Sebastián Ortega

@KentBeck To be fair, discounting doesn’t fully explain it. You need to lack desires that can be posthumously fulfilled with money. For example, for your descendants or to fund a foundation (e.g. against malaria or other longer term cause).

My Parkinson's diagnosis forced me to. Here's what I found. tidyfirst.substack.com/p/extreme-time…

A billion dollars in 30 years. I wouldn't take it. And I can prove that's not crazy.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. —Albert Bartlett (He was talking about population and pollution but applies to things like covid and AI)

Sorry, but I don't think we can rely on technical debt to destroy vibecoding. AI is a moving target. If an AI writes the most clever code it can, AI six months later will be smart enough to debug it.

@cfenollosa Y eso es cuando comparas una checklist súper simple con juicio experto. Imagina el abismo de diferencia cuando tienes muchos más datos y puedes entrenar modelos sofisticados.

¿Es antiético basarse en juicios intuitivos para tomar una decisión importante, cuando un algoritmo comete menos errores? Kahneman, 2011. Más vigente que nunca.

Interesting Reading in February open.substack.com/pub/sortega/p/…

Interesting Reading in January open.substack.com/pub/sortega/p/… (I know that it's March, busy days)

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages. The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse. I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true. But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

Interesting Reading in December open.substack.com/pub/sortega/p/…

@QURIResearch or @NunoSempere, the search feature of Metaforecast has been broken for some time. Is the tool unmaintained?

the idea that AI is a bubble was a bubble

Interesting take, worth a read

✨ El mundo no empeora, mejora. No es perfecto; ni siquiera un buen lugar. Pero de los escenarios globales que hemos conocido (no imaginado o deseado), este es el mejor. 45 datos para empezar 2026 con optimismo👇

when codex gets a little better - my experience gets overwhelmingly better. the addictive ness of the act of creation goes up wildly with respect to the drop in friction

Nada como estos nuevos juguetes para redescubrir la ilusión de construir como cuando éramos muchachos 🤩

No te pierdas esta pequeña obra de arte con centenares de referencias a cultura pop y cosas frikis. Yo he encontrado: • Chuck Norris • Guybrush • Shinji • Duck Hunt • Naruto y más... floor796.com

Few realize that Claude Code isn't only about code

GDP up 4.3%, murders down 20%, suicides and opiate deaths down too, life expectancy recovered and rising again, cancer survival up and disability down, bee populations coming back... It's been an incredible year. Merry Christmas everyone!

Interesting Reading in November open.substack.com/pub/sortega/p/…

@Manel_Sanyudo Gracias por responder!

@_sortega 2/Quede claro que no juzgo la calidad de la propuesta.

@Manel_Sanyudo, qué opinas de le metodología International Baccalaureate? ibo.org