Culture – Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev.

Roman Naming Traditions: From Numerical Sons to Maiden Names | June 17 2026, 13:04

In Rome, there was a tradition to give personal names only to the first four sons, and to the rest — numbers: Quintus — “fifth”, Sextus — “sixth”, Septimus — “seventh”, Octavus — “eighth”, Nonus — “ninth”, and Decimus — “tenth”. However, they quickly grew lazy and stopped counting the children literally. For instance, a sole son might be called Quintus simply because it was his grandfather’s name. There’s a more elegant version too. The numerical names might indicate not the order but the month of birth. For example, Sextus might refer to the month of Sextilis (August, the sixth month).

For men (patricians), the structure was strict: Praenomen (personal name), Nomen (clan/family name), and Cognomen (family branch/nickname). For example: Gaius Julius Caesar. In this entire immense civilization, there were about 18 praenomens. The most popular ones were: Gaius, Lucius, Marcus, Publius, Quintus.

If you are a woman in Ancient Rome, you have no name. Period. Women were referred only by the feminine version of their father’s clan name (family name). If the father is named Julius, his daughter is named Julia. If he has a second daughter, she is named Julia Secunda (the Second). The third — Julia Tertia (the Third). The youngest — Julia Minor (the Younger).

P.S. By the way, about the months. Why is September the 7th month, October the 8th, etc.? It turns out the year started on March 1st. January and February were added later. In the very first Roman calendar, which, according to legend, was introduced by the founder of Rome, Romulus, in the 8th century BC, there were only 10 months and 304 days in a year.

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.

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.

Taste and Protest: Unveiling the Symbols at an Iranian Restaurant | May 03 2026, 19:40

A very tasty Iranian restaurant. Perhaps you didn’t know, but there are two flags of Iran. This one – the historical flag, used before the Islamic revolution of 1979, and today its use inside Iran itself is a political crime. The main difference from the official one is the emblem of the lion and the sun. Therefore, when Iranian protesters in Washington hold demonstrations, it’s interesting to see which flags they carry. If there’s four crescents and a sword in the middle, those are protesters from another camp 😉

From Wooden Puppet to Beloved Boy: The Evolution of Pinocchio’s Tale | May 01 2026, 16:52

It turned out that initially Carlo Collodi, who wrote “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” did not intend to turn his hero from a wooden puppet into a real boy. Pinocchio was destined to be hanged by the Cat and the Fox on an oak tree—as a lesson to all children who lie and disobey their elders.

The author was persuaded to continue Pinocchio’s adventures by the editor of the “Children’s Newspaper,” who said that otherwise it would be their last publication. The readers were so outraged by the death of the hero that the editorial office was inundated with letters demanding a continuation.

Eventually, after a few months, the author was forced to “resurrect” the puppet. This is how the Blue Fairy appeared in the story, who saved Pinocchio from the noose, and the grim parable gradually turned into the familiar fairy tale with a happy ending.

When Pinocchio was already hanging on the oak tree and gasping for air, a Beautiful Girl with Azure Hair appeared at the window of a nearby little house. At that moment she is described not as a kind fairy, but rather as a ghost or spirit (she says that everyone in this house died, and she too is waiting for her coffin).

Seeing the puppet dangling from the tree, she took pity and organized a whole rescue team. The fairy clapped her hands three times. A giant Falcon arrived. She ordered him to fly to the Great Oak, gnaw through the rope with his beak, and carefully lower Pinocchio onto the grass. Then she summoned her servant—a poodle named Medoro. He was dressed in festive livery, with a cocked hat and a curly wig. Medoro was sent for Pinocchio in a luxurious carriage drawn by a hundred pairs of white mice. When the puppet was brought to the castle, he was neither alive nor dead. To decide what to do next, the Fairy summoned “luminaries” of medicine. By Pinocchio’s bed came the Crow, the Owl, and the Talking Cricket (the same one that Pinocchio “killed” at the beginning of the book, but he returned as a spirit).

Harsh.

Essentially, the hero owes his happy ending not to the author’s mercy, but to commercial success and public pressure.

Dinner, Dialogues, and Decor: A Cozy Evening at an Uzbek Restaurant | April 26 2026, 21:42

The Art of the Unresolved Finale: Viewer Frustration as a Narrative Tool | April 20 2026, 13:27

We finished watching the series “Pete”. It seems like TV directors do everything to ensure that the last episode offers no answers, resembling just a regular mid-season episode. In many TV shows, the second-to-last or third-to-last episodes answer the questions, while the final one rarely satisfies, always adding a multitude of hooks and new questions, probably serving as an invitation to a next season that may never come. Or it might, but for now the director doesn’t know what it will entail and leaves much unsaid. However, the likely goal is to irritate viewers so that they flock to Reddits and Facebooks to discuss what they’ve seen. A logical end was only seen in the series Chernobyl, it seems.