This blog

May. 31st, 2029 10:08 am
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I'm writing the blog in English because I type twice as fast this way than in Russian, and 90% of my friends and friends read English any way. I answer comments in the same language they are posted.

I am trying not to post anything related to my employer, but if I do so, this expresses only my own views and does not represent official position of my employer.

When I post about some technical topic which seems non trivial and is related to my employer's product, don't expect it to be inside information. If I post about it, it means that this info is already public. Usually I do not post any personal information or anything that is related to my family.

All photos are mine, and I allow anyone to copy, change, do anything you please with them. I don't post "friends only".

Useful tags are: http://izard.livejournal.com/tag/software , http://izard.livejournal.com/tag/readlog , http://izard.livejournal.com/tag/idea , http://izard.livejournal.com/tag/deutschland and http://izard.livejournal.com/tag/trip_report
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Jacob's last U11 tournament with is over, and now it is time to buy a longer weapon and start attaching wire to the helmet. This time he only got 6th place; worse than before. And once again, most of dangerous opponents only practiced single move.
The most strange one was a guy who was only using one move: take the priority, and ram the opponent with both blade and helmet, while covering his chest with left hand! With serious judges, this would grant him black cards each time, but now judges only warned him, and I overheard when they were discussing "I should disqualify him but I do not want to spoil fun." Jacob still managed to win.
Another guy was an opponent who weights ~2x more than Jacob and more than any other competitor, and he also practiced a single move: really very strong parry which looked like using a club rather than a foil, and then quick attack while the opponent is distracted. Jacob managed to win 5:0 while feinting against parry and then attacking, worked 5 times in a row.
And then Jacob lost in elimination to a left-handed opponent who rushed to start close quarter combat (while doing so, he scored 3 points and my son scored 4), and then in close quarter fight he scored 6 points and Jacob scored 0. He was begging his coaches to teach him close quarters for a long time, but they always responded that it is too early, and he should not let the opponent that close anyway.
Once the first "ramming" guy learns close quarters fight techniques, he will be very difficult to face.
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Just returned from the Upper Bavaria Open Fencing Tournament - Jacob’s first competition under German rules and his return to competitive fencing after a long break. The format followed European youth fencing regulations, which meant a significant equipment change for Jacob: a shorter and stiffer foil compared to one he was using in U.S. tournaments.

Read more... )
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Here is how buggy messenger delivery status can lead to miscommunication.

Message status: [Sent, Delivered, Read]

My view, after mobile internet went down on my phone at some point:
1. Me: Going home now. [SDR]
2. Julia: We'll be at a grocery store soon, should I pick you up at station A?
3. Me: No, thanks, I'll exit at station B and walk home. [SD]
4. Me: I'll be there in 30 minutes. [S]
5. Me: I'll text you if something happens with the train. []

Julia's view:
1. Alex: Going home now.
2. Me: We'll be at a grocery store soon, should I pick you up at station A? [SDR]
3. Alex: I'll be there in 30 minutes.
4. Me: I am waiting, where are you? [S]
5. Me: FindMy shows you at station B, why? [S]
6, 7, 8, 9

I was considering sending an SMS, but as my 3. was shown as delivered, I did not expect Julia to receive my message 4. only, but not 3. I should probably switch to WhatsApp.
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When I was a kid, I was spending every summer holiday in my grandmother’s village in Russia. The region sits on a cultural and religious border between Christian and Islam parts, with surviving traces of pre-Christian paganism. Some villages still had practicing shamans who preserved old rituals that were rarely talked about openly, but widely respected.

When I was 14 a drought had started in summer. Crops were at risk, and everyone was worried. A weather forecast finally offered some hope: light, scattered showers the following day. In response, several shamans from neighboring villages decided to “ask the gods” for rain.

I didn’t witness the ritual itself. But later that evening, I saw what they had left behind: stains of chicken blood at the base of a centuries-old oak tree, and bright cloths tied into its branches, swaying in the still, hot evening air.

The next day, it rained. Not much, maybe 20 minutes, but it was something. That’s when things got strange. I took my bicycle out and rode around the area.
Read more... )
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The most prominent LJ biologist recently wrote a long article about Trump's CDC/FDA appointees.

One of his points was "А ещё мракобеса посадили в кресло директора FDA по оценке и изучению биопрепаратов, то есть вакцин и генных терапий. Это хирург Марти Мэкари, известный своей резонансной статьёй о том, что повторная вакцинация от ковида приносит мальчикам-подросткам больше вреда, чем пользы. Правда, среди авторов статьи не было ни одного специалиста по вакцинам или инфекционным заболеваниям."

I think this is the article.

Scinquisitor's point was that all authors of that article were not qualified, hence the article is wrong (though BMJ journal of medical ethics editors still published it)

Makary is 8th author (indeed signed as Department of Surgery, Johns Hopkins University), but he is not the only author from Johns Hopkins University. Another one is from Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins University; another one is from Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; and another from Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco.

Interestingly, Paul Offit is favourably mentioned in both BMJ article and LJ post :)

Looking through the article, I can't really get it why Makary is "мракобес". Anybody knows why?
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Just got back from vacation, where we drove through 7 counties: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Italy, Monaco and France. 11 hours one way not accounting for traffic jams, and it took us 12 and 16 hours in real life.

