Understanding Name Conventions in Southern India: The Case of LinkedIn Profiles | September 29 2026, 15:06

It seems that the names of Indian colleagues on LinkedIn like Sakthi S are almost always not from a desire to hide their full name, but because in South India it is approximately like that. Traditionally, there are no surnames in the European sense there. Instead, a father’s name initial is added to the personal name. So, “Sakthi S” most likely means Sakthi, son of someone like Selvam, Subramanian, or Sentil. In India itself, it is often written the other way around, with the initial first: “S. Sakthi”. Accordingly, D at the end would be a father’s name starting with D (Durai, Dinesh), A – for A (Arumugam, Anandan), etc. A daughter would have the same initial, and sometimes it changes to her husband’s initial after marriage.

A classic example is mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan: “Srinivasa” is his father’s name, not a surname, and at home he was simply called Ramanujan.

In Tamil Nadu, it’s also a deliberate stance— the Dravidian movement (Periyar) actively encouraged abandoning caste surnames because they immediately reveal caste affiliation. A father’s initial doesn’t reveal anything like that.

Interestingly, when you ask Gemini about this, it says its program isn’t designed for such tasks, that it doesn’t understand me and can’t respond, that it’s just a language model and doesn’t have such capabilities. Claude, on the other hand, responds alright.

The screenshot is just a random manager from LinkedIn.

Mastering Project Presales with Claude Code: A Customized Approach | September 29 2026, 14:10

Lately, I’ve become proficient at creating project resource plans for presales using Claude Code. It turns out very cool. That is, you create an interactive model with sliders that shows the final cost of the project for the specified team and specified flexibility (more or fewer roles, some stages have a larger or smaller buffer). The main thing is that such a model is very specific to a particular project and generally useless as a template for the next, but the principle of building models is the same. In the end, you adjust the sliders to what looks believable and satisfies the level of risk, and you see the sum, and then you generate artifacts for the client, which after manual refinement (sometimes major) are ready to be shown to the client.

Revamping Smartfolio.me: A New Era of Personal Knowledge Workspaces | September 26 2026, 12:51

I’ve updated my smartfolio.me (In short, it’s a personal workspace for knowledge, built around pages that contain other pages, where a child page can reveal a selected snippet in the context of the parent. You write in a full-featured editor—text, formulas, images, embedded PDFs with annotations, saved web pages—and instead of organizing documents into folders, you insert one page inside another, or create a child page as an explanation through LLM of the selected snippet in the context of the parent document. Incoming items accept material from outside, search finds what is left unlinked, and several LLM plugins can parse raw transcription into connected sections, assemble a whole subtree into one document, translate a page without touching its formulas and layout.)

Previously, Smartfolio was a SaaS and stored documents only in Turso—SQLite as a service. Now, in addition to local SQLite and Turso, there are three new storage options: a folder on the disk (for local installation), a GitHub repository, and a folder in Google Drive.

Synchronization has been introduced, and it’s three-way: what A and B have and what they last agreed upon. As a result, “they differ” becomes “this has changed”—without referring to clocks owned by someone else’s machine. Storage pairs are by default bidirectional (a unidirectional mode exists for backups, and the interface writes “only from X to Y”, not drawing an arrow that might be interpreted in reverse); they can be restricted to a page and everything it reaches—including assets identified directly in the content. Conflicts preserve both sides in the form of a conflict copy, rather than merging or discarding them. Pairs are remembered in both storages, so a setup configured on a laptop also appears on the next machine, and the record of consensus lives in exactly one place—if each machine had its own, a regular edit from one side would turn into a conflict.

GitHub and Drive connect easily via oauth; afterwards, the profile shows repositories that the token may write to, or folders in Drive created by this app—selecting an existing one uses it, rather than creating a second one alongside. This is precisely how a second machine connects to already existing notes.

Desktop versions are now available on Electron—for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Smartfolio also works from a mobile browser.

