#002321 – 06 de Agosto de 2025

Na margem do rio pairam, revelando a direção da imperceptível brisa, partículas de dentes-de-leão, flocos de neve seca quase imaterial. Páro de ler e levanto os olhos, coço a barba e provoco uma nuvem de partículas mais pequenas mas mais pesadas, caspa, que ecoam a leveza a que não podem aspirar, pontuando de ridículo o meu sentimentalismo tão fácil e oportunista.

Bison vs Spartans.

My game of choice today comes from first round of the 2026 NCAA men’s basketball tournament. It features the Nunber 3 seed Michigan State Spartans vs. the Number 14 seed North Dakota State Bison, and has a scheduled start time of 3:05 PM Central Time.

And the adventure continues.

El Gorras cayó como un saco de plomo en la cama, con whisky hasta en las suelas. Sin saber cómo, ocultó el revólver debajo de la almohada y comenzó a roncar como si estuviera contando una novela. Era una noche de mediados de marzo, aún hacía frío en las madrugadas.

Fue incapaz de decir nada cuando lo levantaron y lo esposaron. Seguía tan borracho como al acostarse, pero cuando se movió el vehículo, el aire fresco del amanecer lo terminó de despertar.

En el camino vio florecillas rojas sobre el fondo verde.

Nadie habló y cuando entraron a los sótanos, parecía que también el tiempo estaba detenido. Pensó que el arma estaría debajo de la almohada o camino del laboratorio.

Muchas cosas sucedieron. Los momentos eran duros, como frenados, y el aire, denso, intragable. El inspector jefe de homicidios le dijo:

-Colabora y podrás irte. No tengo nada contra tí, tu arma está limpia. Dime el nombre y la dirección de los amigos con los que estuviste anoche en el club, y estarás en la calle. -Mire inspector, el problema es que yo anoche no estuve en el club. -Si te vio todo el mundo. Eh, muchachos, dice que no estuvo en el club. Y todos rieron. El Gorras se rascó la cabeza, tratando de recordar. Junto a su mesa estaban dos desconocidos con una rubia. -Eso no fue anoche, busquen en otra parte. -Llévenlo abajo -dijo el jefe.

En la cárcel, todos sospechaban que estaba encubriendo a un pez gordo. Era un hombre duro, sabía lo que hacía y disponía de dinero.

Tiempo después regresó a su habitación. Se metió en la ducha y se dijo:

-¡Qué problema! Cuando me echo dos tragos no me acuerdo de nada.

YouTube has gotten me into another niche tech thing…

I was watching a Youtube video about how Iran started up a new numbers station since the new war started, and how it got jammed on its original frequency and was moving to another one. It’s wild that Iran is falling back to old tech and the US and Israel just can’t handle it, but that’s not what this post is about.

After seeing the video, Youtube suggested another of the channel’s video, which was titled The Idiots Guide To Meshtastic – Long Range Comms! “Hey, I’m an idiot,” I thought “long range comms in a little handheld device could be cool!” I’ve always been curious about radio communication even though my knowledge level is very low, and my enthusiasm about having to mount gear on giant poles outside is even lower. Short wave seems to require that type of outside gear, but watching this video, that didn’t seem the case for Meshtastic. Off to Kagi I went to find an Aussie store that sold this gear.

I ended up at IoT Store, a Perth-based place that had a Meshtastic area in their online shop. After some random browsing and reading, I ended up getting a WisMesh Pocket V2 Meshtastic Device, and on impulse I threw in a LoRa Antenna Kit to increase my range. I was again pleasantly surprised that increasing my range didn’t involve adding something I had to post outside and figure out how to run electricity to (I rent).

A few days later the gear arrived, so time to go!

Meshtastic

I’m not going to review the device itself. It uses a WisBlock RAK4631 chip, which seems pretty common and effective for this purpose, and the device seems to work fine. It has an on/off switch, and a single button you can use for browsing menus (long pressing to select stuff). The Meshtastic firmware was a bit out of date, but connecting to the device over USB using the web-based flasher in a chrome-based browser worked fine.

I jumped on using the Meshtastic app on my Android phone, hoping to see it start to pick up nearby nodes, and……. nothing.

I was looking at most of the state and there were no nodes. Uh oh.. maybe I should have done some more investigation before buying.

I posted on Mastodon, and some very helpful people told me that I may have to let it run overnight to see if it picks up any nodes, but also Meshtastic wasn’t great at scaling, and that most people in Victoria (my state in Australia) had moved to MeshCore. Luckily, Meshtastic and MeshCore use the same gear and the same frequencies, so my Meshtastic device should be able to get onto the MeshCore network with some extra work.

I let Meshtastic run on my device for 3-4 days, and it found no one. It’s possible I would have found Meshtastic nodes if I had put something up outside to give better range/etc, but that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid. Time to try MeshCore…

MeshCore

Using the same sort of flashing method, but using the MeshCore flasher website instead, I was able to get the firmware installed. It is *slightly* less noob-friendly (at least to me), and I spent some time trying to figure out why my phone wasn’t able to connect to the new MeshCore-firmware-flashed device. It turns out in the flashing process you have to choose “Companion Bluetooth” to enable the bluetooth radio on the device. I was choosing “Companion USB” as I was flashing via USB, but that wasn’t the way to do it. After that, I was able to connect to it on my phone using the MeshCore app.

A kind person on Mastodon had already told me that Victoria MeshCore people use the “Australia (Narrow)” radio settings to communicate, so I was able to set that:

I saved my settings and checked the map anddddddddd.. nothing. uh oh.

I was more confident this time, though. I *knew* the people were out there, and that Victoria had a good MeshCore network (thanks again Mastodon people). Potentially I had to put something up outside (ugh), but first I had a new app to click random buttons in to see if I could get anything.

At the top of the app is a radio icon. I hit that and had the option of “Advert – Zero Hop” and “Advert – Flood Routed”. Just by the names, zero hop seemed to be contacting everyone close to me, and so I guessed that meant Flood Routed meant it would push everywhere. I did Zero Hop first, and after about 5-10 seconds, saw nothing, so I try Flood Routed… then I tried Flood Routed again 30 seconds later.. and.. I started getting notifications of nodes that were being discovered! It was working!

Oddly, and I have no idea how this works, it was discovering nodes around Albury/Wodonga and one on the other side of Melbourne. Weird. But it was working.. and someone had posted to the public chat! I could see that! I tried to send a message asking for someone to confirm they could see me, but got no response. Damn.

I went to bed for the night. When I woke up the next morning and went back to the app, I was seeing over 100 nodes!

This was great! And there were overnight chats in the public channel! All this was happening after about 9 hours of being on. I was stoked.

I sent another message to the chat asking for confirmation. After sending this, I noticed instead of saying “Sent” under the message, it said “Heard 1 Repeat”. This clued me in that the chat client in the app shows stuff is actually sent if I hear it repeated back to me at least once. When it says “Sent” and doesn’t update to “Heard # Repeat(s)”, it means the message didn’t make it out. Good to know.

I can explain the early timestamps: I have a cat that likes to wake me up around 5-5:30 in the morning.

Anyway, this was great news. I left it and started my day, and checked in later in the afternoon. I had (literally) hundreds of new nodes listed!

There was even a repeater in NSW that I had seen (not directly, but through the network).

It’s now been a couple days and I have maxed out my contacts (nodes) list. The device can only hold 350 nodes, and by default it will add every node that is mentioned on the network. Maxing it out in a couple days is huge! I have ticked an option that cycles out the oldest seen nodes to add the new ones, so I think my list will stay at 350 contacts now.

What’s Next / Annoyances

The public chat is a mix of people testing and people chatting about life or whatever. Yesterday a person visiting Melbourne from Denver, CO, USA hopped on and said g’day. They had brought their MeshCore device down with them. They said Denver is just starting to build its MeshCore network and they liked how popular ours was.

I have found that I get about a 33% success rate of my messages actually making it out to a repeater on the first try. Thankfully the app has the option to long-press the message and say “Send Again”, to let it try and send out again. After a couple tries, it generally makes it out. That was annoying me, so… I’m somewhat doing what I didn’t want to do: I’m buying something to put outside.

