Tag: Thoughts

The Uncertain Future of Automation and Employment Disparities | December 21 2025, 15:27

Everyone is waiting for a cyberpunk future where each cafe table is served by an android. But it seems that it will never happen. The automation of the service sector is stagnating and will continue to do so for one simple reason: maintaining a human is becoming cheaper than servicing an industrial robot.

Food and clothing are rapidly depreciating. Production volumes are such that feeding and clothing a “bag of skin” today costs pennies. Now compare this with the cost of developing, software, and maintenance of a complex robot waiter or cleaner. A human is a self-regulating system that fuels and updates itself. And if worn out, easily replaced. Pure economy!

In the “First World,” the motivation to labor hard will disappear. Why go to a hard, boring job if basic needs are met with minimal effort, and everything else is done by others who really need to? People in developed countries will work only where there is thrill and pleasure. Eventually, we will face a shortage of hands where it is “not cool,” but there won’t be robots there either – too expensive.

Poor countries will be stuck in the past. Their populations are growing like yeast. Choosing a job there is a luxury available only to a few. An excess of labor makes work almost free.

I think the world is facing a harsh imbalance. Developed countries will likely permanently close their borders to avoid diluting their comfort, and all industries that are still difficult or expensive to automate will simply move to poor regions. Perhaps, developed countries will become less likely to conflict with one another, as there will be too many resources to make every resident happy.

But it will be harder with poor countries. Why invent a complex robot if you can relocate a factory where thousands are ready to work for food, which becomes cheaper every year? This has long been happening and will most likely continue for a long time.

Conventional programmers in the USA won’t be replaced by AI, but by programmers from Southeast Asia and South America. Several layers of AI for quality control and one manager approving AI conclusions and automatic layoffs and hiring will oversee them. And those programmers who remain in developed countries will focus more on orchestration than on coding. This role requires even more intelligence, and only one in ten current individuals will be capable. Only, the reason for such a crisis will not be AI.

Also, I think that the borders of the future world may close in one direction. It will become increasingly difficult to enter developed countries from developing and poor ones, but the opposite will be facilitated by authorities. Africa is growing so fast that it will surely become a problem if people there are not already prepared for life beyond their villages.

The future is not about the uprising of machines. It’s when some work for pleasure, and others because they are cheaper than electricity and gears.

Do you agree, or am I exaggerating too much?

Decoding Dog Signals: What Does the Ironing Board Mean? | December 17 2025, 01:55

Help decode the signal being sent into the universe by a dog. The same gesture towards the refrigerator means wants treats, to the door – open it (outside or inside), to the knee – pet me, to the cat – a complex indecipherable set of emotions. Question – what could it mean towards an ironing board?

I have tried everything. Gave food. Poured water. Took for walks. Opened the backyard. Played with a ball with him. Definitely petted him. Only thing that worked was leaving the room. But then when you come back – he returns to playing at the foot of the ironing board. You turn around – he looks and waits for something.

Apparently, he concluded that to get everything at once, he needs to do it with an ironing board

Preserving the Essence of Soviet Animation | December 13 2025, 15:05

In Soviet times, there was a great school of animation that led the world for many decades. If you search on YouTube for “Vovka in the Land of Far Far Away”, it almost exclusively shows restorations 🤮, and at the same time, it shows the same disgusting restorations of heaps of other cartoons, all made in the same style (vectorization, black outlines). If you go to Wikipedia, it will display a screenshot from the restoration, not from the original 1965 cartoon. The original can be found, for example, by searching “vovka in the land of far far away madina gazieva”, but searching “vovka in the land of far far away soyuzmultfilm 1965” shows nothing at all.

They really broke the internet.

P.S. By the way, “two of a kind, fulfilling wishes,” and “good enough” resonate very much with today’s ChatGPT 😉

Stages of Understanding Scientific Papers | December 10 2025, 19:38

As I periodically read scientific papers on my topic, I will try to articulate the levels of understanding the truth.

Level 0: “Read Later Folder” Downloaded the PDF, the title sounds genius, the abstract seems like the solution to all my problems. The file is forever buried in the ~/Downloads/Papers/ToRead folder.

Level 1: “Sumerian Cuneiform” Don’t understand anything at all. Random symbols, the Greek alphabet is over. “Orthogonal extrapolation of cognitive entropy within a quasi-stationary discourse inevitably induces a bifurcation of transcendental synergism.” Such materials really lower self-esteem. Most often from this level, you either fall back to zero, or gradually move to the second level.

