Author: Rauf Aliev

Absurdist Reactions to Government Promises in Crisis | July 30 2026, 16:20

“Once on TV appeared a deathly pale Finance Minister and declared:

— The financial crisis will not affect us. Because. I am telling you for sure.

The population, knowing the nature of official statements, silently swore and went to stock up on salt, matches, and sugar.

The next day, an utterly bewildered Minister of Trade appeared on TV and said:

— The stocks of bread and basic necessities allow us to proudly state, that there is no threat of hunger or shortages. Here are the figures.

— Oh! – said the population and bought even more flour and cereals.

The Minister of Agriculture, for emphasis, danced on the podium and joyfully announced:

— Unprecedented harvest! Hopes for export! We are reviving! The storerooms are bursting!

— Really now! – the population was horrified and ran to convert their savings into foreign currency.

— Real estate prices will fall! A penthouse for every student! In the near future! – declared the Minister of Construction, unflinchingly.

— What’s happening, huh? – the population wailed and rushed to purchase kerosene, kerosene lamps, wood, and coal.

— A modern army on a contractual basis. As early as tomorrow. And grenades of a new system. The likes of which the world has not yet seen. – stated the Minister of Defense solemnly. – Well, why not? We have plenty of money. Reserves, supplies, and a surplus in general.

— Mom!… the population squeaked and began digging dugouts.

Everything is AWE-SOME! Do you understand? AWE-SOME!! – the President insisted. – We could have built communism today. The only thing stopping us is there’d be nothing left for us to do. So, you can sleep peacefully! It doesn’t get more stable than this! Pensioners are buying caviar by the bucket! I foresee a qualitative leap and bound. And quantitatively – it’s simply a run! Taking seven-league steps towards prosperity and abundance. The Caribbean is getting closer. From here we shall threaten the world. One hundred and thirty tons of roses from each flowerbed. We will even have to reduce dairy production. The cows cannot carry the udders. The population is outraged by the cheapness. South America is asking to join us as a state farm. Hurrah!

— What on earth are you cooking up, you beasts?! – the population screamed and just in case, changed into all their clean clothes…”

Zhvanetsky. Link in comments

The Art of Beauty Marks in Historical European Portraiture | July 28 2026, 06:34

It is interesting that the artist did not hesitate to place a black beauty spot on the temple of the hawthorn seller in this painting. At that time, it was a very typical accessory. They were applied to cover skin defects and quickly became an essential element of makeup. The black color of the beauty spot fabric created a strong contrast, visually emphasizing the aristocratic paleness and whiteness of the face, and also drawing attention to the eyes. In Europe (including Spain, where Lorenzo Tiepolo worked), there was a complex “language of beauty spots”. Depending on where the piece of fabric was attached, it conveyed a specific message to suitors.

But they probably would not have understood piercings and tattoos 🙂

The CIA’s Secret Role in Promoting American Avant-Garde Art | July 28 2026, 05:15

Today I learned that the popularity of American avant-garde worldwide turns out to be the result of a CIA program—at least in part. During the height of the Cold War, starting in 1950, the CIA secretly funded magazines, concerts, and exhibitions throughout Europe through the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” and front organizations (the most famous being the Fairfield Foundation). The idea was simple: to demonstrate that the free West produces bold experimental art, while the USSR produced only state-controlled socialist realism. For example, when London’s Tate Gallery couldn’t afford the “New American Painting” exhibition in 1959, a “generous patron” Julius Fleischman suddenly appeared—though the funds actually came from the intelligence budget.

The most astonishing fact is that the artists themselves had no clue. Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, who came from the left-wing bohemia of the 1930s, despised the government and the era of McCarthyism, and would have considered it insulting to work for the intelligence. The CIA didn’t propose: they didn’t pay the artists or dictate anything, they simply “promoted them in the dark,” paying for the infrastructure of fame through two or three layers of intermediaries. It reached the point of absurdity. While one hand of the government secretly transported their canvases across Europe as a symbol of American freedom, the other—the FBI and conservative congressmen—kept files on the modernists and branded their art as “communist smears.”

Saint of the Cyber Age: The Miraculous Journey of Carlo Acutis | July 27 2026, 08:22

Madrid, at the arrival of San Ginés, a poster about the veneration of the saint programmer.

Carlo was an Italian teenager who played video games, mastered programming (judging by the time – in Perl or PHP), and created a website — a virtual catalog of Eucharistic miracles (miracolieucaristici dot org). He died of leukemia in 2006 and posthumously earned the titles “cyber-apostle” and patron saint of the internet.

