Category: art

Rediscovering Pyotr Boborykin: The Prolific 19th Century Wordsmith | June 13 2026, 16:47

I find it astonishing that an unknown to me Pyotr Boborykin wrote heaps in the 19th century, introduced words like “intelligentsia” and “nonsense-maker” into the language. Considered the most prolific writer of the 19th century. Almost no one knows him besides a few philologists. And yet, the guy was a star in his time.

Boborykin was deeply concerned that he would remain in the history of literature as a “secondary” author, so he wrote furiously. He authored about 20 large novels and countless smaller works. 12 volumes, 350 pages each. Essentially, he was the Darya Dontsova of his era. He has a novel “Vasiliy Terkin” which you might have heard of, but not his; you’re likely thinking of the poem by Tvardovsky by the same name, who knew nothing about the novel at all, these were different Terkins.

For instance, finding the novel “Doctor Tsybulka” online is very challenging; there’s only one PDF in the form of a reprint with pre-revolutionary orthography.

Freeports: Tax Havens for the Wealthy’s Art and Wine | May 30 2026, 14:15

Freeports are tax-free storage facilities that wealthy people use to store their investments in art, wine, and artifacts. The Geneva Freeport stores more artworks (both in quantity and value) than the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In 2013, the freeport contained about 1.2 million artworks. In addition to paintings and gold bars, it stores about three million bottles of wine. Freeports are closed to the general public and have been repeatedly used to store stolen paintings and cultural valuables.

They are not exactly free, or rather, not free at all. The only “free” thing you get is the right to store, buy, and sell anything within a certain territory without paying taxes… the goods, while within its territory, are considered “in transit,” that’s all. But this only lasts until you export the goods from there. At that point, you will have to pay taxes to the treasury of the country into which you are importing the item or money.

I learned about such a model from a recent video by Varlamov-Chichvarkin about wines, googled it, and it turns out that while wine is a minor thing, it’s much more significant with art.

Script Evolution: Creating Multi-Dimensional Word Art | May 27 2026, 21:12

I created a script that generates inscriptions readable as three different words from the left, right, and top. Overall, this is a development of what I had in my previous post – there it was only left-right. One script generates triplets of words from a dictionary, which technically can be done. Another creates a 3D model that can be thrown onto a printer (might do that today), and the third does a visualization of this model – see video

Scripting Letter-Matched Phrase Translations | May 27 2026, 18:28

Made a script that creates stuff like this. You can translate different phrases into each other, as long as the number of letters matches. Now thinking about printing it on a 3D printer, it’s all ready

Exploring Algorithmic Image Processing for Large Format Printing | May 24 2026, 22:40

I’m playing with algorithmic image processing. Images only look interesting when printed in a large format – because all these fine lines merge when scaled to a phone screen. I’ll post a close-up in the comments.

It works like this: an image is given as input, and it is divided into squares of different sizes. Each square represents one number: how dark it is. The darker it is, the more lines are drawn inside. The lines are not straight – they are Bezier splines. They smoothly transition from one square to another because the points at the boundaries are shared. What results is not a grid, but a single continuous thread. Color – the image is split into CMYK channels (like in printing). Each channel is processed separately: its own grid, its own lines. Then the layers are superimposed on each other – and from three or four black-and-white plates, a colored picture emerges.

The image doesn’t look blocky because the splines smoothly transition from one square to another, but there is a problem: dividing the image into 10×10 squares essentially reduces the resolution tenfold. To correct this, several passes are made with different square sizes and shifted grids. The first pass uses large cells, the second is finer and shifted 10 pixels to the right, the third is even finer and shifted diagonally.

The entire process is controlled by a JSON config – separate parameters for each channel, specific settings for each pass within a channel. On output – SVG, which can be scaled to the size of a wall without loss of quality, and PNG, in which CMYK layers are superimposed with transparency.

