Category: AI

Interactive Text Enhancer: A Tool for Embedding Clarifications | February 12 2026, 16:11

I whipped up this thing in just an hour. Do you think anyone besides me needs it?

Here’s the idea. Take any text – a Wikipedia article, for example. Highlight any segment, say something unclear. The LLM gives us an explanation, and instantly inserts a box right in the text which you can click to open the explanation. In this explanation, there might be something unclear too. We highlight it with the mouse from this explanation, and a box appears there too. This continues until everything is clear. All the boxes remain in the text, so you can always return to them. So, if the idea was unclear to me, maybe it will be to others, and then a ready link with explanations will come in very handy. The result can be shared with colleagues.

For explanations, not just the fragment is used, but also the context. For example, otherwise, the highlighted word Terrier would yield text about a dog breed, not about the search system.

Chris Pratt’s Race Against AI in “Mercy”: A Cinematic Journey | February 10 2026, 16:24

We went to see the movie Mercy with Chris Pratt yesterday. Bekmambetov! His “screenlife” format has finally been expanded into a $50 million blockbuster and stuffed into IMAX. The guy really did well. First, he made six Yolki movies, and then, bam – he broke out and even started to produce something decent. (We were alone in the theater in super comfy motorized chairs. Empty halls — that’s pretty much the norm for the last many years. I don’t know how cinemas even break even. Even the bar was closed, it only works on weekends when more than two people show up to a hall)

So, the plot. The near future. The justice system is maximally optimized: instead of jurors and years of appeals — an impartial AI. The main character (Chris Pratt) is accused of brutally murdering his own wife. The evidence against him is significant, and society demands blood.

He is placed in a high-tech chair and given 90 minutes. This window” for defense — the time in which he must convince the algorithm of his innocence. If after an hour and a half the guilt probability” scale doesn’t drop below a critical threshold — he will be executed right there. Everything happens in real time, the movie runs for 90 minutes.

In the era of neural networks, this seems very timely. Screenlife here is ideal: we see the evidence and the world through the system’s eyes via cameras and browsers. Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson on screen — always a plus.

However, what causes doubt is the attempt to crossbreed a hedgehog with a snake. Screenlife is good for its chamber feel, but here they sell us IMAX 3D, explosions, and chases, although 95% of the time the hero just sits in a chair.

Classic cinema for streaming. Not bad. On the couch with pizza on a Friday night — it’ll be great, there’s a solid detective story. Your brain might explode from the overload of details. Big question whether it’s worth paying for an IMAX ticket to watch Pratt watching a monitor… Who knows. There are some action scenes here and there, and they’re pretty good, but only occasionally.

Overall, detective fans should like it. From the plot, it’s clear they won’t fry the guy in the chair at the end of the movie, the question is how he’ll manage to wriggle out of it.

Exploring Algorithmic Stylization in Plotter Art: A CMYK Fractal Journey | February 01 2026, 04:18

Now that I have a plotter, I am fully experimenting with ways of algorithmic image stylization. To achieve what is attached, a Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm was used. Essentially, it converts an image into stochastic rasterization – that is, where it’s darker, there are more dots, and then connects the dots with lines so that all points are connected in a single network, the total length of all lines is minimal, and there are no closed loops (meaning it’s precisely a “tree” with branches, not a “web”).

And this is what I do with each of the CMYK channels, then combine the result into a color picture. On this picture, there seem to be no other colors except for these four CMYK ones, but in reality, there is a bit because some smoothing has crept in.

Printing such on a plotter, of course, is difficult, I will be waiting forever, but I am getting the hang of it, I have already printed the first color picture (it turned out so-so. Well, the first pancake is always lumpy. Comments below)

Navigating the Confusion of Ergative Verbs in English | January 27 2026, 00:52

In English, ergative verbs cause me significant cognitive confusion. These are verbs that can be used in both directions: written, people change can be translated as “people change” and “people change themselves”.

For example, on the screenshot right now “illustrator will install next”. Somehow not will be installed next.

Or the sentence “she photographs well” is understood as “she is photogenic”.

“The book sold 1mln copies”, obviously not about the book’s ability to sell.

Tesla Ends Lifetime Autopilot: Subscription Models Rise | January 24 2026, 19:27

Tesla has stopped selling the lifetime autopilot option for $8,000, leaving only a subscription for $100 a month. I never understood people who pay these $80,000 instead of sticking with the subscription, because the subscription only equals these $8,000 after 7.5 years (considering 3% inflation), when probably it’s time to switch to a new car anyway.

But it’s interesting how much Tesla has increased the attractiveness of cars with low mileage, which have FSD, but are sold significantly below the MSRP due to being used. In fact, if you’re buying a car and seriously intend to pay for FSD, purchasing a used one could save you thousands of dollars in ownership costs.

Spam Tactics: Money for Forms and the Illusion of Payouts | January 20 2026, 01:30

Spam in the mailbox. The letter says here’s some money, if you fill out a three-minute online form on the internet you’ll receive twice as much back through a digital gift card;) technology, darn it

Navigating the Future: Embracing Earth’s Magnetic Field as a GPS Alternative | January 10 2026, 17:41

I learned today that there is and is actively used a technology for navigation using the Earth’s magnetic field. It is used as a replacement or an extension of GPS.

For example, there is the Scandinavian ferry Express 5 of Bornholmslinjen, which insures against GPS problems (which do happen) by using MagNav navigation. Unlike GPS, the Earth’s magnetic field cannot be jammed or spoofed—it simply exists. The ferry follows the same route, and generally, navigation could even be achieved through household fishing sonars.