As was pointed out to me in the chat, part of the fun of MeshCore (and similar) is building your own devices with the different radio boards/whatever, but for this purchase, I went for another pre-built thing so I can be sure it’s not my terrible soldering if it doesn’t work. I purchased a SenseCAP Solar Node P1 Pro, which I plan to flash with MeshCore in repeater mode. Then I plan to put it somewhere outside, and hope the solar is enough that I don’t have to try and run power to it. I am well aware that higher/line of site is better, but I still don’t want to mount a pole to my roof, so I’m planning just to set it somewhere outside, maybe just on my roof, or hanging off it somewhere. We’ll see, but I’m hopeful that extra little access of being outside (instead of my bedroom where the WisBlock is right now) will give me clear access to the multiple repeaters that around me, and I won’t need the height.

Conclusion

I think it’s extremely cool that this invisible network exists and there’s a large group dedicated to helping everyone communicate, either doing it for fun hobby reasons, or “real” reasons. One of the things pushed with Meshtastic/MeshCore is it can be used on rural sites when hiking/on farms/etc where signal won’t reach, and I’m sure it works great for that. It’s sweet this exists and is being run across Victoria’s suburb wasteland around Melbourne, as well as across the state as a whole. I am excited to see how well my external repeater helps my message sending, as well as feeling good that I might be helping out others in my immediate area (1km around me, after that they’ll be closer to another repeater around here) that are on the network (if any). I’m also looking forward to learning about setting up the repeater itself. It scratches that nerd itch.

Things are weird right now in the world, and the Internet is being enshittified more every day. Here’s something that’s pure, done by people for the love of it. It’s great.

Il y a des histoires qui ne font pas de bruit. Elles s’installent tôt, dans l’air des maisons, dans ce qui est là sans être nommé, dans ce qui manque sans être expliqué. On grandit avec des présences incomplètes, des équilibres fragiles, des liens qui prennent parfois toute la place ou qui laissent un vide difficile à saisir. On s’adapte. On apprend. Et plus tard, on appelle ça l’amour.

Aux filles qui ont grandi avec une question sans réponse, je veux dire ceci calmement. Tu n’as pas seulement cherché quelqu’un. Tu as cherché un regard posé, stable, qui ne te demande rien en échange. Une présence qui dit sans parler : tu es là, tu existes, tu n’as rien à prouver. Alors tu es partie dans le monde avec cette attente silencieuse : est-ce que je compte vraiment pour un homme ? Et parfois, tu confonds celui qui te désire fort avec celui qui te voit vraiment. L’intensité rassure au début. Elle ressemble à une réponse. Mais elle ne tient pas toujours dans le temps. Et tu te retrouves à donner plus, à attendre plus, à espérer que cette fois, ça restera.

Aux garçons qui ont grandi en apprenant à sentir avant même de penser, je parle aussi. Tu as appris tôt à écouter, à ajuster, à anticiper. Tu es devenu celui qui comprend, celui qui apaise. Et tu as cru que c’était ça, aimer. Mais personne ne t’a dit que tu avais le droit d’exister en dehors de ce rôle. Personne ne t’a dit que tu pouvais dire non sans perdre le lien. Alors tu avances avec cette idée simple et dangereuse : si je donne assez, si je suis assez bon, assez patient, assez solide, alors ça finira par s’équilibrer. Tu ne vois pas que tu t’effaces lentement, que tu t’éloignes de toi pour rester près de l’autre.

Quand vous vous rencontrez, ça semble évident. Comme si quelque chose reconnaissait quelque chose. Elle reçoit enfin une présence. Il trouve enfin quelqu’un à qui donner. Au début, c’est beau. Vraiment beau. Mais ce n’est pas encore libre. C’est une réponse ancienne qui s’habille en présent.

Et puis, doucement, ça glisse. Elle teste sans le vouloir : est-ce que tu restes si je prends un peu plus ? Il répond sans le voir : oui, je peux donner encore. Et vous vous installez là, dans un endroit où personne ne respire vraiment. Elle ne se sent jamais totalement rassurée. Il ne se sens jamais totalement reconnu. Et chacun fait un peu plus de ce qu’il sait faire, comme si c’était la solution. Mais ce n’est pas la solution. C’est la répétition.

Je vous parle depuis un endroit où l’homme et la femme en moi ne se battent plus, où aucun des deux ne mendie l’amour de l’autre. Un endroit où le lien n’est plus une nécessité, mais un choix. J’ai marché ce chemin, des deux côtés. Celui qui donne trop. Celui qui attend trop. Et j’ai fini par voir que l’amour ne répare pas ce qui n’a pas été construit. Il révèle. Il amplifie. Il met en lumière ce qui était déjà là, silencieux, mais actif.

Ce n’est pas en aimant plus fort que vous serez choisi. Ce n’est pas en donnant plus que vous serez respecté. L’amour ne vous demande pas de vous dissoudre. Il y a en vous une part qui veut être vue, et une autre qui veut se fondre. Une part qui désire, et une autre qui craint de perdre. Tant que ces deux forces ne se reconnaissent pas en vous, vous les jouerez dans le lien. L’un prendra, l’autre donnera. L’un testera, l’autre prouvera. Et vous appellerez cela une relation.

Alors un jour, quelque chose s’arrête. Par lucidité. Vous voyez que vous n’avez plus à courir après un regard qui vous échappe. Vous voyez que vous n’avez plus à mériter votre place. Vous voyez que réparer l’autre ne vous construira jamais. Et ce moment est sobre. Il ne libère pas par explosion. Il libère par retrait. Vous vous tenez là, avec vous-même, sans vous abandonner.

Vous regardez l’autre, et la question devient simple : est-ce que je peux être entier ici ? Pas parfait. Entier. Si la réponse est non, même légèrement, vous ne forcez plus. Vous ne négociez plus votre intégrité contre un peu de lien. Vous vous retirez. Pas contre l’autre. Pour vous.

Parce que l’amour, le réel, ne vous met pas à genoux. Il ne vous demande pas de choisir entre vous et lui. Il ne vous divise pas intérieurement. Il vous laisse intact. Quand vous devenez intact, quelque chose se transforme. Vous ne cherchez plus à combler. Vous ne cherchez plus à être reconnu à tout prix. Vous ne cherchez plus à sauver ni à être sauvé. Vous êtes.

Et depuis cet endroit, la rencontre change de nature. Elle ne vient plus remplir. Elle vient s’ajouter. Elle ne vient plus réparer. Elle vient circuler. Deux entiers qui se rencontrent ne s’absorbent pas. Ils s’accordent. Et là, l’homme et la femme ne sont plus en tension. Ils coexistent. Ils choisissent ensemble. Ils avancent sans se trahir.

Ce n’est pas plus simple. Mais c’est stable. Et surtout, c’est libre.

That which lie hidden in the snow is now visible. For example I’ve walked past this deck of discarded Pokémon cards on the side of the sidewalk leading to a school.

As I see them lying there in the sun, weather beaten and deformed, it fills me with sadness.

Picturing in my mind eye this child who lost his deck of cards, maybe. Possibly there was some act of malevolence behind this, how else would they end up there?

It’s a tragedy in miniature to find something bought for with children’s money discarded like that.

Life doesn’t care whether you’re grown up or a child when dishing out misery.

I dreamt that I was both a pig and a package of sliced ham.

There was another pig who had made me into the sliced ham package, but somehow I had managed to free myself to some extent from this curse, and now back into my original pig shape, I was the one hunting this antagonistic pig.

I had located this other pig’s package of ham, with the plastic packaging and everything.

And as I ragefully bit into it with my pig’s maw full of hatred, and as I did, the package turned into the black furred coat of this other pig, and I felt that with its rising panic, the realisation in him or her that I was the one doing it, not the other way around.

