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When I thought out to write daily I didn’t really have a plan or even focus really: I just had thoughts and wanted to voice them, making the blog as my medium. I still do have thoughts but I have been noticing it is not as easy to come up with interesting ideas to write. Moreover, I have less experience with such things than my main trade—computer programming and engineering, software development and other adjacent fields. Thing is, writing about technical stuff seems harder—you have to provide…
There comes a time in a life of a project or even one’s life when you have to change trajectory: the things you have to do will lead you on a new path and at the same time you don’t know what to do exactly. This is called the bifurcation point and after crossing it you have no way back: you literally have to live with it. Interesting thing about this is that the activity of thinking itself can trigger the transition. So effectively there is no way to know prior. The question is how do you cope…
In one of the latest interviews, Rory Sutherland mentioned an idea that resonated with me. He said that marketing should not be a department, and that being one undermines the core principles. How instead of trying to deliver the most value to the customer and make the business as best as it can be, the department of marketing in faced with things like proving the budget is worth spending or that a genuinely authentic and creative endeavour would really buy trust and reputation. This has a…
https://youtu.be/3mLYNxgw9wE There is a mantra going around about how "AI is the worst it will ever be" and it becomes dangerously misleading. Or should I say: This is the least misleading it will ever be. More and more people outsource not just the work, but thinking to the AI models and more increasingly AI agents. In fact, I do as well. And it becomes increasingly more uncanny, it becomes very difficult to distinguish reality from fiction and—worst of all—you are unable to verify it if you…
Idealisation is typically considered bad. And for a good reason: it can be blocking and misleading. It can force you to focus on the wrong things. There are times, however, when idealisation is a net positive — when you double or triple check the configuration as to prevent any outages. When a large number of clients depend on you and bringing their stuff down would be more than a mild inconvenience. There is yet another case for idealisation. When you can’t help yourself but make the right…
There are times when life throws and you what seems at the first glance a huge inconvenience or an unreasonably difficult challenge. First, check if that’s indeed true and that it’s not that you simply don’t want to do it. Because if it’s something that you don’t want to do, then the uncomfortable truth is that you can’t say “no” for some reason. Even if objectively yii can. At other times the challenge seems difficult from your current point of view. But remember past challenges: were they as…
"Pandora's box", "genie out of the bottle" and other similar nonsense has been getting traction, touted by CEOs of AI labs (understandable) and by people who came under the influence of AI. Then these same people are boasting how they can run 10+ agents in parallel, doing x-whatever more work. Then (to the surprise of absolutely nobody) when LLM providers finally raise their prices (because that's how early startup economy works) it suddenly turns out that those who shouted the most are…
People who are just starting promoting their products online typically think like this: “I’ll bring up a site, put some content on it and the people will come.” Technical founders are most frequently prone to this. After all, if you create a good product surely people will like it. Problem is: people won’t know that it exists, even if they will like it. The issue goes even further. Creating one site is not enough, posting updates on the social media of choice is not enough. And it’s not because…
Ever had to work on a project that lacks documentation for the decisions hind an important logic path? Or maybe code that had cryptic variable names like a and b? Bytes aren’t cheap, you know. In security there is a term “security through obscurity” — an approach when in reality the thing is not secured. For example some admin path like /admin.php is accessible to anyone, but instead of having such obvious path it is instead located somewhere like /chdjdjf/jfksjs/vxz.php?k=2746227. Hard to…
Remember McAfee antivirus? It comes from the time when regular computer users were “more serious” about security: you had to install some third party anti-virus software because there was really was no alternative. Problem with such software, however, is the conflict of interests—vendors who sell you such software are interested in their users being scared that their computers might get compromised. What’s worse is that most of the AV (antivirus) software is very poorly optimised or is bloated…
Sometimes the mind is blank and it is impossible to come up with anything — at other times there are too many thoughts. Writing shorter is usually harder, because it focuses to distill the idea and trim unnecessary details. That trimming is significant work also. Actually, I was thinking: flow state can help you write more, but not as succinct. To write shorter, more focused thoughts maybe it’s worth stepping back from the flow.
