Education – Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev.

Revamping Smartfolio.me: A New Era of Personal Knowledge Workspaces | September 26 2026, 12:51

I’ve updated my smartfolio.me (In short, it’s a personal workspace for knowledge, built around pages that contain other pages, where a child page can reveal a selected snippet in the context of the parent. You write in a full-featured editor—text, formulas, images, embedded PDFs with annotations, saved web pages—and instead of organizing documents into folders, you insert one page inside another, or create a child page as an explanation through LLM of the selected snippet in the context of the parent document. Incoming items accept material from outside, search finds what is left unlinked, and several LLM plugins can parse raw transcription into connected sections, assemble a whole subtree into one document, translate a page without touching its formulas and layout.)

Previously, Smartfolio was a SaaS and stored documents only in Turso—SQLite as a service. Now, in addition to local SQLite and Turso, there are three new storage options: a folder on the disk (for local installation), a GitHub repository, and a folder in Google Drive.

Synchronization has been introduced, and it’s three-way: what A and B have and what they last agreed upon. As a result, “they differ” becomes “this has changed”—without referring to clocks owned by someone else’s machine. Storage pairs are by default bidirectional (a unidirectional mode exists for backups, and the interface writes “only from X to Y”, not drawing an arrow that might be interpreted in reverse); they can be restricted to a page and everything it reaches—including assets identified directly in the content. Conflicts preserve both sides in the form of a conflict copy, rather than merging or discarding them. Pairs are remembered in both storages, so a setup configured on a laptop also appears on the next machine, and the record of consensus lives in exactly one place—if each machine had its own, a regular edit from one side would turn into a conflict.

GitHub and Drive connect easily via oauth; afterwards, the profile shows repositories that the token may write to, or folders in Drive created by this app—selecting an existing one uses it, rather than creating a second one alongside. This is precisely how a second machine connects to already existing notes.

Desktop versions are now available on Electron—for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Smartfolio also works from a mobile browser.

Demo (somewhat outdated, without synchronization) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWSzEsgciaY

For now, everything is by invitation only—both the service and the source code.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWSzEsgciaY

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The Pursuit of Prestige: Questioning Academic Titles in Russia | September 19 2026, 04:18

Mark Solonin shared in his latest video some information and reflections that made one think. His first thought was that a true professional simply signs with his name; non-specialists always accompany the surname with titles like “academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences,” “corresponding member of the International Academy of Informatization,” “senior research scientist of the International Institute for the Study of Global Threats to Universal Security” and that such a long signature is a “red flag.”

To substantiate his thesis, he presents interesting figures and facts. The “Law on Science” of 1996 allowed scientists to create “public academies of sciences” — meaning essentially any association of citizens can call itself an academy and distribute titles. As early as 2013, Kommersant counted more than 80 academies of sciences in the country, of which six were state academies. The rest, more than seventy, are public organizations where memberships are sold or distributed by their own rules.

Among them, the absolute record holder is a former reference office. The “International Academy of Informatization” grew out of the Moscow City Reference Service. Its founders included the leadership of the Moscow City Reference Service, and its first president was its director. In 1990, the “Academy of Informatization of the USSR” was registered as a small enterprise. Today, it proudly announces on its website: more than 19,000 active members. Nineteen thousand academics from one office. The chairman of the Russian Academy of Sciences Commission against Pseudoscience Eduard Kruglyakov wrote that the MAI stamps out specialists in 101 specialties, including astrology, ufology, telepathy, and telekinesis. Bonus — since 1995, the MAI has had consultative status with the UN ECOSOC (don’t laugh, this is the Economic and Social Council at the UN), so now there are also “academicians at the UN.”

The most dangerous is the one that sounds the most solid. The Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (RANS) – by 2003 had about 4000 members. The name is almost indistinguishable from RAS, and it indeed includes real academicians — hence the signature “corresponding member of RANS” works so well on the unprepared reader (for example, “‘We will literally defeat everyone’: a brilliant scientist-prophet predicted the triumph of Russia” — this headline is about Kvasha, a cor.-m. of this RANS). The president of the RAS Yuri Osipov directly asked at a meeting of the Presidium — who preaches torsion fields? — and answered himself: RANS. In 2006, 29-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov became an honorary member of RANS. The president of RANS later confirmed that the title was awarded for saving the lives of servicemen in Chechnya.

There was also the Academy of Security, Defense, and Law Enforcement Issues (2000–2008). According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, it, along with its “National Public Rewards Committee,” established 73 types of awards identical to state ones, introduced academic degrees, its own military uniform, and military ranks. It issued identifications of professor, corresponding member, and academician, externally similar to state ones. Annual budget — about a million dollars. This is the only “academy” that was eventually shut down (December 10, 2008; the Supreme Court liquidated it at the request of the Prosecutor General — not for trading titles, but for imitating state awards). The former president was fined 500 rubles.

