Evgeny Kuznetsov

Я тут в выходные программировал немного на домашнем компе, и включил, конечно, автодополнение от LLMки — очень удобно и полезно, когда пишешь код или документацию. А в блог же я пишу в том же редакторе, и обычно функцию эту выключаю: насколько предложения LLM обычно «в тему» для кода, настолько же они отвлекают и сбивают при написании нормального текста.

Само собой, садясь писать вчерашний пост, отключить автодополнение я забыл. Но «интеллект», разумеется, немедленно о себе напомнил.

Recently, I had to solve an engineering problem: make Telegram work reliably for my wife (and for me, while I was at it). Solve it I did, of course. But I can’t tell about it in details here, understandably¹. And (quite) some time ago I also solved a somewhat similar problem: make YouTube work properly on the living-room TV. And I can’t tell about it, either.

Come to think about it, this is a basic instinct: you do something of use, you tell, explain, share so that others can do the same. This is what the whole science is about, this is what human civilization is about! That’s why we invented languages, that’s precisely the reason we invented writing. The Internet, we have it for the same purpose: to spread knowledge and share information. A wonderful property of information: “You and I each have an apple and we exchange them, each of us will have one apple, but if you and I each have an idea and we exchange them, each of us ends up with two ideas!” We, the humans, have learned how to use it effectively, and thanks to that we’ve become the dominant species on the planet (and in our star system, perhaps).

A very talented software engineer we have on our team once referred to an agentic tool he was using for a task as “The Slop Machine”. The more I ponder, the more I like this name.

Names matter. Knowing the true name gives you power over the named — not in a way described in the ancient legends, perhaps, but nevertheless.

The slop machines are very useful for a lot of tasks in a lot of imaginable and not-yet-quite-imaginable ways, there’s no question about it. But I’m finding lately that I get the best results and am most productive when I use them while being acutely aware of what they really are: slop machines.

There are things that are nice and interesting to do, yet there are things you’d rather not spend your time and effort doing. People are different, and my categorization may not match yours, but on average, there are a lot of things in today’s life that one would like to delegate to some extent. Hiring a person or a team for this is something very few of us can afford, but technical progress gives some hope to wide audience, too.

Visitors of this blog might have noticed I’ve moved it from Known to Hugo recently. Doing it without losing IndieWeb features was quite a hassle, I admit, so I felt the need to document the process. Hopefully, my experience will be of use to someone, and even if not, bragging is half of the fun about blogging anyway, isn’t it?

This post is about obvious things, but it looks like they aren’t that obvious to some people.

Many messengers allow to send voice messages instead of text. These messages are problematic: you can’t read them in a meeting, you can’t skim through them later to remember what the conversation was about, you can’t search the contents of these messages… The fact that the voice messages are possible to send doesn’t mean you should. You shouldn’t.

very much Russian.

Owning your own data is great. I’ve been using this website as the central IndieWeb point of my online life for over five years, and I love it. However, the joy of owning your own website comes bundled with great responsibility: as the website owner, I am responsible for what’s on my site and for what’s stored “under the hood” to make this website work.

It’s not a huge issue as long as I only post my own content on my site, but the cool thing about the IndieWeb — as opposed to “regular” Web — is its social aspect, the ability to interact with other people running other websites. To do that I usually need to put some of the data that belongs to other people onto my website. And that always makes me uncomfortable.