Preparing a book for publication on Solr&Lucene. What do you think about publishing such a translation on Amazon? 🙂
The book is about algorithms and under-the-hood engineering. I haven’t seen books from this angle yet, maybe someone will find it interesting.
I read something interesting today. About fractals. If you take any three points that form a triangle, and then a fourth point anywhere, and subsequently throw a dice, the faces of which are assigned to the first three points. Next, you move from the current point towards the point corresponding to the result on the dice and place a new point halfway; this becomes the new current point. After many iterations, the points start to form the Sierpinski triangle – the one shown in the attached picture. Intuitively, you would think the triangle should be fully filled because it involves random movements in three directions from a randomly chosen point, but no. Moreover, it works even if the starting point is inside the future empty triangle (yes, a few points will disrupt the picture, but that’s it). If you start our experiment with five or six points instead of three, different shapes will form – see the attached picture. This graphical method is called the Chaos Game.
By the way, it may seem obvious, but in case you wondered — all the presented figures have zero area.
If you take two triangles and with a probability p move towards random vertices of the first, and with (1-p) towards random vertices of the second, you end up forming a Barnsley fern (picture №2).
I love such things because they seem like magic at first glance 🙂
(It’s a kind of problem from the same class as the synchronization of metronomes)
Friends, I am currently at the opening of Marcia Klioze’s exhibit at the Arts Club Of Washington and I am absolutely thrilled! I am so happy for my wonderful mentor, from whom I have been learning oil painting for two and a half years. Today her solo exhibition is here, and the atmosphere is simply magical.
I am proud to be learning from her invaluable experience and learning to see the world anew. Next Tuesday is another class😉 I’ve wanted to post her works for a long time, and today I finally have the opportunity to share (I asked for permission, so it’s all official)!
Almost all works are for sale, for those who are interested, do drop by
Listening to Sapolsky in the background, he mentioned Jerusalem Syndrome. It’s when a deeply religious American Baptist from the southern USA, having saved money and prepared, arrives in the Holy Land and sees that Jerusalem is just another city: traffic jams, smog, noise, pickpockets, McDonald’s—everything like that. And then—an interesting feature—in all cases, the person tears up sheets, takes off their clothes, and suddenly finds themselves on the streets of Jerusalem, dressed as if in a toga, begins to preach on the streets, calling for a simpler life and all that.
A psychiatric team arrives, takes the person to the hospital for a few days, everything becomes clear, they send him back home, and he never encounters this syndrome again.
Each year in Jerusalem, about up to many dozens of cases are recorded. It’s a recognized syndrome, about which scientific articles are published.
Sapolsky says that if hotels in Jerusalem always had, for example, checkered sheets instead of white ones, which seem to “invite” one to don a toga, it would help prevent the crisis.
But amusingly, there’s a twin brother of this disorder, the Paris Syndrome, which for some reason mainly affects the Japanese. Japanese tourists come to Paris because they are attracted by the culture, language, literature, and history of France, as well as the landmarks of Paris. However, once there, they encounter difficulties such as a language barrier (surprise surprise!), differences in mentality, and disappointment from the reality of Paris not meeting their expectations.
There’s also a milder version called the “Florentine Syndrome.” This often happens during a visit to one of the 50 museums in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance. Suddenly, a visitor is overwhelmed by the depth of feeling the artist has imbued in the artwork. At this point, they acutely perceive all emotions, as if transported into the space of the image. Victims’ reactions vary up to hysteria or attempts to destroy the painting. Despite the syndrome’s relative rarity, guards in Florentine museums are specially trained on how to deal with its victims.
Overall, be careful with syndromes when you’re traveling.
PS. This image was made for me by google. In the second image, a guy in a tie tells a tearful girl 脆培, which seems just a meaningless set of characters, something like fragile culture. But when I asked ChatGPT, it told me it resembles 脱げ (nugu) — undress 🙂 if you ask Google Gemini to redo it, Google gives the same picture, where he’s also shouting 暁は, but at the same time, he has already taken off his shirt. But that’s also unclear what 暁 – it’s dawn. Generally, with Japanese, LLM is bad. I’ll leave the second image in the comments. By the way, there are several differences there, you can play a game to find ten differences. They are amusing
While working on a book, I realized what kind of product I’m missing. It’s an AI diagram generator based on textual descriptions.
The idea is that the master document for the diagram is text. This textual description can be (and should be) quite detailed, so the generated diagram exactly matches the author’s vision. The diagram itself is not edited. That is, it can be edited – moving circles around, but ideally, after making changes, the system should update the text, generating from which will result in what the user adjusted.
The result — the diagram — should correspond as closely as possible to the description. If it does not match the description because, for example, it’s impossible to make a triangle with three obtuse angles, the system should do its best and provide a verbal response about what didn’t work. The user can then modify the task so that the system complies and produces the diagram correctly.
But then we understand that the author might have randomly achieved something that they liked with their flawed text. And if regenerated, it might turn out differently, and not necessarily better. Therefore —
You could ask the system to generate a diagram description from the diagram, which, if inputted back into the diagram generator, would result exactly in what the description was generated from. Yes, this description would be more verbose and complex, but it would more reliably describe the result.
So, from this point, you are no longer working with the diagram. You are working with text. If a diagram is needed — you simply compile the text into a diagram and it turns out as needed. But you don’t even work directly with the text. You work with this diagram-description text through an LLM, asking it to add some block, and the text changes, but changes in a way that everything doesn’t suddenly shift.
The final diagram should be in an object form, from which raster (PNG) or vector (SVG, EPS) images can be created.
