Yuki is like clockwork. Twice a year, he enters a mode of howling. Just like a wolf at the Moon. Last year, the autumn howl started on October 15-16, 2024, and ended on the 20th. Today, October 15, 2025, it began. Prior to this
* March 15, 2022,
* October 27, 2022,
* February 2, 2023,
* April 1, 2024, lasted four days.
* October 15-16, lasted 4 days
Update: October 19, 2025, it ended
Yuki, we have everything recorded!
Recently, my Tesla Model Y fell ill, and the dealership gave me a Model S Plaid as a loaner car. It’s simply a monster, accelerating to 100 km/h in 2 seconds. Over a thousand horsepower. But after driving it for a week, Nadezhda and I realized that we would still not trade our Model Y for a Model S.
Well, the fact that it’s unusually low to the ground is a minor issue. We would get used to that. But getting out from behind the wheel is always incredibly awkward for me. My belly isn’t that big, but in the Model S, it’s like a real cockpit. You have to carefully sit down and climb out, whereas in the Model Y, you just jump in somehow and go.
Moreover, the Model S is really noisy inside compared to the Model Y. You can hear the road. And this is for a price twice that of the Model Y. Also, for some reason, the mode where you just walk away from the car works less sensitively, and locks the car only when you are already quite far away.
And then there are the turn signals. What idiot decided to put their buttons on the steering wheel? It’s impossible to get used to that. The steering wheel still turns, and the buttons are always somewhere unclear.
But, damn it, it’s very beautiful from the outside. Especially with a light interior.
By the way, Tesla has somewhat poorly thought out the mechanism for issuing a replacement car, and it works with only one driver. You can’t set two keys for two different phones. Moreover, it would be nice to store the settings in the cloud and receive a replacement car already adjusted to your preferences.
And the car fell ill in an interesting way too. It’s funny when the car on the highway tells you that there’s a little problem, the engine is dead, but you should not distract yourself, just keep driving. After parking, the car might theoretically not drive, but so far all is normal. If not, we will tell you. Meanwhile, your drive will not sound the same.
As I understood, the car simply switched from 4-wheel drive to 2-wheel drive. Funny that such a fallback exists at all. Already fixed, it needed an inverter replacement.
Rajesh Exports states on their website that they process 35% of the gold mined on the planet. Of course, they are exaggerating, but overall, India and Rajesh do shape the market. It turns out that 11% of all the gold on the planet is adorned on Indian women. Additionally, it was found that in 1947, 70% of all mined gold was in the USA. From 1934 to 1970, it was legally prohibited for private individuals to own gold in the USA. Approximately 22% of all the gold ever accounted for on the surface of the Earth has been mined from a plateau in South Africa called the Witwatersrand. And if you consider all the gold mined throughout history, it would amount to less than an Olympic swimming pool.
China buys up silver, with India not far behind. Interestingly, platinum is significantly used in the production of catalytic converters for vehicles – almost 40% of the global production goes there. China, of course, holds much of this production.
Practically every smartphone, tablet, or touchscreen monitor that we use is coated with a thin layer of indium tin oxide (ITO). This material has a unique combination of properties: it is almost completely transparent while also conducting electricity excellently. This allows the screen to register your touches.
Although lithium is now strongly associated with batteries, historically and still today, a significant portion of it is used in the production of glass and ceramics.
It turns out that the phrase “barristers must gain admission to the bar” is not at all about bars and baristas, as I would have thought, had I not read that it’s actually about lawyers in the US. Admission to the bar” — is the official admission to legal practice (for barristers). And a Barrister” is a lawyer who represents clients in court. There’s also Solicitor” — a lawyer who works with clients and documents.
Historically, bar” literally means a bar (barrier) in court, separating the area where the judges and lawyers sit from the rest of the hall. Being called to the bar” means being called to the barrier,” i.e., being admitted to represent cases in court. Today, the bar” refers to the legal profession as a whole or the legal community.
Actually, it all started when I saw the title (professional designation) “Esq.” with a guy’s name and realized I didn’t understand any of these letters often listed after names. There are a lot of them, and you’ve probably seen PhD, M.D., or CPA numerous times.
Finally, I have released a book! It is called Recommender Algorithms — it contains more than 50 recommendation algorithms with mathematical explanations, detailed descriptions, and code examples.
