Nvidia RTX 5090 32Gb! Happy as an elephant. Installed ArchLinux and CUDA. Planning to soon get smart about boosting transformer deep neural networks and have a bunch of ideas for digital art based on concepts other than diffusion models.
Performance: Just ran a test, model GPT_OSS_20b_UD_Q4_K_XL generates 350 tokens per second with a context of 131072 tokens. That’s roughly an A4 page in a few seconds. Gemma3 27B – 55 tokens per second. Qwen3_30B_A3B_Q6_K – 259 tokens per second.
Two yachts in a row stand – the first, Moonrise, belongs to WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, the second — the yacht Dragonfly — belongs to Sergey Brin, founder of Google.
Apparently, chatgpt did the advertising himself and placed it (it’s hanging where, it seems, nobody goes at all)
Miami police and a sign next to it
Miami!
Wikipedia has one big problem. Well, or we have it with Wikipedia. If you go to almost any Wikipedia page about a relatively complex mathematical or physical concept, you often suddenly don’t want to read it any further. Formally everything is correct there, but the explanation is given through concepts, often even more complex than the concept being explained. Besides, there is often a lot of unnecessary information — what is formally/academically/taxonomically part of the topic, but essentially “pollutes” the first impression.
This problem arises because the authors of Wikipedia (often mathematicians) prioritize rigor and completeness rather than didactics and comprehensibility.
In the English-speaking environment, this is sometimes called “Drift into pedantry”. Articles are often written by experts for experts, not for those who are trying to learn the subject from scratch.
Let’s take, for example, a “tensor”. Imagine a student who has heard that tensors are used in machine learning (Google TensorFlow) or physics and wants to understand the essence.
What the reader expects (intuition): “A tensor is a table of numbers (or some sort of data container) that describes the properties of an object and correctly changes if we rotate the coordinate system”
What Wikipedia provides: “A tensor (from Latin tensus, ‘strained,’ as per the classical layout of mechanical stress at the sides of a deformable cube, see illustration) — is a layout (arrangement in space) of numbers (components), used in mathematics and physics as a special type of multi-index object, possessing mathematical properties.” The article immediately starts listing ranks, covariance and contravariance of indices. This is formally correct but it “pollutes” the first impression.
The illustration at the very top is captioned like this: “Mechanical stress, deforming a cube with faces perpendicular to the coordinate axes, in classic elasticity theory is described by the Cauchy stress tensor, which links 2 indices: the normal vector to the face with the stress vector T (force per unit area); there are 3 directions of normals and 3 directions of stress components, which gives a 2nd rank tensor 3×3 — consisting of 9 components.”
Formally — not a single error. In fact — it’s a wall of text that requires knowledge of linear algebra just to read the definition.
It’s as if you asked “What is an apple?”, and you were responded with: “An apple is a fruit of plants from the subfamily Amygdaloideae or Spiraeoideae, featuring an epicarp, mesocarp, and endocarp, often participating in Newton’s gravitational experiments.”
On one hand, it seems like with the emergence of LLM, Wikipedia is no longer necessary. There are conditional LLMs like ChatGPT, which essentially paraphrase everything that is in Wikipedia in the required form. But they do it because they were trained on Wikipedia, and undoubtedly Wikipedia was given much more weight during training than other internet junk. If there was no Wikipedia in the training set, it would be much more difficult. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is constantly edited, and LLM and Google use it exactly when answering questions.
Therefore, on the one hand, it seems to me that it is high time for Wikipedia to transition to generating on the basis of expert-curated data and packaging knowledge in the required format, for example, in the form of questions and answers. On the other, the whole idea of encyclopedia master-data for LLM/RAG is lost.
The paradox is that LLM is, in essence, the only “interface” that was able to read these pedantic definitions of Wikipedia, “understand” them (through thousands of examples of code and articles) and translate them back into humane language. Wikipedia has become an excellent database for robots, but a poor textbook for people.
Miami — what to do there? We’re flying out tomorrow for 3 days — Nadya, Lisa, and me. Throw out some suggestions on what’s worth visiting. And if by chance we have mutual friends from Miami, tag them, please, they might recommend something interesting. To be honest, I only have one museum on my “definitely must-visit” list (Perez), and everything else is kind of iffy.
When I was little, I used to take apart old telephones many times, and only now, in my grey years, I realized that I never wondered how they worked. And they worked in a very interesting way.
