Sebastián Auyanet
LightNews LightNews
banner
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Sebastián Auyanet
@sebauyanet.bsky.social
240 followers 280 following 42 posts
Periojournalist. Media consultant. Journalism should be more about listening than anything else. Uruguayo. Montevideano.
Posts Replies Media Videos
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Esto promete. Arrancó Liminal y aquellos hilazos de Martín van a tener mucho más a partir de ahora. A suscribirse.
mundoliminal.substack.com Liminal / Martin Sarthou @mundoliminal.substack.com · Aug 29
No es fácil mirar. Pero callar duele más.

Hoy lanzo Liminal: análisis sin filtros sobre geopolítica, poder, tecnología y propaganda.

Es gratis. Es incómodo. Es urgente.

📩 Suscribite: mundoliminal.substack.com
August 29, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by Sebastián Auyanet
uk.theconversation.com
In Uruguay, families co-own and co-build their homes through housing cooperatives. Some chip in savings, others swing hammers.

The result? Affordable, dignified housing that stays off the private market, and a blueprint the world can learn from.

tcnv.link/tfgDHec
July 28, 2025 at 8:33 AM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
"In many ways, public media remains the last broadly shared civic commons. It is both commercial-free and independently edited." www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/publ...
Public media is very different from state-run news. Here’s why.
In many ways, public media remains the last broadly shared civic commons.
www.niemanlab.org
July 29, 2025 at 3:31 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
'El periodismo necesita fondos del gobierno para sobrevivir', dicen en Estados Unidos. En Uruguay se toman turnos para quejarse de quiénes son los dueños de los medios pero nadie hace mucho por facilitar el desarrollo de un ecosistema más diverso. www.cjr.org/analysis/jou...
Journalism Needs Government Funding to Survive
The recent cuts to public media are part of a broader attack on public welfare.
www.cjr.org
July 29, 2025 at 3:30 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Hace meses que intento hacer un trámite llamado “inscripción de partida de nacimiento extranjera” en Uruguay. Se supone que dan números martes y jueves a la noche, pero *nunca* los hay. No entiendo que el Ministerio del
interior complique tanto un trámite tan simple.
July 15, 2025 at 11:32 AM
Reposted by Sebastián Auyanet
jeffjarvis.bsky.social
Excellent Times reporting by Mike Baker, Malika Khurana, Harry Stevens, Marco Hernandez.
The bastards built cabins in harm's way. The bastards in Texas & local government let them.
Camp Mystic Cabins Stood in an ‘Extremely Hazardous’ Floodway
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Camp Mystic Cabins Stood in an ‘Extremely Hazardous’ Floodway (Gift Article)
An analysis of flood maps shows that several buildings, including those where children were sleeping, were in known hazard zones. A $5 million expansion in 2019 did nothing to alleviate the problem.
www.nytimes.com
July 10, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Sebastián Auyanet
mongabaylatam.bsky.social
🇨🇱😰 Los mastodontes sudamericanos, conocidos como gonfoterios, desaparecieron de Chile hace más de 10 mil años. Estudio revela que las consecuencias de su extinción aún afectan a los ecosistemas. Hablamos con la investigadora Andrea Loayza sobre el tema. tinyurl.com/nwtb64ww
El legado invisible de los mastodontes: científicos explican cómo su extinción aún afecta a la vegetación chilena | ENTREVISTA
La extinción de los mastodontes sudamericanos en Chile, hace más de 10 000 años, interrumpió la dispersión de semillas de plantas nativas.
tinyurl.com
July 8, 2025 at 7:49 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
What I liked about this @themarshallproject.org story is that the people suffering from the issue are who tell the story. I assume that having a pipeline to get these testimonies –and to dispute them with the prison's comms teams is not easy to build. www.themarshallproject.org/2024/09/19/p...
How We Survived Extreme Heat in Prison
Incarcerated journalists detail the first signs of a heat wave in prison — and how they’ve coped with record-breaking temperatures.
www.themarshallproject.org
June 26, 2025 at 3:10 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Seguir una guerra en tiempos de IA: cómo líderes de gobiernos también la usan para mentir sobre eventos del conflicto. Gran reportería de 404 media, de los medios que más estoy leyendo en estos tiempos www.404media.co/the-ai-slop-...
The AI Slop Fight Between Iran and Israel
There’s a lack of footage from the conflict and AI-generated content is filling the void.
www.404media.co
June 26, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Reposted by Sebastián Auyanet
404media.co
Parents Don’t Understand ‘Let Him Cook’

