Essays, notes & visual writing
Writings
Essays, notes, visual writings, conference syntheses, and findings from an evolving thinking practice.
Section lens Writings in the Atlas A section-only view of 29 writings across the four modes.
Realization
Apply · Create
Invention
Explore · Create
No records
Reflection
Apply · Consume
- Everywhere and nowhere: the neglected role of environments
- Generative Anomie
- "It's just predicting the next token"
- Natural Language Understanding: What’s the purpose of meaning? (Part 2 of 2)
- Natural Language Understanding: What’s the purpose of meaning? (Part 1 of 2)
- Highlights from AAAI 2021: papers, insights, datasets and tutorials
- Highlights from KDD 2020
- Highlights from AAAI 2020
- Infographic: Tips On Digital Experiments
- Infographic: Common Corporate Mistakes in Data Science Projects
- O Primado da Miséria
- Loyalty in fish markets
- Highlights from ESEC/FSE 2018 – Day 3 (final)
- Highlights from ESEC/FSE 2018 – Day 2
- Highlights from ESEC/FSE 2018 – Day 1
- Highlights from A-TEST 2018
- 12 dicas visionárias para o sucesso disruptivo
- Listening to music properly
- French TV overseas tip
- Deep Learning course
- O ódio criativo
- A unidade bem e mal aplicada na indústria
- Princípios de composição para além do papel. Ou: você sabe a diferença entre harmonia e unidade?
- O pensamento colonizado brasileiro e seus efeitos sobre o empreendedorismo tecnológico nacional
Inquiry
Explore · Consume
Theme 01
Intellectual practice & human flourishing
Frameworks for thinking, creating, learning, and judging computing by the human value it helps produce.
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The Curiosity–Creativity Atlas
A map for understanding what is, creating what could be, and locating intellectual work across four modes.
AI-assisted- Tools for thought
- Creativity
- Design
- Digital experimentation
Theme 02
Generative AI & software practice
How generative AI changes the design of software, the methods used to build it, and the people doing the work.
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Building GPT-3 applications — beyond the prompt
One of the first practical tutorials on building applications in the GPT-3 era, presenting a method for specification, prompt iteration, architecture, testing, and user feedback. It had significant impact among the general public and professional colleagues.
- LLM applications
- Prompt engineering
- Generative AI
- Software engineering
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Generative Anomie
A sociological diagnosis of the normlessness experienced by software professionals amid AI-assisted programming.
- Generative AI
- AI-assisted programming
- Software engineering
- Society
Theme 03
Language, meaning & LLMs
What language models compute, how prompts shape their behavior, and what it means for machines to understand language.
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"It's just predicting the next token"
Why autoregressive token prediction says little about an LLM's internal computational capabilities—and why rich prompting matters.
- Language models
- Generative AI
- Prompt engineering
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Natural Language Understanding: What’s the purpose of meaning? (Part 2 of 2)
Grounding, distributional semantics, implicit understanding, and the broader role of meaning in natural-language processing.
- Natural-language understanding
- Language models
- Artificial intelligence
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Natural Language Understanding: What’s the purpose of meaning? (Part 1 of 2)
An introduction to natural-language understanding through semantic representations, intents, entities, and structured meaning.
- Natural-language understanding
- Language models
- Artificial intelligence
Theme 04
Behavioral simulation & environments
Computational perspectives on people, behavior, interaction, and the environments in which they unfold.
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Everywhere and nowhere: the neglected role of environments
An essay on environments as first-class objects for understanding computation, behavior, organizations, and society.
- Environments
- Behavioral simulation
- Multi-agent systems
- Simulation
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Cats with lasers: the Mythos Entertainment System 1
A playful, unfinished physical-computing experiment: an Arduino-controlled laser cat toy, built and iterated on through four small experiments with a real cat.
- Humor
- Software tools
- Design
- Human-computer interaction
Theme 05
Conference notes & industry landscape
Field notes from academic and industry conferences in software engineering, AI, and data mining, surveying papers, trends, and practitioner takeaways.
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Highlights from AAAI 2021: papers, insights, datasets and tutorials
The site's most extensive conference synthesis, covering AAAI 2021 papers, insights, datasets, and tutorials across meta-learning, AutoML, graph neural networks, causal inference, and other business-relevant themes.
- Conferences
- Artificial intelligence
- Machine learning
- Datasets
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Highlights from KDD 2020
Dated conference-note synthesis of KDD 2020, covering the online-conference format, industry-and-research relationships, recommender systems, AutoML, time series, NLP, and healthcare/COVID-19 topics.
