Author: Rauf Aliev

Exhibits from Burning Man, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC

Besides “as though,” which appears 51 times in the first Harry Potter and zero in the two Narnias, I noticed that Rowling likes to use the verb “stare” – 58 times in “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” while in the two Narnias – 9 times.

Reading the first Harry Potter, I noticed Rowling’s fondness for “as though”.

In the book, this phrase is repeated 51 times, whereas in the first two Narnia books, for example, it does not appear even once. Based on such metrics, one could probably automatically guess the author of a book even from a fragment without proper nouns, if trained on phrases and grammatical patterns.

I wonder why it is generally assumed that extraterrestrial civilizations operate on the same time scale as we do? For instance, we see a stone on planet X. Just a stone. But in reality, it’s a frame from the multimillion-year life of some being. Or, conversely, although this is debatable.

And another important point. It seems obvious to everyone, but still. It’s absolutely impossible to determine if there is life or what is happening somewhere RIGHT NOW. You can determine if something happened some time ago, but you can’t say anything about right now. The further from Earth, the greater the gap in time. Light from the neighboring galaxy takes hundreds of thousands of years. And if we look further – then we are talking about millions of years. Assuming that time there flows faster for an entire species, which may emerge and disappear faster than on Earth – at best, we see traces.

There are two wildly interesting topics right now – the deep-sea world and space. Both are poorly studied – discoveries occur almost every year by recent students. It’s a pity, kids these days aren’t particularly interested in these subjects.

I wonder, why aren’t there decentralized instant messaging systems built on the principles of tor/torrent? Like, having each client assemble a pool of IP addresses that perform further routing of the message across the network, and this pool being dynamic, i.e., constantly updated. That means, if user A sends a message to user B, the message goes through a network of intermediate servers set up by the users themselves, using HTTPS. Since the nodes are ultimately set up by the participants, there is a risk that something might suddenly turn off. Therefore, each node in the network has a reliability rating, which influences others’ decisions about the level of redundancy in sending to this somewhat unreliable network. As soon as a mess-up happens, the reliability rating drops. The provider can only curb such activity by either analyzing the protocol or blocking the IP addresses. If the system of obtaining IP addresses and the protocol are secured, then, in general, the nature of the traffic won’t differ much from ordinary web surfing. Participants need a public IP for this, which is challenging since not everyone has one. But if you could devise a monetization model where these participants earn money from ads passing through them… technically it seems feasible. Where here is the oversight and logical flaws?

This pertains to the quality of chat support. Sberbank is sticking to its usual standards. And just so you know, this is not a bot, but a live agent (“Thank you for waiting. Specialist NATALYA will assist you.”)

Hmm. Coffee can still surprise. On the box – a recipe for making “a large thermos of one liter”: boil one and a half liters of water, add ten teaspoons of coffee with cardamom, boil for 3-4 minutes, turn off the heat and wait at least an hour, filter, reheat to a boil, add more cardamom

my bad translates as “well, my bad”

I am sharing my experience in developing a screenshot testing system for a large website. There are hundreds of pages, in different languages and domains, containing a final set of functional components (like news or banners). All this was managed by a network of distributed administrators, who were not easy to control, as Hybris is not great with auditing, plus people make mistakes. Controlling the changes of these pages was crucial because at the crucial moment the website is launched, and it is essential to be sure everything is under control. This solution helped to identify problems earlier than the client found them or before they started to have consequences.

Although all of this was implemented on Hybris and in Java, the approach is not tied to any specific technology.

Very interesting lecture #2 from those viewed today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koI4dGUBS_8