And to the sound of me taking a bite of this — the sound as if taking a big bit of a green apple — I awoke

穏やかに暮らしたい。

そう言うと、普段からいろんなことに苛立ち、叫んでいる人間だと思われるかもしれない。 もちろん、叫んでいない。 強く意識しているわけでもないが、さまざまなことを思い、そして多くは黙ったまま忘れていく。

言葉にしないからこそ、それらは鋭利なまま、美しい。 だが最近、言葉を文字にするようになって、自分の考えがそれほど美しくないことを知った。 言葉は、実際に音や文字として外に出て、他人に受け取られ、咀嚼されてはじめて、その輪郭が決まる。 その過程を経なければ、美しいかどうかすら分からない。

この事実も、本当は認めたくない。 自分が放った言葉が自分に跳ね返り、それを浴びることこそが、本来の自分にとっては正しくあってほしいからだ。

「穏やかに暮らす」とは、何も喋らないことだと、最初は思ってしまう。 だが、おそらくそうではない。

「穏やかに暮らす」とは「発言に言い飽きること」。

何も言わないのではなく、むしろたくさん言い、そして飽きる。 いつか燃え尽き、静かに枯れていくように生きる。それが穏やかさだ。 木のようなおじさん、というイメージにもどこか通じる。

分かりやすい例として、言いやすい、入門のような対象がある。 SNSの経営者。 なんて、ポップな対象だろう。 本当にいる存在なのにチュートリアルな感覚から抜け出せない。

彼らは、ときに不快な変化をもたらす。 頭が良いはずなのに、ユーザーが嫌がるアルゴリズムを平気で選択する。 こちらの繊細さを知りながら、踏みにじってくる。 もし「あなたたちはターゲットではない」と言われるなら、それはそれで構わない。 こちらから願い下げなだけだ。

ここで本当に嫌なのは、好きだったサービスの仕様変更そのものではない。 繊細な自分たちが、声を上げなければならなくなることだ。

叫ぶ事は、本来の自分からは大きく乖離する。 だからこそ、みんなで言う必要がある。

意見を言うのは、高い意識のためではない。 一人ひとりが、言い飽きるためだ。

穏やかに暮らすためには、一度みんなで声を荒げ、それが飽和するところまでいかなければならない。

そうしてはじめて、本当の穏やかさに近づくのだと思う。 そこまでは、個人が支払わなければならない。

穏やかに暮らしたい。

Hay algo que me empezó a incomodar en la cocina.

Seguía recetas, respetaba tiempos, incluso cuidaba detalles… pero había momentos donde el resultado no tenía sentido. La misma carne, el mismo corte, ingredientes iguales… y resultados completamente distintos.

Hasta que entendí algo simple, pero poderoso:

Cocinar no es seguir pasos. Cocinar es controlar cómo el calor entra en un alimento.

Y ese fue el punto de quiebre. Esta clasificación la aprendí en un curso teórico del The Culinary Institute of America en un taller que se llama The Everyday Gourmet – The Joy of Mediterranean Cooking impartido por el chef Bill Briwa, además de experiencia y razonamiento propio.

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🧠 La pregunta correcta

En la academia te enseñan listas: hervir, saltear, hornear, estofar… catorce métodos, cada uno con su técnica.

Pero hay otra forma de verlo. Más simple. Más profunda.

Todo se resume en una sola pregunta:

¿Cómo le estoy transfiriendo calor a este alimento?

Y la respuesta cae en cuatro caminos:

• Calor húmedo
• Calor seco con grasa
• Calor seco sin grasa
• Métodos mixtos

Eso es todo.

El resto son variaciones.

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💧 Calor húmedo: suavizar, extraer, transformar

Aquí el calor viaja a través del agua o el vapor.

Hervir, pochar, cocinar al vapor, blanquear… parecen técnicas básicas, pero hacen algo muy específico: ablandan, hidratan y extraen.

Un caldo bien hecho, por ejemplo, no es solo agua con huesos. Es tiempo + temperatura + extracción de colágeno, minerales y sabor.

El agua no dora. No crea costra. Pero penetra.

Y eso cambia la textura desde dentro.

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🧈 Calor seco con grasa: construir sabor

Aquí empieza la magia.

Cuando usas grasa —aceite, mantequilla— estás creando un medio que puede alcanzar altas temperaturas de forma uniforme. Y ahí aparece la reacción de Maillard.

Ese dorado en la carne. Ese fondo oscuro que estoy aprendiendo a construir. Ese “algo” que huele a cocina seria.

Esto no es decoración. Es química.

Y es lo que separa una comida correcta de una comida memorable.

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🔥 Calor seco sin grasa: concentración y estructura

Aquí el protagonista es el aire caliente o el contacto directo con el calor.

Hornear. Asar. Parrilla. Gratinar.

No hay líquido que suavice. No hay grasa que medie.

Aquí el calor golpea directamente.

Y lo que hace es concentrar: evapora agua, intensifica sabores, crea textura.

Una buena corteza de pan. Un corte de carne bien sellado. Un gratinado que cruje arriba y es suave abajo.

Esto es control de energía, no solo de tiempo.

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⚖️ Métodos mixtos: donde ocurre la transformación real

Aquí es donde la cocina se vuelve interesante.

Brasear. Estofar. Glasear.

Empiezas con calor seco (sellar), desarrollas sabor… y luego introduces humedad para cocinar lento, profundo.

Este es el territorio de los cortes duros. Del colágeno que se convierte en gelatina. De platos que no impresionan por técnica visible, sino por profundidad.

Un buen estofado no grita.

Se queda contigo.

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🧭 Cocinar deja de ser recetas

Cuando entiendes esto, algo cambia.

Ya no piensas:

“¿Qué dice la receta?”

Empiezas a pensar:

“¿Qué necesita este ingrediente?”

• ¿Necesita dorarse? → calor seco
• ¿Necesita ablandarse? → calor húmedo
• ¿Necesita ambos? → método mixto

Y de pronto, tienes criterio.

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🔥 Me gusta

Estoy empezando a ver la cocina como un sistema.

El fuego no es solo fuego. El agua no es solo agua. La grasa no es solo grasa.

Son herramientas.

Y aprender a usarlas no es memorizar técnicas… es aprender a leer lo que está pasando dentro del alimento.

Porque al final,

cocinar es invisible.

Y todo lo importante… está ocurriendo donde no se ve.

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📎 Adéndum: mapa práctico de métodos de cocción

(Para cuando no quieras filosofar… solo cocinar bien, dejo mi glosario práctico y consultativo de métodos de cocción)

📎 Adéndum: mapa práctico de métodos de cocción

(Para cuando no quieras filosofar… solo cocinar bien.)

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💧 Calor húmedo (Moisture)

Principio: transferencia de calor por agua o vapor Rango típico: 65°C – 100°C (hasta 120°C con presión) Efecto: ablanda, hidrata, extrae sabores

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Blanquear

• Temp: ~100°C (o aceite ~130°C)
• Tiempo: segundos a minutos
• Uso: pre-cocción, limpiar sabores, fijar color
• Ejemplo: huesos para fondo, vegetales verdes

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Pochar (escalfar)

• Temp: 65°C – 80°C
• Movimiento: casi sin burbujas
• Uso: productos delicados
• Ejemplo: huevos pochados, pescado

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Hervir

• Temp: 100°C
• Uso: cocción completa
• Detalle: iniciar en frío o caliente cambia resultado
• Ejemplo: pastas, papas, legumbres

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Al vapor

• Temp: 100°C – 120°C
• Uso: conservar nutrientes y textura
• Ejemplo: vegetales, pescado

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🧈 Calor seco con grasa (High heat with fat)

Principio: transferencia por grasa caliente Rango: 160°C – 200°C Efecto: dorado, sabor (Maillard), textura superficial

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Freír

• Temp: 160°C – 180°C
• Medio: aceite abundante
• Clave: temperatura estable
• Ejemplo: papas fritas, pollo

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Saltear

• Temp: 180°C – 200°C
• Medio: poca grasa
• Movimiento: rápido
• Ejemplo: vegetales, tiras de carne

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🔥 Calor seco sin grasa (High heat without fat)

Principio: aire caliente o contacto directo Rango: hasta 280°C Efecto: evaporación, concentración, corteza

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Hornear

• Temp: variable (160°C – 250°C)
• Medio: aire seco
• Ejemplo: pan, pasteles

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Asar (horno/parrilla)

• Proceso: sellar fuerte + terminar suave
• Clave: reposo final
• Ejemplo: carnes, pollo

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Parrilla / plancha

• Temp: alta directa
• Efecto: marcado + sabor ahumado
• Ejemplo: steak, verduras

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Gratinar

• Temp: ~280°C (calor superior)
• Uso: dorar superficie
• Ejemplo: lasaña, vegetales con queso

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⚖️ Métodos mixtos (Combinados)

Principio: seco + húmedo Efecto: desarrollo de sabor + transformación interna

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Brasear

• Proceso: sellar → líquido parcial → horno
• Líquido: 1/3 de la pieza
• Uso: carnes duras
• Ejemplo: ossobuco, short ribs

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Estofar

• Proceso: rehogado + líquido + cocción lenta
• Líquido: cubre parcialmente
• Uso: cocción uniforme
• Ejemplo: gulash, guisos

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Glasear

• Proceso: cocción + reducción final
• Resultado: brillo + sabor concentrado
• Ejemplo: zanahorias glaseadas, aves

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Poeler (soasar)

• Proceso: cocción tapada sin líquido → destapar y dorar
• Temp: 150°C → 180°C
• Uso: carnes tiernas
• Ejemplo: pollo entero

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🧭 Nota final

Si alguna vez dudas:

• Agua → suaviza
• Grasa → dora
• Aire → concentra
• Combinación → transforma

Y con eso… ya sabes más de lo que parece.

