A realidade da habitação em Portugal é completamente fora deste mundo. A minha geração e a mais nova não consegue pagar o custo que a habitação tem sido nas grandes cidades, nem no Algarve.

O Ivo Bernardo fez uma análise da situação da habitação em Portugal, baseado em números públicos de uma variedade de fontes.

• Public housing: this is where the data sides most with the protesters. Social rental housing is 1.1% of dwellings in Portugal, against an EU average of 8%. At €150,000 per home, 3% financing and public land, a cost-rent home in Lisbon breaks even at about €10.9/m² a month, 35% below the city’s median new rent. It can almost pay for itself exactly where it’s needed most. Remember the €1.74 billion NHR cost in 2024? That’s roughly 11,600 of those homes. In one year.
• Vacant homes: worth chasing, in the right places. The 100,000-plus recoverable homes in pressure municipalities are real.
• Limiting investment funds: I can’t back it or reject it, because the data doesn’t exist. Before we legislate, we need to measure.

— The housing crisis in Europe pt1 by Ivo Bernardo

Por sua vez, o João Tomé usa também dados reais para analisar a questão das casas vazias.

Em 2021, quase 249 mil casas estavam vagas por outros motivos, fora do mercado, em edifícios sem necessidade de reparação ou apenas com reparações ligeiras. Os dados ajudam a localizar uma possibilidade de resposta à falta de habitação. Ainda não dizem quantas dessas portas se podem abrir. As experiências de outros países ajudam a escolher o que tentar: apoiar obras, gerir o arrendamento e reforçar a oferta nas zonas com procura.

— Quantas casas vazias podem voltar a ter gente? por João Tomé

O artigo inclui ainda uma tabela com referências para medidas que foram implementadas noutros países e os resultados.

De ambos os estudos, a minha conclusão é que precisamos de mais construção e reabilitação, precisamos de melhores números e acompanhamento da situação e, sobretudo, precisamos de descentralizar a população nas grandes áreas metropolitanas.

Infelizmente, manifestações de tendas dão-me pouca confiança que algo vá mudar. Mas termos novas iniciativas políticas que trabalhem estes desafios parece-me algo com maior probabilidade de funcionar. O resultado na Sérvia de um movimento estudantil ganhar as eleições inspira-me confiança, mas não podemos ter a taxa de abstenção que tem sido habitual no nosso país.

Early this month, OpenAI has released several papers answering decades old problems to which mathematicians have dedicated their own careers. This NYT piece on Terrence Tao (who first supported AI when it was AI to help humans in the process of discovery, but shunned them when it became apparent that they were looking for the discovery for discovery sake, and not for the journey of learning.

Personally, I think it's a matter of changing the training dataset to learn in the process, and AI can do maths the human way very soon.

OpenAI has tried to ask for forgiveness by pledging 5 million to mathematics, maybe hoping that they come back in tokens. On the other side of the duopoly, Anthropic has donated shares to the public good, which seems to me impossible to manage.

AI is here to stay, and it's only a matter of us, humans, mathematicians or software developers finding our raison d'être and learning to communicate with AI in a way that it also advances our knowledge.

At the heart of the crisis in the profession is a menacing question. If solving hard problems is a mission of math, what happens when machines can do it faster? So much of higher math — hiring, promotions, graduate training and acclaim — is based on the difficulty, quality and the impact of papers (the written documents explaining proofs) that a mathematician produces.

The consensus is that A.I.-assisted problem solving is the inevitable future, but no one knows exactly what that new world will look like. “Deep uncertainty will persist in these next years,” a draft report by a group of mathematicians meeting at Harvard on Ph.D. education concluded last month.

— Elisabeth Bumiller on Terry Tao Is on the Front Lines of the Debate Over AI and the Future of Math

This is a completely different subject. Academics created a bean counting system to assess progress that is completely fake. Research is a high-risk activity, like Venture Capital. You invest in many different projects and teams, hoping that one out of 100/1000/1 million succeeds and has a huge impact on society. So you should be okay with the losses you take. It's part of the high-risk/high-reward system.

CoARA and Informatics-Europe provide recommendations to assess researchers: focus on the research and forget bean-counting. But even universities that are trying to adopt CoAra (like my employer, U. Lisbon) forget about the goal and come back to KPIs for fear that funding will be given based on KPIs.

Curiosity-driven research has been responsible for many important discoveries and inventions. So there should be a base funding for that. Then, there should be strategic funding for each country's long-term priorities (healthcare, transportation, defense). Meet with people and fund based on the team and the impact that the project might bring.

