Author: Rauf Aliev

There’s one thing in macOS Finder that really annoys me. You download a zip archive into the Downloads folder, where you already have a million files (I clean it every six months). And then you unpack it. The folder from the archive doesn’t appear next to the zip file, but somewhere lower down, sometimes much lower. This is because the files are sorted by creation/modification date (which puts the zip file at the top since I just downloaded it), and the unpacked file ends up somewhere in the middle because its creation date is in the past. And finding that folder or file can sometimes be very non-trivial, because you don’t always remember what it was named in the archive.

UPDATE: Thanks to Naumov Aleksey – you need to sort by Date Added. To do this, you need to enable this column, which is not enabled by default. Sorting by created/modified date is now out the window

Hope and support

Interestingly, everyone washes spoons and forks, but no one washes cola cans before licking them

By the way, I’ve been tormented by this question since visiting NASA – does it make sense to use a multilayered complex architecture, like the whole Windows with drivers, for solving algorithmically simple tasks, which include both moon landing and ballistic missile control? After all, a simple algorithm directly controlling a microcontroller can realistically be tested for all branches, whereas in a complex system one has to introduce the concept of faith and hope. I mean, if a manufacturer promises something, and it’s lengthy and complicated to verify, it’s easier to believe that the manufacturer has already considered everything and to address problems as they arise, hoping that there will be no problems at all. The result of your work goes as a component into a more complex system, where they now trust you. And so a cascade accumulates, at the end of which unreliability arises.

Civic-patriotic education and cultural-recreational activities in a typical American school and Lisa’s quarterly project for the Government of the USA course on organizing PR support for a real Senate candidate in Virginia. What amazing work they do! Read about it, it’s out of this world. Many of our political technologists need to go learn in the 12th grade at McLean High School.

The first hospital in my life turned out to be not bad 🙂 fixed the menisci

Here is HBO, which, seemingly a globally renowned cable and satellite network with dozens of great series, has a site with a monstrously inconvenient interface. There, movies are simply listed in alphabetical order with a crude breakdown into eight categories from ACTION to SUSPENSE. The only banner that highlights a featured movie among the bunch only contains a picture and the title.

I just watched their new Watchmen, the first episode. After all, series based on comics are a world of their own. For instance, in the middle of the episode, some kind of extraterrestrial squids start falling from the sky, and then they are completely forgotten by the end of the episode. It turns out, the average American will recognize this as a reference to the giant telepathic squid from outer space that concludes the comic. The director of the movie (not the series) Watchmen did not include this squid in the plot because “leave the squid out, I would have had to spend about thirty minutes explaining why it’s needed there”. But in the series, they didn’t bother 😉 and that’s how it is there. Literally every question requires a Google search. These aren’t the fairy tales I grew up on 😉

By the way, what’s happening with the air in Moscow right now? Specifically, everything about pm2.5

compared to the “normal” index in Moscow, which is around 50 (in an industrial place like Houston, packed with oil refineries, it’s about 70, and in China over industrial cities – it’s like now in Moscow)

Houston. Last time I posted pictures from a film camera, now it’s time to dissect an iPhone. Digital ones always come later, they need to be analyzed, and that takes time. But the film photos were all good 😉

A very interesting presentation of the results of Elon Musk’s Neuralink project. Scientists are reporting, there are many cool slides. They are developing brain-machine neural interfaces: essentially an implanted Bluetooth-like I/O port for a small part of the brain, which a person can control after some training. The presentation is from July, but I only got around to it now. The link includes a translation too. The N1 chip was shown, which will be implanted in the brain. According to the company, Neuralink may begin clinical trials with humans in 2020.