Tag: Tech
Exploring the Quirks of Whisper Large-V3’s Russian Decoding | July 26 2026, 18:49
It’s funny that the Whisper Large-V3 (OpenAI) voice decryption model, when working with Russian, occasionally replaces a random fragment of what it heard with one or several consecutive phrases “The point is that all speeches today speak of the most monstrous disgrace.”
Apparently, it’s also funny that many don’t care about the outcome of the transcription.
At least a thousand examples are found by Yandex and Google
Automating Disk Analysis with AI: Towards Smarter File Management | July 23 2026, 12:24
I contemplate creating a small program that would scan the disk and analyze all folders and files, peering inside the files only if necessary – primarily focusing on their names, and using LLM to tag and briefly describe entire hierarchies, and more importantly, classify, and save the size of files in the hierarchy. It’s assumed that such a tool runs in the evening and the results are discovered in the morning, because naturally all this is slow. But in the morning, I receive a detailed, structured, relatively small comprehensive report on what needs to be backed up, what can probably be deleted (for instance, a clone of some repository from the public domain), sorted by impact (freeing up space, less clutter, etc.).
Of course, throwing tens of thousands of files at an LLM – is an unreasonable waste of tokens. An agency scheme is assumed – the system takes the top level, makes assumptions, checks them, looks at the time files were modified, checks if there have been changes since the creation of the entire hierarchy and asks the LLM very compactly, setting a percentage of confidence in the judgement about the necessity/unnecessity of any given folder. Then the user can manually check something, or ask to take a closer look at something else.
I wonder, would such a thing be useful to anyone else?
41 Days of Fitness with Oculus Quest 3: A Game-Changer for Home Workouts | July 21 2026, 01:09
Oculus Quest 3 workouts. Day 41. 40 minutes a day. All systems go! Basically, I highly recommend spending a few hundred dollars on such fitness. It especially helps with switching tasks between projects and weight disappears quickly. Not least because of Oculus I am 10 kg lighter 🙂 In other words, if you work from home, finding 30-40 minutes for several sessions is usually not difficult, and it’s really fun! In the video, I’m passing an 8-minute Advanced level with weights on my arms and torso – 3 kg on the arms, another 10 on the shoulders. Well ok, I do it after three more such levels (off-camera), but I’m already used to it, and still, about 20-25 minutes is enough to be dripping sweat on my shoulder and shirt.
In the video is the game FitXR. There are actually a lot of such games. I just started with this one, and it keeps statistics and all that – vendor lock, basically. There are games that I can’t even properly start – it’s a simulator of a gravity board, the speed of which is determined by the frequency of squats, while you try to stay in lane with the joystick. Quite a dizzying thing, a challenge for the vestibular apparatus. But the main thing is the muscles give up – after a few minutes of very fast squats, you don’t want to play anymore, but people are chopping at it, apparently, need more training.
When we went to Florida, I managed to play between beds – overall, you don’t need much space. But the room at home is large, 6×6 meters, almost no furniture, so you can even play in a level where you need to run around the room and hit virtual buttons hanging in the air. This is augmented reality, through the mask you see quite clearly everything around, and these animated buttons during a very short time allow you to press them (but you first have to quickly find them, then run to them).
Yuka App Reveals Surprising Health Scores: The Uncommon Bread That Scores Perfectly | July 14 2026, 19:18
There’s an app called Yuka, and it shows how healthy food is based on its barcode from 0 to 100. You’ll never guess what scored a 100 out of 100 from the photo. It’s not berries and not salmon. It is – bread.
Ezekiel 4:9. It’s truly not ordinary bread. There’s no flour in it. It’s made entirely of sprouted grains, seeds (like flax, sunflower, and chia) and psyllium as a binding agent. Sprouted Grain Bread. Well, in terms of texture, it’s bread as usual. Speaking of which, the regular white and yellow sandwich bread from the same store scored a 4 out of 100.
How Yuka evaluates products. Three criteria – nutritional value according to the Nutri-score system (60%), presence of additives (30%), organic status (10%). The algorithm adores products high in fiber and protein but severely penalizes for caloric content, saturated fats, sugar, and salt. Salmon, due to fats and high caloric content, scores 78/100. Meanwhile, ready-to-eat French fries score 66/100, and BBQ chips – 4/100.
Revamped Hybrismart: Engineering a Smoother E-Commerce Blog Experience | June 29 2026, 03:45
I completely redesigned and refreshed my hybrismart – an engineering blog about ecommerce. Yes, as you’ve gathered from this introduction, it’s in English. All 200+ articles have been revamped; no more style zoo, the font is easier on the eyes, illustrations are clickable, and there is now in-article navigation. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s enough to go public.
Search will be available. It’s already operational, but I temporarily hid it. Just need to finish it up.
