Category: Tech

Harnessing GPU Power Beyond Machine Learning: A Data Processing Experiment | December 13 2025, 01:16

Torturing my supercomputer. Illustration that the GPU is not just for machine learning and some complex math.

My script takes a thick English dictionary (Webster) and multiplies it by 30, creating a list of 12 million words. Then, the algorithm looks through all 12 million words and replaces all the vowels with asterisks using regex. To add more load, a “word length” column is added, and then we take words longer than 10 letters and find the most frequent (top 5).

So, in Python this is

df[‘masked’] = df[‘text’].str.replace(r'[aeiou]’, ‘*’, regex=True)

df[‘len’] = df[‘masked’].str.len()

res = df[df[‘len’] > 10][‘masked’].value_counts().head(5)

and this code is executed first through the main processor, then through a GPU.

The main processor (I have the top-tier Intel i9 285k) completes this task in 24 seconds, while the Nvidia RTX 5090 does it in 0.51 seconds. That’s a 46 times difference!

[Pandas CPU] Top Patterns:

masked

s*r w. sc*tt. 23280

s*r t. br*wn*. 23220

j*r. t*yl*r. 16140

bl*ckst*n*. 10860

b***. & fl. 10830

Name: count, dtype: int64

[Pandas CPU] Computation Time: 23.5596 sec.

Transferring data to GPU…

Transfer complete in 1.16s

— Running Benchmark: cuDF GPU —

[cuDF GPU] Top Patterns:

masked

s*r w. sc*tt. 23280

s*r t. br*wn*. 23220

j*r. t*yl*r. 16140

bl*ckst*n*. 10860

b***. & fl. 10830

Name: count, dtype: int64

[cuDF GPU] Computation Time: 0.5108 sec.

TOTAL SPEEDUP: 46.12x

Misadventures in AWS: Misusing aws-nuke for Configuration Exports | December 12 2025, 16:29

Just for laughs. I asked Gemini how to export the entire AWS configuration for local analysis, and they recommended using the aws-nuke command for permanently deleting everything, but if you add a dry-run flag, you’ll get the configuration… and someone actually follows such advice 🙂 and then we wonder

Two Weeks on Linux: From Mac to ArchLinux+KDE Bliss | December 12 2025, 16:24

Two weeks on Linux, wildly satisfied. After a Mac. I specifically have a setup of ArchLinux+KDE/Plasma 6.5. Everything here is customizable. For instance, I made a program from scratch in half an hour (no lie, thirty minutes) using Gemini that translates selected text to English or corrects errors if the selected text is already in English when ScrollLock is pressed. There seems to be an app for every situation in life, at least in my field. Everything flies (even though this is an Intel i9 285K/64Gb). I just enter a folder that contains 470,000 files, and it opens instantaneously. I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere else. I launch IntelliJ Idea, and there is practically no delay between clicking the icon and the editor being ready with the loaded project. All devices connected perfectly, unlike with the Mac, for which there are simply no drivers for my HP LaserJet 1018 and I need to perform tricks.

Now I occasionally switch to a Mac, and it drives me crazy that the hotkeys are different. Of course, they can be reconfigured for Mac, and probably I will do that. Muscle memory builds up, and switching quickly doesn’t work out. I miss iMessage a bit – I’m used to writing and responding to messages from the computer. Apple iMusic works, through a browser.

Overall, the impression is very good so far.

Comparing US and Russian Higher Education Systems through Credit Hours | December 10 2025, 17:35

Regarding education in the USA and the USSR/Russia. My degree in the USA is evaluated as a Master of Science degree in Computer Science. My younger colleagues say that a Russian university degree is rarely recognized as a Master’s these days, and often hardly qualifies even for a Bachelor’s. I decided to look at the numbers and was very surprised.

To earn a bachelor’s degree in the USA, you need to spend about 2000 hours in classrooms/laboratories. In terms of credits, this equals 120 credit hours. One credit usually equals 1 hour (50 minutes) of lectures per week for a semester (15 weeks). Laboratory work has a different coefficient (often 2–3 hours in the lab count as 1 credit), so the actual number of classroom hours is slightly higher (closer to 2000+).

So, my diploma states that I spent 7908 hours in classes over five years. That’s four times more than the typical student in the USA. Based on the numbers, it turns out that I spent about 2000 hours on math, physics, and English alone over five years, with a total of 42 subjects.

A colleague shared that in his Russian bachelor’s diploma there are 3140 academic hours, which is twice as less. And can you share how many hours are in your diploma?