- Conferences
- Data science
- Machine learning
- Recommender systems
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Highlights from AAAI 2020
Dated conference-note synthesis of papers, ideas, and resources encountered at AAAI 2020, spanning AI history, datasets, and industry applications.
- Conferences
- Artificial intelligence
- Machine learning
- Multi-agent systems
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Highlights from ESEC/FSE 2018 – Day 3 (final)
Final installment of a three-day conference-note series covering ESEC/FSE 2018 sessions and papers.
- Conferences
- Software engineering
- Human-computer interaction
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Highlights from ESEC/FSE 2018 – Day 2
Second installment of a three-day conference-note series covering ESEC/FSE 2018 sessions and papers.
- Conferences
- Software engineering
- Software verification
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Highlights from ESEC/FSE 2018 – Day 1
First installment of a three-day conference-note series covering ESEC/FSE 2018 sessions and papers, spanning machine learning applied to software engineering tasks.
- Conferences
- Software engineering
- Artificial intelligence
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Highlights from A-TEST 2018
Dated conference-note synthesis of highlights from the A-TEST 2018 automated-testing workshop, co-located with ESEC/FSE.
- Conferences
- Software engineering
- Software verification
- Artificial intelligence
Theme 06
Culture, society & critique
Essays on culture, business fads, national character, and everyday life, blending humor with social observation.
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O Primado da Miséria
Portuguese personal essay reflecting on hardship, family, and cultural memory.
- Society
- Culture
- Entrepreneurship
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12 dicas visionárias para o sucesso disruptivo
Satirical Portuguese listicle parodying disruptive-success business advice and startup buzzwords.
- Humor
- Culture
- Entrepreneurship
- Technology
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O ódio criativo
Portuguese essay reflecting on creativity, hatred, and emotionally charged judgment, connected to the Liberalis and Ludism projects.
- Creativity
- Society
- Technology
- Entrepreneurship
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A unidade bem e mal aplicada na indústria
Portuguese companion essay applying the composition principle of unity to well-known industry successes and failures (Apple, Google, Windows 8).
- Design
- Culture
- Technology
- Software engineering
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Princípios de composição para além do papel. Ou: você sabe a diferença entre harmonia e unidade?
Portuguese essay distinguishing harmony and unity as composition principles that apply beyond visual art, illustrated with the author's own hand-drawn sketches.
- Design
- Creativity
- Visual art
Archived writings 4
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Loyalty in fish markets
Short cultural-economic essay on why loyalty between buyers and sellers can be a rational, profitable market structure, prompted by the documentary Tsukiji Wonderland.
- Culture
- Society
- Entrepreneurship
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Listening to music properly
Short essay on attentive listening and engaging seriously with music, prompted by discovering Yale's online course on listening to music.
- Music
- Culture
- Technology
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French TV overseas tip
A short, dated tip on using a VPN to access geo-restricted French (and other) television abroad.
- Travel
- Culture
- Technology
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O pensamento colonizado brasileiro e seus efeitos sobre o empreendedorismo tecnológico nacional
Portuguese essay from 2014 on cultural dependence and its effects on Brazilian technological entrepreneurship.
- Culture
- Society
- Entrepreneurship
- Technology
Theme 07
Data science & experimentation practice
Practical resources and reflections on running data science and experimentation work, from datasets to recommender systems to course material.
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Infographic: Tips On Digital Experiments
A visual, practical guide to designing digital experiments, connected to Paulo's Experiment-Oriented Computing field, with a full accessible-text transcript.
- Digital experimentation
- Data science
- Design
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Infographic: Common Corporate Mistakes in Data Science Projects
A visual, professionally distilled summary of six recurring mistakes corporations make in Data Science projects, with a full accessible-text transcript.
- Data science
- Design
- Software engineering
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Datasets for Fun and Profit
An essay and resource note on discovering, preserving, and using interesting datasets, including a preserved copy of the historical PKDD'99 Czech banking dataset.
- Datasets
- Data science
- Machine learning
- Software tools
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"Taste our books": An Extraordinary Recommender System at Garret Street
An essay connecting an unusual bookstore's human recommendation practice with recommender-systems research and HCI.
- Recommender systems
- Information retrieval
- Data science
Archived writings 1
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Deep Learning course
A 2017 recommendation of Jeremy Howard's fast.ai Deep Learning course, preserved as a dated resource note.
- Deep learning
- Machine learning
- Artificial intelligence