I’ve been thinking, it’s been a while since there was an exciting video from Boston Dynamics. Remember, each one used to create quite a stir online. I checked their channel. And it looks good. Hundreds of millions in investments from the Pentagon/US Department of Defense suggest that it won’t stop at drones.
Category: AI
Advancing Full-Text Search: Testing and Refining with Multi-User Platforms | July 06 2025, 04:35
I have developed expertise in full-text search testing. Essentially, it’s a turnkey multi-user platform that, given roughly 1000 queries and several search engine configurations, can produce reports with graphs, metrics, and conclusions by morning, showing why configuration A performs better than B, and here’s why. It calculates all those NDCG@k, MAP, precision, recall, and about a dozen other metrics. It uses LLM, but only at the final stage, after all the math is done.
So, here’s my question. I’m looking for someone who has faced the same issue in their project, to understand the demand and the ask.
The problem the system solves is defined as follows: there is a functional search for goods, documents – Solr, Coveo, Elasticsearch, Algolia – it doesn’t matter, and there are hypotheses on how to improve it, but there is also the fear that improving one aspect might break another. Well, my thing helps to see this in numbers and graphs, providing a conclusion with justification, including statistical significance and other metrics.
It also acts as a virtual search assessor. For each search result, it can give a rating, assessing how well each document matches the query. This is a very non-trivial task (especially for large documents), involving chunking, embeddings, LLM evaluation of relevant chunks, etc. Non-trivial, but it works.
It also can analyze search queries and break them into groups based on similarity. For instance, such segmentation might show that users sometimes separate the words forming a brand name with a space, and sometimes not. These different variants would be grouped together.
I would like to discuss this with someone who knows more about this topic than I do, someone who has/had such problems and has somehow solved them.
I currently feel like my product is unique in the market. Actually, it’s not even on the market yet. But I really don’t see anything similar out there. Maybe nobody needs it?
I won’t publically post screenshots yet. The picture is merely for attracting attention.
Please share if there might be relevant people in your network.
A Costly Trip to the National Cryptologic Museum: Enigmas and Espionage | July 02 2025, 14:56
I went to the National Cryptologic Museum yesterday. Indeed, this trip will cost me $1000 because a rock hit the windshield of the new Tesla on the way. Anyway, let’s talk about the museum.
It’s very small. Located on the premises of the National Security Agency. The museum basically consists of three small rooms. One is dedicated to German Enigmas and there exhibits Alan Turing’s Bombe decryption machine, — a device as big as a kitchen in Lobnya, used for systematic decryption of messages encrypted by the Germans using “Enigma.” After the war, Churchill, for reasons of secrecy, ordered all physical traces of the program, including the Bombe machines, to be destroyed, so it’s quite a rare thing. Moreover, there’s only one working Bombe machine in the entire world, somewhere in England, and even that was barely restored. The Enigmas themselves were produced in large numbers, and the museum has two working ones; you can press the buttons and encrypt something.
In the room with computer equipment stands an old Cray, as well as a decommissioned nuclear deterrence hardware server rack taken out of service 15 years ago. It’s not very clear what’s remarkable about this – well yes, old computers, that’s all. The Cray is actually exhibited many places.
Unfortunately, there are no longer exhibits from the Star Gate project — like the blue box shown in the attached photos. The Star Gate project was used by the US government during the Cold War. Many of the psychic spies were based at Fort Meade, tasked with gathering intelligence, detecting enemy agents, and identifying vulnerabilities in the US using “remote viewing.”
Never heard of “remote viewing”? It’s the mental observation of a distant place where a person has never been, in order to gather information about an individual, an object, or specific data. As absurd as it may sound, it’s claimed that the program was quite successful and used until 1995 🙂
Specifically, this little blue machine, PSIFI, is part of that program. For example, it was used to study the impact of consciousness on random processes — like altering the behavior of random number generators through thought, collecting statistics on attempts at psychokinesis — with “hits”, “trials”, “gated hits”, “gated trials” etc., suggesting successful impacts compared to an expected random distribution, biofeedback — the lower part of the panel contains controls and inputs, apparently for electromyography and other biosignals. Overall, a good addition to the UFO research program.
Discover Your Flight Gate Early with This Simple Plane Finder Hack | June 24 2025, 22:08
I just found a lifehack on how to determine your departure gate when it’s not yet displayed on the board. Go to planefinder net, enter your flight, and it shows the tail number of the airplane for that specific departure. Click on the link with the tail number, and it shows where the plane is arriving from—the gate it arrives at is known much earlier than the gate from where the new flight departs. So head to this gate, as it’s almost certain to appear on the board by the time someone gets around to updating it.
Yes, everything will go awry if they change the plane. But it’s very unlikely that the airplane will change, as any replacement has to be the same model otherwise it causes chaos with the already assigned seating, and airplanes are not changed often (although it has happened to me several times). Nonetheless, there’s nothing to do at the airport, and playing the game of guessing the gate is interesting.
From Concept to Prototype: Merging Surveillance and Health Safety | June 20 2025, 16:30
Not bad, thought of it a minute ago, and here’s the prototype already.
Simulated Realities: When Fiction Mirrors Life | May 31 2025, 13:47
Generated people are convinced that everything around them is fake, and that they themselves are made from prompts, yet they do not believe it.
It turned out dystopian.
It would be funny, if we also didn’t believe that we live in a simulation.
Or is it not funny?
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 