It would also be great if such a system could take existing diagrams or diagram templates so that it could borrow styles and existing conventions on how to display what.
So, these are my fantasies. If anyone has ideas on how to implement this — let’s discuss 🙂
I decided a while ago to write a book on recommendation algorithms. With mathematics, code examples, a repository, etc. English, of course.
Accordingly, I am looking for volunteer reviewers who are knowledgeable in the field. Also those who have experience with print-on-demand on Amazon.
There’s already about 200 pages of content. About three months of work left. Working title Recommender Algorithms in 2026: A Practitioner’s Guide. Roughly half of it is still in draft form, with the first 80 pages about 80% complete.
I’ve built a mechanism to publish in HTML and PDF simultaneously. The HTML version is fully functional, with navigation. The navigation block reflects the current section, and as you scroll, it shifts to the one in front of the reader. Clicking on a section, of course, teleports you to what you clicked on. It’s all completely automatic.
I remember being puzzled as a child by who the idiot was that decided to make the radio plug exactly the same as the one for 220 volts. This radio plug was supposed to go into a radio socket.
As a child, I used to disassemble and “improve” almost everything electrical in the house (I hadn’t graduated to electronics yet). Of course, I got shocked many times by the outlet, but to my surprise, the old Soviet phone could also give a shock. When a call came in, the voltage in the line would jump from 12-60 volts to 120 volts 🙂
I also had an interesting experience with Christmas lights. For a younger schoolchild, it was unclear why Christmas lights could shock you since they used the same bulbs that I connected to a flat “Planeta” battery. I had to learn the technicalities 🙂 By the way, those square flat batteries have disappeared; they used to be everywhere.
It turns out USB-C cables are sometimes whole computers inside the odd form factor of a wire. Watching a video where guys from Adam Savage’s dissected an Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable ($130) using a CT scanner, explaining its internals, and comparing it to a similar cable for $12.
The cable connector contains a complex system that includes a full-fledged processor, two power supplies, and many other components. The processor splits data into multiple parallel streams and converts them into differential signals that travel through twisted, intertwined pairs of wires. The system sends two signals simultaneously, but in mirror-opposite directions. This helps protect the signal from interference (from vacuum cleaners, mobile phones, etc.). Indeed, the circuit board inside is nine-layered.
On the internal circuit board, there are interesting serpentine/wavy tracks with sizes in fractions of a millimeter. It turns out, Apple engineers intentionally made them longer to match the overall length with the neighboring longer tracks (because they include turns). This is necessary for the signals to reach the processor absolutely simultaneously, down to the nanosecond.
The cable itself inside is made up of many individually shielded smaller coaxial cables. There are more than a dozen of them.
The cheap cable lacks this smart electronics, no active components inside. It just has connectors and wires.
But the coolest thing – the guys post such scans in the video description as a link to a viewing program. There you can rotate and examine everything on your own. I’ll put it in the comments
We just finished watching Le Nozze di Figaro with Nadezhda in a serialized mode and today we’ll continue with Don Giovanni, also in a serialized mode, because no one has the time. So, both of these operas were written by an American 🙂 I mean the librettos. Turns out, Lorenzo Da Ponte, an Italian librettist, emigrated, naturalized in the U.S., lived here 33 years, taught Italian literature at Columbia University in New York, founded an opera theater in the USA, which became the precursor to the New York Academy of Music and the New York Metropolitan Opera. Really an interesting dude. His real name was Emanuel Conegliano. A Jew by birth, who became a Catholic priest, a friend of Casanova, and a supporter of Rousseau’s ideas. Before moving to the U.S., Da Ponte successfully juggled teaching and a small business, earning not so much from lectures as from owning a brothel for aristocrats which he maintained. In the U.S., he kept a grocery store in New Jersey and tried selling medicines in Pennsylvania. Lorenzo Da Ponte died on August 17, 1838, in humiliating poverty, a few blocks away from the boarded-up building of his theater. His grave in one of the New York cemeteries, which was not marked, eventually got lost. Essentially, the same post-mortem fate befell his friend Mozart.
I constantly see such panels on almost every house in Turkey. Of course, my first thought was that these were solar photovoltaic panels for generating electricity. But the second thought — they are expensive, there shouldn’t be so many of them, plus typically just two panels on a roof seems too few. I started googling.
It turned out, these are solar water heaters, more precisely, flat-plate solar collectors. The system is simple, reliable, and inexpensive — that’s why they are installed on every other house.
The principle of operation: the panels consist of an absorber (usually copper or aluminum plates with a black coating), a transparent cover (low-iron glass for greenhouse effect), and thermal insulation (glass wool or stone wool). A heat-carrying fluid circulates in the tubes — either water or antifreeze (glycol).
Solar rays heat the absorber up to 60-90°C, the heat transfers to the fluid, which by the principle of thermosiphon (natural convection, without a pump) rises to the tank, which is usually nearby. The tank is a thermos of 100-300 liters, with insulation, so the water stays hot for 2-3 days.
This too was a surprise. I actually thought the tanks were just metal and heated up in the sun by themselves. That’s how it was in Baku. It turns out, no, and so they are white here, not black.
In Turkey, with over 2000+ hours of sunshine a year, such a system covers 70-90% of the hot water needs for a home. The efficiency of the collector is 40-60% (depending on the model and angle of installation, optimally 30-45° to the horizon for the latitude of Antalya). For a family, this costs from 500-1500 euros, with a payback period of 3-5 years due to savings on gas/electricity. Electricity is expensive in Turkey. Plus, government subsidies and tax incentives encourage installation.
Probably, there are also electric panels, but I haven’t seen them yet.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 