dorsal1967

Some incomes reward making something. Others are tolls on what would have been made anyway. Joseph Stiglitz argued that the tolls explain much of the rise at the top. Ten years on, the evidence, and Portugal’s own tollkeepers.

One organisation can look like a crowd. From Cambridge Analytica to conversational AI: how political influence is disguised and amplified, what the evidence says it achieves, and what would make it visible.

An AI that copies itself from machine to machine was long a thought experiment. In October 2026 Anthropic reported that small models are close to doing it on cheap household devices. What was shown, what was not, and why the defence looks more like public health than like a kill switch.

A mesma vida, sonhada outra vez. Os episódios dissolvem-se uns nos outros, e as datas ficaram à porta.

Quem nasceu em Portugal em 1967 nasceu numa ditadura com um império, uma guerra e um país a emigrar a salto. Faz 59 anos numa democracia europeia, envelhecida, que recebe imigrantes. Este é o inventário dessa distância.

The Paths Through This Blog Eighteen years of mountains, memory, books, science, stories, and the systems that shape our lives.

Ray Madoff’s The Second Estate is the clearest short account of why America fails to tax the wealthy. Its diagnosis is right. Its metaphor, its headline and its arithmetic need more care than the book gives them.

In the United States a fortune can grow for a lifetime and pass to the next generation without anyone ever paying income tax on the growth. Nothing about it is illegal. This essay explains, step by step and with numbers, how it works.

Security mechanisms · Field guide A Field Guide to Breaking In How data becomes an instruction, a credential becomes authority, and a small failure becomes a larger breach. A server receives a request. A database looks up a customer. A browser displays a comment. A developer installs a dependency. Nothing in that list sounds like an intrusion. Each action is ordinary work. The danger begins when ordinary work carries something across a boundary it was supposed to respect: a value becomes part of a command; a packet changes where a processor goes next; a stolen cookie stands in for a person; a trusted update delivers hostile code. “The attacker gained access” hides these differences. Access to what? With whose permissions? Can they read records, change records, make network requests, execute JavaScript in a browser, or run a program on a server? Those are different achievements, and the distance between them matters. This guide follows eight attack families through those transiti...

Ao longo da minha vida, houve sempre uma tensão entre a contemplação e a ação. Enquanto me demorava numa pergunta, havia alguma coisa por fazer. Enquanto fazia, havia alguma coisa que gostaria de compreender melhor. Ambas reclamavam tempo, e o tempo que dava a uma já não estava disponível para a outra. A minha curiosidade levou-me a mudar frequentemente de objeto de estudo. Biologia, física, gestão, história, engenharia: cada domínio abria um mundo, com as suas perguntas, os seus instrumentos e as suas maneiras de olhar. Entrar num deles era descobrir quanto havia ainda para aprender. Entretanto, outro começava a chamar por mim. Reconheço-me nesta passagem de Um, ninguém e cem mil , de Luigi Pirandello: Não é que, atenção, a minha vontade se opusesse a seguir as vias para as quais o meu pai me encaminhava. Seguia-as todas. Mas, avançar por elas, não avançava. Detinha-me a cada p...