If you type “fifth president of Russia”, “sixth…”, “seventh…” in Yandex, Putin comes up until the hundred first. The hundredth, too, brings up only Putin. But the hundred first – it switches to Yeltsin. And the hundred second and beyond – back to Putin again.
DID YOU KNOW that in Russia there’s a Russian Skittles Sport Federation with a president, a first vice-president, and a regular vice-president. All in blazers. There’s a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There’s an entire apparatus for the president of skittles sport with three advisors and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. They have a skittles march, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky. There are 18 regional departments and 28 regional federations with their own hierarchy.
The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Interesting, doping in skittles sport… There’s a subsection called “methodological recommendations”. Also, their charter talks about online skittles competitions. Imagine that, online!
In 2024 there was a World Championship in Skittles Sport. Apparently, they are supposed to hold it every three years. And it had a Grand Closing. Apart from Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, in addition to Sergey, Vitaliy, and Konstantin, there was Eugen Schlein, or simply, Zhenya. From the development program for 2026-2029, it turns out that players from Congo, Ghana, Guinea, and Ecuador are actively training now. In the selection criteria for the national team, there is a requirement for “game thinking”. To be admitted, you need to come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of passing the anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.
At the world championship, the disciplines are “classical skittles” and “European skittles” (and separately Finnish ones). The goal in both is to knock the skittles out of the town. European ones appeared in Germany because the emigrants from the USSR were told that it’s not customary here to throw three-kilogram stones and were given lighter ones.
In short, it’s all serious.
Talk about tons of weird and intriguing stuff about Ilya Mechnikov (biologist). His older brother (Ivan) – a prototype for Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Another brother (Lev) – an anarchist, sociologist, fought in Italy alongside Garibaldi. Mechnikov himself made two attempts to depart this life: the 1st time — after the death of his 1st wife (who, suffering from tuberculosis, was carried into the church on a chair). Mechnikov swallowed morphine but survived. The 2nd time — when his 2nd wife contracted typhoid. He deliberately infected himself with relapsing fever. Both survived. By the way, this 2nd was his 15-year-old teacher (when he was 30).
Odessa. The country’s first bacteriological station on Leo Tolstoy street 🙂 An employee there botched a vaccine for anthrax and a whole flock of sheep died. Scandal => M emigrated to Paris.
Paris. Came under the wing of Louis Pasteur (the father of pasteurized milk). P supported M’s theory, gave him a lab in his institute for 28 years. M worked there for free.
M advanced the theory that not everyone who gets infected becomes sick and dies. Basically, it’s all about (of course) the gut microflora. To prove it, he deliberately drank cholera vibrios. Nothing, he got lucky (“lucky as you were”, M thought)
Not satisfied. To prove that it was about the microflora, he made his lab assistant Latapie drink cholera. Hmm, then M gave the culture to a second person, the biologist-watchman J.-B. Joupié. Joupié nearly died. Mechnikov: yay, it works: different microfloras, the microbe works differently (hmm).
Result – Nobel Prize for phagocytosis (cell immunity). And he is also the “father of gerontology”: M proposed that for longevity, one needs to quell “bad bacteria” using probiotics (hmm).
In the end, he still died after the third heart attack. In Paris, his ashes are kept in the library of the Pasteur Institute. Also, in English Wikipedia, he is Élie Metchnikoff. Hard to guess.
In the photo, Mechnikov is persuading Leo Tolstoy that he is not a charlatan.
I’m almost finished with Project Hail Mary. I’ll write separately about my impressions. Today – some notes along the way that somehow didn’t make it into the movie.
Russian engineer Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka from a frighteningly large glass at a meeting, and during the rocket launch, she joyfully screams and downs one shot after another. In her personal baggage for the space flight, 5 liters of vodka in bags are found. Grace directly asks the Russian scientist Dmitry: “Are all Russians crazy?”, to which he smiles and replies: “Yes. It’s the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.” Ilyukhina, planning her own death, asks to be provided with heroin. She wants to die from an overdose to experience “maximum pleasure” before death (while the Chinese Yao pragmatically chooses a gun). During the launch of the ship’s modules (cabin, laboratory, and sleeping compartment), broadcasted from the Flight Control Center in Moscow, Russian cosmonaut Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka and yells at the TV: “Don’t screw up my home, bastards from Roscosmos!” But overall, Russian space technologies are occasionally even praised – for instance, it is claimed that experts from around the world have recognized the Russian “Orlan” spacesuit as the safest and most reliable, so it is used in the mission.
When the main character (Grace) sees the Black American scientist Martin Dubois, he turns to the project director Stratton: “Dubois turns out to be Black! Surprising that you allowed that! Aren’t you afraid he’ll ruin the mission with talk about rap music and basketball?”
When they decide to send Grace to space forcibly, they lock him in a special room at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This room resembles a college dormitory but has a steel door and bars on the windows. The hero quips about this: “Why is there a prison cell at the Baikonur launch complex? I don’t know. Ask the Russians.”
Grace complains about how the work with malfunction reports is organized during the spaceship’s preparation. Instead of sending an email, they bring him stacks of paper documents. Grace: “Because Russians do things a certain way, and it’s easier to work with them than to complain about it.”
Out of scientific curiosity, Grace decides to observe how his alien friend Rocky eats. It turns out, Rocky is a “monostome”, meaning he both eats and excretes through the same opening in his body. Grace watches as a gray lump falls out of the alien’s stomach with a moist sound, after which Rocky tosses pieces of fresh meat into the same opening. Grace concludes: “The subject defecates from the mouth… Yep, that was pretty disgusting.”
The caricature nature of the characters, stereotypes, fantastic coincidences, and “plot contrivances” like deus ex machina are somewhat annoying.
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.
Popov has risen!
An interesting interview with Ilya Remeslo by Sobchak. But if I were Ilya’s political technologist, I would have suggested a much more coherent story: as if, one morning, he woke up, looked back at the past, and decided to fix his karma, rather than drown. Everything I did before that morning – my past life. We can talk about it, but for me, it is a closed page, I am ashamed of it, and if someday they decide to punish me for it – it would be fair, I am ready. If they punish for today’s stance – it would be unjust, but I am ready nonetheless. Either option is better than drowning, hence the boldness. Such a story would have been much more coherent, and it doesn’t matter if it has anything to do with reality.
From realistic explanations, I keep to myself that the guy was genuinely threatened with death, someone close to the powers that be, unclear why, the reasons could be numerous, and from all the options on what to do, this one had the best chances of staying alive because if the threat is realized now, the ratings will drop even more. Well, if he is jailed, it’s almost state protection from threats.
There’s one more thing. Possibly, this individual made it known to the right people that if he is locked up, some very serious dirt will immediately go to the media, but if nothing happens to him, there will be silence.
A female blogger is not a luxury, but a means of transportation
The spokesperson for the Phystech press service explains how to determine cardinal directions in Moscow when navigation systems are down. Find the North Star or use the sun: it rises in the east and sets in the west. Also reminds us how to determine directions using trees. Ziya, do you know how to find cardinal directions using trees? — What’s there to know? Fir tree points north, palm tree points south!
Overall, it seems the Phystech press service is not aware that in Moscow, the annual amplitude of sunrise point movement is almost 90 degrees. That means, it only sometimes (like now, in March) actually coincides with the east. But they do know the word “asterism”. I think most readers will place it somewhere near the word “flatulence”
Yesterday it was plus 27 °C
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 