Author: Rauf Aliev

The Crucial Difference Between “Honoree” and “Gonorrhea” | August 13 2025, 00:46

There is a big difference between “honoree is coming” and “gonorrhea is coming”

The main thing is not to confuse them

Exploring Muscadines: A Native Grape with a Rich History | August 12 2025, 20:40

At our supermarket, they sell muscadines – a type of grape that is twice the size of regular ones. The green variety of muscadines is called scuppernong. They have thick skin and seeds a few millimeters in size. Muscadines are a native grape variety, known since the 16th century. Typically, muscadines and scuppernongs are used for making wine, but they are also sold fresh.

I hadn’t seen them before, and probably neither have you.

Exploring Must-Have Russian Books for Science and Art Lovers | August 10 2025, 14:01

Can you recommend some interesting books to bring (or order) from Russia to the USA, considering my interests (popular science, primarily local non-translations from English, as I can read the originals in English, and perhaps drawing) and various other intriguing things (see part of my collection)?

The Art of Illusion in Pricing: Dishwasher Capsules and Subscription Models | August 09 2025, 13:06

An interesting marketing tactic: three different types of dishwasher capsules are sold at the same price: good Complete, premium, and premium plus. Identical packaging, identical prices, but of course, a different number of capsules. For example, platinum has 59 capsules, while the plus version has 47. It seems such odd numbers hardly register in the buyer’s mind, but not every buyer fundamentally thinks about whether it’s important for them to save money. However, if you compare the extreme versions, the platinum plus version is simply twice as expensive as the complete version.

Another interesting example – a subscription to LLM (Chatgpt, Gemini) for $200 a month. It would seem, what fool would pay a couple of hundred for something barely better than the basic for $20-30. But it’s a very sensible decision when you have a market of hundreds of millions of users: most of them are organizations. For an organization, $200 a month is not much different from $20 a month, both are negligible for the budget. Well, okay, even multiplying by hundreds and thousands of subscriptions, there are those who place themselves among slightly more premium clients at a small price for them.

Exploring the Intrigue of 657 New Words in the Russian Orthographic Dictionary | August 08 2025, 18:46

657 new words were added to the RAN orthographic dictionary — for instance, “smoothie,” “TikToker,” “powerbank,” and “SVO.” I decided to check out their complete list. Let’s head to the Akademos website and type “2025” in the search.

(Putin’s advisor wrote that “SVO” is correct, but anglicisms are unnecessary. In my opinion, anglicisms are perfectly fine, but with everything else — they truly break the Russian language. Check it out)

Noble-metallic, Bodrich-style and Radimich-style, Byzantinizing, suitable-for-vine-growing, humanizing, icy-frosty, two-strap, Dregovichanka, jacaranda, children-foreign-phoned, “Devo: Virgin Mary Devo” (that’s an entry in the dictionary), fear-of-women, back-of-the-chair, koin, literature-centricity, petty-little-thing (is it describing a woman or a coin?), over-door-woman, Nibelung-esque, nonillion (I guess needed for fining Google), deaeration, Palaiologos and Pantalone, varicolored, petrosphere, to preexist, family-preservation, strongly-fleeing and moderately-fleeing, scrambled.

Interestingly, there is an entry “firmly promised,” written with a space inside.

And there is Sloboda Ukraine there.

There’s offline-messenger! and proxy-list. And torrent-client.

In 2025 “FIFA (International Federation of Association Football)” and “Dictionary of Modern Russian Literary Language” were added to the orthographic dictionary. There’s separately, “Doomsday: Doomsday plane”

There’s taphophilia — a fascination with cemeteries.

And there is philosemitism. As I understand it, it’s the same as Judophilia — manifestations of interest, respect for the Jewish people, their historical significance, and a positive appraisal of the influence of Judaism in history. Where do they even get such words?

Added to the dictionary were west-northwest-er (apparently, a direction slightly west of northwest) and west-southwest-er.

