An intriguing artist, Alexey Isupov (1889 Vyatka – 1957 Rome), was a celebrated member of artistic circles in Italy from the 1920s, enjoying enduring popularity among the Italian populace throughout his lifetime. The official pretext for his migration from Russia in 1926 was a Soviet commission to create a monumental piece titled “Parade of the First Trade Union Holiday of Physical Culture” in Italy. Following his death, in 1958, Tamara Nikolaevna Isupova, executing her husband’s last wishes, transferred a portion of his oeuvre back to Russia. Approximately 300 works, comprising 80 paintings and over 200 drawings, were bequeathed to the art museum in Vyatka/Kirov (using both the old and new city names), an institution he helped establish. The artist’s widow gifted nineteen of Isupov’s works to the State Tretyakov Gallery. Among his creations are the self-portraits “With Braces and with a Dog”.
I finished reading “The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. It all started with Netflix—after watching three episodes, I stopped and ordered the book. It turns out, they had significantly reinterpreted everything. Netflix’s scriptwriters eliminated the main character of “The Three-Body Problem,” or rather, split Professor Wang Miao into three characters—an African American, a strong Brazilian woman, and an Indian named Raj. That’s the solution they came up with for the “three-body problem.”
Overall, the book is quite good, but if I were the author, I wouldn’t attach, let’s say, Morse code to the communication between aliens and earthlings. It smacks of comics for teenagers. For instance, they could have made the communication occur non-verbally—perhaps through dreams. While not more scientific, it would have been at least less naive. What’s more, the depiction of events on Trisolaris is somewhat anthropocentric. The author does not describe what Trisolarans look like, but logically, their society can’t have anything in common with ours. If I were the author, I would have highlighted that. What we know about the Trisolarans is just our fantasies stretched to fit our language abilities and familiar concepts, but on their planet, everything is so different that no parallel can principally be drawn.
But credit must be given where it’s due—the author’s imagination is limitless. The book is packed with details that could suffice for 2-3 works.
I read it in English. The English translation is highly praised—I’m very pleased with it, and so is the author, despite the translator (who is, by the way, a science fiction writer himself) admitting that he occasionally had to retell large portions in his own words because all other options worsened the outcome. Indeed, the Chinese language is quite unique.
On this day, May 3rd, “Mary Poppins” herself, Natalya Andreichenko, was born. As they say, a real treat for dads. Seemed like she vanished for a while, so I did a bit of googling, and it turns out there are quite a few interesting facts.
It turns out she was the former wife of Maxim Dunayevsky (the movie’s composer) and of Oscar-winner and pianist Maximilian Schell. Turns out she lives in Mexico, but in 2022 took part in “Succession”. Turns out she recorded a vocal album Natasha & GooSee (“Natasha and the Geese”). Her YouTube is full of conspiracy theories, like the coronavirus being created by the global elites to control the world order. She also dipped into the info-business and sold her video course online “From Heart to Heart – Spiritual Secrets of Success” – “we live in an era of quantum leap, desires must be voiced, something about the Almighty, etc.” In short, granny is living life to the fullest.
— I hope your journey was pleasant?
— Utterly unpleasant, Mrs. Banks. Just like your children. Extremely unpleasant, Mrs. Banks.
I refined the mechanism for cross-posting to Russian and English blogs. Firstly, I figured out how to group posts by topics, assign them tags, and categorize them. Plus, this is now done on the fly for new posts. I’ll write an article on hybrismart later, but the gist is that openAI vectors are first created for all posts, then they are divided into 50 groups via KMeans and sorted by their distance from the center. Subsequently, the first posts are selected (so as not to exceed the N Kb limit), and the script asks openai about the topic of this cluster of posts. Eventually, I end up with 50 topics, from which I choose, say, Art or Books, and then extract all posts close to the theme of art or books, again sorted by their distance from the theme. The accuracy isn’t very high, especially for posts with little text. Therefore, each post is fed into a local LLAMA3 8B on my laptop, and it decides whether it truly fits the theme or not. Overall, also with rare mistakes, but out of 2000 found by the script based on proximity, it left 600 on the theme of art, and generally quite well.
A separate script iterates over posts on beinginamerica, and there it corrects tags and categories for posts from the list provided by the script above.
