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Human Behavior Under Isolation: Lessons from the SPHINX Experiment | May 10 2026, 18:01

In the book Project Hail Mary, Stratt tells Grace that in the USSR there was supposedly an experiment where people were locked up for several months to see what would happen, and that the people almost killed each other, leading to the experiment being halted. That wasn’t the case, but I googled and found there was another experiment – SPHINX in 1999.

There were several groups. In the first, there were four Russians and during the New Year celebrations with alcohol, they beat each other up (10 minutes, blood, they had to be pulled apart). Another group had three guys and a girl (Judith Lapier) and the mission ended because during the New Year’s celebrations, driven by excitement, Judith was attempted to be kissed twice, leading to the mission being terminated.

As VICE reports, the dialogue was “We should try kissing, I haven’t smoked for six months. Then we can kiss after the mission and compare. Let’s experiment now.”

The team included doctors with degrees (Lukyanuk, Karashkin, Murashov) and Haider Hobikhozhin, who essentially was a randomly included technician with secondary education, taking the place of the Japanese man to the right in the photo and who was first in the second photo. Who beat up or kissed whom is now somewhat forgotten.

Vadim Gushchin, a coordinator from IMBP, after the scandal stated that the fight was “friendly,” and that Lapier “ruined the mission, the atmosphere, by refusing to be kissed.”

At the Canadian Space Agency, Lapier was told that such behavior is normal for Russians and that public complaints would be considered taboo in the culture of the host country.

Navigating Simple English in “Project Hail Mary” | May 10 2026, 15:30

I’ve read about a quarter of Project Hail Mary so far. The English is very simple, easy to read, captivating; the movie so far follows the book closely, but still, it makes reading quite interesting. However, I generally find it hard to read fiction because I keep getting distracted to google stuff. I reached the phrase “..I used the bathroom (or “head” I guess, because I was on the ship)…” and it got me thinking, it’s interesting to learn that the toilet is called differently on a ship not just in Russian. And why “head”? Turns out that “galley” in Danish and German is “head”. Interestingly, galleys are also found on airplanes, and historically, galleys were used only by sailors; officers did not use them.

The text is very childish, and understandably so – the main character is a physics teacher at a school after all. All these motherfluffer and dang it, gosh darn it, fudge, holy moly, for cripes’ sake instead of for Christ’s sake, there’s even bull-puckey instead of bullshit. “To go wee” is how they say “to pee” in the book. I recall, the day before yesterday we entered a mattress store, and the consultant, while discussing the topic “if one of you goes to the toilet, the other won’t even notice that the first one got up” – well, because the mattresses are so soft – actively used the verb “to pee”. So what? 🙂

Update: when the physics teacher encounters an alien ship on page 120, the chapter ends with holy fucking shit! That’s what all the rest was leading to;)

Occasionally, there are quite funny expressions that can even be used in life 🙂 For instance, the main character asks, “Who pooped in your Rice Krispies?” which is the idiom “to poop in someone’s cereal” – “who messed up your meal”.

In conclusion, if you’re choosing your first book to read in English – this one is at the top of my list. Even something seemingly simple like “Harry Potter” is more sophisticated, in my opinion. Here, there’s a lot of dialogue, school level but almost slang-free vocabulary, and a pretty interesting plot. Plus, it’s real science fiction, where the author educates the reader about the scientific method, how the world works, etc., all from the viewpoint of the hero, a physics teacher, who shares various facts and thoughts on how physics works, relating it to the plot in his interactions with other characters or thoughts to himself (rather than directly to the reader). It’s middle school level so far, but maybe it’ll get more complex later on.

Exploring Automated Documentation of Large Excel Datasets | May 06 2026, 22:28

I wonder if there exists an agent that takes an Excel table significantly larger than the context window and begins to document its essence. Here are several tabs. Here on tab 5, there is a table with a million rows and five columns. The columns are as follows. We take random data from the table, looks like there are numbers, and there – surnames. We assume that there are numbers everywhere – we write a code that checks this assumption and at the same time calculates min/max and a set of unique values. So, few values, only five. We record it. Now we check the surnames. Yes, these are just strings, new sampling showed that they are indeed surnames. Here’s a formula. We see where it points. And so on. And this column – unclear purpose. We look at the data – these are some numbers from 0 to 1. We measure the average and the spread. We ask the user – maybe they’ll provide some comments. They did. It turned out to be a KPI issued to this user from an external system. We record it. And so on. Documentation emerges. Later, when there is documentation, one can request to perform some operations with all this, since the LLM now more or less understands the purpose of the data and their connection, and can build some hypotheses on detecting outliers and verifying them.

The Crucial Role of Data Quality Oversight in Development Projects | May 06 2026, 16:07

Almost every development project features a dedicated functional testing automation team, yet surprisingly, a similar emphasis on Data Quality is rarely found. Regardless of whether data comes from external integrations, users, or is generated by the system itself, it often remains without proper control simply because no one seems to consider it important, and later they struggle with the consequences – they accumulate like a snowball. The longer such issues persist, the harder they are to resolve, eventually leading to a situation where people just resign themselves to the “irreparable” state of the database. It is much better to identify these problems at the moment they arise, while the technical debt has not yet become insurmountable, rather than later figuring out how to prevent them from causing everything to crash;

In essence, there needs to be a constant “supervisor” over all types of databases used by the system (relational, NoSQL, search indexes, or graph databases) — essentially, this is a layer of data quality checking over processes. Of course, there must be clear rules – specifically what to check and which flags to use to mark specific anomalies.

There must be a responsible party for the process (a human, not AI), who will integrate these reports into the development and support workflows. Many data integrity issues cannot just be resolved through an interface — they require the engineering team to develop scripts for mass correction and data cleansing.

Incidentally, this also transitions into the realm of anomaly detection (outlier detection). Machine learning and LLMs for identifying subtle “bad” patterns that traditional rule-based systems might miss.

What do you think about this? Are similar mechanisms implemented in your processes?

Disappointed by Project Hail Mary: A Missed Opportunity for Smart Sci-Fi | May 04 2026, 16:40

We went to see Project Hail Mary yesterday. Honestly, neither Nada nor I liked it at all. Maybe we’ve just grown out of the age group that likes such movies. Comic book style. The alien, in my opinion, appeared on a budget. It feels like it’s at the level of the early 2000s – when you could have made exactly the same thing. Remember the movie Arrival, where they tried to come up with something unusual? Really, was this stone monstrosity worth 200M? The whole plot is full of cliches and banalities. In one minute, they made it so that the human and the alien began to understand each other perfectly via some program that a science teacher created in a day. As if the astronaut and a piece of rock just start chatting like buddies… 5 kilometers of iron chain the thickness of an index finger is about 10 tons of metal… did they have that much on the ship?

The directors became successful in the realm of Lego movies and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, along with a couple of comedy series and 21 Jump Street. I was expecting a movie in the spirit of Interstellar or The Martian, smart adult sci-fi that is not afraid of scientific details, and instead I got a children’s fairy tale with an ugly alien.

I googled it, and it turns out that a ton of people are thrilled with it and it’s making a lot of money.. Probably, people are nostalgic for such amidst post-irony, satires, various narratives, Lanthimos, and “Battle after Battle”. As children, everyone watched “Flight of the Navigator” and “Short Circuit”, so adults are nostalgizing over simple goodness. Perhaps it’s just a family movie for watching with the kids. Then it might be okay.

okay, going back to watching the second season of Succession. It’s considerably better.