Article by Daniella Fernández, and Andrea Paola Hernández: “After twin earthquakes struck northern Venezuela last month, thousands of people took to social media, pleading for help locating friends and family. The interim government was slow to act, but help came quickly from an unexpected source: developers and programmers.
“Who knew when the government was going to respond?” Jorge Bastidas, a 31-year-old Venezuelan programmer who lives in Buenos Aires, told Rest of World. “We decided to take action.”
Bastidas and his team of six created Desaparecidos Terremoto Venezuela, a website for citizens to report, identify, and reunite with missing family and friends. Using Claude Opus 4.8, and facial recognition software donated by Mexican company Lab-Co, Bastidas designed the site to load quickly, without requiring users to register or download an app. It received more than 30,000 missing-person reports in the first two days, he said.
Without AI, “it would have taken me about 24 hours without rest to build something that took me three hours,” Bastidas said…(More)”.
