Duarte O.Carmo's articles

I share how I use Hermes Agent daily as a customizable, always-on assistant that lives on a remote server and talks to me via Telegram. From coding on the go and reactive reminders, to job monitoring, calendar...

If there's one thing Retrospectiva does for me - other than giving me an excuse to write for you of course - it's making me realise how fast time moves. It's June already - and May was – well – hectic to say the least...

<p> I revisit my earlier critique of open-source text-to-speech and explain why the landscape has changed with Qwen3-TTS: open weights, strong inference via vLLM-Omni, voice cloning that actually works, and fewer...

<p> </p> Educational score over time vs. document count for Bagaco v2 <p></p> <p>A couple of months ago I released Bagaço - a pretraining dataset for European Portuguese. The idea was simple: take the FineWeb 2 dataset...

<p> </p> My Hermes agent – Saramago – giving me coaching feedback and looking for the ideal flights for an upcoming trip. <p></p> <p>Another month bites the dust. We've been back in Denmark for the past couple of weeks...

<p> </p> <p>In December 2024, the Portuguese government announced AMÁLIA: a 5.5 Million Euro investment on a large-scale LLM for European Portuguese1.</p> <p>The other day, while building an overview of the different...

<p></p> <p>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.</p> <p>Happy...

<p> </p> <p>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...

<p>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. </p> <p>This might seem...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p></p> <p>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...

<p></p> <p>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...

<p>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.</p> <p>I understand the attention economy. Companies are...

<p>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...