A particular point of pride is the contextual article recommendation system. That is, next to a paragraph about drools, there will be a link to an article about drools explaining why it’s relevant in that context. On desktop, this will appear as a margin note, and on mobile, it will be an inset in the text.
The entire site is static and generated from markdown. Goodbye WordPress, you were very, very bad.
Exploring the Odd and Ingenious with Engineer’s Zen | June 25 2026, 03:38
Just a reminder that I have the Engineering Zen group on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, these topics have been covered:
– The 1956 TV remote control that had no batteries, no electronics, and not a single LED — and it worked perfectly. How? With a small hammer.
– SQLite — a database that exists in a trillion copies literally everywhere (even on Mars). It was developed by three people, originated on a military destroyer, and instead of a Code of Conduct, the developers adhere to a 1500-year-old charter.
– Eel eggs haven’t been seen for 2000 years. Aristotle brooded over this, followed by a 19-year-old Sigmund Freud, who dissected hundreds of eels, found nothing, and frustratedly left biology.
– Obelisks — a new “form of life” discovered in 2024. Not a virus, not a cell, nothing like anything else. And it lives right in your mouth. About one in ten people have it.
– Midjourney — the very company that creates images in Discord — is suddenly building a body scanner that “is better than an MRI”. You have to be scanned underwater. No, it’s not a joke.
– Light from sound. Catch a bubble in ultrasound — and it flashes. Inside, it’s 10,000 degrees for a moment. It’s assembled on a kitchen table, and physicists are still debating exactly how it emits light.
– Why memories can’t be erased by sheer willpower — and why it’s so easy to rewrite them. It also explains why so many people want to go back to the USSR.
– Why you can’t bring water on a plane — an honest engineering breakdown.
– Cicadas that have learned prime numbers to avoid getting eaten. They emerge every 13 or 17 years — and it’s a mathematically verified survival strategy.
– A Japanese mathematician who proved a great hypothesis over 500 pages in his invented language with “Hodge theatres” and “frobenoids”. Half the world believes him, the other half found a flaw. A very beautiful and very sad story.
– And for dessert — the bigger brother of a flying manhole cover in Moscow: a cast iron plate that was launched upwards at a speed of 67 km/s by a nuclear explosion in 1957 — six times faster than escape velocity.
Join us to not miss out on a lot more interesting stuff.
Also on Telegram @engineersdzen
Upgrading to Oculus 3: My Fitness Journey with FitXR | June 22 2026, 13:17
I enjoyed the Oculus 2, upgraded to Oculus 3 yesterday! Father’s day. For the last two weeks, I have only been using FitXR for about four to six ten-minute sets a day, most often in groups of three. If you, like me, have always been too lazy to go to the gym, this is a great thing. Especially convenient is that you can exercise whenever you want to break up the routine between meetings and other work during the day.
I also have a 10kg vest and 1.5kg wrist weights for this device.
Engineering Zen: A Daily Dose of Science and Creativity | June 19 2026, 03:28
Due to numerous requests, I have created a Facebook group and a Telegram channel “Engineering Zen”, where I can write about all kinds of interesting things related to science and engineering every day, and guests can write too. I’ll find it interesting if we gather at least 50 people. Shall we gather? I have a ton of interesting content, enough for a year for sure.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/4344370099148010
I will also write on Telegram if we gather at least 50 members there. The channel is called @engineersdzen.
I will be happy for the shares and likes. If we don’t gather enough people, I will drop this activity with groups and channels, which I’ve been planning to do for ten years anyway 🙂
Mind-Blowing Facts About SQLite: From Naval Beginnings to Mars | June 18 2026, 12:48
Today I learned some mind-blowing and brain-blasting facts about SQLite — the most widely used database in the world (A trillion installations. In every smartphone, browser, vehicle, A350 aircraft, even on Mars). So, it was born on the military destroyer USS Oscar Austin. It’s developed by JUST THREE people. Open source. But. You can’t just walk into this open source – it’s invitation-only and through an affidavit. The company is called Hwaci (“Hipp, Wyrick & Company”). Also involved in music (founder’s wife is a musician). Check out the website. Office — in a residential house in Charlotte. 600+ lines of tests for every line of code. 100% branch coverage and MC/DC. That is, they simulate OS crashes, power outages, I/O errors, and memory shortages. The main test suite is proprietary and closed. Imagine that, open source with paid private tests. Want access — join the consortium for $120,000 a year.
And the strangest thing — the spirit of the project is almost monastic. Instead of a Code of Conduct, they have a Code of Ethics, taken from chapter 4 of the Rule of Saint Benedict (literally 1500-year-old “tools for good deeds”). At the beginning of each source file instead of a legal notice — a blessing: “May you do good and not evil…”.
(They have not yet found a suitable version control system and wrote their own for themselves — Fossil (based on SQLite, of course). And their parser-generator Lemon is also homegrown. Just like Linus with Git.)
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 