In 2013, there were 500 academicians in the RAS. After the reform and the addition of the Medical and Agricultural Academies, their number increased to 941 by 2025 — a growth of 71%. This is not the assessment of “enemies of science”: this is reported by the chief research scientist of the Institute for Science Development Issues of the RAS in the journal “Economics of Science,” particularly noting the election of officials, politicians, and businessmen to academicians, and cases of nepotism.

To defend a thesis, you need publications in “vakovskie” journals. The list today includes more than three thousand such journals. Imagine, in Russia, there are several thousand scientific journals that no one reads 🙂

In general, the thought is quite original — when you see the signature “academician of such-and-such academy, corresponding member of such-and-such, senior research scientist of the international institute of something,” — it’s not a credential, but a red flag. A real professional has a name. And that’s enough.

Unveiling the True Terms of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Will | September 18 2026, 22:26

Earlier today I wrote a post about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and, like everyone else, I referenced her will: it says that if the trustees change the layout, the entire collection goes to Harvard. This statement is quoted in every article, every guidebook, and every podcast about the 1990 heist. Then I got curious: what else is in the actual document? I went looking — and to my surprise, I found that the will is not publicly available. Everyone refers to it, but you can’t find it: not on the museum’s website, not in archives, nor in legal databases. All I found was a fragment on Scribd, where just the pages I needed were missing.

So I just wrote a letter to the museum archive. I sent it at 3:54 pm. By 3:58 pm, I had received a response — with photos of the original: seventeen handwritten pages on lined paper with red margins, red ribbon, wax seal, and the signature “Isabella Stewart Gardner” dated May 9, 1921, plus a typewritten codicil from 1924.

The most interesting part — the famous stipulation about Harvard is actually much more specific than it is recounted. It kicks in if the trustees display something she did not own at her death, or change the “general arrangement” of items on the first, second, and third floors — “except for the kitchen and adjacent bedrooms on the first floor.” Then everything — the land, the building, paintings, statues, trinkets, furniture, books, and a $1.2 million fund — must be sold by Harvard, and not in Boston, but in Paris, with the proceeds going towards either salary increases for professors or scholarships no less than $1,200 each per year. The fourth floor and the attic are not included in this restriction — that’s where the director lived, to whom she bequeathed an apartment rent-free, $5,000 a year, a month of vacation, and up to two servants paid for by the museum.

The will does not grant free admission to everyone named Isabella — some online sources refer to the will, but no, that’s a marketing ploy. Moreover, it states precisely the opposite: the director himself should nearly personally collect admission fees, “as the greatest public good will be achieved by such a fee,” and the museum should be open only on specific days. So the twenty-five dollars for a ticket is literally her will. She also prohibited “extravagant expenditures” on maintenance, with any excess to be given every five years to two Boston hospitals, one for a free bed.

Every year on April 14th, on her birthday, trustees are required to conduct a memorial service in the chapel at the end of the Long Gallery — the museum still does this to this day. The remainder of her estate was divided between the children’s hospital, child and animal protection societies, with the animal protection society receiving money on the condition that they spend $75 a year on a free stall in memory of the horses Dolly, Pluto, and Lady Betty and $35 on a kennel in memory of the dogs Kitty Wink and Patty Boy.

Exploring the Black Box: AI’s Struggle with Novelty Creation | September 14 2026, 20:19

I’ve devised a simple illustration of where current AI still falls short.

Imagine a black box with two knobs sticking out. You move the first one — the second one moves too, but according to its own rules, like with delay, inertia, threshold, however you like. In essence, the box transforms f(t) into f'(t). The question is: what’s inside? It’s necessary not only to devise an efficient mechanism but also to fit it within the box’s dimensions.

Formally, this is almost like programming. Because one can formally describe input-output and come up with an “alphabet” for mechanical components inside. But unlike programming, there’s a lot of nonlinear aspects – the mechanisms are bulky, and one must take into account numerous factors from materials to friction, and importantly, it’s not so simple to test a prototype before creating it. But the main thing is not even this – it’s understanding the problem. The only way to find out what’s inside the box is to put forward a hypothesis and devise a knob movement in which this hypothesis and an adjacent one yield different results. A good experiment here is more important than a good answer. And models are trained on a corpus of solved problems, where mistakes have already been cleaned up, and there nothing trains the ability to choose the next question.