There’s late-developing and later-developing.

If you go on a diet, know that there’s a word for de-fatting. And then there’s a chance that you’ll become an ectomorph — also a word in this dictionary.

There are also drone and pilot-borehole.

Yet among the new words of 2025 there’s “coup d’état”.

Unexpected Repair Success at a Premium Bike Shop | August 07 2025, 02:41

Today, I had a little odyssey trying to find a place to tune up my bike. It’s a few years old, tired, and in need of attention. I visited three shops, each told me it would take at least a week or two and would cost about 200 dollars. Everyone said there were thirty people ahead of me. Eventually, I took a chance and went to the last shop which I initially thought was too premium and expensive to consider at all: their main inventory includes triathlon Cervelo and Factor bikes with five-digit price tags. But here’s the surprise: they took the bike right away, told me to wait for a call today, and if anything serious—a decision from me would be required. In the evening, they called and told me it was all done, and the cost… just 32 dollars! I’m very glad that I did not have to overpay or wait for weeks.

This goes to show that sometimes, to achieve something, you just need to act contrary to standard patterns of behavior.

Unlocking Smartwatches with Unique Heart Rhythms: A Missed Opportunity? | August 06 2025, 16:43

Why has no one made it so that smartwatches only unlock on the wrist of their owner, reading their unique heartbeat or other biometric data? This is in addition to having the owner’s phone nearby.

Officially, you can’t disable this in the settings of an Apple Watch — Apple intentionally made it such that when you put on the watch for the first time each day, it always requires a code, even if the iPhone is nearby. This is due to security policy: the watch may end up on someone else’s wrist, and the phone may just be nearby.

Moreover, every person has unique heart rhythm patterns, which include, for example, slight variations in the intervals between heartbeats, characteristics of the heart signal shape, and how the heart responds to different stresses. These microscopic differences create a unique picture” of heart rhythm that is difficult to fake or replicate. Watches have quite a lot of time, after being worn and before they are needed unlocked, to collect, process, and decide whether to unlock or not.

Navigating Code Generation with AI: Essential Skills for Programmers | August 04 2025, 14:28

I am currently using Gemini extensively for code generation, and I see a skill that programmers need to have to be successful in this field. It’s the ability to quickly read and understand someone else’s code, as well as explain why AI generation needs to be redone and how. For the former, you simply need to know the language very well and read “from the sheet,” because there will be little time to ponder. For the latter, you need to know patterns well and understand where they apply and where they do not. AI will still mess up using patterns inappropriately for a long time.

Moreover, a person will still need to understand “as a whole” 90% of the code generated by AI, and also manage to find time to comprehend each generated line of code. If you relax and miss it, the system may produce even working, but very poorly maintainable code. For instance, there is an unwritten rule that individual files should not contain so much code, and if it grows, you need to refactor, breaking one large into two or three. Sometimes this requires rewriting logic, but this rewriting is always aimed at one task – to simplify maintenance. And AI, while rewriting, also “improves” the code at the same time. And this is quite difficult to prohibit.

In addition, the very concept of LLM implies the limitation of the contextual window. Which gets filled with code very quickly. To create an illusion for the user that everything is working even with a large volume of code, LLMs are able to do preliminary processing, extracting only relevant pieces for processing and setting aside irrelevant ones, so that the relevant ones fit into the actual contextual window. But this process is very unreliable, and once it works, and the second time it turns out that something important was set aside, and as a result, the system did not see the whole picture and generated code, which includes a function very similar to the function set aside, and now we have two almost identical ones.

Besides, currently logic is distributed between the DB and the code. That is, data often controls the code. And data in LLMs simply often do not fit. There is too much of it. In the end, without programmers, current LLM architectures cannot cope. But the requirements for programmers’ qualifications will only increase with LLMs, not decrease. So yes, juniors should be worried, but leads not so much 🙂