Oliva Pope, but corporate 👔 dying on weird, unpopular hills all the time 🍅 my personal yapping doesn’t reflect my employer’s or my mom’s
Makati City
Joined April 2012
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adobomocha retweeted
About the Nuclear Deal in the Philippines
Word is that the US offered a $5B USD loan or loan support for a new reactor that would meet the national short-term objective of 1200 MW. That implies that another $5B would be needed to be raised by the Filipinos to build a large conventional reactor that might cost $10B total ($8,333/kW), a reasonable if slightly optimistic estimate.
I fully support US Ambassador Lipton in this mission but have some constructive criticism as to how he’s going about it. First, he’s acting quite Trumpian – find the dealmakers, flash some cash, and make a deal. Very American but he needs to realize that the oligarch business leaders he’s talking with are less than beloved by the broader population. The big four power producers, with about 60% of the electric market (Sam Miguel, First Gen, Aboitiz, and ACEN) have made for a concentrated market. Those are the companies that could step up to handle a nuke (along with Meralco) but that threatens even greater market concentration.
The National Power Corporation (NPC or Napocor) was a New Deal program created during the Commonwealth era using as its template the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). NPC was replaced with EPIRA in 2001 that made a “free market” for generation. That move is now blamed for the Philippines having the highest electric rates in ASEAN. Also the single NPC has been replaced with at least seven new agencies and players.
Amb. Lipton is not paying enough heed to the efforts in the PH Congress to make nuclear a public power project like a restored NPC in part to avoid further market concentration. The old fights in the US over private vs. public power (like TVA) were finally exhausted by the 1960s but are at the core of efforts to reform EPIRA and the dysfunctional market it has created.
Finally, there’s the problem of no nuclear regulator. President Marcos signed into law a new nuclear regulator (PhilAtom) but has yet to appoint its leaders or to otherwise stand up the agency. Without a viable applicant, one can hardly blame him. And who would commit to a leadership job when there is no work?
A grand gesture of support by the US would be to buy the Philippines a new building to house the agency, once the deal Lipton is brokering is a go.
I’ll post more as the more details of deal are revealed.
adobomocha retweeted
Anyone who unironically participates in this regional tribalism is helping our enemies. We are all Filipinos, united by a shared national identity and connected by a rich Austronesian heritage, whose expansion from Taiwan reached our archipelago. Language shall not divide us.
adobomocha retweeted
Low-key, the Avatar franchise is actually a fairly good barometer for the dominant liberal socio-political mood when each series is written.
1/20
adobomocha retweeted
This is a disaster for the human race and I’ve really lost patience with the useless morons who can’t see that. An AI video chat that passes for human has no necessary legitimate applications. It will be used to scam old people out of their life savings. Lonely, mentally vulnerable people are going to form romantic attachments to people who aren’t real. Isolation will increase. Mental illness will skyrocket even more than it already has. Kids in grade school will have AI boyfriends and girlfriends. All of this will happen. And worse things we can’t even conceive at this point. People are already forming unhealthy emotional attachments to text-based LLMs. Once there’s an audio and visual component, it’s over. Millions of brains will be broken irreparably.
The benefits of this technology, whatever they are exactly, are so vastly outweighed by the societal catastrophe it will cause, and is already causing, that you can’t even measure the two categories on the same scale. But at least this is the best thing that ever happened to third world scammers. So if you’re in that community, congratulations.
Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test.
48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video.
It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The 48% figure and "video Turing test" claim are from Tavus's own study of 54 one-minute calls, not independently verified or using a standard protocol. Griffin-Lite leads NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark on their public leaderboard.
cellcog.ai/blog/tavus-gri…
research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/proj…
tech-ish.com/2026/10/02/tav…
adobomocha retweeted
omg. these ladies are carly rae jepsen DOWN!!! how are their picks all so excellent??? @carlyraejepsen
🔗 @CBCMusic
adobomocha retweeted
The Times journalist Caitlin Moran shares a wild story about partying with Lady Gaga at a sex club in Berlin
adobomocha retweeted
Sharing a gift link to the New York Times' devastating minute by minute report of the World Trade Center's last 102 minutes, based on the hundreds of last calls and emails people made.
Never forget.
nytimes.com/2002/05/26/nyreg…
adobomocha retweeted
I have spent 23 years documenting the global LED transition of city lighting from space.
Across my 4 missions to the ISS, I have photographed every major city on Earth, building a data set of the gradual replacement of sodium vapor lighting with LEDs.
The warmer, yellow-orange of gas discharge lamps has been phased out worldwide to multi-colored LEDs, citing energy savings and environmental reasons.
Widespread adoption has markedly changed the way our cities look from orbit, and as many have pointed out, how they feel to those on the ground!
Here is a collection of the most striking before-and-after photos I have observed:
adobomocha retweeted
This is a better way to visualize Columbus’ voyages than the traditional way (that shows him traveling through a modern map)..
It looks a lot crazier and more daring when you see it as a trip into the unknown.
adobomocha retweeted
This is a major reason why some people are so black and white. So loyal to their beliefs. Angry at people for not being as extreme or radical. They never had to see their beliefs apply in the real world. Never had to see it fail and deal with the consequences. They think this
adobomocha retweeted
In 1990, Dolly Parton went on vacation in Ireland.
She walked into a local pub in County Kerry and delivered a flawless performance of Coat of Many Colors.
A heart of pure gold who made people smile across oceans.
adobomocha retweeted
Dolly Parton's first act as an angel
A federal judge has ruled that Texas’ ban on drag shows is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment, offering the following advice to those offended by drag:
“The solution is relatively simple ... just don’t go [to the shows].”
(nbcnews.com/politics/politic…)
adobomocha retweeted
This paper gives a fancy name to a problem you can already feel in your bones
"The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons." Checking AI output requires deep expertise. Deep expertise comes from doing grunt work for years. And grunt work is the first thing AI eats
So we're building systems that need expert supervision while dismantling the only known process for making experts
The paper calls the shared pool of human expertise the "cognitive commons." Every profession drinks from it. Nobody's refilling it.
By eliminating junior roles, each company is acting totally rationally, and the collective result: a profession that can't catch AI's mistakes anymore because it never learned to do the work in the first place
Who checks AI's homework in 15 years?
adobomocha retweeted
The guy from Britney Spears’ ‘Womanizer’ video is still fine to this day! He’s an artist & gay. 😭
Truly the hottest guy in any Britney music video.