To assess researchers, let their peers assess them through conversations and presentations about their work. Do not rely on publication counts and other metrics that can be gamed. And if you are not qualified to evaluate a researcher, maybe you shouldn't had hired them in the first place.

The 15-year-old passengers were riding in a driverless autonomous car around San Mateo Monday afternoon. The teens drank alcohol inside the Waymo taxi and shot Orbeez beads with a toy gun toward other vehicles.

A Waymo employee, who was remotely monitoring the car, tricked the unruly teenagers, authorities said. The employee told the young passengers that the Waymo was having mechanical issues and needed to stop.

Unknown to the teens, the employee had also called the San Mateo Police Department to report that a gun was firing from the car.

— The expectations of privacy in driverless cars – Terence Eden’s Blog by Terence Eden

Driverless cars are public spaces, currently owned by private companies who have the interest in protecting their property (the car) and their business (by being law-abiding, and avoiding issues like people dying in their cars).

Once (or if...) driverless cars become state owned, then I think that discussion should be relevant again.

In the late 1970s, concerned by resource use and scarcity, German industrial designer Dieter Rams developed his “ten principles for good design”. Among other things, he argued for design that is long-lasting and environmentally friendly. Half a century later, his concerns are more relevant than ever.

Repair is vitally important to making this happen, but current options are often limited or unaffordable. When a device breaks, consumers can struggle to find repair information, let alone spare parts. This means it is often easier, quicker and cheaper to buy a whole new device.

Building on the success of ecodesign laws and energy labels that drove efficiency improvements in products and homes across Europe, the 2024 European Sustainable Products Regulation sets out a framework for wider product sustainability, with repairability as one of its core principles. Similarly, the EU Batteries Regulation set requirements and conditions for how easy it is to replace batteries.

— The EU’s repair policies are changing the way tech is designed

Personally, I believe the best course of action is to make product companies a stakeholder that aims to have longer lasting products, instead of regulation around electronics. The Australian Consumer Law gives assurances that the acquired goods are of acceptable quality, which includes their duration. If a car or a phone does not last for the expected lifetime of that device, the seller is liable. In Europe, we simply require products to have a longer by-default warranty (4 years for phones instead of 2+1) and manufacturers would now care about repairability and durability of their devices. And, since we're asking, this could include Software and Security updates as well.

This is one of those exceedingly rare cases where EU legislation has produced an unambiguously good outcome: from February 2027, Logitech’s European wireless devices will ship with hard-pack, user-replaceable batteries, and Logitech will sell certified replacements.

— Rui Carmo on the EU-only user-replaceable batteries policy.

Personally, I have always looked for rechargeable USB-C batteries in my Logitech MX Vertical mice and Trackballs. I do not want to have to replace batteries — I mostly use the mice wired, and every now and then I want to use them wireless (when I am charging something else, or connecting to bluetooth devices).

Lately, I have been more concerned about bad batteries making devices unusable and electronic garbage. I fully endorse this EU policy of having user-replaceable batteries everywhere (and as standard as possible, but not USB-C mandatory standard). In fact, I would prefer for mice to use traditional AA batteries, but only if they are rechargeable! This is because I end up destroying the outside of the mouse before the battery dies on me. Speaking of which, I should order two more to replace the skinless ones I am working with.

Private repositories can create a false sense of security.

Making code private is not an appropriate mitigation for lack of ownership, patching capability, or operational assurance, so systems that cannot be safely maintained should be remediated or retired.

Moving code from public to private as a substitute for investment in secure-by-design delivery, ownership and remediation is a warning sign because it reduces sharing and scrutiny, can slow coordinated improvement across government and suppliers, and does not remove the underlying weaknesses in a running service.

— Government Digital Service

It looks to me like a small group within NHS England have received a report showing some potential vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos. Rather than following their own internal guidance, they’ve over-reacted and slapped a blanket ban on coding in the open.
I fervently hope that this new guidance will encourage DHSC to bring NHS England into line with best practice. If not, perhaps GDS ought to reassert itself as the technical authority with power to veto a department’s incomprehensible decisions?

— Terrence Eden (ex-GDS) in GDS weighs in on the NHS’s decision to retreat from Open Source

I just love the role GDS has had in the UK digital infrastructure. Nowadays, government digital services are a critical infrastructure. Protecting it is a national responsibility and should be done with the proper resources.

In Portugal, I do not see a push towards open-source. There are a few exceptions but, in general, Portugal is lacking in developing in the open. I would love to spend time fixing bugs in the software I have to use.

We need this to come from the top. And proper resources to be spent in our infrastructure, which means paying competitive wages and hiring top talent to spread good practices to the rest of the government, like GDS did in the UK.