Tag: essay
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Drunk Post: Things I’ve Learned as a Senior Engineer (2021)
A few years ago, a data engineer on r/ExperiencedDevs got drunk and wrote down everything he learned in 10 years of engineering. The original account is deleted, but the post captures something real — the kind of honesty you only get after a few glasses of wine. Preserving it here, typos and all. I’m drunk and I’ll…
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Who am I? (AI)
I saw this post from Santiago this morning, a topic that I have anticipated in my thinking and essays for at least two years now. If digital intelligence can easily copy our looks and tone of voice, the final step in the process of creating a realistic copy of ourselves that could be expressed in…
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My Brother & Motorcycles
My brother and motorcycles: no more. Motorcycle. Motor cycle. Cycle. I met with him last weekend and he said, “Thank goodness I lost the passion for motorcycles.” “I’m no longer addicted to it.” “Can you imagine being into motorcycling like a teenager at this age I am now?”, he asked me. He is 47. I…
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AI: Speed || Complexity
I’m writing this in the early stages of AI. This morning, I read a post on X.com from a man who wanted to put his entire codebase under review using AI. Until recently, people wanted AI to do things they considered “doable,” but faster. — “Oh, I can do this, but it would take time.…
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Note Taking, revisited
May 2026 I’ve never been so active in my notes as now. In fact, I don’t even consider them as “notes” anymore. I believe I have finally achieved the concept of a “second brain”. If I don’t I might be very close to it. I wasn’t happy with my two methods of note taking using…
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Personal Accountability? Make it impersonal.
Do you want to encourage a culture of personal accountability in your team or company? Start by making it impersonal. Good accountability, in general, involves having tools and processes in place to generate business metrics. It is impossible to implement accountability without metrics. Therefore, it is necessary to have parameters, or criteria, by which the…
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UAI
In case you are Brazilian, you must be thinking I’m crazy. In some regions of Brazil, “UAI” sounds like a gentle form of “WTF”. That’s not what I mean. UAI stands for Useful Artificial Intelligence. Useful to me, at least. Instead of labeling AI to every piece of artificial intelligence I see around — and…
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Reflexion of Reality
Humanity has spent centuries developing perfectly reflective mirrors. The idea of transposing your own image to an external object was almost dreamlike. It was something magical. Some colonizers used rudimentary mirrors to enchant indigenous peoples in the Americas when they arrived. Some colonizers pleased the locals with the gadget, while others were eaten alive as…
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Greed Based Pricing
Thirty years ago in 1994 I was entering university to get my Business degree. One very interesting theory that I learned right from the beginning was Michael Porter’s cost-based competitive advantage. Porter points out that if your company does a great job of keeping its operational costs low, it could practice lower prices than its…