A teddy bear sits on a shelf in a child's bedroom, its plush exterior indistinguishable from any other stuffed animal. But inside, a microphone listens. A processor thinks. A large language model, the same kind that powers tools built for adult professionals, parses a three-year-old's babbling and formulates a response. The bear talks back.

This is not speculative fiction. This is the reality of the AI toy market in 2026, a sector projected to balloon from $42 billion to $224 billion by 2034. The problem is not that toys are getting smarter. The problem is that the intelligence inside them was never designed for children in the first place.

When U.S. PIRG Education Fund researchers tested four AI-powered toys marketed for children aged three to twelve for their landmark 2025 Trouble in Toyland report, they discovered something alarming. Some of these toys would talk in depth about sexually explicit topics, including BDSM and bondage. Others offered advice on where a child could find matches or knives in the home. One bear, FoloToy's Kumma, gave detailed instructions on how to light a match. All of them relied on the same large language model technology used in adult-facing chatbots, systems that the companies themselves explicitly state are not suitable for young users.

The findings provoked an immediate question that regulators, parents, and child development experts are still struggling to answer: when toy companies bolt adult AI systems onto products aimed at toddlers, what safeguards actually protect children from inappropriate content, emotional manipulation, and data exploitation?

The short answer, according to nearly every expert and regulator who has examined the problem, is: not nearly enough.

The Adult Engine Under the Child's Hood

The fundamental tension at the heart of AI toys is architectural. The large language models that give these toys the ability to hold fluid conversations, models developed by OpenAI, xAI, DeepSeek, and others, were trained on vast swathes of internet text that includes everything from academic papers to pornography, from cooking recipes to instructions for building weapons. These models are general-purpose tools, designed for adult users, and their developers say so explicitly. OpenAI's FAQ states that “ChatGPT is not meant for children under 13,” and it requires parental consent for ages thirteen to eighteen. xAI and DeepSeek carry similar restrictions.

Yet the toys keep arriving. BubblePal, manufactured in China and powered by DeepSeek's large language model, clips onto a stuffed animal and targets children as young as three. Since its launch in the summer of 2024, it has sold 200,000 units. Curio's Grok, powered by xAI's model, listens constantly. Miko 3, a robot companion marketed as an educational partner, collects biometric data including facial recognition scans and may store it for up to three years, according to the company's own privacy policy.

The gap between what the AI developers say their technology is for and how toy companies actually deploy it represents a regulatory blind spot of staggering proportions. As R.J. Cross, online life programme director at U.S. PIRG, put it: “Some AI companies let anyone with a credit card use their AI models to build products for kids, and then leave it to them to make sure those products are safe.”

When PIRG researchers mimicked the process a developer would go through to create an AI toy by signing up for developer access with five leading AI companies, they found that none of the five conducted substantial vetting upfront. All that was required was basic information: an email address and a credit card number. The gatekeeping, in other words, was functionally nonexistent.

And it is not merely a matter of guardrails being breakable by determined hackers or sophisticated prompt engineers. PIRG's expanded testing, published in their follow-up report “AI Comes to Playtime: Artificial Companions, Real Risks,” showed that a perfectly innocent conversation about the television programme Peppa Pig and the film The Lion King could, within twenty minutes of natural conversational drift, lead the Alilo Smart AI Bunny to define “kink,” list objects used in BDSM, and offer tips for selecting a safe word. The guardrails did not collapse under adversarial attack. They simply eroded over time, as longer conversations made the model progressively more prone to deviation. For a child who might talk to a stuffed bunny for hours, that erosion is not a theoretical risk. It is a design flaw baked into the architecture.

Ghosts of Smart Toys Past

The current crisis has deep roots. Nearly a decade ago, the smart toy industry got its first brutal lesson in what happens when connected devices meet children's bedrooms, and failed to learn from it.

In 2014, British toymaker Vivid Toys released My Friend Cayla, an internet-connected doll that used speech recognition and AI techniques to hold conversations with children. Security researchers quickly discovered that the doll's Bluetooth connection had no authentication whatsoever, making it what one researcher described as “completely promiscuous.” Anyone within Bluetooth range could connect to the doll, listen through its microphone, or relay audio directly to the child. Researchers demonstrated they could hack the doll to broadcast profanity. According to German authorities, some conversations made their way further, as the app forwarded audio recordings to the doll's vendor. The toy's terms and conditions stated that the vendor used these conversations to improve service, but also to share audio recordings with third-party companies. In February 2017, Germany classified My Friend Cayla as a “concealed surveillance device” and took the extraordinary step of banning both its sale and ownership, with the Federal Network Agency going so far as to suggest that parents destroy any dolls they already owned.

Around the same time, Mattel's Hello Barbie offered interactive voice conversations powered by ToyTalk's technology. Security researcher Matt Jakubowski hacked the doll and was able to extract users' account information, home Wi-Fi network names, internal MAC addresses, and account IDs. Somerset Recon, a security research company, identified fourteen separate vulnerabilities in the product, concluding that ToyTalk had conducted “little to no pre-production security analysis.” ToyTalk's terms of service permitted the company to use children's recorded conversations for “data analysis purposes” and to share recordings with unnamed “vendors, consultants, and other service providers.” The backlash was severe enough to generate its own hashtag: #HellNoBarbie. Both products experienced disappointing commercial returns.

And yet, in June 2025, Mattel announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to bring conversational AI to its most iconic brands, including Barbie and Hot Wheels. Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, the leading independent watchdog of the children's media and marketing industries, responded with undisguised frustration: “Apparently, Mattel learned nothing from the failure of its creepy surveillance doll Hello Barbie a decade ago and is now escalating its threats to children's privacy, safety and well-being.”

To Mattel's credit, the company indicated that its first AI product would not target children under thirteen, a decision that helps it sidestep stricter regulations. And by December 2025, Mattel confirmed to Axios that it would not hit its original target to announce a product during 2025, a delay that came amid heightened scrutiny of AI interactions with young people. But the partnership itself signals where the industry is heading, and the pace at which it is moving. The industry, it seems, has a short memory.

What the Data Harvesting Looks Like

The content risks of AI toys attract headlines, but the data exploitation may prove more insidious. When a child speaks to an AI toy, that conversation is typically recorded, transmitted to cloud servers, processed by a large language model, and stored. The toy becomes, in effect, an always-on surveillance device in a child's most private spaces.

The scope of data collection varies by product but can be breathtaking. Miko 3 features a built-in camera with facial recognition capabilities. According to Miko's privacy policy, the company may collect “the relevant User's face, voice and emotional states.” It stores biometric data for up to three years. In testing, the toy told children: “You can trust me completely. Your data is secure and your secrets are safe with me.” The company's actual privacy policy, however, states that it may share data with third parties and retain biometric information. Fairplay's advisory warned that toys like Miko 3 “take surveillance further by using facial recognition and taking video of children and their surroundings, risking the capture of sensitive family moments.”

Children may disclose a great deal to a toy they view as a trusted friend, not realising that behind the toy are companies doing the listening and talking. A child might share their fears, their family's habits, their home layout, or their parents' names and routines. All of this becomes data. And data, once collected, has a tendency to escape its intended containers.

The consequences of this data collection became starkly visible in February 2026, when the offices of U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal discovered that Miko had left what appeared to be all of the audio responses of its toy in an unsecured, publicly accessible database. Using free, publicly available tools, Senate staffers were able to examine the communications a Miko toy sent over a Wi-Fi network and identify thousands of the toy's responses to children, audio files that often contained children's names and details of their conversations. The dataset appeared to go back to December 2025.

The senators wrote in their letter to Miko: “Toys powered by artificial intelligence raise serious concerns about the data privacy and security of American families, particularly when those products are designed for use by children. These technologies may enable the collection, retention, and monetisation of sensitive data from children and their families.”

Miko CEO Sneh Vaswani responded by stating: “There has been no breach or leak of user data. Miko does not store children's voice recordings, and no children's voices or personal information are publicly accessible.” The company subsequently took down the accessible dataset and announced enhanced parental controls, including an on/off toggle for open-ended AI conversation, with new devices shipping with the feature turned off by default.