Year of graduation, university, specialty, and the number of hours? I’m curious about the range of variation.

Nostalgia and Innovation: The Story of Starchat.ru | December 09 2025, 23:41

2003. We had a chat, my creation, Starchat.ru, where people constantly hung out and communicated with each other. It had a Java applet! Nobody even remembers what that is nowadays, probably. Initially, some programmer I found on the internet wrote this thing, who then disappeared, and I took over the support.

Just for laughs, I made a bot that you could chat with by simply sending it a private message. It was always online, and not everyone realized that it was a bot. When the robot received a message, it searched through massive chat logs for messages that contained the most words from the query and had some response. A response is the next message directed at the user by someone (like “Vasya: oh just go you know where!” is a response to Vasya’s message). In the chat interface, you had to click on a message and then reply to it. In the presence of several options (and there were always several options, given the traffic of chatters), a random one was chosen.

It turned out to be a robot that very amusingly answers questions. If you ask it what its name is, it always replies with different names but appropriately, with emojis and suffixes, often swearing. Also, the bot always gave adequate responses to standard questions like “where do you live” or “how old are you.” Since there was a huge history, and they talked about everything in general, it was hard to find a question to which the system did not give an interesting/correct/funny answer.

So, the bot had an interesting side effect. If you start swearing at it offensively, it begins to swear back even more offensively. And generally, it often reacts inadequately to attacks and reproaches. Simply because in real conversations, a polite question is answered politely, and a rude one — of course, rudely. The audience had a lot of fun with this bot.

It was especially interesting to read the bot’s logs afterward. People there didn’t understand that it was a robot. They asked it questions, quarreled and made up with it. It was fun)

Living Without Autopilot: A Surprising Reunion with My Tesla’s Upgraded Skills | December 09 2025, 19:30

Lived several months without autopilot in the car, now I turned it on, and during this time the car has learned not only to drive to a location across the city and through backroads, but also to find parking at the destination and park itself. But when I told it to come home, specifically pointing it to where it gets fed (charger), it stopped in front of the neighbor’s house. Makes you think;) but overall, very cool, Tesla

Alien Encounter and Parking Woes: A Bizarre Day | December 07 2025, 01:21

Such a “facehugger” jumped out of an egg nearby and attached itself to the windshield of my RAV4, just like that to implant its embryo, but the little car held its ground.

It all started when I went outside with my keys and realized that the car was not in the yard. Damn! I had used it to get to the metro, and Nadia brought me back from the concert in Washington in her Tesla. Well, okay, I’ll call an Uber.

The Uber took me to the metro parking lot, where the local parking attendants had found my car overnight and slapped a yellow card on it. Removing this thing takes five minutes; you just need to pay the fine by scanning the QR code. Luckily, the fine was divine, just 75 dollars accumulated. If I had remembered later, it would have been more.

Theremin Tones at Splean’s Concert: A Musical Blend | December 05 2025, 23:29

Thereminvox at a Splin concert yesterday. It turns out that this seemingly borrowed word doesn’t exist in English. Instead, the name of this musical instrument is theremin because the generic family name of Lev Theremin had French roots and was spelled as Theremin. The thereminvox was nicely incorporated into the arrangement, although it was played quite simply by a musician from Rostov, and the thereminvox itself had only one antenna.

Among the musicians, Meshcheryakov, the drummer, really stole the show. The most melancholic was the guitarist, Vadim Sergeyev. He just stared motionlessly into the crowd, almost immovable, but performed his part very precisely – evidently, professionalism can’t be diluted.

In-Flight French: Building a Language App on the Fly | December 01 2025, 15:45

By the way, yesterday morning, while waiting at the gate for my flight to Miami, I quickly wrote a French language learning app using Gemini based on an idea I sketched out to a friend while driving to the airport, and then used this app during the flight.

The idea is that in an unfamiliar foreign language text, the user first marks unknown words and then sees their translations — but without the original text, and then returns to the text itself — but no longer seeing the translations. It’s as if the “dictionary was in the next room.” The hypothesis is that this method helps better memorize than when the translation is shown immediately upon clicking on a word, and when no effort is needed.

I am pleased that creating the app from scratch to the finished version took only about 35-40 minutes, and then I used it for some time during the flight, without the internet. Since all translations of all words/phrases were already made in advance.

I just deployed it on Render. It’s also nice that demonstrating the code in action was free and took another 10 minutes.

https://readandlearn.onrender.com/