On our way back, I rented a Chalet in an Italian high mountain camping village called "Ёлки-Палки". It was great overall, but there was a small nuisance in one of the rooms: just before our arrival, a butterfly laid eggs on a top level of a bunk bed, they hatched during the night, so thousands of tiny caterpillars went on a quest to find some fresh leaves for dinner. Caterpillars started descending towards my lower bed using their threads. This is how nature works, but Julia was scared first.

One of the hosts spoke adequate English, but I did not expect him to know the word "caterpillar". So, I had to find words in Italian, and came up with "thousands of small caterpillars in the room" - "мияйя ди пикколи брукки нелла камера"
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I just used local Deepseek-r1-llama70b-q8 model and asked it to translate my short story from a previous post to Russian. Here is the result:
Read more... )
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As always, flu got me over the weekend. So I could hardly sleep with 39C+ fever, and could not help but use the time to write a dark sci-fi short text, heavily influenced by Isaac Asimov and Pavel Ievlev.
Please see under a cut.
Read more... )
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On December 31st we've moved to a new condo. Here is the view from a window:

We were thinking first that we are choosing between an apartment in Munich close suburb or a house in a village, but finally had to settle for an apartment in a village not too far from Munich in the direction of Alps.
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Recent (end of 2024!!) social media discussion:

Someone: I won't do covid-19 boosters, they cause myocarditis. 3 upvotes, 8 downvotes.

Pro-vaxer: Here is a link to a study proving that covid-19 vaccine causes myocarditis, but covid-19 causes myocarditis more often.
15 upvotes, no downvotes.

Me: Could you please explain why you claim that this study proves that "covid-19 vaccine causes myocarditis, but covid-19 causes myocarditis more often", while the study does not explore frequency of myocarditis after covid-19 and after the vaccine at all? All the study does is demonstrating that post-vaccine myocarditis is less harmful than post-covid19 one.
6 downvotes, no upvotes.

Pro-vaxer: Oh, sometimes stupid antivaxers even read the linked studies! But they can't comprehend what they read, this is the problem. You see, even the abstract says: "Patients with post–COVID-19 mRNA vaccination myocarditis, contrary to those with post–COVID-19 myocarditis, show a lower frequency of cardiovascular complications than those with conventional myocarditis at 18 months."
You probably just read a part of the summary, which says "Post-vaccination myocarditis after vaccination with anti-COVID vaccines has a milder course and a lower risk of developing complications in the long term."
You think I made an error, but the error is all yours!
0 downvotes, 1 upvote

Me:
Let's think step by step:
1. From your first comment: "covid-19 vaccine causes myocarditis, but covid-19 causes myocarditis more often"
Let's assume P(A) the probability of getting myocarditis from the vaccine, and P(B) the probability of getting myocarditis from COVID.
So, your statement is P(A) < P(B).


2. From your second comment, the first quote from the abstract, which, in your opinion, I misunderstood. "Patients with post–COVID-19 mRNA vaccination myocarditis, contrary to those with post–COVID-19 myocarditis, show a lower frequency of cardiovascular complications than those with conventional myocarditis at 18 months." Please re-read it again. It says nothing at all about P(A) and P(B). All it says is that P(C|A) < P(C|B), where P(C) is the probability of cardiovascular complications 18 months after the diagnosis of myocarditis.
1 downvote, 0 upvotes, no responses so far.

The scary part is that Pro-vaxer is likely a doctor, based on his (or her) other comments. Confirmation bias maybe really tough.

New author

Dec. 16th, 2024 07:37 pm
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Maybe I am a bit too late, but I just discovered this guy

Not a great literature, but OK.
1. "Кровь на воздух" - LLMs in space opera setting. Darkness - 5/10
2. "Седьмая мапа" Cyberpunk world - high tech, low life. Interesting setting - a cyberpunk city. Darkness - 7/10
3. "Хранители Мультиверсума ", Darkness - 8/10
2 & 3 are part of universe of великого кристалламультивесума.
The author knows how to use genai to do illustrations..

Какие времена, такой и Крапивин.
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Back in university, my friends and I had a trick when it came to exams in advanced physics and math courses: we’d try to sit exams with a postdoc or, better yet, a PhD student rather than a seasoned professor. Professors, with decades of experience, could gauge a student’s depth of understanding after just a few questions, accurately assigning grades. PhD students, however, lacked this refined intuition and often gave higher grades if you could converse confidently about basic concepts and demonstrate a good grasp of basic terminology. They usually tended to assume the best, consciously or subconsciously. The real test wasn’t the material itself, but skilfully steering the exam into a dialogue where you could shine.