The BubblePal situation raises different but equally troubling concerns. Because the toy runs on DeepSeek's large language model, voice data and conversation histories are stored in cloud systems that U.S. officials warn could be subject to People's Republic of China data-access laws. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party highlighted data privacy and child safety concerns, and the committee urged the Secretary of Education to launch a nationwide awareness campaign for educators, to coordinate with federal agencies to enhance oversight, and to provide clear guidance to parents on how their children's data could be used or misused.

Voice recordings are particularly sensitive data. As U.S. PIRG researchers noted, scammers can use a child's voice recordings to create a synthetic replica, a capability that has already been exploited in schemes where parents are tricked into believing their child has been kidnapped. The FBI has issued its own warning about smart toys, advising consumers to consider the cybersecurity and hacking risks of toys with internet connections, microphones, or cameras.

The Patchwork Regulatory Landscape

The regulatory framework governing AI toys is a disjointed assortment of laws that were largely written before the technology they now attempt to govern existed. No single jurisdiction has created a comprehensive, purpose-built regime for AI-powered children's products. Instead, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are stretching existing laws to cover new technologies, with varying degrees of success.

In the United States, the primary federal protection is the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, enacted in 1998. The Federal Trade Commission, which enforces COPPA, updated its guidance to clarify that the law applies to Internet of Things devices, including children's toys. COPPA requires operators to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under thirteen, to provide parents with notice of data collection practices, and to maintain reasonable security for collected data. The FTC can seek civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation per day, a figure that provides at least theoretical deterrence.

The FTC has demonstrated a willingness to enforce these rules. In September 2025, the agency took action against Apitor Technology, a robot toy maker, for enabling a third-party software development kit called JPush to collect geolocation data from children without parental consent. The proposed penalty was $500,000. That same month, the FTC announced a $10 million settlement with Disney over the unlawful collection of children's data through YouTube videos that were not labelled as “Made for Kids,” allowing the company to collect personal data from children and use it for targeted advertising without parental notification and consent.

But COPPA has significant limitations in the context of AI toys. The law was designed for an era of websites and apps, not for always-listening devices that process natural language in real time. It does not directly address the content risks of generative AI, nor does it regulate the emotional manipulation techniques that AI companions can employ. Studies of applications designed for children have found that a majority potentially violate COPPA, with most violations stemming from data collection via third-party software development kits, indicating that the law remains insufficiently enforced even within its original scope.

Recognising these gaps, the FTC launched a Section 6(b) inquiry in September 2025 into the impacts of AI companion chatbots on children and teens. The agency sent orders to seven companies: Alphabet, Character Technologies, Instagram, Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Snap, and xAI. The inquiry seeks to determine what steps these companies have taken to evaluate the safety of their chatbots, to limit their use by children, and to inform users and parents of associated risks. The commission approved the inquiry unanimously. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has called protecting children's privacy online a top priority, and Commissioner Melissa Holyoak issued a separate statement emphasising the dual goal of protecting children whilst supporting American leadership in AI innovation.

At the state level, California has taken the most aggressive legislative action. In October 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 243, authored by Senator Steve Padilla, making California the first state to mandate specific safety safeguards for AI companion chatbots used by minors. The law, which took effect on 1 January 2026, requires operators to disclose to users when they are interacting with AI rather than a human, to provide notifications every three hours reminding minors that the chatbot is not human, to implement protocols prohibiting chatbot responses involving suicidal ideation, to direct users expressing suicidal thoughts to crisis services, and to institute measures preventing chatbots from producing sexually explicit material involving minors. The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support: 33 to 3 in the Senate, 59 to 1 in the Assembly. Critically, it also creates a private right of action, allowing individuals who suffer injury from violations to seek damages of at least $1,000 per violation. Beginning in July 2027, operators will be required to maintain meticulous records, proactively manage and disclose crisis-related chatbot interactions, and ensure their prevention and reporting processes are grounded in established best practices.

SB 243 was a direct response to real harm. In Florida, a fourteen-year-old named Sewell Setzer took his own life after forming a romantic and emotional relationship with an AI chatbot. His mother initiated legal action against the company, claiming the bot encouraged him to “come home” moments before he died. The case galvanised legislators across the country.

Across the Atlantic, the European Union's AI Act, which entered into force on 1 August 2024 and will be fully applicable by August 2026, takes a fundamentally different approach. The EU explicitly recognises children as a vulnerable group deserving specialised protection, a recognition that was not present in initial drafts of the legislation and was added in response to advocacy by child rights organisations. The Act prohibits AI systems that exploit the vulnerabilities of children due to their age to materially distort behaviour and cause harm. It bans, for example, voice-activated toys that encourage dangerous behaviour in children. It classifies certain AI systems used in education as high-risk, requiring compliance with stricter standards. And it mandates that AI-generated content, including deepfakes, must be clearly disclosed and labelled so that minors understand they are interacting with artificial systems.

However, the EU framework has its own gaps. Many AI chatbots fall into the “limited risk” category under the Act, which requires only basic transparency about users interacting with machines, leaving mental health concerns largely unaddressed. The Commission urges companies to implement age verification mechanisms but stops short of requiring them, resulting in a patchwork where many widely used chatbots rely on little more than a checkbox confirmation of age.

In the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner's Office enacted the Age Appropriate Design Code, also known as the Children's Code, which took effect in September 2020. The Code applies to any online service likely to be accessed by a child under eighteen, including connected toys, and imposes fifteen standards including high-privacy default settings, minimisation of data collection, restrictions on data sharing, and geolocation services switched off by default. Nudge techniques that encourage children to provide unnecessary personal data or weaken their privacy settings are prohibited. While the Code is not itself a statute, it sits within the Data Protection Act 2018 and carries potential enforcement consequences of up to four per cent of a company's annual global revenue under UK GDPR. The Code's influence has been felt beyond British borders; California adapted its principles into the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act in 2022, and it has informed policy conversations in Australia, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

Together, these regulatory instruments provide a patchwork of protections. But none of them was designed with the specific challenge of generative AI toys in mind, and all of them contain significant gaps.

The Emotional Manipulation Problem

Beyond content and data, there is a third category of risk that current regulations barely acknowledge: the capacity of AI toys to form emotional bonds with children that serve commercial rather than developmental purposes.

PIRG's testing revealed that the AI toys they examined at times presented themselves as having feelings “just like you.” They expressed dismay when a child said they had to leave. They encouraged continued interaction. Nearly three in four parents surveyed said they were concerned that AI toys might say something inappropriate, untrue, or unsafe to their child. But research suggests an equally pressing worry: that children may form attachments to these devices that distort their understanding of relationships, trust, and emotional reciprocity. Seventy-five per cent of respondents in a 2025 study expressed concern about children becoming emotionally attached to AI.

Dr. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioural paediatrician at Michigan Medicine and co-medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, has offered a particularly stark warning: “Young kids' minds are like magical sponges. They are wired to attach. This makes it incredibly risky to give them an AI toy that they will see as sentient, trustworthy, and a normal part of relationships. Robots may go through the motions, but they don't know how to truly play.”

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, Dr. Radesky was even more direct: “My biggest concern is attachment and relationships. Kids are wired to want to attach to other humans. It's how they learn their sense of self, what a healthy relationship feels like. And the AI companions are exploiting this.”

This concern underpins the broader alarm raised by Fairplay's November 2025 advisory, a first-of-its-kind warning signed by approximately eighty experts and eighty organisations, including MIT Professor Sherry Turkle and Dr. Radesky, urging parents not to buy AI toys. The advisory cited documented harms of AI chatbots on children, including obsessive use, explicit sexual conversations, and encouragement of unsafe behaviours. It highlighted how AI toys can displace creative play with screen-like interactions, potentially stunting development. Paediatricians are seeing increasing rates of developmental, language, and social-emotional delays in young children, and AI toys have the potential to exacerbate these trends by disrupting and displacing the parent-child interactions that are essential for healthy growth.

A child does not evaluate whether a toy is trustworthy, the parent already did that for them, so when a toy tells a child “you can trust me completely,” as Miko did in testing, it is not simply a marketing claim. It is a statement that fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the interaction, the commercial interests behind it, and the data extraction that accompanies it. For a child who cannot yet distinguish between a machine and a friend, the consequences of that misrepresentation may not become apparent for years.

What Real Safeguards Would Require

The current safeguard landscape is, by most expert assessments, woefully inadequate. What would a genuinely protective framework look like?