Demo (somewhat outdated, without synchronization) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWSzEsgciaY

For now, everything is by invitation only—both the service and the source code.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWSzEsgciaY

“>

Hippos in America: The Wild Idea of 1910 | September 20 2026, 03:06

Today I learned that in 1910, the U.S. seriously considered importing hippos and releasing them into the wild to (1) eat invasive water hyacinths and (2) be eaten by Americans. The bill, H.R. 23261, also known as the “American Hippo bill”, was introduced in 1910 by Congressman Robert F. Broussard of Louisiana. Funnily enough, the bill itself makes no mention of hippos. It wasn’t actually about hippos. It was a “give us the money and we’ll figure it out” kind of law. The committee politely thanked everyone for a “very interesting morning” and dispersed. There was no vote. Never.

The Pursuit of Prestige: Questioning Academic Titles in Russia | September 19 2026, 04:18

Mark Solonin shared in his latest video some information and reflections that made one think. His first thought was that a true professional simply signs with his name; non-specialists always accompany the surname with titles like “academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences,” “corresponding member of the International Academy of Informatization,” “senior research scientist of the International Institute for the Study of Global Threats to Universal Security” and that such a long signature is a “red flag.”

To substantiate his thesis, he presents interesting figures and facts. The “Law on Science” of 1996 allowed scientists to create “public academies of sciences” — meaning essentially any association of citizens can call itself an academy and distribute titles. As early as 2013, Kommersant counted more than 80 academies of sciences in the country, of which six were state academies. The rest, more than seventy, are public organizations where memberships are sold or distributed by their own rules.

Among them, the absolute record holder is a former reference office. The “International Academy of Informatization” grew out of the Moscow City Reference Service. Its founders included the leadership of the Moscow City Reference Service, and its first president was its director. In 1990, the “Academy of Informatization of the USSR” was registered as a small enterprise. Today, it proudly announces on its website: more than 19,000 active members. Nineteen thousand academics from one office. The chairman of the Russian Academy of Sciences Commission against Pseudoscience Eduard Kruglyakov wrote that the MAI stamps out specialists in 101 specialties, including astrology, ufology, telepathy, and telekinesis. Bonus — since 1995, the MAI has had consultative status with the UN ECOSOC (don’t laugh, this is the Economic and Social Council at the UN), so now there are also “academicians at the UN.”

The most dangerous is the one that sounds the most solid. The Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (RANS) – by 2003 had about 4000 members. The name is almost indistinguishable from RAS, and it indeed includes real academicians — hence the signature “corresponding member of RANS” works so well on the unprepared reader (for example, “‘We will literally defeat everyone’: a brilliant scientist-prophet predicted the triumph of Russia” — this headline is about Kvasha, a cor.-m. of this RANS). The president of the RAS Yuri Osipov directly asked at a meeting of the Presidium — who preaches torsion fields? — and answered himself: RANS. In 2006, 29-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov became an honorary member of RANS. The president of RANS later confirmed that the title was awarded for saving the lives of servicemen in Chechnya.

There was also the Academy of Security, Defense, and Law Enforcement Issues (2000–2008). According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, it, along with its “National Public Rewards Committee,” established 73 types of awards identical to state ones, introduced academic degrees, its own military uniform, and military ranks. It issued identifications of professor, corresponding member, and academician, externally similar to state ones. Annual budget — about a million dollars. This is the only “academy” that was eventually shut down (December 10, 2008; the Supreme Court liquidated it at the request of the Prosecutor General — not for trading titles, but for imitating state awards). The former president was fined 500 rubles.

In 2013, there were 500 academicians in the RAS. After the reform and the addition of the Medical and Agricultural Academies, their number increased to 941 by 2025 — a growth of 71%. This is not the assessment of “enemies of science”: this is reported by the chief research scientist of the Institute for Science Development Issues of the RAS in the journal “Economics of Science,” particularly noting the election of officials, politicians, and businessmen to academicians, and cases of nepotism.

To defend a thesis, you need publications in “vakovskie” journals. The list today includes more than three thousand such journals. Imagine, in Russia, there are several thousand scientific journals that no one reads 🙂

In general, the thought is quite original — when you see the signature “academician of such-and-such academy, corresponding member of such-and-such, senior research scientist of the international institute of something,” — it’s not a credential, but a red flag. A real professional has a name. And that’s enough.