I wondered, does the name Alex sound like “kitty” (le chat) in French? Or is that a stretch? And what about Nastya and Anastasia in the English-speaking world? I might be wrong, but all sorts of unkind and uncultured people might smirk, recalling nasty and anesthesia. Is this far-fetched, or does it really pose problems?
Patricia Piccinini; Ρ. 1965. Australian artist and sculptor. What do you think about her art? For me, she is a good candidate for my #artrauflikes
P.S. And here are some comments about her from YouTube from haters (the first one is a bomb):
Major update on Hybrismart: Saturday Evening Post Archives: Engineering a Smart Search Solution.
The Saturday Evening Post (TSEP) is one of the oldest magazines in the U.S., published every Saturday since 1821. For many decades, it was a voluminous magazine with over 100 pages. Virtually none of its articles can be found through a simple Google search. It was immensely intriguing to index nearly 400,000 pages and to experiment with various technologies, from ML reranking to vector search using OpenAI Embeddings.
The article is technical and should be of interest to programmers and solution architects.
https://hybrismart.com/2024/05/01/saturday-evening-post-search-embeddings-solr-smart-search/
Saturday Evening Post Archives: Engineering a Smart Search Solution
Dearest Nadya β happy birthday! Stay as intelligent, beautiful, athletic, energetic, and vibrant as you have always been and I am sure always will be! What’s with the notebooks? Nadya β a volleyball coach, spending hours daily on the volleyball court and hours at home preparing for training. At home, we call this “drawing little squares.” For Nadya, it’s the little squares first, and then everything else, because a coach cannot come unprepared to the court! The gift from her girls “for when your notebook runs out of pages” touched her deeply π So thoughtful! I tell Nadya β someday you’ll publish a multi-volume series on how to raise superstar volleyball players. Happy birthday!
I really like this illusion. There are no red pixels in the image. Zoom inβthe section where the coke can is contains only black and white, and around it is cyan. Color perception is shaped by consciousness.
Red is the opposite color to green. The black stripes make the brain think that the missing color is formed by the same rules as around the jar, and tonal contrast is replaced by color, thus creating the red color.
It’s hard to understand, but this image illustrates it perfectly!
I found a book by Lewis Carroll in which he describes his impressions from visiting Moscow with Henry Liddon in 1867.
He was most kind in answering our questions, and in giving us many hints on seeing Petersburg, pronouncing the language, etc., but gave us rather dismal prospects of what is before us, as he says very few speak any language but Russian. As an example of the extraordinary long words which the language contains, he spelt for me the following:
Π·Π°ΡΠΈΡΠ°ΡΡΠΈΡ ΡΡ
which, written in English letters, is Zashtsheeshtshayoushtsheekhsya. This alarming word is the genitive plural of a participle, and means “of persons defending themselves.”
This picturesque canvas, displayed in the artists’ exhibition hall as part of the “Youth of Petersburg” exhibit, is titled “Door to the Future” and closely resembles a well-known meme.
The cow is the most interested in the future, judging by the painting. And it looks like something is burning behind the door. It’s also unclear whether he is opening or closing the door here. More likely the latter. The guy by the door is resembles Putin as of 2005. In the lower left corner, an artist whose name history has not preserved was covering something up, either in haste or by order from above.
Artist James Swanson hails from a small town in Wisconsin. Life seemed to guide him towards a career as a forester until he realized that painting trees was much more convenient than sitting on them. His latest project was spurred by the passing of his dog, Amber. In her memory, James decided to initiate a series of paintings featuring dogs, one per day. Eventually, he painted so many pictures of wet dogs that it probably just became uneconomical to paint anything but dogs. By the way, he also has a painting featuring giraffes.
Published a detailed article on migrating from Facebook to WordPress with simultaneous translation from Russian to English + migrating an archive of several thousand posts, also with their translation.
While driving home in the evening, I came up with an interesting project, and by two o’clock in the morning, I had finished it. Now I have an English-language blog β RaufAliev.com. All the posts on it are automatically translated from Facebook, which, as I wrote a couple of days ago, are also published on beinginamerica.com.
Translating the archive takes time (and slightly eats $$$), and so far by 2 a.m. translations are done for the last two years, but the process is still ongoing, and I hope soon all 5000 will be translated.
Some technical details: translation via ChatGPT-4. All content is exported into a file, one line per post. Each post starts with a prefix like this (2024-04-22T07:59:18.json). Then, this file is divided into fragments of no more than X kilobytes each (I chose 10). It is then sent to the OpenAI API with the prompt “Translate to English preserving my style and keeping the HTML markup. Each line starts with a json filename in parentheses. Your output should be formatted in the same way – each line should be started with the same, but the text should be translated to English. Below is the text”. The result is recorded in a translation file. Then, I run the same script that created my Facebook posts on beinginamerica, but now I publish it on another WordPress site, and I use the translated content instead of the original.
In addition, I have connected the LinkPreview API service to pull an image and title from the link if it is in the post, making it look nicer. This post on raufaliev.com should pull up Hi, I’m Rauf Aliev.
A separate script transfers my new posts. This one, for example, itβs not in the archive which I made a week ago. The JSON format of Facebook’s latest posts is slightly different, but more or less the same. We extract the latest posts, check if there are any images, if yes, download them, check if they were not uploaded on beinginamerica, if not, upload them, then check if the post has been previously published on beinginamerica, if not, publish it, then translate it into English using OpenAI, then beautify the links using the LinkPreview API, then check if it was not yet uploaded on the English site. If not – upload it.
