Digesto

* Reclaiming Meaning in the Age of Instant Everything* I’m from early Generation X, raised with a particular dream: that AI and robotics would *finally* liberate humanity from drudgery. Not to make us lazier, but to give us the freedom to pursue *nobler* things: philosophy, art, reflection, even idleness with purpose. That dream still flickers. But lately, it’s flickering in the shadow of something darker: not a future of liberation, but one of numbing convenience, where meaning is bypassed in the rush for efficiency, and the effort that once made life feel rich is treated like a bug in the system. A recent article summed up this fear powerfully. It argued that we're systematically destroying the biological reward system that makes effort feel worthwhile. Not by accident, but *on purpose*. In our quest to eliminate friction from life, we’ve also eliminated the very struggle our brains are wired to reward. The satisfaction of cooking, creating, learning, and slowly improving ourselv...

As "artificial intelligence" grows in power and generality, the question of how to align these systems with human values, or at the very least, with human intentions, becomes existentially important.  Most of the contemporary alignment conversation focuses on optimization, feedback, and safety: how to guide a model’s behavior using techniques like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), red-teaming, or reward modeling. These are all valid concerns. But what if the deeper issue lies not in the process, but in the substrate? What if the problem isn’t just that our data is noisy, biased, or incomplete, but that deception itself is woven into the very structure of human thought? This isn't a novel claim in philosophy or literature. From Plato’s cave to Freud’s defense mechanisms, from Nietzsche’s “will to illusion” to postmodern critiques of ideology, thinkers have long suspected that much of what we call “knowledge” or “tru...

What if the stars could be dreamed of, but never reached? What if the tools of transformation lay forever out of grasp? Image generated by LLM We humans often take for granted the raw material of our progress: fire. From the first flickering spark in a cave to the controlled infernos of blast furnaces and rocket engines, fire has been our great transformer, a force that allowed us to rework the world at every scale. At its core, technology is the transformation of matter, and fire is the energy that enabled it. But what if intelligence had arisen in a place where fire could never exist? The Fire Barrier Imagine a species of Homo sapiens-level intelligence evolving not on land, but in the crushing depths of an alien ocean. Or even Earth’s own ocean, had history flowed differently. Cephalopod-like minds, self-aware and curious, living in a world of currents, pressure, bioluminescence, and utter absence of flame. Fire cannot burn underwater. There are no sparks, no embers, no forges....

Image:  pexels.com As Brazil undergoes a rapid digital transformation of its public services, the debate around transparency, technological sovereignty, and the role of open-source software in public administration becomes more urgent than ever. Yet, one critical point, largely absent from public discussion, raises a serious legal and ethical concern: the development and distribution of digital systems by the Brazilian state, with PIX as a prime example. What Does the Law Say? In 2021, Brazil enacted Law No. 14.063, which governs the digitalization of public services. Its Article 16 is clear: “Information and communication systems developed exclusively by the public administration shall be governed by open-source licenses, allowing their unrestricted use, copying, modification, and distribution by all public agencies and entities.” In short, software developed solely by the public sector,  funded with taxpayer money and intended to serve the public interest, must be ma...

The 3D Tree Traversal Problem Spatial data structures are everywhere , from game engines to robotics and scientific simulations. But while traditional trees like quadtrees, octrees, and BSP trees do well in axis-aligned or position-based contexts, they begin to falter when direction and orientation become the dominant parameters. How do you traverse a hierarchy not by going "left" or "down," but by rotating your point of view? Enter SpinStep SpinStep is intended to be a lightweight traversal framework based on quaternions — mathematical structures that represent 3D rotations. Rather than following nodes based on positional distance, SpinStep selects branches according to their angular proximity to the current orientation. This creates a new traversal metaphor: not stepping from point A to B, but rotating into the next part of the tree. At its core, SpinStep implements a directional depth-first iterator. It uses quaternions to determine whether a child node is reacha...

The recent election of Pope Leo XIV, a priest of the Augustinian Order, has drawn fresh attention to the legacy and thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential theologians in Christian history.  First of all, I must say that by no measure can I be considered a religious man. I am, in fact, a staunch rationalist , but also a lover of history and philosophy. The election of the new Augustinian pope led me to revisit some of Augustine’s reflections, especially on themes he considered central: the soul’s orientation toward the Divine, the dangers of pride, and the role of humor in human life. Augustine’s View on Humor Augustine didn’t launch a full-scale war against laughter, but he was certainly wary of it. In Confessions and City of God , he questioned the value of many human pleasures, including humor,when they threatened to distract the soul from divine truth. Laughter, for Augustine, wasn’t inherently evil, but it was deeply suspect when it veered into irrev...