Author: Rauf Aliev

Just a really good and free book on Machine Learning by Andriy Burkov,

(The book is distributed on the “read first, buy later” principle)

Highly recommend to all those interested (especially beginners)

About bicycles in Amsterdam. 1) there are a lot of them 2) almost one hundred percent have the same lock mechanism (see photo). It’s on the wheel 3) there are almost no new bicycles 4) not a single one has ridden on the sidewalk yet

Interestingly, why hasn’t anyone come up with a program that performs horizontal or vertical scanning of space? Imagine you have a long shelf full of products, and you want to capture it all beautifully. But you can’t step back because of the wall. Ideally, you’d take your phone in your hands and walk from one end to the other. Essentially, the phone needs to stitch together a panorama, but in this case, the panorama isn’t radial as it usually is, but parallel. That is, the phone should take frames every 1/N seconds, and then stitch together the middles of the minimal possible width (the faster you move the phone, the wider it will need to capture, which can lead to distortions). You could do interesting things with this. For example, drive along the street with your phone and get a panorama of the street. Or walk along the aisles of a bookstore and get a panorama of the shelves.

I’ll tell you, there’s no better urban transportation system than in the Netherlands, especially in Amsterdam. The quantity and quality of options to reliably get from point A to point B are off the charts in my personal rankings. Maybe it’s because I only see the good side. Huge respect for the bicycles. In Amsterdam, where the weather is just as bad as in St. Petersburg, and they manage to keep it without any mud or bad vibes—impressive. Though, I still don’t know what happens here when it snows.

Visited the Boijmans Museum. There’s a great Rubens exhibition here

Clothes hanger, inside – storage for bags (somewhere there is my backpack). Mind-blowing

Well, here is modern art from me

Visited the modern art museum in Amsterdam. And the Banksy exhibit, where I accidentally bought tickets. Banksy is wonderful, but brief.

a meter-long chandelier, hanging above my bed. The view from the pillow

My desk is by the window, and during moments of contemplation on what to write on a slide, I look out with interest. For the second day, I have been witnessing some bizarre scenes. At night, some guy’s bike broke down. In the rain. Another guy arrived, hoisted the first one – with the bike – onto the rear rack, and this construction went off into the horizon. I didn’t manage to capture that. And just now, I saw a rollerblader, in the rain, down the center of the road, at a red light. Skiers probably passed by here too.