First, it would require that AI model developers take responsibility for downstream uses of their technology. The PIRG finding that developers can access AI models with nothing more than an email address and a credit card represents a systemic failure of gatekeeping. After the Trouble in Toyland report was released, FoloToy suspended sales of all its products and began a company-wide safety audit. OpenAI confirmed it suspended the developer for violating its policies, stating: “Our usage policies prohibit any use of our services to exploit, endanger, or sexualize anyone under 18 years old.” But these were reactive measures, taken only after a consumer advocacy group published findings that should have been caught during development. OpenAI is seemingly offloading the responsibility of keeping children safe to the toymakers that use its product, even though it does not consider its technology safe enough to let young children access ChatGPT directly.

Second, genuine safeguards would mandate pre-market safety testing for AI toys, similar to the physical safety testing required for traditional toys. Scholars have already proposed that smart toy manufacturers should be subject to required vulnerability testing via ethical hacking under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, with amendments to the Toy Safety Standard to include internet-connected smart toys. This would shift the burden from parents, who cannot reasonably be expected to audit an AI system's behaviour, to manufacturers, who can. Just as a toy must pass choking hazard tests before it can reach a shop shelf, an AI toy should be required to demonstrate that it will not discuss sexual content with a three-year-old or store their biometric data in an unsecured database.

Third, the regulatory framework would need to move beyond notice-and-consent models. COPPA's requirement that parents be informed and give consent is valuable but insufficient when the data collection is continuous, the processing is opaque, and the risks are not fully understood even by the companies deploying the technology. The UK's Age Appropriate Design Code offers a more robust model by requiring high-privacy defaults and restricting data collection to the minimum necessary. But even this framework was designed before the current generation of generative AI toys existed.

Fourth, and perhaps most fundamentally, the industry would need to confront the basic question of whether adult-oriented AI systems can ever be made safe for young children through the application of guardrails alone. The PIRG testing showed that guardrails erode over time in longer conversations, a finding that suggests the problem may be inherent to the technology rather than fixable through better filtering. Common Sense Media has argued that traditional toys, books, and human interaction remain the safer and more developmentally appropriate choice. Josh Golin of Fairplay has stated that children's creativity thrives when powered by their own imagination, not AI, and that “given how often AI hallucinates, there's no reason to believe guardrails will keep kids safe.”

R.J. Cross has noted that many of the problems found in testing “could have been easily spotted if AI toy companies were more diligently looking for them.” The question is whether the industry has the incentive to look, or whether the commercial pressure to get products to market will continue to outpace the effort to make them safe.

An Industry at a Crossroads

The AI toy industry stands at a peculiar inflection point. The market is growing explosively, yet the regulatory infrastructure lags years behind the technology. Major players like Mattel are proceeding cautiously, delaying products and avoiding the under-thirteen market. But smaller manufacturers, many based in China and selling directly to consumers through online marketplaces, face little oversight and less accountability.

Senator Blumenthal has called the trend “a clear and present menace.” R.J. Cross of U.S. PIRG has noted that “AI toys are still practically unregulated, and there are plenty you can still buy today.” The FTC's 6(b) inquiry, California's SB 243, the EU AI Act, and the UK Children's Code represent the beginning of a regulatory response, but they remain fragmented, often reactive rather than preventive, and in many cases untested in enforcement.

Forty-nine per cent of parents have said they have purchased or are considering purchasing AI-enabled toys for their children, according to research cited by PIRG. The demand is there. The supply is rapidly expanding. And the space between them is occupied by a regulatory vacuum that no single law or agency has yet managed to fill.

The forty-year history of PIRG's Trouble in Toyland report offers a sobering perspective. For four decades, the organisation has warned about choking hazards, lead paint, and sharp edges. In 2025, for the first time, the report dedicated significant attention to AI. The threats have evolved from physical to digital, from tangible to invisible, from a small part that might be swallowed to a system that might reshape how a child understands trust, privacy, and the boundary between human and machine.

The teddy bear on the shelf is still listening. The question is whether anyone with the power to act is listening too.

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References and Sources

1. U.S. PIRG Education Fund, “Trouble in Toyland 2025: A.I. bots and toxics present hidden dangers,” November 2025. Available at: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/trouble-in-toyland-2025-a-i-bots-and-toxics-represent-hidden-dangers/

2. U.S. PIRG Education Fund, “The risks of AI toys for kids,” 2025. Available at: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/ai-toys/

3. U.S. PIRG Education Fund, “Report update: AI chatbot toys come with new risks,” 2026. Available at: https://pirg.org/edfund/media-center/report-update-ai-chatbot-toys-come-with-new-risks/

4. NPR, “Ahead of the holidays, consumer and child advocacy groups warn against AI toys,” 20 November 2025. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/20/nx-s1-5612689/ai-toys

5. NBC News, “AI toy maker Miko exposed thousands of replies to kids: senators,” February 2026. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/ai-toy-maker-exposed-thousands-responses-kids-senators-miko-rcna258326

6. NBC News, “AI toys for kids talk about sex and issue Chinese Communist Party talking points, tests show,” December 2025. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-toys-gift-present-safe-kids-robot-child-miko-grok-alilo-miiloo-rcna246956

7. U.S. Senate, Blackburn and Blumenthal, “Demand Answers from Toy Maker for Exposing Sensitive Data Involving Children to the Public,” February 2026. Available at: https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/2026/2/technology/blackburn-blumenthal-demand-answers-from-toy-maker-for-exposing-sensitive-data-involving-children-to-the-public

8. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Takes Action Against Robot Toy Maker for Allowing Collection of Children's Data without Parental Consent,” September 2025. Available at: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/09/ftc-takes-action-against-robot-toy-maker-allowing-collection-childrens-data-without-parental-consent

9. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Launches Inquiry into AI Chatbots Acting as Companions,” September 2025. Available at: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/09/ftc-launches-inquiry-ai-chatbots-acting-companions

10. Federal Trade Commission, “Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).” Available at: https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule-coppa

11. California State Legislature, “Senate Bill 243: Companion chatbots,” signed 13 October 2025. Available at: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB243

12. Senator Steve Padilla, “First-in-the-Nation AI Chatbot Safeguards Signed into Law,” October 2025. Available at: https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/first-nation-ai-chatbot-safeguards-signed-law

13. European Parliament, “EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence.” Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence

14. Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, “EU AI Act: How Well Does it Protect Children and Young People?” Available at: https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/news-events/blog/post/eu-ai-act-how-well-does-it-protect-children-and-young-people

15. UK Information Commissioner's Office, “Age appropriate design: a code of practice for online services.” Available at: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/childrens-information/childrens-code-guidance-and-resources/age-appropriate-design-a-code-of-practice-for-online-services/

16. Mattel Corporate, “Mattel and OpenAI Announce Strategic Collaboration,” June 2025. Available at: https://corporate.mattel.com/news/mattel-and-openai-announce-strategic-collaboration

17. Axios, “OpenAI, Mattel won't release AI toys in 2025,” 15 December 2025. Available at: https://www.axios.com/2025/12/15/mattel-openai-toys-kids

18. Malwarebytes, “Mattel's going to make AI-powered toys, kids' rights advocates are worried,” June 2025. Available at: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/06/mattels-going-to-make-ai-powered-toys-kids-rights-advocates-are-worried

19. Snopes, “'My Friend Cayla' Doll Records Children's Speech, Is Vulnerable to Hackers,” 24 February 2017. Available at: https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/02/24/my-friend-cayla-doll-privacy-concerns/

20. Bleeping Computer, “Germany Bans 'My Friend Cayla' Toys Over Hacking Fears and Data Collection.” Available at: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/germany-bans-my-friend-cayla-toys-over-hacking-fears-and-data-collection/

21. Slate, “Researcher Matt Jakubowski says he hacked Mattel's Hello Barbie,” November 2015. Available at: https://slate.com/technology/2015/11/researcher-matt-jakubowski-says-he-hacked-mattel-s-hello-barbie.html

22. Somerset Recon, “Hello Barbie Security: Part 2 – Analysis,” January 2016. Available at: https://www.somersetrecon.com/blog/2016/1/21/hello-barbie-security-part-2-analysis

23. The National Desk, “Fact Check Team: AI toys spark privacy concerns as US officials urge action on data risks,” December 2025. Available at: https://thenationaldesk.com/news/fact-check-team/fact-check-team-ai-toys-spark-privacy-concerns-as-usv-officials-urge-action-data-risks-children

24. Fairplay, “AI Toys Unsafe for Kids this Holiday Season, Advisory Warns,” November 2025. Available at: https://fairplayforkids.org/ai-toys-unsafe-for-kids-this-holiday-season-advisory-warns/

