Most of what I write starts as an itch. Some fact lodges sideways and won't come out: a limpet that spends months grinding a groove into rock until the groove is the only thing keeping it alive and the only thing keeping it stuck. A church that figured out eight centuries ago that confessing a sin and fixing it are different acts, and built the second one in on purpose. CEOs whose voices on an earnings call predict the next two quarters better than anything they actually say. I pull on these until they stop being curiosities and turn out to be about something closer to home, usually the same thing every time: how wide the gap is between understanding something clearly and that understanding changing anything at all.
I'm João. Portuguese, though I grew up in enough countries that the honest answer to where I'm from is a short pause. I'm a builder. I've made things at Google and Protocol Labs and now at Citadel Securities, mostly AI agents, which means I spend my days at the seam where very capable software meets the parts of an organization that no one ever wrote down. I came to it sideways and I still approach a system the way you approach a composition: looking for the shape underneath that holds the whole thing together. Writing is the newest stab at the same instinct.
So the essays wander. AI and how it lands inside companies, attention and what it costs, the strange durability of self-deception, occasionally a mollusk. I'll also admit that I think out loud with language models more than I'm fully comfortable with, and I'd rather say so than pretend the thinking arrives clean.
The blog is called Latent Self Expression because the interesting version of an idea, like the interesting part of a person, lives in the compressed space before it gets decoded into output.