Month: November 2020

November 06 2020, 21:42

I have had an electric piano standing no further than a meter from my monitor for many years, both at home and at work. When I go on business trips and get stuck there for weeks, I start to crave playing and look for a place in the city to play. Almost every trip, I find something somewhere without much trouble. This year has not been great for business trips, but there is a story from past years.

So here I am in city X. I punch in the conservatory on the map. Found it! The doors are open, four floors, no security (as usual everywhere in Europe and the U.S.). I ask the students if I can play here. Yes, says a girl, downstairs in the basement there are practice rooms on two levels. Many of the rooms are locked, but there are some that are open. “If there’s no one there, then probably no one will kick you out.” Small rooms with good pianos.

I settle into one of them, playing to my heart’s content. An hour, another.

And then I go out to the restroom, and for some reason, I slam the door behind me. It clicks, locks, and the electronic lock beeps. I already understand what has happened. Even before touching the handle. The doors there open with cards, close automatically, and some students just don’t bother to close them behind them. That’s why so many doors are open. Until you close them.

All my stuff is inside. There’s a backpack, laptop, passport, hotel keys, bike keys, well, everything. For the next 10 minutes, I look for at least one student to help. Inside many of the rooms, someone is there, but the doors are closed. Hooray! One is walking down the corridor. I ask.

“No way,” he replies. “Here, the cards only open the rooms we reserve in advance through the website.”

I go upstairs to give up. There, under the “information” sign in the “aquarium,” sits an old man. I try to explain in English that my things are inside, the door is locked, I want to get back. He doesn’t understand me, because English is not the native language in that country. Took 10 minutes to try to explain with gestures. Unsuccessful. And suddenly:

“So you speak Russian? Great, start over, I didn’t understand a thing. What are you even doing here?”

I explain. In Russian, he understands! Simply a lifesaver.

We go downstairs. Two floors down and a long corridor. We’re silent. I try to smooth it over:

“Decided to drop by, see how modern students are learning, and here’s a piano in an empty room. How could I not play it. And how can I do this officially? I’m willing to pay a little somewhere.”

“No way,” the old man replies. “Actually, non-students are not supposed to play here. But, hmm.. On the other hand, there’s really no one to forbid you to play here, nor to keep an eye on it.”

“When I lived in Moscow, I used to go to the Bolshoi Theatre,” he continues. “So I really understand you, but formally I can’t allow it.”

He opened the door, I took my things, but the weekend was over, no more time was found, and I never made it back to that conservatory.

November 06 2020, 15:38

I wonder how the mechanism would work if the city, school, and university received a larger portion of centrally distributed targeted funds from the government, if their graduates received some sort of public recognition from which the state benefits overall (achievements in sports, science, technology, creation of a large number of jobs or revenue additions to the budget)?

November 06 2020, 15:20

Well then, first place at the internal hackathon “Voice for Commerce” – DONE. The full cycle of product selection-cart-checkout – without touching the keyboard or mouse.

At the same time, I’m somewhat skeptical about voice interfaces in e-commerce. To be precise, I believe that certain segments like purchasing music and movies, confirming regular payments, and subscriptions will work wonderfully. Why? I think the future belongs to interfaces with a higher density than visual ones, and audio has significantly less information density. Context is crucial here, which is quite difficult to translate into a computational brain lacking the same social experience as my surroundings and myself. I believe that the voice channel should and will complement the others, but only be noticeable in certain areas, albeit gradually expanding. We won’t be buying sofas over the phone until “Just Sofa” becomes a trend.

And today, I genuinely regretted for the first time that YouTube still can’t handle all this. I bought food at the supermarket enough for 15 bags, and before the mad rush home, I turned on the second episode about Gagarin to occupy my ears, while my phone ended up at the bottom of one of the bags. And almost immediately, YouTube plays two ads in a row: one from Amplitude lasting over 20 minutes and another short one right after. And for all those twenty-plus minutes, I had to listen to Amplitude until I got home with the bags. And damn it, you’ll be waiting forever for Google to make “Skip ad” a voice command…

I’ll show the video if EPAM approves the publication of the clip. Overall, I don’t even know why I had to ask about such things, but I decided to ask anyway. After all, they did give us first place 🙂

November 05 2020, 19:27

Whatever you think up online — it’s already been done. I’m working on my pronunciation, and I need to hear what I say through my own headphones. Pressing record and play a hundred times will drive you insane. I found a website that returns what you say immediately as soon as you stop. It learns the rhythm, and if the phrases are roughly equally short, it works great.

Then you open something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rui0QywfrdY (randomly picked on YouTube just for this post) and repeat after the speaker, creating this cycle “reference -> pronounce – listen to the result -> reference”. It’s ideal to sit in good isolated headphones with noise cancellation, so that nothing but your voice gets picked up by the microphone.

https://echobackto.me/