about +2pp higher annually. This premium had completely faded by ~2005. So we're at 1/4 - 1/2 of peak dot com boom effect.
4. I would put next to no weight on quarter-to-quarter productivity growth. It's very noisy.
5. Productivity growth was stronger in 2023, when AI capabilities were far lower but AI capex was accelerating precipitously. That should tell us something.
6. There are probably other factors besides AI affecting short-run measured US productivity as well, including knock-ons from US policy choices made during the pandemic, the high-churn labor market of 2022, and large shifts in immigration flows.
7. Measures of TFP growth from Fernald and BLS are weak, suggesting to the extent AI is a factor, it's not primarily through task- or worker-level productivity effects (but TFP has to be estimated so take it with many grains of salt).
More from @Stripe Economics here:
stripeeconomics.com/p/ai-and…
Evidence is growing that we’re turning the corner on productivity.
US productivity grew at a 3.6% annual rate this past quarter.
That’s more than double the 1.5% average from 2007-2019.
The new numbers put me further ahead for my bet with Bob Gordon about productivity growth in the 2020s. 💪
Here’s how far the US is now ahead of the CBO estimate at the start of the decade (before they knew about the pandemic or LLMs) courtesy of @jasonfurman’s
Econvitals.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
Yes, it was a foreign influence op to fearmonger about AI.
It's not a conspiracy, just the truth.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
We are at the 'ballot initiative to personally give me a billion dollars' stage of democracy in California.
Heriberto Acosta Maestre retweeted
JUST IN: Planet Labs $PL has released the first image from its most advanced high-resolution satellite yet, designed to capture objects as small as 30 centimeters from orbit.
Pelican-12 photographed Luanda, Angola, on October 30 from approximately 589 kilometers above Earth, following its launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9.
The spacecraft carries an $NVDA NVIDIA Jetson computing platform for processing data onboard, alongside an experimental communications system designed to reduce the time required to deliver satellite imagery to customers.
Pelican-12 will initially provide 50-centimeter-class imagery, with 30-centimeter-class capability targeted after the satellite reaches its lower operational orbit.
The spacecraft is Planet's 25th satellite launched in 2026, across four missions, as the company expands its high-resolution imaging constellation for commercial and government customers.
Today's first-light release confirms the satellite is operating, although calibration remains underway.