The point is this. It seems that the challenge for AI (we’re talking about LLM; the field is broader)— isn’t the assembly of the known, it handles that increasingly well. That is, with an “alphabet” for describing the task and laws of mechanics, AI can solve the box problem through combinations of the known, rather than through a fundamentally new component. The challenge is inventing something new. Although, to be honest, most human inventions, when analyzed, also turn out to be an assembly from far-flung pieces. Yet, consider the invention of the escapement in clocks, where all the components — a wheel and an oscillating fork, and even the very idea that the oscillating system shouldn’t be driven by a spring, but should itself regulate when the spring is allowed to release a burst of energy, reverses causality in the device, and took centuries to achieve. And the lockstitch in sewing machines. It’s pointless to copy a hand with a needle, instead, it’s necessary to pull a second thread through the loop of the first from the back, and the needle must have the eye at the tip. All this isn’t just assembly from components, it’s changing what is generally considered the task, and that’s why such things are so poorly derived by mere combination, whether by humans or models.

An inventor has feedback from reality and a cost for mistakes, so they learn to test before believing. Within one answer, a model has nothing to pay with for a wrong guess. And besides, if you replace the mechanics with particle physics, everything has to be redone because it all works differently there.

Interestingly, this is not cured by the size of the model, but by the structure of the task. Let the box respond to movements — and the task transitions from textual to experimental. Let’s see who learns to play this game first.

Mapping the Minds of Search & RecSys: A Comprehensive Directory | August 10 2026, 03:56

84 researchers, 40+ laboratories — who’s who in Search & RecSys, all on one page.

https://www.testmysearch.com/who-is-who.html

Google, Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, CMU, UMass, UCSD, and others — for each person links to their website, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, key papers. Plus the h-index and number of citations from Semantic Scholar.

Made it for myself, because it’s more convenient to quickly see who publishes what. Couldn’t find anything ready-made — had to compile it myself. Seems useful, I hope not only to me.

https://www.testmysearch.com/who-is-who.html

Engineering Zen: Mind-Bending Science and History Revealed | July 13 2026, 16:16

Reminding you that I have an Engineering Zen group on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, there have been posts about:

– The British plan to build an aircraft carrier… out of ice. Measuring 600 meters in length — the largest ship in history. Material scientists found an additive that makes ice as strong as concrete. A prototype was actually built — its remnants still lie at the bottom of a Canadian lake.

– The fact that no one really knows why a bicycle doesn’t fall over. For a century and a half, textbooks offered two beautiful explanations — until in 2011 they built a bicycle that disabled both effects. By all laws, it should fall over. Yet, it rides.

– How the military communicates with submarines through the depth of salty water, where radio waves cannot penetrate. The Americans nearly turned 40% of the state of Wisconsin into an antenna, while the Soviet system used the Earth’s crust itself as an antenna. Efficiency — megawatts in, a couple of watts out. And that’s enough for almost the entire globe.

– That very rotor with blades behind glass, which has been explained incorrectly for 150 years. Maxwell was initially pleased — but then they noticed it spins the wrong direction. The correct answer is much trickier, and it specifically requires a “non-ideal” vacuum.

– Why a fridge magnet sticks only on one side, and barely on the other. It turns out, it’s the same trick used to focus beams in particle accelerators. And it has a very non-obvious “flip side.”

– The “Silicon Lottery”: chips from the same production line turn out different, and your processor might just be a flawed model of a higher-end version with blocks disabled. And in the 90s, there was a coprocessor that, upon installation, simply switched off the main processor and worked instead.

– Undersea cables that carry the entire internet: as thick as a garden hose, under 20 kilovolts, amplifying light directly with light — no electricity involved. And why traders are willing to pay for the fact that light in fiber is “too slow.”

– The Hoover Dam, inside which nearly 1000 km of piping is hidden — otherwise, the concrete would have taken 125 years to set and it would have cracked from tension. It was cooled with an on-site ice plant.

– And for dessert — the fact that trolleybuses, electric cars, faxes, drones, video calls, and even humanoid robots are much older than you think. One of the robots walked, talked 700 words, counted with his fingers, and smoked. In 1939. Seems we’re just dusting off the past.

Join us to not miss much more interesting stuff.

“Engineering Zen”, Engineering Zen and on Telegram t.me/engineersdzen

Exploring Engineering Zen: Uncovering the Secrets of Technology and Science | July 02 2026, 21:47

I’m reminding you that I have an Engineering Zen group on Facebook and Telegram. In recent days, there have been posts about:

– Why a fridge magnet sticks only on one side, and barely on the other. It turns out, this is the same trick used to focus beams in particle accelerators. It has a name and a very unobvious “inside out”.

– A skyscraper in New York that could have been toppled by wind — and which was secretly fixed “live,” at night, while during the day offices went about business as usual. It all started with a student doubting the calculations. The story was then classified for almost 20 years.

– The fact that trolleybuses, electric cars, faxes, drones, video calls, and even humanoid robots are much older than you think. One of these robots, by the way, walked, talked about 700 words, counted on fingers, and smoked. In 1939.

– “Kelvin’s Thunderstorm” — dripping water that pumps thousands of volts and strikes with a spark. Completely without a power source. It is assembled on a kitchen table, and the energy comes not from what you might think (and it’s not a perpetual motion machine).