It all started early in the spring in Germany, when I attended the ACM conference and made the first sketches of the book’s structure, analyzing reports on the RecSys stream. And now, six months later, the book has been published.
Why did it appear? Because there is no single, accessible source either online or in print where the recommendation algorithms of various types and purposes are thoroughly examined. There are articles focused on narrow aspects, but to collect and systematize the developments — from fundamental to the most recent — until now, it seems, no one has managed to do it for some reason. Maybe no one needed to. Suddenly, I found I needed to. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I am eager for your feedback.
Available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. There is a Russian automatic translation (surprisingly, but very decent), but I do not know how to sell it yet.
https://www.testmysearch.com/books/recommender-algorithms.html?FB
(This is not my only book, but today — just about this one.)
Preparing a book for publication on Solr&Lucene. What do you think about publishing such a translation on Amazon? 🙂
The book is about algorithms and under-the-hood engineering. I haven’t seen books from this angle yet, maybe someone will find it interesting.
Microsoft has one very nasty thing with Outlook for MacOS, which for some reason nobody tries to fix. If you have a meeting in 30 minutes, Outlook reminds you with a popup showing the upcoming meetings, where it “highlights” these meetings. Well, in my case, there’s no secret here, I could even share my screen during that time. But it would be nice if such notifications didn’t appear while screen sharing, especially while recording, because screen sharing goes through Teams, which is part of the same package as Outlook.
But what’s worse is something else. If you try to CLOSE this notification window while screen sharing on MacOS (especially if the recording is on), it causes the whole Outlook with all the emails there to pop up. And there might be things there that the viewers shouldn’t see. That is, by _closing_ the window, you suddenly reveal the titles of email messages. Which is completely unexpected (well, until you step on these rakes, then it’s not unexpected anymore).
Today I learned how scientific achievements fly under a pig’s tail when faced with reality.
There’s this thing called precision feeding in pig farming. The gist is: a pig has an RFID chip attached to its tag (actually to its ear), and when it wants to eat, it sticks the tag into the feeder – and a special sensor reads its data and dispenses exactly as much feed from the machine as it should, also recording in a database how much and when it was given. If the pig sticks its tag in too early, the feed machine won’t dispense any. The idea is to reduce feed costs, improve growth and health of the animals, and lessen environmental pollution (less uneaten feed).
It seems like a great idea. However, such a system doesn’t work where there are large populations – it only works in specialized productions with few pigs, where almost all are known by name.
Why doesn’t it work on a large scale?
Because pigs are very cunning and quickly adapt. One pig inserts a tag, and then the one higher in the hierarchy chases it away and eats what isn’t meant for it.
Whole classes of oppressed arise, whose role is to insert the tag so that the authorities can gorge themselves. In the end, chaos ensues and no precision is achieved.
This is how pigs oppose technological progress.
In our language, glasses are called tumblers. I decided to find out why, because a tumbler is essentially an acrobat.
There are two mutually exclusive theories. According to one, the original tumbler glasses had a rounded or slightly convex bottom, which allowed them to “rock” or “tumble” (to tumble), but not tip over completely. So, a tumbler in this sense is kind of like a “weeble.” According to the other, they were specifically made so they could not be put down on the table open, because, say on a ship, they could tip over and the valuable rum would spill out.
I read something interesting today. About fractals. If you take any three points that form a triangle, and then a fourth point anywhere, and subsequently throw a dice, the faces of which are assigned to the first three points. Next, you move from the current point towards the point corresponding to the result on the dice and place a new point halfway; this becomes the new current point. After many iterations, the points start to form the Sierpinski triangle – the one shown in the attached picture. Intuitively, you would think the triangle should be fully filled because it involves random movements in three directions from a randomly chosen point, but no. Moreover, it works even if the starting point is inside the future empty triangle (yes, a few points will disrupt the picture, but that’s it). If you start our experiment with five or six points instead of three, different shapes will form – see the attached picture. This graphical method is called the Chaos Game.
By the way, it may seem obvious, but in case you wondered — all the presented figures have zero area.
If you take two triangles and with a probability p move towards random vertices of the first, and with (1-p) towards random vertices of the second, you end up forming a Barnsley fern (picture №2).
I love such things because they seem like magic at first glance 🙂
(It’s a kind of problem from the same class as the synchronization of metronomes)
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 