But there are a few startups that use this technology for indoor navigation, where GPS signals cannot reach. It’s claimed that the navigation accuracy is within 1 meter. That’s more interesting.

GiPStech, Oriient, Mapsted.

The basis of this technology is a process called magnetic fingerprinting. Engineers or mapping robots walk through a building with a smartphone, recording unique distortions of the magnetic field at every point. These distortions are created by the steel frame of the building, rebar in the walls, and large electrical equipment. A database is formed where each coordinate (x, y, z) corresponds to its unique magnetic field vector (intensity, inclination, deviation).

The collected data is uploaded to the cloud platform of the provider company. There, they undergo noise cleaning and are “stitched” together with the digital floor plan. When a user walks through a shopping center, their smartphone reads data from the built-in magnetometer in real-time. Special software (SDK) compares the current readings with those stored in the database. For accuracy to be within 1–2 meters, the system relies not only on magnets. It uses sensor fusion—combining data from the magnetic field with inertial sensors (accelerometer counts steps, gyroscope determines turns) and sometimes Wi-Fi/Bluetooth signals for rough localization.

This technology is certainly being actively implemented for drones. The main technical difficulty there is dealing with their own interference and considering that the magnetic field changes, requiring constant map updates. Electrics, engines create strong magnetic fields, which “drown out” the natural background of the Earth. However, various filtering algorithms (including neural networks) are used, which in real-time “subtract” motor interference from the overall sensor readings. From what I understand, at high altitudes (kilometers), the magnetic field is more “smooth”, therefore the accuracy is lower (about 1–5 km). But if several drones fly together and exchange signals, overall they can provide very good accuracy each. Additionally, a group of drones can measure the gradient (rate of change) of the magnetic field in space, tying location not to absolute values, but to relative ones. Essentially, using a group of drones turns the navigation system from a set of individual receivers into a distributed phased array antenna, capable of filtering global interferences and working with much weaker useful signals. Considering that small drones capable of staying airborne for long periods can be released into the air by the hundreds (and cost pennies), this is a quite promising area for military.

There’s an interesting startup, Zerokey. They release QUANTUM RTLS 2.0. This device provides spatial accuracy to 1.5mm. It’s used in production, for example. Their video shows a “watch” on a worker’s hand that monitors the correctness of assembling something on a table. Here, the principle is ultrasonic, and it’s understandable that these “watches” are paired with stationary sensors and further multilateration.

How Gemini Transformed Low-Resolution Previews into High-Quality PDFs | January 03 2026, 14:18

How unexpectedly useful Gemini turned out to be in a simple task – to create a high-quality PDF from a low-resolution preview. Nano Banana Pro was used, meaning, the output was raster, not vector. Look at the difference. Very often it is impossible to even make out the text, so from time out it turned into time dute;-). But overall, not bad.

Exploring ASML’s Advanced Chip-Making Equipment with Veritasium | January 02 2026, 00:47

Veritasium released a very cool report yesterday from ASML about the equipment used to print chips for your little phones, cameras, and laptops.

For those who aren’t familiar with the process. First, a monocrystal is grown from ultra-pure silicon and cut into thin wafers, then multiple layers of thin dielectrics, conductors, and semiconductors are repeatedly applied to the wafer surface, each time shaping the necessary areas using photolithography, etching, and ion doping, eventually creating billions of transistors and connecting metallic paths; finally, the wafer is tested, cut into individual crystals, and packaged into casings, making them into finished microchips.

This process had a limitation – the width of the paths and the distance to the next one are limited by the wavelength of the light used, and reducing it is difficult because there’s nothing to focus such a beam with – lenses simply absorb/reflect everything. In EUV lithography (extreme ultraviolet), the wavelength is 13.5 nm. This is virtually soft X-ray radiation.

The video explains details about the ASML machine costing 400 million dollars. Instead of refracting lenses, highly complex systems of reflecting mirrors are used. These mirrors are the smoothest surfaces ever created by humanity. If the mirror of this machine were enlarged to the size of the Earth, the largest bump on it would not be thicker than a playing card. To enable the mirrors to reflect X-rays, up to 76 alternating layers of tungsten and carbon, each less than a nanometer thick, are applied. All this is done by Zeiss. In addition, this mirror has a controlled curvature—it is constantly adjusted by robots with precision up to picoradians. The precision of the mirror control is so high that if a laser were mounted on it, directed at the Moon, the system could choose on which exact side of a 10-cent coin lying on the moon’s surface to hit with the beam.

But. We don’t have a “light bulb” that emits light in the EUV range.

To generate this light, a laser “shoots” at a droplet of molten tin the size of a white blood cell, traveling at 250 km/h. The first pulse flattens the droplet into a disc, the second and third turn this “disc” into plasma – and all this occurs within just 20 microseconds. When hit by the laser, the droplet heats up to 220,000 Kelvin — approximately 40 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This plasma emits that very necessary light. And it does so 50,000 times a second. They say it’s been brought up to 100,000. Imagine, at a hundred thousand laser shots per second, it never misses a single one. All this happens in a deep vacuum. To clean the mirrors from tin particles, the chamber is constantly blown with hydrogen at a speed of 360 km/h — faster than a Category 5 hurricane. This process is described by the same formula (Taylor-von Neumann) that describes a nuclear explosion or supernova explosion.

The machine layers the chip with an error margin of no more than five atoms, while the matrix swings back and forth with an overload of 20G.

A single High-NA machine is transported in 250 containers on 25 trucks and seven Boeing 747 aircraft.

Link to the video – in the comments. Or search on YouTube on the channel veritasium.