🔗 www.404media.co/ai-models-an...
AI Models And Parents Don’t Understand ‘Let Him Cook’
LLMs are not familiar with “ate that up,” “secure the bag,” and “sigma,” showing that training data is not yet updated to Gen Alpha terminology.
www.404media.co
June 24, 2025 at 7:14 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
A hugely inspiring piece. medium.com/we-are-heark...
Civic space is closing: How local journalism can open it up
Imagine a city where on any given evening, community spaces buzz with activity — book clubs in coffee shops, workshops in the library, and…
medium.com
June 24, 2025 at 7:19 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
“We must figure out a way to talk across our differences so that we can govern together using a shared set of facts,” she added. “We are very far from that right now.”

www.niemanlab.org/2025/05/swin...
Swing state journalists were trained to avoid the worst kinds of political coverage. Did it work?
“None of this transformed content really matters much if newsrooms can’t get it in front of all kinds of audience groups.”
www.niemanlab.org
May 7, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Sebastián Auyanet
mattzollerseitz.bsky.social
Employee owned!
timcarvell.bsky.social Tim Carvell @timcarvell.bsky.social · May 5
Holy shit, just three years into its existence, the nonprofit Baltimore Banner has won its first Pulitzer.
thebaltimorebanner.com Baltimore Banner @thebaltimorebanner.com · May 5
Baltimore Banner wins Pulitzer Prize for coverage of overdose crisis
May 5, 2025 at 9:29 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Es importante incorporar y no demonizar pero a la vez también hay que tener prudencia. La IA es un muy buen asistente para organizar proyectos y formatear documentos pero requiere que verifiques cada cosa en la que que te ayuda a ser más rápido. Y es muy floja en cualquier actividad creativa.
nytimes.com The New York Times @nytimes.com · May 5
The newest and most powerful A.I. technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier.
A.I. Hallucinations Are Getting Worse, Even as New Systems Become More Powerful
A new wave of “reasoning” systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don’t know why.
www.nytimes.com
May 5, 2025 at 10:12 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Los creadores de contenido conservadores de EEUU sacan provecho de la batalla entre una estrella de Hollywood y un actor sin talento que se cuelga a la antipatía contra el Me Too para hacerse una carrera (y la tendrá). Buenísimo análisis de @taylorlorenz.bsky.social www.usermag.co/p/right-wing...
Right wing creators are dominating Lively-Baldoni coverage
Conservative commentators are leveraging the case to dismantle support for #MeToo and amass unprecedented audience growth.
www.usermag.co
March 7, 2025 at 4:52 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
No puedo esperar a ver la parodia de este discurso en 10-15 años, si es que sigue habiendo Planeta Tierra.
karenattiah.bsky.social Karen Attiah @karenattiah.bsky.social · Mar 5
Trump talks about talking about building the most "dominant civilization" on earth
March 5, 2025 at 4:00 AM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
I'm sorry this is only in Spanish but hey @jeffjarvis.bsky.social @brizzyc.bsky.social, you might find this one (and the whole newsletter as it just has started) somewhat interesting 🍻
sebauyanet.bsky.social Sebastián Auyanet @sebauyanet.bsky.social · Mar 4
"Hubo un tiempo donde la evolución de la tecnología no se medía solo por su capacidad de generar ganancias y donde hombres como Berners-Lee, a diferencia de los tecnoligarcas, estaban más ocupados en servir, en colaborar".
@simonajaz.bsky.social para @elsurti.com 👇 www.laprecisa.net/p/el-invento...
El inventor de la Web tiene un plan para devolver el control a la gente
Una charla con Tim Berners-Lee sobre cómo trabaja para recuperar su creación de la captura de unos pocos (y qué puede significar para Latinoamérica).
www.laprecisa.net
March 4, 2025 at 4:39 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
"Hubo un tiempo donde la evolución de la tecnología no se medía solo por su capacidad de generar ganancias y donde hombres como Berners-Lee, a diferencia de los tecnoligarcas, estaban más ocupados en servir, en colaborar".
@simonajaz.bsky.social para @elsurti.com 👇 www.laprecisa.net/p/el-invento...
El inventor de la Web tiene un plan para devolver el control a la gente
Una charla con Tim Berners-Lee sobre cómo trabaja para recuperar su creación de la captura de unos pocos (y qué puede significar para Latinoamérica).
www.laprecisa.net
March 4, 2025 at 4:37 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
"This isn't just another media reshuffling, but an example of how corporate decisions can undermine diversity while executives hide behind neutral-sounding business-speak".

