Tag: facebook

On a flight from Dubai, I decided to watch a movie. Despite the magnificence of Emirates, their movie selection is so-so, and you can’t watch from your own devices, only with these silly headphones. Well okay, after much thought I chose to watch Bezos. About the path of the main Amazon guy.

Biographical films really need to be done well. The director Hoa Le (who is that anyway?) didn’t quite pull it off. It turned out to be boring, sluggish, chaotic, and superficial, and I turned it off halfway through. Everything was bad there. The acting, the script, the cinematography. The husband comes home and says, “I’ve come up with some nonsense, and it seems like it might work. Quit your good job, and let’s sell the house, and I’ll spend all the money on a startup that’s supposed to take off.” The wife is upset, then a minute later, all is well, like, “okay, let’s do it.” They both quit their jobs and then go to their parents to ask for a lot of money because it turns out they don’t have enough for the startup. Wasn’t that clear before? The parents are upset, a minute later, all is well, here’s the check. Couldn’t it have been the other way around? First to the parents, then sell? And that’s how everything goes there. It’s even unclear how Amazon (or Bezos) eventually agreed to the release of such junk.

The Marriott in Atlanta practices something interesting. You book a hotel with breakfast. Just the standard American fare – scrambled eggs, potatoes, bacon, sausages. Everything is buffet style, except for the drinks: they bring as many as you need, but they do bring them. In the end, you receive a bill where the cost of breakfast ($19) is itemized, there’s an optional line for tipping, and a place for your signature, which is required. In the USA, it is customary to leave a 20% tip unless there are serious reasons not to. As a result, the hotel earns tips on top of what is already quite an expensive breakfast.

By the way, I barely found the hotel. Here in Atlanta, PRIDE WEEK was happening, and everything was scooped up. What wasn’t scooped up was beyond the local beltway, and it seems they charge an extra markup on those.

I predict that by around 2025, there will be a service to which you can feed a song of any length, and it will create a version of the duration you need. Or it changes the style from pop to jazz.

I predict that by no later than 2025—and much ahead of that—an AI assistant will be integrated into all development environments. That is, a programmer will write as they can, then select a fragment and press a button to ‘make it normal’. And it won’t even be necessary to write initially – you just write in the comments what you need and voila, there’s your code. This, in some form, exists now but isn’t integrated.

I predict that somewhere around 2025-2026, illustrations for articles and all advertising on the network will not only be made by AI based on a template, but also be adaptive, for instance, resonating with the theme of the article beside which a banner or illustration is displayed. Essentially, articles will also be largely, and sometimes fully, generated by AI.

I think that there will be AI artists in movies and AI musicians. Architects will receive an AI tool that creates a random project in all details according to the specifications and ideas of the artist.

The search by keywords like today’s Google will also soon die out.

“…First: the world is filled with both good and evil — it has always been and will always be so. Second: the boundaries between good and evil are permeable and blurred. And finally, third: angels can become demons, and demons, although sometimes hard to comprehend, can become angels.”

“The Lucifer Effect. Why Good People Turn Evil” by Philip Zimbardo

reading this little book

“It’s Camel, you have to smoke it”

Not surprisingly

Good coffee is when they don’t ask you what size you want, medium or large. I always remember this when it’s mentioned that software quality requirements are formulated by a customer survey. And there’s no I’m feeling lucky! button there.

Mashenka, happy birthday! I can’t write better than Nadya, so I’m joining in 😉

Today, while riding the metro, I was studying the map. Some station names really stand out in an odd way.

For instance, the station called max catches the eye. It’s spelled with a lowercase letter. In Arabic, there are no uppercase and lowercase letters, but in English there are, and for some reason, it is written exactly as max. And the translation into Arabic is also literally “max” (ماكس). It turns out it’s named that because it’s a sponsored station by the Max Fashion store chain. In Dubai, it seems you can buy a station for yourself. (In our parts in Virginia, you can sponsor a section of a bike trail, but not to “rob caravans” as you might think, rather to oversee its cleanliness and condition)

The same explanation applies to stations like ADCB, ONPREMISE, equiti, and others.