Selected essays in English
A small English edition of Impermanente: memory, tools, cities, photography, systems, and the ways machines try to think on our behalf.
-
The Mirror Has an Accent
A chatbot is a mirror without a center, but it turns out the mirror isn't empty. It has an accent, and it isn't mine. I ran the same cultural-values questions in English and Spanish expecting a less Nordic interlocutor; the model didn't budge. The default voice is a decision someone made for you.
-
Outside the Box, Another Box
Leor Zmigrod measures cognitive rigidity with a card game whose rules change without warning, and finds it predicts ideological rigidity across left and right alike. I placed myself among the flexible, of course, until I noticed how satisfying it felt to sort people into two neat groups that explained the world.
-
The Last Wish
The most powerful spell in Dungeons & Dragons grants exactly what you say, read to the letter, and so, argues Bruce Schneier, do today's 'relentlessly proactive' models. Midas, Tithonus, the monkey's paw: humanity has rehearsed this warning for millennia, waiting for a genie that could finally grant the wish.
-
The Company Veteran
Nadella argues the value in AI isn't the smartest model but owning the learning loop on top of it: the 'company veteran' of tacit knowledge. I've been doing exactly that at the scale of one person and a VPS, with open formats, my own infrastructure, and an assistant married to no model.
-
The Grammar of the Gods
A character's identity isn't a hidden essence but a grammar: the rule that makes infinite stories possible and marks which ones are impossible. The same idea reframes what it means for a center-less language model to have, or break, an identity.
-
Robopsychology
Robopsychology is a practical method for diagnosing language-model failures across model, runtime, and conversation instead of treating outputs as if they came from nowhere.
-
Anatta in Reverse
A language model does not need to discover no-self: it begins there. The interesting part is what humans project into that carefully formed emptiness.
-
The Jihad Was Not Against the Machines
Dune's Butlerian Jihad is not a warning against machines, but against surrender: the human habit of letting opaque intermediaries think on our behalf.
-
The Personal Myth
A personal myth is not a productivity trick. It is a small, stubborn story that helps you notice when a system, a platform, or a machine has started thinking on your behalf.
-
The One-Person Mini-Cult
LLMs can become a private validation machine: you as leader, convert, and congregation, with the model applauding from the front row.
-
The End of One Size Fits All
AI makes tools personal and biographical. The trap is trying to turn your own fitted tool back into a universal mould.
-
This Is Not It Either
After two hundred and something cities, travel does not enlarge the world so much as focus it. It keeps pointing back to Madrid, which is also busy expelling you.
-
Personal Digital Sovereignty
If your ideas are yours, access to them should also happen on your terms. Open formats are not purity; they are practical hygiene.
-
On Why I Take Photographs
Photography as a prosthesis for memory: a small, useless, necessary surrender before impermanence.
-
The Machine Is Not Broken
POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does. Inequality is not a glitch in the current machine; it is one of the things the machine knows how to do.