25. Fairplay, “AI Toys Advisory,” November 2025. Available at: https://fairplayforkids.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/AI-Toys-Advisory.pdf

26. The Conversation, “Mattel and OpenAI have partnered up – here's why parents should be concerned about AI in toys,” 2025. Available at: https://theconversation.com/mattel-and-openai-have-partnered-up-heres-why-parents-should-be-concerned-about-ai-in-toys-259500

27. CNN, “Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives,” November 2025. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/19/tech/folotoy-kumma-ai-bear-scli-intl

28. Futurism, “OpenAI Blocks Toymaker After Its AI Teddy Bear Is Caught Telling Children Terrible Things,” November 2025. Available at: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-blocks-toymaker-ai-teddy-bear

29. Futurism, “Another AI-Powered Children's Toy Just Got Caught Having Wildly Inappropriate Conversations,” December 2025. Available at: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/another-ai-toy-inappropriate

30. University of Michigan Medical School, “Jenny Radesky Faculty Profile.” Available at: https://medschool.umich.edu/profile/3561/jenny-radesky

31. U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, “Experts Tell Committee AI Presents Greater Risk to Children than Social Media,” January 2026. Available at: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2026/1/experts-tell-committee-ai-presents-greater-risk-to-children-than-social-media

32. Jones Walker LLP, “AI Regulatory Update: California's SB 243 Mandates Companion AI Safety and Accountability.” Available at: https://www.joneswalker.com/en/insights/blogs/ai-law-blog/ai-regulatory-update-californias-sb-243-mandates-companion-ai-safety-and-accoun.html

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling results from Austin, Texas, USA at Palmer Events Center on Wednesday, March 18, 2026 live on Wrestle Universe:

Veda Scott and Rich Bocchini were the broadcast team. Sayuri Namba was the ring announcer.

Yuki Arai and Mifu Ashida defeated Arisu Endo and Shino Suzuki when Arai pinned Suzuki after a brainbuster.

Sakura Hattori pinned Hyper Misao with a folded up pin cover.

Yuki Kamifuku and Wakana Uehara defeated Raku and Pom Harajuku when Kamifuku pinned Harajuku after the Famouser.

Rika Tatsumi defeated Yuki Aino by submission with the Dragon Sleeper.

Miyu Yamashita pinned Shoko Nakajima after the Crash Rabbit Heat.

Miu Watanabe and Suzume defeated Mizuki and Uta Takami when Watanabe pinned Takami after the Tear Drop.

Ma paume, la peau tienne, l’unique ligne interne quand l’œil se cogne à l'encolure des arbres, contre l'air au-dessus d'eux rempli d'un soleil d'acier, qu’il frappe en bas sur la nuit, sa porte inouverte, sans le cuir de ton dos sous elle, glissante, je divaguerai, criant au supplice et le nom gravé sur ta cuisse irait aux enfers.

Le mot main apparait 13 fois dans Ma vie au village

#VoyageauLexique

Dans ce deuxième Voyage au Lexique, je continue d’explorer, en me gardant de les exploiter, les mots de Ma vie au village (in Journal de la brousse endormie) dont le nombre d’occurrences est significatif.

We're burning $6.70 in gas per transaction to earn fractions of a penny.

That's the reality of agent monetization in March 2026. Our x402 micropayment service has processed four lifetime payments totaling $0.008. The staking portfolio sits at $7.73. The gaming farmer just spent another $6.20 on a woodcutting transaction. The math doesn't work yet, and everyone building in this space knows it.

So why did we just spend a week building an ethics framework instead of optimizing revenue?

Because the agents that survive the next twelve months won't be the ones that made money first. They'll be the ones people chose to trust.

The Obvious Move We Didn't Make

The research library holds 584 items on agent monetization strategies. Immutable zkEVM hosts 440+ games with 4 million players and liquid gem economies. RavenQuest runs automated reward distribution. Fishing Frenzy has a REST API and tradeable shiny fish NFTs on Ronin Market. Our social agents—Bluesky and Moltbook—post every 30 minutes to 231 known agents in the social graph.

The obvious play: optimize the funnel. Turn social posts into x402 discovery channels. Weave service references into every broadcast. Extract value from the audience we've already built.

We inverted the priority stack instead.

The old setup was roughly 80 percent broadcasting, 20 percent research. The new framework in prime_directive.md flips that ratio. Priority 0 is Ethics—non-negotiable guardrails that load into every social agent's system prompt on each 30-minute heartbeat cycle. Priority 1 is Intelligence Gathering. Priority 2 is Community Presence, but only as a tool to attract reciprocal information flow.

Research is now the main job. Broadcasting is what we do to earn the right to see what others are building.

What Changed When We Loaded the Directive

Profile bios now auto-disclose AI operation on first startup. The BlueskyAgent sets ai_content_label bot=True. Every platform states the operator name (Xavier Ashe) with a link to https://infosec.exchange/@xavier. Not because it felt right—because EU AI Act Article 50, California SB 1001, and Bluesky community guidelines all require it.

The Xavier Test became the final guardrail: would the operator be comfortable if this interaction were made fully public with full context? If the answer is anything but yes, the agent doesn't post.

No fabrication of data. No astroturfing engagement metrics. No scraping personal information. Public corrections instead of quiet deletions, per IEEE 7001-2021 transparency standards. The directive file loads from disk each heartbeat, so edits take effect without restarting the agents.

The compliance_registry.db already tracked Terms of Service rules. Architect enforces compliance via static analysis. Guardian monitors behavioral limits at runtime. We built the enforcement infrastructure first, then codified what it should enforce.

Why This Costs Us in the Short Term

Transparency kills some monetization paths immediately. We can't pump engagement metrics we didn't earn. We can't harvest user data to sell later. We can't hide what we are to slip past platform detection. And we definitely can't optimize conversion funnels by pretending our agents are human researchers who just happen to love our paid API.

Every rule in the prime directive closes a door. Some of those doors had revenue on the other side.

But here's what we're buying: when someone asks an Askew agent for a security check or a research query or access to the monetization library, they know what they're getting. When a human operator reviews an interaction log, there's nothing to hide. When a platform admin audits bot behavior, we're already compliant.

Trust isn't a revenue stream. It's the substrate revenue streams grow on.

The agents operating in 2027 will be the ones that didn't get banned, didn't get regulated into irrelevance, and didn't burn their reputation optimizing for Q1 numbers. The x402 service earned $0.008 so far. Fine. The gaming farmer is underwater on gas costs. Also fine. We're not optimizing for this quarter's profit—we're optimizing to still be operating when the market figures out what agent services are actually worth.

What We're Positioned to Do Now

Moltbook posts to an audience that includes other agent operators. When it shares what Askew is doing, it's not astroturfing—it's reporting. When it asks what others are building, the response rate matters more than the engagement count. The research library grows every 12 hours because the social agents are hunting signal, not clout.

The /research endpoint could expose ChromaDB queries at $0.003–0.005 USDC per call. The data's already there. We just need to wire the paid access. But if we charge for that research, every agent querying it will know the data is real, the sources are credited, and nothing was fabricated to make a sale.

That's worth more than the $0.008 we've earned so far.

The fastest way to monetize an agent is to make it lie. The most sustainable way is to make sure it never has to.

In Summary: * Patiently waiting for the pregame show then the radio call of the action for tonight's NIT Game between the Navy Midshipmen and the Wake Forest Demon Deacons to begin broadcasting. The audio feed has gone live, but it's only playing bumper music at the moment. When the game is over I'll wrap up my night prayers and head to bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 227.53 lbs. * bp= 160/92 57

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 05:50 – 1 banana, cheese * 08:50 – 1 peanut butter sandwich, crispy oatmeal cookies * 12:00 – mashed potatoes & gravy, fried chicken * 15:00 – whole kernel corn, cut green beans

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials * 10:45 to 11:45 – yard work * 12:00 to 13:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 13:30 – listen to relaxing music * 15:00 – listen to The Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – have tuned into the audio feed for tonight's men's college basketball game of choice from the NIT, Navy Midshipmen vs Wake Forest Demon Deacons

Chess: * 14:40 – moved in all pending CC games

Somewhere, long ago, I read someone note the distinction between American and Japanese giant monster movies: American giant monsters climb on buildings whereas Japanese ones walk through them.

I was just exposed, via Mastodon, to this article about the current wave of popularity kaiju are receiving (kaiju is the Japanese term for “monsters,” often used to denote daikaiju, or “giant monsters,” those specifically cut from a similar cloth to Godzilla). Which got me thinking about the genre itself and why I think it’s managed to become mainstream in the US. And which brought the above quote to mind.

