Retrospectiva #8

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.

Data Makers Fest was awesome - and I absolutely love Porto. The talk resonated. Many had questions after the talk and – as usual – I didn't have any answers.

A week after that, while out on a Saturday morning run, I saw some runners with Copenhagen Marathon goodie bags. I got so jealous. A marathon? In my own city? And I'm NOT running? "What are you waiting for?" Vitto asked. "At least go for a PB - you have nothing to lose." I signed up for a last-minute ticket, and the rest is history.

We then came to Italy and spent the last half of the month putting things in order here - making sure we feel at home, and making sure Allegra is as happy as she can be.

So yeah - the month felt hectic.

Using

DeepSeek V4 Pro: I've talked about Hermes before. And I know I still owe a post about how I use Hermes on a daily basis. Agent harnesses (like OpenClaw) can become real token hoarders. Truth is, over the past few weeks, I've barely felt the cost. DeepSeek V4 Pro is not only an incredibly smart model, but also insanely cheap. If that wasn't enough, what I thought was a momentary discount became the official price. I always use it through the official DeepSeek API. It has some quirks (like keeping requests open while they wait to be scheduled), but it has been reliable and incredibly cheap.

Vast.ai: Remember when I wrote about Scaleway in last month's Retrospectiva? Scaleway is awesome. But sometimes I want compute at a dirt-cheap price. Sometimes, I need to run a 27B model on a reliable A100 at 1.5 USD/hour. That's what Vast does for me. Also, their CLI is pretty good, I just set it up, and my agent takes care of the rest.

HOKA Hopara 2: Are these shoes incredibly ugly? Yes. Are they the sort of thing you probably don't want to wear out in public? Yes. But for someone who loves to walk freely, run, hike, and pack light - these have been incredible. I use them with socks most of the time. They can get wet, and they dry incredibly fast. If you don't care what other people think (hint: you shouldn't), and want shoes that you can wear to most activities in the summer, consider them.

TranslateGemma: You probably know by now that I'm on a quest to build European Portuguese large language models. I feel like this model release is under-hyped. It's open source, and it supports underrepresented languages like Catalan, European Portuguese, and others. It's available in 3 different sizes. To give you some context, when translating English to Portuguese, the 4B TranslateGemma model beats Gemma 3 27B. The technical report is worth reading.

Reading

A Visual Guide to Gemma 4 12B - Maarten Grootendorst: Local models are becoming increasingly viable. Especially the 4 to 27B range. This is a nice deep dive into one of the latest models from DeepMind. Instead of using an image or audio encoder, the model uses a lightweight embedding layer. A great write-up from Maarten. Worth the read.

MAI-Thinking-1: Building a Hill-Climbing Machine - Microsoft AI: Microsoft announced a nice set of new models. Among them is MAI-Thinking-1, a new reasoning foundation model. This technical report is a gold mine. Unlike many, it answers the why, rather than only the what.

This was a month where I scanned many books, but had a hard time sticking to one.

AI Systems Performance Engineering: I started this one and read about 2-3 chapters. Too dense (which is not something I usually say). I felt like reading a CUDA documentation book. It could be interesting. But this one didn't really convince me.

Deep Learning for Biology: I'm around 50% done with this one and I can already say that it is a great read. I've worked on a few biology-related projects, but I was always curious to learn more about the field. This book delivers. Well written, practical, and tangible.

Raising Raffi - Keith Gessen: Every single parenting book seems to focus on what you could (or should) be doing better. I'm a bit sick of that approach. This book is the first real, honest, and raw tale from the perspective of a new father. It's chaos! You are not ready. And that's okay - nobody is. It's the first parenting book that resonated with me. And I haven't even finished it.

Listening

Eyes Off You - Tokyo Tea Room: My favourite band of the past 3 years has a new single. That single is now on repeat.

Svaneborg Kardyb: May was definitely a Nordic Jazz month for me. Svaneborg Kardyb is a duo from Denmark that makes beautifully simple music. You can feel where their Superkilen album takes its name from. I recommend getting lost in the discography.

Watching

Roland-Garros 2026: Vitto and I love to watch tennis. The top three players in the world are out, and we will have a new Grand Slam winner. There are still two Italians in the draw, and they will play each other tomorrow. I think that's what I love about tennis. It's always a bit like an adventure - you never know what will happen.

A Beginner's Guide To Ryuichi Sakamoto - Derrick Gee: For years, I heard my dad blast Sakamoto while studying for long stretches over the weekend. Dad always had good taste in music. It's been 3 years since we lost Ryuichi to cancer. His music, though, is timeless.

Let's hope June is less hectic. Enjoy the summer weather!