Month: December 2019

Can you enlighten me on this matter? I seem to be “out of my depth” with these issues.

If there is a country where 50% of the territory is occupied by 51% of the population, who would unanimously vote for the independence of their 50% if they were asked in a national referendum. The country is a corporation of the country’s citizens, and the land is the corporation’s property. Is it stipulated anywhere in the constitutions of any country that the people have such a right? Let’s assume the remaining 49% living on the other half are making their lives miserable and mismanaging their joint savings, and they want to live in a separate country, consisting only of them.

Now let’s complicate the issue. The 51% of the population actually live not on 50% of the territory, but on 10% of that 50%, yet they still want the whole 50%. Why not? They are the majority, aren’t they? Why should they consider the interests of the minority on the other half?

Why do patriots love the land they did not invest in, just as their fathers and grandfathers didn’t, when all they did was live there? I understand when someone invested in a bridge and then there is a possibility of losing it, then one can raise the issue of compensation; but when no one built the bridge, why is there an attachment to the land into which not a penny was invested by the people living on it?

I tricked out my bike, thanks to Denis Potapov for helping with the choice. 105 groupset, carbon fork, 8.5 kg. My bike lock alone weighs one and a half kilograms.

Attending meetings where you are silent for more than 30% of the time and which you did not organize yourself is a waste of time. It creates the impression that this is exactly what you’re being paid for, when in reality this is something for which you should retain your money, since it distracts without significant benefit. Ideally, a person should either organize the gathering of information themselves (then being silent is fine – you listen and comprehend) or pass on information to someone who organized its collection (then being silent is not fine). In all other instances, it’s almost always a waste of time. Online meetings are even stranger, but at least it’s easier to do some work simultaneously.

Unfortunately, not everyone shares my view.

Fortunately, I haven’t had internal face-to-face meetings in negotiation rooms for the past seven summers. Only when visiting a client.

This tree is already in spring!

MacOS has somehow become complicated recently. It’s impossible to share the desktop from Webex and Teams, because, damn it, they’re not in the list of applications that are allowed to access the screen, and you can’t add them there. Webex doesn’t have a proper uninstall; neither manual nor reinstallation helps. So, it turned out today that files moved from the desktop via terminal don’t get deleted in Finder. Here is a screenshot with an almost empty desktop on the right, and on the left – the same one, in Finder, with files. And they open just fine. Among them, there’s a receipt’s folder that I created on the right 🙂 Perhaps a restart will save the day, but Apple is no longer as good as it used to be.

I will be in Moscow for two weeks starting the 24th, I will need mobile internet + a plan, preferably with unlimited or inexpensive data. It should also have good coverage to work in Lobnya, Kolomna, Moscow. After two weeks, everything purchased will become unnecessary, so I am trying to minimize expenses.

Is it possible to rent or borrow a device for a couple of weeks, something like a modem, wireless (preferably) or USB?

Is it sensible to use mobile internet all day long from morning to evening over two weeks from a computer? Or will it end up being quite expensive or eventually slow due to traffic that at some point will exceed the limit?

Which providers should I consider – the big three or are there special companies?

A new beast has appeared at my home – Roborock S5 / S50. Right now, it’s running around vacuuming.

I’m not very knowledgeable about robot vacuums yet, but my first impression is very pleasant indeed. First, it has a lidar on its dome, scanning the room and understanding where it is based on the scenery. This allows it to always vacuum the floor parallel to the walls, with very high accuracy, without exceptions.

It remembers the map of the apartment, updates it during operation, and you can draw areas in the app where it shouldn’t go, etc.

At first glance, the wet mopping feature seems to be added just for show—as expected for mobile vacuums, it’s not great. But formally, it’s there, which helps marketers with sales. On the other hand, if the water tank were bigger, the vacuum wouldn’t be able to fit between chair legs.

Of course, it doesn’t get along well with wires and small papers on the floor that shouldn’t be sucked up. Also, it just pushed a clothes dryer and was compacting old fluorescent lamps to be thrown away in the corner (I quickly jumped up to help with those).

In general, it’s a fun little thing. It beeps and reports to my wife on her phone when you pick it up.

From my window, I currently have a view of the DARPA headquarters, “the Pentagon brain”, the US Department of Defense’s research agency. Kind of like our scientific units 🙂 This is where the internet started (ARPANET, TCP/IP), Unix (BSD), and also Boston Dynamics with their crazy robots. It’s a pity they don’t have a museum. Even the CIA has a museum here, though admittedly, they don’t let us in.