I have already distributed posts on themes like art, books, science. Overall, everything is automated, and it’s easy to create another 10 new themes. I will be doing it gradually. For now, tags are only on beinginamerica; I will do it on raufaliev.com later.
Additionally, if a post has ENG in parentheses, it sends the piece after ENG to the English site, and the piece after ENG below in parentheses to the Russian site. This is convenient when I write a post in both languages simultaneously.
The title for my archive was generated through LLAMA3 8B, but openAI is still more powerful, albeit more expensive. For new posts, openAI GPT-4 is now used.
Neither LLAMA3 nor OpenAI GPT-4 excel at creating titles for texts that are too short and uninformative, often producing quite incoherent outputs. Feel free to read and smile.
I wondered, does the name Alex sound like “kitty” (le chat) in French? Or is that a stretch? And what about Nastya and Anastasia in the English-speaking world? I might be wrong, but all sorts of unkind and uncultured people might smirk, recalling nasty and anesthesia. Is this far-fetched, or does it really pose problems?
Patricia Piccinini; р. 1965. Australian artist and sculptor. What do you think about her art? For me, she is a good candidate for my #artrauflikes
P.S. And here are some comments about her from YouTube from haters (the first one is a bomb):
“THE RUSSIANS DID IT!!!!”
“Sick. Not art”
“Never seen something so ugly!”
“This is probably what our Government is creating. Just another top secret operation.”
“This is EXTREMELY AND SERIOUSLY DISTURBING AS HELL. She says this represents the world we live in. Whose world. That tells us a lot about you and your sick and twisted world. This woman is a creep.”
“Supposedly a satanic pedophile favorite…sounds right. They will all soon get exactly what they deserve, god willing.”
“No wonder pedophiles buy this garbage…”
“She is garbage not artist.”
“Stupid talentless whore, please don’t insult the word ‘artist’.”
“Sick, sick, sick, I hope this is not something they are experimenting with that the “elite” have knowledge of.”
“Disgusting so ugly ughhh please stop calling this art”
“KILL THEM ALL WITH FIRE”
“By so far John pedestos favorite art. So much pedophilia filled in the world”
“The artist was a victim of sex trafficking and is obsessed with this sick twisted interpretation of Art…”
“It is not art, it is satanic!!”
“They all need 3 bullets in their heads!”
“This is the official art of the new world order.”
Major update on Hybrismart: Saturday Evening Post Archives: Engineering a Smart Search Solution.
The Saturday Evening Post (TSEP) is one of the oldest magazines in the U.S., published every Saturday since 1821. For many decades, it was a voluminous magazine with over 100 pages. Virtually none of its articles can be found through a simple Google search. It was immensely intriguing to index nearly 400,000 pages and to experiment with various technologies, from ML reranking to vector search using OpenAI Embeddings.
The article is technical and should be of interest to programmers and solution architects.
Dearest Nadya — happy birthday! Stay as intelligent, beautiful, athletic, energetic, and vibrant as you have always been and I am sure always will be! What’s with the notebooks? Nadya — a volleyball coach, spending hours daily on the volleyball court and hours at home preparing for training. At home, we call this “drawing little squares.” For Nadya, it’s the little squares first, and then everything else, because a coach cannot come unprepared to the court! The gift from her girls “for when your notebook runs out of pages” touched her deeply 🙂 So thoughtful! I tell Nadya — someday you’ll publish a multi-volume series on how to raise superstar volleyball players. Happy birthday!
I really like this illusion. There are no red pixels in the image. Zoom in—the section where the coke can is contains only black and white, and around it is cyan. Color perception is shaped by consciousness.
Red is the opposite color to green. The black stripes make the brain think that the missing color is formed by the same rules as around the jar, and tonal contrast is replaced by color, thus creating the red color.
It’s hard to understand, but this image illustrates it perfectly!
I found a book by Lewis Carroll in which he describes his impressions from visiting Moscow with Henry Liddon in 1867.
He was most kind in answering our questions, and in giving us many hints on seeing Petersburg, pronouncing the language, etc., but gave us rather dismal prospects of what is before us, as he says very few speak any language but Russian. As an example of the extraordinary long words which the language contains, he spelt for me the following:
защищающихся
which, written in English letters, is Zashtsheeshtshayoushtsheekhsya. This alarming word is the genitive plural of a participle, and means “of persons defending themselves.”
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 