About
Hi. If you made it this far, you want to know a bit about me, right?
My name is Douglas Amaral. On this blog you will mostly read about artificial intelligence, programming and — who knows — electronics and philosophy. The idea is to share things that help you learn something, and that manage to make this decade's technology (maybe this century's) at least 0.00001% more democratic, more fair and more aligned.
I have always liked building things. I was still a teenager when I got into programming: I made games, websites and programs in several languages. Today I build solutions for ERP systems on Azure, after a long stretch working with AWS. My focus now is studying AI — alignment, specifically: a problem nobody has solved yet, and one that gets more urgent with every more capable model that shows up. Making a machine obey is the easy part; the hard part is making sure that what it obeyed was what we actually wanted. Estado de Máquina is how I learn, and how I show what we can do with AI in an uncertain future.
The name works on three readings at once. A state machine, which is how we model a system that behaves one way or another depending on what has already happened. The state of the art, which is where the technology stands today. And, quite literally, what state the machine is in right now — which is what I come here to write about.
If you liked the articles and want to talk, write to me: douglas@estadodemaquina.com.br