– A fax machine that became commercially successful before the telephone. A two-meter-tall eight-kilogram pendulum with a needle, 1860s. Guess who was the main customer.

– A simple soap film, which instantly “solves” a problem still unsolved by mathematicians in general terms. Without performing a single computation.

– Hoover Dam, inside which nearly 1000 km of pipes are hidden — otherwise, the concrete would have taken 125 years to set and would have cracked. How exactly they cooled it is a separate attraction with an ice plant right on the site.

– Those very same rusty “rusty” iron pieces sticking out in every fashionable square. They rust deliberately, and that is precisely what makes them almost eternal. Of course, they were not designed for beauty.

– Why memory cannot be erased by force of will — and why it’s so easy to inadvertently rewrite it. Also explains why so many people want to go back to the USSR.

– Benford’s Law: the first digit of a random number does not appear haphazardly — a one is at the forefront in almost a third of cases. It is used to catch fraudsters, and is even accepted as evidence in court.

– And for dessert — the world’s best mechanical calculator the size of a can, designed by a Buchenwald concentration camp prisoner. It was this work that saved his life.

Join us to not miss out on many more interesting things. “Engineering Zen”, @engineersdzen

Exploring the Odd and Ingenious with Engineer’s Zen | June 25 2026, 03:38

Just a reminder that I have the Engineering Zen group on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, these topics have been covered:

– The 1956 TV remote control that had no batteries, no electronics, and not a single LED — and it worked perfectly. How? With a small hammer.

– SQLite — a database that exists in a trillion copies literally everywhere (even on Mars). It was developed by three people, originated on a military destroyer, and instead of a Code of Conduct, the developers adhere to a 1500-year-old charter.

– Eel eggs haven’t been seen for 2000 years. Aristotle brooded over this, followed by a 19-year-old Sigmund Freud, who dissected hundreds of eels, found nothing, and frustratedly left biology.

– Obelisks — a new “form of life” discovered in 2024. Not a virus, not a cell, nothing like anything else. And it lives right in your mouth. About one in ten people have it.

– Midjourney — the very company that creates images in Discord — is suddenly building a body scanner that “is better than an MRI”. You have to be scanned underwater. No, it’s not a joke.

– Light from sound. Catch a bubble in ultrasound — and it flashes. Inside, it’s 10,000 degrees for a moment. It’s assembled on a kitchen table, and physicists are still debating exactly how it emits light.

– Why memories can’t be erased by sheer willpower — and why it’s so easy to rewrite them. It also explains why so many people want to go back to the USSR.

– Why you can’t bring water on a plane — an honest engineering breakdown.

– Cicadas that have learned prime numbers to avoid getting eaten. They emerge every 13 or 17 years — and it’s a mathematically verified survival strategy.

– A Japanese mathematician who proved a great hypothesis over 500 pages in his invented language with “Hodge theatres” and “frobenoids”. Half the world believes him, the other half found a flaw. A very beautiful and very sad story.

– And for dessert — the bigger brother of a flying manhole cover in Moscow: a cast iron plate that was launched upwards at a speed of 67 km/s by a nuclear explosion in 1957 — six times faster than escape velocity.

Join us to not miss out on a lot more interesting stuff.

Also on Telegram @engineersdzen

Engineering Zen: A Daily Dose of Science and Creativity | June 19 2026, 03:28

Due to numerous requests, I have created a Facebook group and a Telegram channel “Engineering Zen”, where I can write about all kinds of interesting things related to science and engineering every day, and guests can write too. I’ll find it interesting if we gather at least 50 people. Shall we gather? I have a ton of interesting content, enough for a year for sure.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/4344370099148010

I will also write on Telegram if we gather at least 50 members there. The channel is called @engineersdzen.

I will be happy for the shares and likes. If we don’t gather enough people, I will drop this activity with groups and channels, which I’ve been planning to do for ten years anyway 🙂

Global Epidemic of Myopia: A Comparative Analysis | June 10 2026, 13:38

Did you know that according to statistics up to 90% of Chinese urban adolescents are nearsighted by the time they finish school—while the global average was about 23% in 2000 and rose to approximately 34% by 2020? In other regions, only 1.2% of Nepalese village residents, 4% of South African children, and 12% of American teenagers are nearsighted. Imagine this, according to data from the article, in Seoul 96.5% of 19-year-old boys are nearsighted (though, this figure only covers conscripts from the capital; across all of Korea, the number among 19-year-olds is more modest—about 55–60%). But even so—almost everyone. The best explanation available is the “light and dopamine” hypothesis, which posits that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, inhibiting excessive elongation of the eyeball. Retinal dopamine is produced according to the diurnal cycle, signaling the eye to switch from night vision, based on rod cells, to daytime vision, based on cone cells. Let there be light! The image shows a test for nearsightedness.