"Neutral-sounding business-speak". That concept particularly resonates over here.

www.readtpa.com/p/that-feels...
"That Feels Indefensible": MSNBC's New Direction Leads Rachel Maddow to Speak Out
As Joy Reid and Alex Wagner lose their shows, Rachel Maddow uses her platform to challenge management's decisions.
www.readtpa.com
February 25, 2025 at 9:21 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
“Rotting may have a particular posture, but I think what separates it from other activities that involve horizontal entertainment is its catalyst: avoidance—the avoidance of responsibility, pressure, uncertainty, anxiety, thoughts.” haleynahman.substack.com/p/208-what-i...
#208: What is rotting, if not rest?
An anatomy of the modern rot
haleynahman.substack.com
February 17, 2025 at 3:46 AM
Reposted by Sebastián Auyanet
edzitron.com
By making DeepSeek “about China” we ignore the root of the problem — that the American tech industry is no longer interested in making good software that helps people. OpenAI's "agent" is a joke, and anyone who believes they're building the future is a mark.

www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/
This isn't about China — it's so much fucking easier if we let it be about China — it's about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models. By making this "about China" we ignore the root of the problem — that the American tech industry is no longer interested in making good software that helps people. DeepSeek shouldn't be scary to them, because they should've come up with it first. It uses less memory, fewer resources, and uses several quirky workarounds to adapt to the limited compute resources available — all things that you'd previously associate with Silicon Valley, except Silicon Valley's only interest, like the rest of the American tech industry, is The Rot Economy. It cares about growth at all costs, even if said costs were readily mitigable, or if the costs are ultimately self-defeating. To be clear, if the alternative is that all of these companies simply didn't come up with this idea, that in and of itself is a damning indictment of the valley. Was nobody thinking about this stuff? If they were, why didn't Sam Altman, or Dario Amodei, or Satya Nadella, or anyone else put serious resources into efficiency? Was it because there was no reason to? Was it because there was, if we're honest, no real competition between any of these companies? Did anybody try anything other than throwing as much compute and training data at the model as possible? It's all so cynical and antithetical to innovation itself. Surely if any of this shit mattered — if generative AI truly was valid and viable in the eyes of these companies — they would have actively worked to do something like DeepSeek. It appears DeepSeek employed all sorts of weird tricks to make this work, including taking advantage of distinct parts of both CPU and GPU to create a virtual Digital Processing Unit, essentially redefining how data is communicated within the servers running training and inference. It had to do things that a company with unrestrained access to capital and equipment wouldn’t have to do. Nevertheless, OpenAI and Anthropic both have enough money and hiring power to have tried — and succeeded — in creating a model this efficient and capable of running on older GPUs, except what they actually wanted was more rapacious growth and the chance to build even bigger data centers with even more compute. OpenAI has pledged $19 billion to fund the "Stargate" data center — an amount it is somehow going to raise through further debt and equity raises, despite the fact that it’s likely already in the process of raising another round as we speak just to keep the company afloat. OpenAI is as much a lazy, cumbersome incumbent as Google or Microsoft, and it’s just as innovative too. The launch of its "Operator" "agent" was a joke — a barely-functional product that is allegedly meant to control your computer and take distinct actions, but doesn't seem to work. Casey Newton, a man so gratingly credulous that it makes me want to scream, of course wrote that it was a "compelling demonstration" that "represented an extraordinary technological achievement" that also somehow was "significantly slower, more frustrating, and more expensive than simply doing any of these tasks yourself." Casey, of course, had some thoughts about DeepSeek — that there were reasons to be worried, but that "American AI labs [were] still in the lead," saying that DeepSeek was "only optimizing technology that OpenAI and others invented first," before saying that it was "only last week that OpenAI made available to Pro plan users a computer that can use itself," a statement bordering on factually incorrect.
January 29, 2025 at 4:42 PM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Impresionante texto, vía el feed de @rodf.bsky.social
edzitron.com Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · Jan 29
Newsletter: The DeepSeek situation is a moment that should fill Silicon Valley with shame, a monument to the lack of vision and herd mentality of the American tech industry. OpenAI and Anthropic have no moat, no business, no innovation, and I believe no future.