Level 2: “Illusion of Competence” The Abstract is clear, the Introduction reads like a good detective story. But as soon as the main section starts, the text turns into a pumpkin. I can’t paraphrase it in my own words, only in general phrases: “Well, they trained a neural net… kind of.”

Level 3: “Formulas where needed and where not” The Abstract is clear, the first half of the article is also okay (architecture, pictures). But then comes formula (4), where “magic” happens. I take the authors’ word for it that equation (3) leads to (4) because, of course, I won’t check it. Beyond that — sheer horror and belief in a miracle.

Level 4: “Goldfish Effect” While reading — everything is crystal clear. The logic is solid, conclusions are obvious, the authors are smart. I close the tab, someone asks me, “What was the article about?” — and I freeze. My mind goes blank. If you take away the paper, I can’t reproduce even the idea because there essentially isn’t an idea, there is a process.

Level 5: “Armchair Expert” Everything’s clear, I can retell the essence over a beer. I know that Input transforms into Output, but the “black box” inside is still black. Give me a computer, I wouldn’t be able to reproduce even the skeleton because, it turns out, the article lacks half of the important stuff.

Level 6: “Critic-Practitioner” Everything is clear, I can recount, understand how to reproduce (even without their code). I see where they cut corners. I definitely know that the “state-of-the-art” result is achieved only thanks to a lucky seed or dataset and this strange trick in preprocessing, mentioned in the footnote on page 12.

Level 7: “Deconstructor” Hooray, I’ve understood everything and implemented it myself. It works worse than in the article, but I know why. However, I understand this work better than the second author (who just made charts). I see that all this complex mathematics over 5 pages boils down to two paragraphs in the middle.

Level 8: “Nirvana” The article is trivial. The idea is secondary, it was all in the ’90s with Schmidhuber, just named differently. Formulas are overcomplicated for importance. I can write the same in 10 lines of code and it will work faster. Reject.

If anything — I’m stuck somewhere between 2 and 4.

Why Snow Clings Only to One End: A Light Moment on a Heavy Day | December 05 2025, 20:28

Imagine how hard it is for me to live. Walking with the dog and you can’t easily and quickly answer your own question, why is the snow only on one end of the twigs. And yes, they all look in different directions.

Yuka’s Nostalgic Snowy Morning | December 05 2025, 13:43

Wow. Morning. Sleepy Yuka came in, looked out the window at the first snow, looked at me, sighed, and went to lie down in the little circle he loved so much in early childhood, but hadn’t noticed at all for the last few years.

The Maddening Ambiguity of Mathematical Notation | December 02 2025, 15:30

If someone tells you that mathematics is an exact science, don’t believe them. Since I’m currently into data science as a hobby, I’m studying all sorts of things from different books and my brain is exploding at how this can happen in a science where every little detail should fit into a system, otherwise it goes by the wayside. Until it gets to notations. It’s a complete mess there. A set of dialects.

Take, for example, common logarithms. The “standard” for how to denote a logarithm depends on which room of the university you are in. In calculus and number theory, log(x) almost always means the natural logarithm ln(x) with base e. The derivative of e^x equals e^x. It’s “natural”. They’re too lazy to write ln. Yet, where decimal logarithms might appear (like in computer science), log(x) suddenly becomes decimal, and ln(x) is based on e.

The expected value E has an argument in square brackets. Meanwhile, the same square brackets in computer science are used for the step function 0/1.

Or if you see a vector – is it a column or a row? In classical mathematics, a vector is always a column. To multiply it by weights, we write T after the vector and then w for the weights. But in many papers, vectors are thought of as rows. And if you see y = xW+b, then x is not a column, because otherwise the dimensions wouldn’t match up. x here is a row. But in the next paper they write Wx+b. And there x is a column 🙂

Angle brackets . For the dot product, the symbol “â‹…” is used, but it is hard to see, especially on a whiteboard, and I very often see that mathematicians use angle brackets for dot product. In general, angle brackets are used for the generalized concept of inner product, where the scalar product is a special case. signifies a certain abstract way to multiply a and b and get a number. Meanwhile, in quantum mechanics this would be written as . And for the scalar product, some use a circle with a dot or x in a circle.

And just for the sake of it, in Russia tangent is tg, while in the USA it’s tan. There’s also tan^-1 and arctan, which are the same, though x^-1 generally means 1/x