Duarte O.Carmo's articles

A quick May roundup: back in Copenhagen, ramping up running with a new virtual coach, and deep in conference season with talks in London and Porto. I share hands-on impressions of Hermes Agent (my new daily driver), Bevel, and Scaleway; plus recent reads, podcasts, mixes, and shows that stood out this month. Relevant links: Original article AI Engineer Europe Data Makers Fest Slides (/talks) Hermes Agent docs OpenClaw Kimi 2.6 model DeepSeek V4 Pro model Bevel Whoop suing Bevel (Reddit) Scaleway Vast.ai H100 GPUs (gpus.io) Books (/books) Anaximander — Carlo Rovelli (Penguin) Foyles (Google Maps) Lifestyle Medicine — Valerio Rosso (Mondadori) The People Do Not Yearn for Automation — Nilay Patel Jensen Huang — TPU competition (Dwarkesh) The Dwarkesh Podcast Building Pi, and what makes self-modifying software so fascinating vinyl house mix from the living room — Chris Luno Brain.fm I Spent £300 on Chinese Running Shoes — YouTube White Lotus — Season 3 (Rotten Tomatoes) The Plastic Detox (Rotten Tomatoes)

In December 2024, the Portuguese government announced AMÁLIA: a 5.5 Million Euro investment on a large-scale LLM for European Portuguese1. The other day, while building an overview of the different Portuguese NLP efforts, I stumbled upon the technical report! I couldn't believe my eyes. Much to talk about …

Well, now would you look at that. Article 100 on this website. Ten years of writing on this small corner of the web. I'm writing this month's newsletter from my favourite place: the airplane. Happy Easter if you celebrate. With clients spread across time zones, I didn't really get the …

As you get older, life becomes complicated. Not in a bad way. There’s just more going on. We don’t all want to run marathons. Maybe you want to run a parkrun. Maybe you want to gradually increase your volume. Maybe you don't want to run at all. Whatever …

Given some text in Portuguese, how easy is it to determine if it's from Brazil or Portugal1? For native speakers, this is pretty easy – it's almost a feeling. But for machines: not so much. This might seem like a useless problem at first. But in the age of language …

Happy February! Just like that, we are close to wrapping up the first quarter of 2026. After quite some time roaming around, we finally flew back home to Copenhagen. It's cold, windy, and grey, but it's also calm, organized, and cozy. Most of all: it's home. Another good thing about …

Let's say your goal is to train a Large Language Model only on European Portuguese. Where do you start? What datasets are out there? What websites are being scraped for the large black box? Bagaço - named after the popular Portuguese moonshine - is a small step in that direction. In June …

Well—that was quick. Just like that, the first month of the year is gone. Winter blues would normally peak around this time. But not this year. We're spending time with family in my favorite place on Earth, somewhere along the Adriatic coast of Italy, in the Marche region. It's …

Let's face it. It might just be the year of agents. If you work in tech and your workflow hasn't changed in the last year or so - you're probably doing something wrong. For those of you who have. It's fun. We're building more than ever before! But there's a dark …

I get up feeling sleepy. I lace up my running shoes and head out the door. I fire up my favourite podcast. "This show is brought to you by..." I hate ads. I understand the attention economy. Companies are capitalizing more and more on everyone's time. I have nothing against …

And just like that, it's the end of the year again. We did not expect to make it to the South for Christmas this year. Getting a passport for a newborn is a painful, bureaucracy-filled process, especially for a Portuguese-Italian baby born in Denmark. But somehow—magically—the Italian embassy …

Benchmarking calorie prediction for Taralli There's something very funny about the current Machine Learning and AI landscape. If you're in the field you probably heard about it. "Vibes" they call it. When someone wants to test something out, they conduct a "vibe test". I call bullshit. How are you supposed …

Big news in the state of Denmark. And no, nothing's rotten. Allegra just came into the world. As she takes a nap, I take the opportunity to write November's Retrospectiva update. The most relevant thing this month is probably the release of my recent book about DeepSeek. It's nice to …

Back in May this year, my longtime friend Alex reached out and asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him on a book about DeepSeek. I would love to tell you the story of how I thought long and hard before getting back to him. I didn't. I just …

or at least the open versions of it. I have this very stupid rule. A couple of years ago I decided to turn this blog into a podcast. At the time, I decided to make up a stupid rule: whatever model I use to clone my voice and generate article …

Welcome to Retrospectiva. Retrospectiva is a monthly update about what I’ve been up to. In the age of LLMs, I’ve heard many argue that it’s hard (and useless) to write anything at all anymore. When anyone can prompt a model and get some text from the magic …

Why do this? A small dataset of news headlines GPT2 in PyTorch Pre-training headlines in Portuguese Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on Portuguese from Portugal Reinforcement Learning (GRPO) for sports news Final thoughts & Acknowledgements Why do this? ML and AI are moving at an incredible pace. The amount of research coming out …

The world moves fast, faster every day. For those who work with technology - and even those who don't - it's hard to keep up with the news. But I've always enjoyed staying up to date with what is happening, and my main tool to get it done hasn't changed in years …

It's that time of year again. As usual, we took a couple of weeks off and came south: a bit of Portugal, a bit of Italy, a lot of friends and family. My family has a long-running joke that I hate people and love my computer. That's not (entirely) true …

A couple of weeks ago in Lisbon, I went to a friend's birthday dinner. In front of …

..but they can also be a lot of fun. If you work in tech, I'd say there's a 98% chance you've heard about it. MCPs are the future of agents, MCPs will be everywhere, MCPs are the future. The Model Context Protocol, first introduced by Anthropic is blowing up. For …

Last month, I built an app called Taralli. It was fun to close the loop and get it out there. Still - there was an elephant in the room: "...[calorie tracking] Accuracy isn’t great, and it makes some pretty basic mistakes. I’ve got plans to fix that..." And things …

For years, I never really cared about what I ate, how much I ate, or when I ate it. But sometime late last year, I finally decided to listen to Vitto. I started noticing that what I eat actually had an impact on how much I ran, how well I …

Even though it never really replaced physical books for me, I've been a big Kindle user for many years. The ability to take hundreds of books with me anywhere is priceless. Vitto even has a running joke that I tend to lose them on the plane. I love my Kindle …

Last year I made an effort to speak less and learn more. However, I still had the opportunity to present at a couple of conferences. One of them was PyCon Wroclaw. The main goal was to talk about a couple of interesting paradigms I've come across while using LLMs to …

Last week over lunch, Pedro was telling me how he uses Perplexity to improve the way he searches around the web. He mentioned we're entering a phase where we have at least 20 'AI' tools to boost our productivity - and the tough thing now is choosing which ones to use …