Category: Business

Mind-Blowing Facts About SQLite: From Naval Beginnings to Mars | June 18 2026, 12:48

Today I learned some mind-blowing and brain-blasting facts about SQLite — the most widely used database in the world (A trillion installations. In every smartphone, browser, vehicle, A350 aircraft, even on Mars). So, it was born on the military destroyer USS Oscar Austin. It’s developed by JUST THREE people. Open source. But. You can’t just walk into this open source – it’s invitation-only and through an affidavit. The company is called Hwaci (“Hipp, Wyrick & Company”). Also involved in music (founder’s wife is a musician). Check out the website. Office — in a residential house in Charlotte. 600+ lines of tests for every line of code. 100% branch coverage and MC/DC. That is, they simulate OS crashes, power outages, I/O errors, and memory shortages. The main test suite is proprietary and closed. Imagine that, open source with paid private tests. Want access — join the consortium for $120,000 a year.

And the strangest thing — the spirit of the project is almost monastic. Instead of a Code of Conduct, they have a Code of Ethics, taken from chapter 4 of the Rule of Saint Benedict (literally 1500-year-old “tools for good deeds”). At the beginning of each source file instead of a legal notice — a blessing: “May you do good and not evil…”.

(They have not yet found a suitable version control system and wrote their own for themselves — Fossil (based on SQLite, of course). And their parser-generator Lemon is also homegrown. Just like Linus with Git.)

AI Revolutionizing Decision-Making in Sports and Business | June 14 2026, 02:06

Today, I pondered how AI is changing age-old, even centuries-old concepts about how people should make decisions in various situations, especially in sports and probably in business. It’s far more interesting than just automation. It’s more about fixing bugs in how people have long considered something to be correct and true.

For example, in the game of “Go,” it was believed for decades that invading the corner (3-3 point) was crude and premature. AI then proved otherwise: early capture of the corner is efficient, and chasing after “beautiful” shapes loses to pragmatic control over the center. Or consider the famous 37th move by AlphaGo in the match against Lee Sedol, which was very strange: people did not play that move because they thought it was “playing into empty space.” It was first taken for an AI mistake, but then recognized as brilliant (there are plenty of analyses on YT). In esports, OpenAI Five demonstrated that aggressive early buyback of fallen heroes in “Dota,” which people considered a waste of gold, works.

Pure mathematics almost erased the mid-range shot from the NBA: it has an accuracy of about 40-42% and yields ~0.8 points per attempt, while a three-point shot with even 35% accuracy brings 1.05 points per attempt, and clubs have restructured for pure profit. Well, this is not AI, but mathematics and statistics. The under-basket shot (lay-up/dunk) turned out to be statistically the most effective.

In soccer, there’s the xG – expected goals metric; AI debunked shots from 35 meters and from outside the penalty area as ineffective (chance of scoring ~5% and 20% respectively) and ultimately teams patiently bring the ball into the penalty area, where the xG of the shot increases to 15-40%. It turns out, DeepMind had a project with Liverpool, a system advising coaches on corners – TacticAI. Expert assessors in 90% of cases preferred TacticAI’s recommendations over the tactical setups used in practice.

So, interestingly, if this continues, will a team or athlete using more powerful AI have an advantage due to more successful methods than a team that does not have such knowledge? Will AI game methods be so complex that they can’t be “stolen” to another team through outside observation – just like in the case with Go?

The Evolution of Telegrams: A Luxury Legal Service in the USA | June 07 2026, 15:04

WHOA, in the US, telegrams haven’t yet been blocked, and they have transformed into an insanely expensive elite legal service, monopolized by American Telegram and iTelegram (both successors of Western Union). An urgent cable costs $34.95 base plus $0.79 per word. Additionally, they officially charge a $20.00 surcharge for home delivery, $25.00 for sending on a weekend, and up to $200.00 if you dictate the text to a live operator. Even sending a regular e-mail through their service will set you back $14.95.

The main source of income is the emergency cancellation of commercial contracts under the federal “3-day rule.” By law, contracts are terminated the second a telegram is sent. Companies are required to recognize the timestamp of American Telegram, authorized by the FCC, which provides ironclad protection in court. For 100% legal force, the service cunningly imposes on clients a delivery report and an archive copy — at $12.95 for each checkbox.

Their rates still include astonishing rules: “a word” is considered any group of characters up to 7 signs (more than that counts as two words), and a fee of $10.00 is automatically imposed for text in any language other than English. Special “War Zone” rates for messages to soldiers still apply ($20.00 base + $0.89 per word) and international cablegrams to sea vessels are sent strictly at the “risk and peril of the sender” with no guarantee of response.

Imagine, to save money, entire code books were published in the early 20th century that replaced complex thoughts with a combination of letters that looked like a word (link in the comments). POTUS and SCOTUS are from there.

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.

Navigating Price Adjustment Policies at Major Retailers | May 27 2026, 21:53

I found out that if you bought a jacket or a TV (for instance, at Target, Best Buy, or Costco), and a week later that item went on sale, you can come back with your receipt within 14–30 days. This is an official policy of almost all major Western retailers, it’s a standard of customer service and is called Price Adjustment. However, a receipt is often necessary. Most stores suspend this policy during the Black Friday season, Cyber Monday, and special holiday promotions.

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.

Sky-High Prices at the CIA-Adjacent Gas Station | April 11 2026, 21:16

We have one gas station near the CIA that simply sets gas prices 40 percent higher than anywhere else. Just an ordinary shabby station that follows the principle of “if it works, don’t fix it.”

From MS-DOS to Modern CAD: My Journey with Bazis Soft | March 06 2026, 17:43

My first job as a programmer, with an office in Kolomna and for money. It was 1993, or maybe even a year earlier. 10th-11th grade of school. And this company still exists, and the guys I worked with are still there! Natalya Bakulina, Pavel Bunakov, Nikolai Kaskevich. Imagine that. Moreover, they started back in 1986, that is, 40 years ago already! I can hardly remember other commercial companies of such age in Russia. When I came to work there, there was MS DOS, they wrote in Turbo Pascal, but they had started many years before me on the SM-1420 computer, though back then, the company was not entirely commercial. At the time of my arrival, their system was a competitor of AutoCAD in the market, locally also competing with “Kompas”. I made an installer from 5.25″ and 3.5″ disks – to capture the spirit of the era. Later they switched to Delphi and Windows. After that, they narrowed down their focus, transitioning from CAD for engineering to CAD for furniture, where they still hold very strong positions.