The path to sainthood for Carlo Acutis was officially confirmed by the Vatican after recognizing two miracles (whether in quotes or not depends on your perspective): the healing of a Brazilian boy from a severe pancreatic anomaly in 2013 through the touch of Carlo’s shirt, and the second — the incredible recovery of a student from Costa Rica after a fatal brain injury in 2022. Prayers for their salvation were directed specifically to this millennial teenager, which ultimately led to his canonization by the Pope.

The boy has already been dissected for organs, lying in different churches.

So that’s how it goes

Exploring the Quirks of Whisper Large-V3’s Russian Decoding | July 26 2026, 18:49

It’s funny that the Whisper Large-V3 (OpenAI) voice decryption model, when working with Russian, occasionally replaces a random fragment of what it heard with one or several consecutive phrases “The point is that all speeches today speak of the most monstrous disgrace.”

Apparently, it’s also funny that many don’t care about the outcome of the transcription.

At least a thousand examples are found by Yandex and Google

“Odyssey’s Unexpected Ending: A Trio on an Island” | July 23 2026, 16:14

We watched the Odyssey. Really cool. At the end, when Odysseus takes Penelope on the boat and they sail off into the horizon, I tell Nadya – he’s taking her to Calypso. I think it would have been a very good ending. The three of them on a deserted island. Calypso (Charlize Theron) did take care of him for ten years after all, you can’t just forget that. Besides, she is truly nice there.

Automating Disk Analysis with AI: Towards Smarter File Management | July 23 2026, 12:24

I contemplate creating a small program that would scan the disk and analyze all folders and files, peering inside the files only if necessary – primarily focusing on their names, and using LLM to tag and briefly describe entire hierarchies, and more importantly, classify, and save the size of files in the hierarchy. It’s assumed that such a tool runs in the evening and the results are discovered in the morning, because naturally all this is slow. But in the morning, I receive a detailed, structured, relatively small comprehensive report on what needs to be backed up, what can probably be deleted (for instance, a clone of some repository from the public domain), sorted by impact (freeing up space, less clutter, etc.).

Of course, throwing tens of thousands of files at an LLM – is an unreasonable waste of tokens. An agency scheme is assumed – the system takes the top level, makes assumptions, checks them, looks at the time files were modified, checks if there have been changes since the creation of the entire hierarchy and asks the LLM very compactly, setting a percentage of confidence in the judgement about the necessity/unnecessity of any given folder. Then the user can manually check something, or ask to take a closer look at something else.

I wonder, would such a thing be useful to anyone else?

Exploring the Missing Trojans: Homer’s Illusive Episodes | July 21 2026, 18:14

Tomorrow I will go to the Odyssey. Remember the Trojan Horse, the snakes, Laocoön, and “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”? So, it turns out that the most famous episode of the Trojan War isn’t in the “Iliad”—the main poem about this very war, and things with the Odyssey are also tricky. In the Iliad, Homer ends the story earlier: the “Iliad” covers only fifty days of the last year of the siege and ends with the funeral of Hector—there’s no horse, no death of Achilles, nor fall of the city in it. In the “Odyssey,” the horse appears a couple of times but only in passing: the bard Demodocus sings about it at a feast, Menelaus recalls how Helen walked around the horse and mocked the voices of the Greeks hidden inside. That’s it. There is no elaborate scene of assault and fire in Homer’s works at all. And that canonical story—with the spy Sinon, Laocoön strangled by the snakes, and burning Troy—is from the Roman Virgil, the second book of the “Aeneid,” written in the 20s of the 1st century BC, almost seven hundred years after Homer. It is precisely from there that the plot leaked into pop culture.

But Virgil did not invent the horse out of nowhere. Between him and Homer, there was an entire “epic cycle”—a series of poems that covered the entire war from beginning to end: “Cypria” (prehistory: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen), then “Iliad”, then “Aethiopis” (the death of Achilles), then “Little Iliad”—here’s where they finally build the horse,—then “The Sack of Ilium”, where they roll it into the city and the massacre begins, and then “The Returns”, “Odyssey”, and a somewhat odd “Telegony” for dessert. Out of the eight poems of the cycle, only two Homeric ones fully survived. The other six—including both with all the salt about the horse—have disappeared and are known only from a later synopsis-summary and scattered quotations, totaling about a hundred lines. That means we have the middle and epilogue of the story at hand, while the beginning and the climax in the original are lost.

Turns out, we’ve been retelling a scene for centuries, the authentic text of which we don’t have.

P.S. A separate story about whether Homer was blind. And whether there was a Homer. It’s all very complicated 🙂 But that’s a story for another time.