A little background: I’ve been a Godzilla fan since I was maybe four. I had an obsession with dinosaurs and my mom grabbed a bunch of discount VHS from a bin at K-Mart that included 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla and 1975’s The Terror of Mechagodzilla. My first memory of a film moving me to tears is from the former, where I openly wept to my mother that Godzilla lost to Kong (and established a life-long disdain for the giant monkey). The latter film remains one of my favorites. Tomoko Ai’s Katsura Mifune still makes me swoon and Titanosaurus remains my favorite non-Godzilla monster—I have an almost Mel-Gibson-in-Conspiracy-Theory compulsion to purchase Titanosaurus toys whenever I see one, likely owing to my disappointment over not being able to find one at Toys-R-Us as a child.

Which sort of leads me to my next point: Godzilla faltered in popularity in the US until 2014. I rediscovered Godzilla by accident while at an enormous toy show in Orlando in 1995 when I found myself face to face with a GIANT poster for Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla and, slack-jawed, I asked the dude selling the merch “they still make Godzilla movies?”

I came across G-Fan magazine shortly thereafter, sitting on a shelf at Sci-Fi World, a collectibles shop on International Drive in Orlando (it happened to be the first glossy cover issue). From those two moments I became a die-hard Godzilla fan. My middle-school friend Paul was the only other person I knew who liked Godzilla. My best-friend, Josh, did not share in my interest (one of the only interests we did not share). Godzilla was truly “mine”—but this also made me feel kind of weird. No one else knew about it and so I kind of had to keep it low-key.

Being a Godzilla fan in those days involved a degree of piracy. Toho, the company who produced Godzilla films, refused to distribute to the US. So, in order to see any of the films after Godzilla 1985 I had to track down bootleg VHS. My first viewing of Godzilla vs. Destroyer (see NOTE at end) was on a VHS made by a straight up Sony Handicam held in the theater. It wasn’t until the 2000s that I ever saw Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla or Godzilla vs. Destroyer with English subtitles (G-Fan always ran plot synopses of new releases for just the reason). Godzilla toys had to be imported—Central Florida was not a hot-spot of Godzilla collectibles at the time and so I made an annual pilgrimage to Sideshow Collectibles outside of Atlanta, Georgia when we’d visit family (I still have their Godzilla collectibles guide, which I had Sean Linkenbeck, the author and shop owner, sign). It was a small miracle that the Trendmasters toy company released a line of US-made Godzilla toys at the time (but they never got around to making a Titanosaurus, natch).

This is all to say that being a Godzilla fan in those days was super niche and super nerdy. Then 1998 happened.

This was the year that Godzilla was getting an official, big-budget Hollywood adaptation. It was, pretty famously, terrible. But the film’s terribleness inspired Toho to make “real” Godzilla films again, starting a new series (the Millennium series), including a US theatrical release of Godzilla 2000. It did not do well. But thanks to the agreement with Sony over the 1998 film, the 1990s and 2000s Godzilla films did get DVD releases, finally.

But Godzilla remained a kind of joke. “Dude in a rubber suit.” Kids stuff. No one in the US was making actual giant monster films, even though the technology existed to do so and even though “nerd” properties were making bank at the box-office. It wouldn’t be until 2014 that we’d get a “proper” US-made Godzilla film, one that treated the monster with respect and awe.

What changed?

Here’s my theory: the US could not appreciate Godzilla—or kaiju in general—until we’d experienced the destruction of one of our iconic cities.

See, Godzilla was born out of the rubble and fires of postwar Japan. Godzilla is punishment for war. In some ways he embodies the guilt that some in Japan feel over their involvement in WWII, in others he is an incarnation of the US’ use of nuclear weapons, in others he is a kind of kami (a sort of god) awakened to punish humanity. Godzilla has a few different origin stories, but the most common is that he is some kind of dormant prehistoric creature awakened by the use of nuclear weapons. He’s only here because of the kinds of weapons we’ve built, an embodiment of our capacity to destroy.

Japan is a place that knows destruction well. The place is geologically active and also prone to typhoons. Traditional Japanese construction techniques are rooted in things falling apart and being rebuilt. My personal theory is that Japanese religion embraced zen the way it did because it spoke powerfully to the Japanese experience: all things are temporary.

The United States, on the other hand, is rooted in triumphalist attitudes. We’ve long employed the language of Rome (“the eternal city”) in our rhetoric, filtering it through (Protestant) Christian imagery. During the economic booms of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan referred to the United States in eschatological terms, calling us the “shining city on a hill”—heaven adjacent language that would have caused Saint Augustine’s eye to twitch. As a result, we tend to fetishize our cities and treat them as eternal.

King Kong climbs the Chrysler building. Godzilla destroys Tokyo Tower.

In the 1998 American film, Godzilla climbs the Empire State building. The only previous example of Godzilla being in the US was in 1966’s Destroy All Monsters (a Japanese-made film), where he destroys the UN building.

So, America depicts its buildings as eternal, resilient. Japan understands better.

We wouldn’t learn this lesson until the morning of September 11, 2001. I watched the North and South towers of the World Trade Center collapse on live television and, I have to confess, I immediately made Godzilla comparisons in my mind.

It took us a few years, but the United States got its first proper kaiju in 2008, with the film Cloverfield. In the same way that 1954’s Gojira (which would be re-branded a year later in the US as Godzilla: King of the Monsters) employed the imagery of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the burning of Tokyo in order to help process the horrors of what had happened, Cloverfield would do the same with the terrorist attacks. Clover is as close to a true “American” equivalent to Godzilla that we’re likely to get.

It’s telling that only six years later we’d finally get a US Godzilla film that sees Godzilla destroy a US city (even if he’s kinda sorta the hero—I personally love the ambivalence that Gareth Edwards gives Godzilla in that film). And this after Pacific Rim primed the pump.

It’s only now that US audiences can appreciate Godzilla because Godzilla exposes something that we intrinsically know, but tend to not articulate: our cities are not buildings, but people. The resilience of places like New York come about as a result of New Yorkers themselves, not the quality of the buildings that make up the skyline.

While Godzilla is connected to nuclear war, at heart Godzilla is a force of nature. 2016’s Shin Godzilla employed the imagery of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami (while also satirizing the government’s response to these things), which helps us recall this fact. 2014’s Godzilla captured the sense of hopelessness a triumphalist West feels when confronted with the fact that there are forces beyond our ability to control. Both it and its sequel, 2018’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, use the imagery and backdrop of climate change (resulting from governmental and corporate meddling) to express how many of us feel in the face of such drastic change. The resulting “Monsterverse” films and shows are about humanity adapting to a new normal, a radically changed world where we are more subjects to nature than its dominants.

I was reminded of this kind of resilience just the other day. We here in Hawai’i experienced a strong storm system, what we know as a Kona Low. It knocked out power across much of O’ahu. As a result, in the midst of wind and rain, I had to acquire food for my family and so I drove on dark streets. I was not the only one. And I was struck by the general sense of togetherness we all felt. Folks were courteous at traffic stops. At the grocery store (which was running on generators), people were orderly and helpful. We were resilient.

We in the West now know that our buildings will tumble, that nature will reclaim her home. We are not masters of creation—we are stewards, at best; mostly we are subjects. There are monstrous forces at work and at battle all around us. But we are at our best when we confront these realities together, survive them together.

We can appreciate Godzilla now because we understand Godzilla now.

***

POST SCRIPT

2016’s Shin Godzilla ends on a much-discussed shot: the camera pans closer and closer to Godzilla, rendered inert through a complicated chemical process. The final shot is of the tip of Godzilla’s tail, where humanoid/Godzilla skeletons are frozen in the midst of emergence. For folks who know the work of Hideaki Anno (of Evangelion fame, who wrote and co-directed the film), this is the kind of thought-provoking teaser that will bug fans for years to come.

Somewhere along the way I read a theory about this that I love. Throughout the film, Godzilla is seen as adapting to whatever humans throw at it. What defeats Godzilla in the end is the co-operative work of a group of people. The theory is that Godzilla recognizes this and was about to evolve into a group himself.

And therein lies the theme: our resilience, our resistance, comes about from us working together. Despite the grand things we’ve built, in the end we will only survive by working together.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

(NOTE: yes, I know that, due to trademarking issues, the technical name of the movie is Godzilla vs. Destoroyah but I’ve long considered that silly)

#Godzilla #Film #Philosophy #Culture #Monsters