Mastering Cross-Posting: From Facebook Frustrations to Dual Blogging Excellence | May 23 2026, 14:28

I have perfected the cross-posting from Facebook to my two blog sites [which almost no one visits] – beinginamerica.com and raufaliev.com. When a new post is published on Facebook, a mechanism is triggered to translate the post into English, process attached images, generate descriptions for them, create a title based on the text of the post and descriptions of the images, generate tags from the same basis, record the post in turso db – this is a cloud database, free up to certain limits, create embeddings via openai, record in qdrant cloud – this is also a cloud database, but vector-based, and finally, upload images to wordpress via API, and publish the post in English and Russian via API.

All would be well, but of all the APIs, the silliest one is Facebook’s. Firstly, for pages like mine, transitioned to New Experience, it’s almost impossible to use most of this API. Well, it’s possible, but you have to spend a long time proving to Facebook that you really need it, by showing startup documents, demonstrating the application, etc. Obviously, they are reluctant to deal with something that takes content out of their system. In addition, the token that gives access to the latest messages is relatively short-lived (possibly a few weeks), and it needs to be obtained anew through a browser only. So, any automation requires regular attention, otherwise it breaks.

If you mess up and don’t offload the latest posts through this Facebook Graph API in time, they just disappear from the list of recent ones and that’s it, no more API access to them. The only way is to request an archive download from Facebook. This download is also rather silly – it requires a lot of transformations and removing unnecessary stuff. For example, in the file containing posts, which I process, for some reason there are links that I sent in comments without accompanying text. And the comments are in a separate file!

To assign tags, I had to solve a separate challenge. Here’s the thing: there are about 10,000 posts over all time. That’s a big chunk, and you can’t build tags from it because it doesn’t fit into the contextual window of the LLM. But you need to. So, I did this: a script takes random posts from the 10,000 in such a volume that their total size is just below the specified limit in tokens, and at the end of this block, it adds the prompt “generate the most common tags for me, 30 pieces” (I simplify the prompt used). In the end, I ran this 10 times and got 10 sets of tags with 30 pieces each, generated for different slices of the database. That made 300 tags, some of which are complete duplicates, while others are synonyms and closely related in meaning. All this is fed into the LLM, and we get a list of tags and a hierarchy of tags. Now we have a limited set of tags that reflect the 10,000 posts as closely as possible. Turns out, that in almost 20 years on Facebook, my breakdown is as follows:

Tag Posts

==================================================

#Russia 3412

#Thoughts 3146

#Tech 3105

#Culture 2765

#Hobbies 2726

#AI 1603

#Science 1367

#Software 1358

#Travel 1298

#Learning 1138

#Society 1050

#Nature 958

#Education 915

#Business 902

#Art 894

#Programming 889

#Humor 840

#History 807

#Gadgets 750

#Moscow 713

#USA 614

#Cinema 567

#Webdev 493

#Music 476

#Sports 473

#Mindset 443

#Auto 400

#Books 386

…

and so on. This list includes both tags from the limited list and tags that the LLM appointed to content simply because it didn’t find anything suitable in the limited one.

Tags from the limited list became categories on the site. The rest of the tags + these just became regular wordpress tags.

As for image search. I had two ideas on how to do it. The first – OpenCLIP. It’s pretty straightforward but requires hosting the model somewhere. Easy on my machine, but inconvenient to start it each time, plus I planned to move the migrator to a cheap server on Amazon. It’s also okay to calculate in cloud models, but you have to pay a bit, which is yet another dependency. But the main thing – it works quite well without it. I generate descriptions for images using OpenAI, which is used for translating into English anyway, and then create embeddings using a large model. So far, all search tests are a great success. Especially when there’s text on the image, and it’s a big question whether OpenCLIP would have interpreted it successfully.

In the end:

1) wordpress raufaliev.com – free

2) wordpress beinginamerica.com – free

3) turso db where all posts are stored – free

4) qdrant cloud where embeddings are stored – free

5) openai for translation and image descriptions – not free, but inexpensive (cost $30 for post processing over a year).

I attach two screenshots – how the search by images works, and by texts, as well as the migrator dashboard.