Category: facebook

May 25 2017, 17:10

Listening to my favorite playlist. Here’s a song. Crimea river. I think, what’s this nonsense. There are no rivers in Crimea. There’s only a canal. Was. Went to look up the lyrics. Turns out it’s not like that at all. The song is pleasant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsalvDqZcFM P.S. Turns out there is a river after all!

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Crimea_River

May 23 2017, 10:00

Came across a news item on Alex Exler’s website about an article on the KP site “Stavropol scientists from the Sheep and Goat Research Institute have developed a Microsoft product analog” (https://www.stav.kp.ru/daily/26678/3701936/, also on Regnum https://regnum.ru/news/innovatio/2274999.html). Decided to dig deeper, especially since this creation was supposed to be presented yesterday. Consider the length of the quote and the credentials of the interviewee. Besides being four, sources say he’s also the head of the institute’s IT laboratory. It turns out he’s the developer. Well okay, now let’s get to the point.

The name – Ivan OS. Based on – Linux.

“It took five years and 40 million rubles to develop the Stavropol analog of Windows. A team of seven scientists worked on the product.” – it turns out, the “scientists” received 95,000 rubles/month. “The name, Belov explained, was chosen deliberately. The programmers want to create a brand recognizable worldwide, hence its name emphasizes that it was made in Russia.”.

Belov: “Firstly, the seven people are just the software developers, let’s not forget about the methodologists, accountants, organizers. Secondly, we are presenting not just our own OS assembly, but a technological platform, one of the components of which is IVAN OS. Thirdly, besides the FGBNU VNIIOK, the main owners of the technological platform are two Russian scientific organizations, LLC NPO ‘Cloud Information Systems’ and LLC NPK ‘Etalon’. Fourthly, the per-person cost estimates are inflated. However, wait for the official presentation. It seems like a strange rehashing of rumors.”

May 19 2017, 23:22

What else to do on a plane. How to study English grammar. While I was sitting at the airport, I was working on a document for work, and I stumbled upon a banner “a business opportunity open for everyone”. Question – where did the “is” go in the middle? Why is it in the active voice? Just found out why. At the same time, I learned some other useful rules. Can be used not only in headlines, but also in meeting follow-ups, for example.

http://www.englishlessonsbrighton.co.uk/8-grammar-rules-writing-newspaper-headlines/

May 19 2017, 20:48

Here’s a niche for those who want to create a useful utility over the weekend.

Every mobile has apps that allow you to photograph a sheet of paper and automatically correct the perspective. There seems to be no such app for Windows or on the web.

There is only one that allows doing it interactively, not automatically. But it’s extremely buggy. There is a plugin for Lightwave, but LW is paid. There’s ImageMagick, which can fix the perspective based on a template, but it uses the command line and you need to specify the trapezoid in coordinates. It would already be useful if you could click this trapezoid once with a mouse. But ideally, it should detect it automatically.

If someone were to create a simple interface for this ImageMagick and then publish it on the web, it would be a useful tool. You won’t make money off it, but a student would learn something ) @[100001539238582:2048:Dmitry Voloshin] to your inspiration box, just in case it comes in handy.

Look, they almost did it: http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/unperspective/index.php

May 19 2017, 19:25

Moreover, I encountered that some operations on the web from a phone are simply impossible to do in 2017. For example, try writing a post in another language on Facebook (there’s a “Write post in another language” at the bottom of the desktop version). Not only is this feature missing in the app and mobile version, but it also does not work at all in desktop emulation. That is, writing in two languages with Chrome on Android is impossible.

Or take Advanced Search on Twitter. I need to search for tweets from Monday to Thursday. And it’s impossible to do that on mobile. Not at all. Well, at least the desktop emulation works here.

May 19 2017, 19:21

While driving to the airport, I talked with the driver about Uber and the development of services in general. He, by the way, is a former Cobol programmer 🙂

I came to three thoughts:

First. The business of providing “traditional” services should consolidate because the bar for service quality and customer expectations for these services will continuously rise, as will the cost of maintaining that standard. For small companies, this starts to become insurmountable, and they merge with larger ones to maintain the infrastructure at the necessary level.

In this case, competition essentially occurs between the major players, while the small ones only operate in niches that are hard to classify as traditional. For example, women’s or social taxi services. Thus, the fate of “Uberization” awaits most traditional businesses.

Along with consolidation, the volume of data grows. And the big data, which was still being buzzed about five to seven years ago, is really working: machine learning in action is already widespread.

A serious downside that I see here is that large entities start using knowledge from small players’ sales for “neighbors” of these small players, and this might backfire on the small players. For instance, a small player introduces a new product, and it sells wildly, like, say, fidget spinners, and the issue becomes how to offer smart procurement services to others while keeping trade secrets. Questionable.

The second thought that came to my mind after endless discussions about machine learning is that it will indeed be increasingly prevalent, but there’s a downside – people will gradually stop understanding how it works. Including developers – they too will stop understanding why the system made a wrong decision. Because historical data trained it wrongly. Fixing this is possible, but then you need to retrain the system with previous data, and that can be very expensive. For example, if your autonomous vehicle suddenly crashes into a tree, perhaps no one will be able to tell why. It so happened that some wrong conditions at the entry of the decision-making system coincided, which operates on an extract from hundreds of terabytes of original data over decades, and taught it wrongly. Now the data processing algorithms have been adjusted not to learn from bad examples, but retraining the model for decision-making is already complex and expensive.

The third thought I have is that in the near future, retail will be automatic. Like playing the stock market. You set a million parameters and go to sleep. The system does everything else. If you’re lazy to set up, you choose the “minimum yield, minimum risks” package and go to sleep. If you want more money – you play with the parameters, sometimes make mistakes, but still go to sleep. Actually, you don’t sleep, instead, you worry and think and think and think. Something like that. Auto pricing, automatic warehouse replenishment, call center outsourcing, etc. – all components are already there.

What do you think?