The Pro Amateur

Approaching Singularity Ray Kurzweil proclaimed that "the singularity is near" in 2005, and reconfirmed his prediction in 2024.

Sadly, I started devoting too much blogging time to the current agenda, but we’re living in interesting times, and I am not immune to ongoing debates.

Let me acknowledge that I usually skip articles of "why I started/stopped/use X" sort, because thanks, keep me posted, we are all deeply interested in your experience.

I somewhat belatedly realized that my little essay on free will would benefit from a short discussion of predestination, how it is different from foreknowledge, and how free will can be imagined in a deterministic world.

The problem of free will is one of those ever-tempting, evergreen topics that one simply cannot avoid sooner or later.

Looks like I still can’t get the hang of regular blogging.

I have a long history of C++ programming that far predates any commercial software development I participated in.

Российская Федерация — государство-червь, государство-пидор. — Олег Кашин Yuri Trifonov’s novel "Neterpenie" ("The Impatient Ones") is not the easiest reading.

Objects as Building Blocks Not sure whether we are already past the era of holywars like "objects vs functions".

I prefer writing about tech stuff rather than commenting ongoing news, but thinking about tech takes time and spare brain power, and I am short on both these months.

It’s interesting to watch both the development of modern AI instruments like ChatGPT or Midjourney and human reaction to this process.

Today’s note is inspired by my short experience with a cooperative variant of the board game Wingspan.

Intro One of the projects I hope to start soon is a game-like environment for teaching and learning concurrent programming.

Хорошо, что нет Царя.

Today’s little essay has no goal other than to be mildly amusing and somewhat informative.

Intro This is one of my reflective notes that merely help me to organize my thoughts rather than offer polished solutions suitable for a broad range of scenarios.

[The author] confesses he dropped a book several times when reading historical sources, and threw away his feather in disgust not because of the thought that Ivan IV could exist, but because of realization that there was a society that could look at him w…

To Mark or Not to Mark In today’s short note I want to reflect a bit on my (former?)

Recently I’ve been watching a talk by Vint Cerf on the topic of AI vs human intelligence.

A vague title of this piece is deliberate: there is no single clear message I am going to send, but I think I am ought to express some feelings and share my thoughts on the ongoing events.

A few weeks ago we had a lab meeting, where a student was presenting his summary of a paper he had read earlier.

Intro Let’s have a less serious post this time for a change.

A Quick Intro I needed to cite Dijkstra’s famous 1968 letter the other day, and finally had an easy chance to read it through.

The Python Experience It took me a while to sit down and write this post, because I was actively experimenting with the VS Code setup for Python.

Choosing the Editor As I mentioned in one of my previous notes, an integrated development environment is something very natural for me.

One of the Faces of Complexity Today I am planning to write on a topic that is addressed literally in every book on software engineering.

The Adventure Begins I am not happy with this title, but the whole topic popped up a bit suddenly, and I decided to jot down some thoughts, while they are still fresh.

On Code and Formatting Styles One of my long-term goals is to setup a powerful development environment that would make the most of today’s technology.

The Problem Python is a very reasonable "default" language of choice for a variety of tasks.