Author: Rauf Aliev

Today on 228,000,000 phones in the USA, a presidential alert blared at full volume. However, you cannot unsubscribe from it, and some group from New York is suing the government for the right to have the option to unsubscribe.

An interesting article on Habr about how text editors are structured. Back in my school and university days, I myself tried to write such editors, and there were no such analyses then:) I learned a lot of new things for myself.

A very interesting lecture on the anatomy of the brain. Not a single slide, just three hours of a talking head. But it’s captivating. Indeed, after the first hour, new information begins to overwhelm the brain.

(website visitor agreement management service, 3rd party)

I give away this idea. Someone should invent a service that supports Terms & Conditions, which are present on virtually every major website and for which there likely are neither proper tools nor people for support.

The service should be able to:

1. Display the document text in a format that is both convenient and easy to read, with navigation.

2. Track changes in the text and display them separately, in a convenient and readable format, with a version for printing, highlighting important sections (if the client deems it necessary) while also allowing access to older versions of the document.

3. Obtain and store user consent.

4. Not ask the user again if they have already consented.

5. Ask again if there are changes, store this status, and not ask again.

6. Notify by email when the rules change. Do not allow access to the service until the user accepts the changes.

7. Deliver the rules by mail, if the client thinks it’s necessary.

8. Support different terms&conditions on the same site. For different categories of users, for different services, for different languages, etc. Ideally – using common fragments to ease administration.

9. In the future, it is not out of the question that services will offer multiple agreements depending on how the user agrees to use the service. With new regulations in the EU, this is very realistic. Then, managing these agreements will be a real headache.

A very interesting analysis –

(in the image — the amount of payload launched by customer country)

Some bold statements:

“The CEO of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, accused the head of the American company SpaceX, Elon Musk, of dumping in the space launch market with the aim of ousting Russia. (…) According to Rogozin, Musk receives about 150 million dollars from the Pentagon for each launch. ‘He is paid extra to enter the market with a cheap product,’ noted the head of Roscosmos. He admitted that under such conditions, Russia is unable to compete. Roscosmos cannot demand from the Ministry of Defense a launch price that would be 3 – 5 times more expensive, Rogozin highlighted, adding that such a game would be unfair. Nonetheless, the head of Roscosmos promised that in the near future, Russia will once again lead in the market of launching payloads into space using carrier rockets. According to him, next year Russia will conduct the second launch of the heavy rocket ‘Angara’, and from 2021 will start its mass production. ‘We will return and be the first again, I promise you,’ Rogozin declared.”

Sad to say.

Dmitry Akhmerov

These brilliant UI designers at Apple must have been tipsy that day, no other way about it. Imagine you’re writing an email from the Apple mail client and you need to attach an image from the library. A screenshot. First of all, there is no attach button or insert image option. But a very curious mind might suggest holding your finger on the email text to open a contextual menu. It’s worth noting that such a menu is nowhere else to be found in iOS – except maybe just for cut/paste, but now we’re talking about pictures and attachments. In this menu, pay attention, there’s again nothing about adding a picture or attachment, but there is a right arrow, which kind of hints at something. You press it, and there you find two more menu items, insert picture and insert attachment. The first inserts the image into the text – which I do not want. The picture is huge, and I do not want to insert it into the text. I go to insert attachment, and there is everything except for pictures. Someday Apple will adopt a file system for phones and call it a huge breakthrough.

I don’t have another notebook, as they say, I can’t recall anything in the morning 🙂 This is about script->pdf tools.

For texts, I periodically use latex; for diagrams, I try to use console tools that convert scripts into graphic form. For flowchart, sequence diagram, and gantt, I use mermaid (https://mermaidjs.github.io/), for sequence diagrams I also use graphviz (https://www.graphviz.org/), and just today, I installed and tested erd+graphviz, a package on Haskell.

I’m afraid next time I won’t be able to find this from scratch, so it may as well hang here, searchably.

Got engrossed in a new book by Yuval Noah Harari, “12 lessons for the 21th century” at B&N. This is the same guy who wrote the wonderful Sapiens and Homo Deus. Nearly parted with 30 dollars in my mind, but then found this book on VKontakte, and, delighted, bought a pastry for five. Last time, we found three books on the art of essay writing there, and bought all three directly from the bookstore on thriftbooks.com for a price five times cheaper (they were used, but it didn’t matter to us). It’s tough being a bookstore these days. I think B&N needs to transform into something fundamentally new in the coming years. Since 2015 their stock has fallen fivefold. Perhaps they need to hold public lectures and educational events in stores. Nowadays, it’s hard to even find a consultant there. Before, there used to be a computer in the center with their in-store search system, now even that’s been removed. What do you think is the future for offline bookstores?

The sign reads “cool descent ahead”

An interesting discussion, both sides are trying hard to defend their viewpoints, but the priest isn’t performing very well. Nonetheless, his level was higher than I expected.