So, why do I find myself reflecting on this old trick now? Read more... )
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After Black Forest released the Flux model, I think everyone started trying it and comparing with DALL-E3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion 3. I am cancelling my Midjourney subscription. (Not that I used it a lot, local SD-3 was mostly good enough for me)

On Mac, Flux just works with the following conda env setup:
Python 3.11.3,
pip install torch==2.3.1 torchaudio==2.3.1 torchvision==0.18.1 einops==0.6.1 numba==0.57.0 numpy==1.24.3 transformers==4.33.1 tqdm==4.65.0 tts==0.21.1
Please use the text encoder and Flux-1-dev.
ComfyUI config and pic:
Read more... )
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4:50pm your flight to Munich is delayed by 20 minutes. (Me - I see on the flightradar, thunderstorm on incoming flight route was not your fault.)
5:10 your flight is cancelled. Please start rebooking or eventually we‘ll rebook for you. (Me - $&@$!)
5:35 We changed our mind, your flight is delayed by 20 minutes. (Me - writing a post in Facebook with a great relief)
6:00pm more delays
6:20 we changed our mind again - your flight will fly to Hannover instead of Munich, starting preboarding
7:00 preborded passengers removed from the plane, it will be probably cancelled but wait for another hour.
Read more... )
Question: how likely is it that Lufthanda would reimburse us the cost of Lufthansa tickets from Hannover to Munich? I already applied for the reimbursement, so let's see.
Answer: They quickly refused to compensate for Hannover to Munich flight, because diversion to Hannover was not their fault.
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Интересно сравнить творчество трех самых плодовитых графоманов рунета. Если что, здесь я использую слово "графоман" отнюдь не как ругательное. Просто они очень любят писать, и публикуют в сети мегабайты и мегабайты своих художественных текстов.

Еще ограничу время. Да, в 90-е был "король графоманов" Петухов, а в 2000е - Иар Эльтеррус. Но здесь я напишу о 2010-х и 2020-х.
Read more... )
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For a long time, there was no decent local LLM that understood and spoke Russian well. I've tested many fine-tunes, and they all behaved significantly dumber when answering in Russian than their respective English originals.

Russian internet has a huge potential training corpus second only to English; but smart French, German, Spanish and Arabic fine-tunes for local LLMs existed for months now, and there was no Russian one.

Until Serge Gotsuliak released his finetune few days ago.

Highly recommend it, works great with llama.cpp. I was missing RAG on my Russian books, will set it up now.

There is a drawback: 4-bit quant that I tested needs GPU[s] with ~48GB VRAM, or Apple silicon machine with 64GB+ RAM to run at decent speed.
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Let's imagine, for a moment, that the late Soviet KGB was not simply a group of bureaucratic careerists, resembling characters from "Our Man in Havana." Instead, consider it as an omnipresent and possibly self proclaimed benevolent force that started working to counter the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.

They recognized that the traditional institutions, such as the Army, the Communist Party, the Police, and even the KGB itself, were all corroded and incapable of withstanding the impending collapse. However, they were well aware of how the Cultural Revolution in China and death squads in Latin America operated to alter the course of complex social dynamics.

It's widely believed that the "Kazan phenomenon" was inspired and/or guided by the KGB, which could explain why it took the police so many years to develop effective countermeasures. Additionally, the complex and effective social norms and language exhibited by these gangs could not have emerged overnight in Kazan, Naberezhnye Chelny, Cheboksary, and later Ulyanovsk. For such a grassroots movement, it would have taken years, if not decades, for these dynamics to flourish. I remember the rituals, language, written and unwritten social norms of the Soviet young pioneer organisation, and the gangs were comparable in complexity and far surpassing in pervasiveness.

But what if there was a long-term, intricate KGB operation to prepare a social cadre movement that could be used to counter the violence that would inevitably erupt during the Soviet Union's collapse? This theory could explain everything:

A whole generation of young males, starting as young as 10 or 12 years old, were placed in extreme settings and closely monitored by a hierarchy of higher-ups. This served as an effective HR sieve and a totalitarian indoctrination system simultaneously. In some districts, nearly 100% of males were recruited into the gangs (I take this opportunity to send regards to the "Психквадрат" and "Поселок"). The slight differences in gang organizations and traditions among the three main cities could be attributed to variations in the experimental parameters. Ultimately, instead of the late Soviet Union's formal "dossier," every male could have had a comprehensive psychological profile collected, identifying natural leaders, potential grey eminences, and obedient foot soldiers accurately.
By the way, I've always been intrigued by the size of the KGB building (and the apparent large number of personnel there) in the center of Cheboksary in the 1980s. It always seemed like an overkill for such a small city.

Hypothesis: Perhaps this intricate KGB operation didn't achieve its intended results because the collapse of the Soviet Union started just 1-2 years earlier than the KGB operation was nearing completion. The timing might have been a critical factor in the success or failure of this ambitious endeavor.
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В конце 2000-ных, когда я на работе стал поддерживать крупные (от миллионов до десятков миллионов долларов) сделки, мне пришлось работать с людьми определенного типажа - корпоративными продажниками.

Очень люблю смотреть, как работают профессионалы своего дела. Хотя это и редкость, но все видели хороших продавцов - консультантов в магазинах. Не тех, которые назойливо пристают, или обманывают покупателей, а таких, как в анекдоте про мужика, который пришел в магазин за прокладками для жены, а купил лодку. Хороший, профессиональный корпоративный продажник в процессе охмуренния клиента - это еще круче.
Read more... )

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