Essays on computer science, software engineering, AI & society, and philosophy — by Jota Torres.https://jotatorres.dev/en-ushttps://jotatorres.dev/writing/machine-doubt/https://jotatorres.dev/writing/machine-doubt/We keep asking whether machines can think. The more revealing question is whether one could ever be built to distrust its own conclusions — and what we would owe it if it could.Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTAI & Societyhttps://jotatorres.dev/writing/happy-path/https://jotatorres.dev/writing/happy-path/Most software is a beautiful demo wrapped around a coward's handling of everything that can actually go wrong. The error states are where the real design lives.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftware Engineeringhttps://jotatorres.dev/writing/everything-compiler/https://jotatorres.dev/writing/everything-compiler/Type checkers, build systems, ORMs, even the humble spreadsheet — they are all doing the same trick: taking a language humans like and lowering it to one a machine tolerates.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTComputer Sciencehttps://jotatorres.dev/writing/ethics-autocomplete/https://jotatorres.dev/writing/ethics-autocomplete/A suggestion is never neutral. Every time a system finishes your sentence, it is making a small, invisible argument about which sentence was worth finishing.Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTAI & Societyhttps://jotatorres.dev/writing/cache-invalidation/https://jotatorres.dev/writing/cache-invalidation/The old joke names it one of the two hard problems. The joke undersells it: knowing when a stored truth has stopped being true is the same problem philosophy has failed to solve for three thousand years.Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTComputer Sciencehttps://jotatorres.dev/writing/what-is-scale/https://jotatorres.dev/writing/what-is-scale/"It won't scale" is the most powerful sentence in engineering and one of the least examined. Scale of what? Toward whom? Paid for by which future?Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftware Engineering