During my time in university I had to write papers. I didn’t really have the chance to get great examples of scientific writing in real world, however I leveraged the internet to see what top universities like Stanford and MIT did and how they did it. When I was tasked to write something I tried to mimic the way how best of the best did it, by simply mimicking it. Bold text to highlight imports values in a table, footnotes, overall general structure of the paper. But the hardest part was to do…
It’s time we start having these conversations — whether we like it or not. I caught myself thinking about this just today while vibe coding a side project primarily for myself — a Telegram bot to download YouTube videos and long podcasts, splitting them into multiple files. Over time wanted more and more of the features like ad removal, creating clips and captioned gifs. Heck, I even added search, bi-weekly recommendations and subscriptions. Sounds like a dream, but in reality I had to spend…
VLC media player is one of the most known free and open-source multimedia players in the world. And for a good reason too: it is cross-platform, boasts numerous features—even obscure ones like video streaming over network. Everything in it is great, except that you cannot pause and resume the video with a mouse click. At first, I thought that was a problem with my wireless mouse. Then, after researching about it I stumbled upon this: a plugin that pauses and plays the video on mouse click, no…
Duolingo has a concept of streaks: their engagement model is built around it. Their mascot, Duo, sometimes even jokingly threatens you if you skip a day. But does it matter, really? I am trying to keep up this perfect streak in my blog, but truthfully it is not as easy as it looks. What’s more interesting is that it doesn’t really matter—not all of the posts I write are even read by people, because I post them at the wrong time or the topic isn’t catchy enough. I don’t have Duolingo’s Duo…
If you are old enough, you remember that in the mid-2000s technology had that particular flavour to it: technological optimism, bright green meadows, clear blue sky, droplets of water. This style would go on later to become a separate genre called Frutiger Aero. At the dawn of that era Windows XP was released, pioneering this style. Technology was supposed to be friendly and personal. So much so that Windows XP had a music track during installation to bring the mood. The only problem is, many…
A friend of mine sent me a curious blog post. In this post, the author talks about the often under-utilised <dl> HTML tag—description list that is used to denote data on the page that acts as any sort of description. What description exactly? Well, you might have seen info cards in Wikipedia and all over the internet. Such cards denote what’s called a “description” of the item: author name, location, date of publishing… anything really. Why would we use a separate tag for this, you might ask?…
The difference between 23:59 and 00:01 is two minutes, pretty minor. On some occasions, though, it can throw you off pretty significantly. I have some unpublished drafts in my posts — something like a collection of notes that I take when the idea strikes, so that I can finish it later. Just now when I wanted to write another blog post I got dizzy for a couple minutes: a whole day disappeared from my backlog. Sounds pretty obvious and at any other occasion I wouldn't notice it. But for some…
Consider two different businesses. One is a sprawling startup, collecting rounds of multiple million investments. Their technology is moving fast (and breaks things). People in the staff come in by the dozen. The aim is certain: disrupt status quo and make the world a better place. https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso In actuality, the boring business wins — the one that doesn't aim to disrupt the world, but the one that simply solves the problem for people who want it solved. And they are willing to…
And during that minute there is a chance that a malicious bot had tried to scan your site for credentials or some other vulnerability. Don't believe me? Check this out: This is called background-noise and it is considered a normal part of the internet. Akin busy streets of a huge city, the internet is quietly but constantly buzzing with “life”. However, in contrast to law-abiding citizens, the internet is more like a constant anarchy—you better watch your back or else. Or else what exactly? The…
"Cryptocurrency" for short, is a term that is used to describe a particular kind of tokens—the ones that are backed up by real money just like how the US dollar was backed by gold. The technology is simple, really: original Bitcoin uses proof-of-work — a way to verify participants in the networks and to filter out malicious actors. It is very elegant, indeed: the power is in the agreement between independent parties, this agreement is called a protocol, in the same way as we use network…
Imagine what happened if the production system updated the moment you typed a letter on the keyboard. Sounds insane but this is exactly what might happen if we are not careful about where we reduce friction and where we add it. Software development is notorious for friction: “if only we could do this faster”. Well, now we (sort of) can with LLMs — they genuinely reduce friction and barrier to entry. But everything has a price, and so does reduction of friction. In automotive gearboxes there is…
There are pull requests — a notice for the developers of a project (typically open source) to merge in the work that have been done by somebody else. This is a great way to contribute to a project but it places burden on the maintainer, because now they have to spend more time reviewing the work. With LLMs now we have a concept of prompts — instructions for a language model, telling it what and how to do. Constructing such prompts takes the time. Some projects are becoming increasingly…
You know, most of the "real programmers" started their career back in 80s and 90s not because of a high-paying salary or office benefits such as coffee machines and bean bags. They started by hacking together their computer and then moving on to hacking their games (because there were none). They were driven by passion. I didn't get to experience that, I got my own PC in 2006 when I was still a kid, but the passion and fascination was there. Fiddling with MS Paint, changing wallpapers and…
There is a term called dark factory, coming from manufacturing industry it describes a way of production that doesn’t require human presence. It is cheaper and scalable. Same thing has been happening with dark stores: you order things or food through the app and courier picks it up from the dark store — a warehouse of sorts. Now with the advent of autonomous programming by LLMs a term of dark agency might be closer to reality than ever. An “agency” which is a collection of AI agents that you…
Ever since I got into marketing or more concretely—driving users to my own online projects—I have started to notice a fascinating thing: that it is possible to predict how many visitors or leads you will have in the future. To me it is fascinating because I am used to rigid technical systems and that they are deterministic. You run it — you get the same result every time (or an error). With people it always seemed to be unattainable. How can I possibly predict what other people would do? Turns…
More than one page for same language in hreflang: 614 URLs Ever got a similar message from one of the "SEO audit" tools? I have and I do constantly. Both from major players like Google: "Hey look, you have got a gazillion non-relevant errors!", to a more sophisticated, "industry-standard" tooling which I will not name here. The issue is that the business model of SEO is rigged. It is a bit like insurance or most of the things related to legal stuff. Step one is to make it as complicated and…
Especially now, when it is a status quo that everybody can do anything one prompt away. I have been bothered for a long time about the notion of "it will take only five minutes". It always made me feel somehow inferior: Surely I must be wrong if everybody around me can figure out exactly how many minutes every complicated task will take. But I did not and still have not budged. My way is to take enormously long amount of time to think the issue through and only then take the action. Do you know…
As a developer, it is easy to do anything you want. Most of the questions such as “can it be done” don’t end up in the realm whether or not it’s possible, but in the realm of whether or not it is feasible. Technically, nobody stops you from rebuilding the whole operating system or a tech stack, it is just that would take decades and will be of lower quality. With commercial projects like Multify I also sometimes end up with similar contemplations, but for a different reason: I need to decide…
