Last week, Nadezhda Shulga painted an oil painting for the first time in her life and played the piano with one hand for the first time in her life! Nadya, well done!!! She asked me so many times to paint nature, that she eventually went ahead and painted it herself.
Funny, over here an entertainment center is a cabinet
I formulated for myself how I manage to get a lot done (actually, I don’t). It’s not a fact that it will work for others. But still, here are the points:
1. Do what you like. You need to do what your heart is in at the moment. If you force yourself, efficiency drops tenfold.
2. Sports anger as a catalyst. You need to treat failure not as a tragedy, but as a personal insult from the task. Anger is the quickest way to enter a state of hyper-focus, turning “didn’t work out” into “oh really, now watch me”.
3. Seamless switching. As soon as energy in one task has waned or the task is done — leap to the next funnel that beckons right now. It might not always be work-related. For instance, I might play the piano, draw, program, write a book, or do work.
4. Completing. Take a chunk that you can chew and bring it to a plus-minus norm. Don’t drop it midway, while there’s still momentum. Finish and refine – that’s a task for the next “high”.
5. If you can’t break through a wall — don’t smash your head against it. Mark the point of stopping, say “I’ll remember you” and retreat to return with a different tool or a different mood. The main thing is to keep this “open gestalt” in active memory and not tuck it away for too long.
6. An external promise is sacred. If you promised a deadline by Monday, personal comfort (like sleep on Saturday) is sacrificed. This pain teaches you to filter promises in the future. Your word must have physical weight.
7. The plus one principle. Always do a bit more than expected of you. How much more is a question of context, resources, desire, but the delta should be tangible.
8. The principle of useful output. Any product of activity should be in a form that can be delivered. The English word for this is ‘deliverable’. Simply getting to grips with something is not a product. But understanding it and documenting it in Confluence is a product. A letter, an article, code – anything.
9. “You gotta, Fedya, you gotta.” Perform mandatory ceremonies and necessary bureaucracy as an inevitable evil that simply has to be done anyway. Need to pass some stupid training every six months? Allocate an hour for it and suffer through.
10. Have the best tools for the task. If you don’t have them, strive to possess them and learn to use them.
Three more principles, which seem unteachable but are very helpful:
0. Don’t get irritated and don’t irritate others.
1. The ability to instantly separate the important from the junk, and the urgent from the hustle. This is an intuition that only develops with years “in the field”. And total curiosity – the ability to find excitement in any topic. This applies to everything – including who to talk to and when to go to the store.
2. If you’re bored — it means you just haven’t dug deep enough. Interest is a matter of immersion scale and having the right people, books, YouTube videos, etc. Eventually, there simply are no topics that seem boring.
3. Lifetime learning principle. Any project is a legal excuse to become smarter at someone else’s expense. Look for what ignites you in routine and what you’ve long wanted to learn. See a task that would be more elegantly solved with a script in Haskell, a language you’ve never seen before? Then today, we are learning Haskell. True, enthusiasm should not bury the deadline. You need to deliver results, even if the experiment completely fails. Promise foundation first, then decorate with the new skill.
These principles have a downside. For instance, I progress very slowly in playing the piano because good progress requires two other principles that don’t “get along” with my principles above:
1. The “one more lap” principle. If you sat down, and got tired after an hour, you need to spend two more, and then you can get up.
2. The “clenched teeth – go” principle. If you’ve taken on learning something, do it regularly, preferably at the same time, and if necessary, through “I don’t want to”.
Well, now I too can write about Bugonia! A good comedy! Hmm. About the ability to communicate. What else to watch from Lanthimos? He is great!
Now that I have a plotter, I am fully experimenting with ways of algorithmic image stylization. To achieve what is attached, a Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm was used. Essentially, it converts an image into stochastic rasterization – that is, where it’s darker, there are more dots, and then connects the dots with lines so that all points are connected in a single network, the total length of all lines is minimal, and there are no closed loops (meaning it’s precisely a “tree” with branches, not a “web”).
And this is what I do with each of the CMYK channels, then combine the result into a color picture. On this picture, there seem to be no other colors except for these four CMYK ones, but in reality, there is a bit because some smoothing has crept in.
Printing such on a plotter, of course, is difficult, I will be waiting forever, but I am getting the hang of it, I have already printed the first color picture (it turned out so-so. Well, the first pancake is always lumpy. Comments below)
I assembled a plotter from a kit. It’s practically a Lego set – you spill out the parts from the box and then read the manual. It worked right away. I have some ideas about what to do with this thing, I’ll tell you sometime.
My plan for 2026:
– Travel to the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador for a week (summer)
– Finish and release a book on Information Retrieval (also summer, progressing slowly, first couple of chapters are already written. Already spent about 50-100 hours on this, the easy part)
– Release at least one scientific paper, probably on Data Mining (spring). Ideally, submit it somewhere to a journal (challenging). Already spent about 30 hours on this topic, a lot left to do.
– Make a step towards a PhD. Find professors, visit universities, understand the cost and assess my capabilities and resources.
– Continue studying fundamental mathematics and not die (linear algebra, calculus, probability theory, statistics, classical ML). In 2025, I spent about 200-400 hours on this topic.
– Continue studying Deep Learning and reach the “can teach” level. In 2025, I spent about 100-200 hours on this topic.
– Continue studying Data Mining/NLP.
– Update my book on RecSys, releasing version 2.0 with updates and corrections (autumn 2026)
– Make noticeable progress in painting and playing the piano. Specifically, learn Schubert’s serenade (Ständchen, D 889) completely and create at least one canvas that I wouldn’t be ashamed to give as a gift.
This can’t be stopped anymore!
It would be interesting to have a camera somewhere on the end of the phone, so you could film more or less covertly.
Through the Rabbit Hole
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 