Let’s start with the dial. The phone is connected to the network by two wires. The dial is a rotary one. When you wind up the disk, the contacts are blocked, and when you release it, the disk returns backward and delivers a series of interruptions/pulses to the line. But how was it made to return at a constant speed (which is 10 pulses per second)?
It operated based on a centrifugal friction governor. The mechanics (gearbox) accelerated the governor’s axle to thousands of revolutions per minute. Two weights with friction pads (consider them brakes) were seated on the axle. The centrifugal force pressed them against the stationary drum, creating a braking effort. This is a direct heir to Watt’s centrifugal governor, allowing the mechanism to work stably regardless of how sharply you released the disk.
Next. The Central Office connected you with a friend. You both speak at the same time, and sound is transmitted there and back through two wires—why two wires and not four, you understand? Well, okay, but why don’t you hear yourself too loudly, since the microphone sends the sound there, from where the “speaker” hears it?
I couldn’t answer quickly. Went googling. So, it turns out that a special differential transformer was responsible for this. There, the current from the microphone branches off: part goes into the line to the friend, and part goes into the “balance circuit” (a chain of a resistor and capacitor inside the phone), mimicking the line resistance. The transformer coils are wound in opposition: the magnetic flows from the current in the line and the current in the balance circuit mutually annihilate themselves in the coil that goes to the speaker. Engineers purposely adjusted the balance not perfectly, leaving a “local effect” – a quiet sound of one’s own voice, so the phone wouldn’t seem “dead.” But the incoming signal from the friend has nothing to unbalance it (silence on your side), so it freely passes to the speaker.
Now about the microphone. At that time there were no transistors in phones, but the signal was loud. The secret is in the design of the microphone, it’s carbon. Essentially, it is a box with carbon powder and a movable diaphragm. The sound from your mouth compresses and decompresses the powder, changing its resistance. The microphone does not generate current but modulates the powerful current coming from the Central Office. Essentially, it worked as an amplifier. Over time, the charcoal compacted, and the audibility dropped—hence the habit of tapping the handset to “shake up” the powder.
The speaker was normal, electromagnetic. Although not quite. If there were only an electromagnet inside (without a permanent magnet), the phone would horribly distort the voice. An electromagnet attracts iron regardless of the polarity of the current. If you supply a sine wave (voice), the diaphragm would be attracted during both the positive and the negative half-waves. Result: the frequency of the sound would have doubled, and you would hear not the voice of a friend, but an unintelligible high-frequency buzzing. The permanent magnet solves this problem: It creates “preload.” The diaphragm is always attracted to the magnet with medium force. When the “plus” of the signal arrives, the magnetic field strengthens and the diaphragm flexes more. When the “minus” arrives, the field weakens and the diaphragm springs back.
In modern speakers, the force strictly depends on the direction of the current. Plus pushes, minus pulls. Therefore, the frequency doubling, which old phone engineers feared, physically cannot occur here. The diaphragm doesn’t need “preload” by a magnet, it just needs to hang in peace.
Interestingly, the principle of old electromagnetic capsules (metal diaphragm + “anchor”) is used now in the most expensive in-ear headphones—google “balanced armature headphones” (prices around $500).
The voltage in the telephone network was negative – minus 48/60 volts. Plus was grounded, and the “live” wire was the minus. Why? It turns out, this is protection against electrochemical corrosion. The cables lie in moist earth. If there were a “plus” (anode) on the wire, upon insulation damage, copper would dissolve (electrolysis) and the cable would rot. With “minus” (cathode), metal ions, on the contrary, tend to settle on the conductor from the soil, which prolonged the cable’s life by decades.
The restaurant is very tasty, but I increasingly notice that establishments include a certain percentage on top of the menu prices in the bill. In this menu, the cost of a dish is listed as $30 per plate, plus a note like this. In this case, it’s a 4% operational charge. Then there are taxes on top of that, plus another 20% for tips. As a result, $30 from the menu turns into at least $40.
Yesterday, we stopped by Comcast/XFinity to get Lisa set up in her new apartment. At the end, I asked, “guys, can you check something because it feels like I’ve been paying too much for internet for two years now. $131 a month for gigabit service.” The dude quickly pulled up my profile, said, “let’s reduce it by $25.” I said, “let’s do it.” Done, goodbye.
Service.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 