www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/
Deep Impact
Soundtrack: The Hives — Hate To Say I Told You So In the last week or so, but especially over the weekend, the entire generative AI industry has been thrown into chaos. This won’t be a lengthy, tech...
www.wheresyoured.at
January 30, 2025 at 4:22 AM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Hoy corté mi suscripción al NYT. No me interesa la cobertura de la política como entretenimiento. Sigo con The Athletic.

Today, I canceled my subscription to NYT. I’m not interested in political coverage as entertainment (especially not with this administration). I’ll stick with The Athletic.
mehdirhasan.bsky.social Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · Jan 29
New White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did her first press briefing today and told a number of demonstrable lies (about condoms for Gaza, the criminal records of undocumented migrants, and more).

This is how the New York Times covered it.
January 29, 2025 at 5:25 AM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Absoluto delirio
marisakabas.bsky.social Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · Jan 27
NEW — OMB temporarily pauses all agency grants and loans programs.

Per copy of memo: "The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve."
SUBJECT: Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs 'The American people elected Donald J. Trump to be President of the United States and gave him a mandate to increase the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar. In Fiscal Year 2024. of the nearly $10 trillion that the Federal Government spent, more than $3 trillion was Federal financial assistance, such as grants and loans. Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities. Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending wokeness" and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve. This memorandum requires Federal agencies to identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the President's policies and requirements. For example, during the initial days of his Administration, President Donald J Trump issued a series of executive orders to protect the American people and safeguard valuable taxpayer resources, including Protecting the American People Against Invasion (Jan. 20, 2025). Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid (Jan 20, 2025), Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements (Jan. 20, 2025). Unleashing American Energy (Jan. 20. 2025). Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing (Jan. 20. ent these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all jal assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that any of the President's executive orders. In the interian, to the extent applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency nay be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial surice tot foreign nongovernmental organizations, DEL woke gender ideology, and the pause will provide the Administration time to review agency programs of the funding for those programs consistent with the law and the he temporary pause will become effective on January 28, 2025, at 5:00 rehensive analysis. Federal agencies must immediately deadlines for assistance programs arising while the les must report this information to OMB along with an directs Federal agencies to pause all activities associated conducting merit review panels No later than Febrar - 10. 2025, agencies shail submit to OMB detailed information on any programs projects or activities subject to this pause. Each agency must pause. (i) issuance of disbursement of Federal funds under all open awards, and (il) other relevant has reviewed provided guidance to your agency with respect to the information act recordin grant and ptions allowing Federal agencies to issue new awards or take other case basis. To the extent required by law, Federal agencies may continue nistrative actions. such as closeout of Federal awards (2 CFR 200.344), or expressly required by law
January 28, 2025 at 3:25 AM
sebauyanet.bsky.social
Meta and all big-tech companies are the most "establishment" entities in the world. We don’t hold them to account the way we do with traditional media and now, as monopolies, they kiss the "ring" of Trump. Fact-checking is not enough, but it’s not censorship. We need facts but also more belonging.
January 7, 2025 at 8:30 PM