Evgeny Kuznetsov

At some point during the summer I lost my backpack; the strap that held it on my bicycle rack got loose which I failed to notice. Never seen it again. In the backpack, among other things, were my work laptop and some documents, including my passport. Rather unpleasant: out of the blue, a whole lot of hassle trying to recover everything.

Here’s what’s interesting: when my colleagues found out about my misfortune, they all sympathized, saying in unison that “the computer is nothing to worry about, restoring the documents is what’s most unpleasant and tedious.” Every government employee, from police officers to clerks, on the other hand, told me with authority that “restoring the documents is a piece of cake; losing expensive corporate equipment is serious concern.” Comparing these two reactions, I came to the conclusion that, in fact, neither of them is really something to worry about.

В последнее время появилась мода на избыточнное подражание голосовых систем человеку. Звонит тебе робот-автообзвонщик, и, прежде, чем начать, собственно, говорить, закашливается, а потом извиняется. Или, например, звоню я сегодня в компанию, отвечает мне робот; он не особенно скрывает, что он робот, и даже готов меня маршрутизировать в нужный отдел к нужному человеку, вот только перед каждым вторым словом у него «э-э-э», после каждого третьего — «м-м-м», а в фоне — звук опенспейса, типа живой колл-центр.

We know the simplest explanation is often true. Mandela effect, déjà vu and similar phenomena are easily explained by actual changes in the time order of events caused by time-travellers’ actions.

Official science will of course only admit it after exhausting every other hypothesis…

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?

I recently learned that the foundations of the audiophile world are being rocked, shaken and uprooted by a horrifying scandal that has already been dubbed MoFi-gate. Everything about this scandal is so hilarious I can’t stop giggling.

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.

Russian users are receiving letters from Namecheap stating they have until March 6 to transfer their domains to another provider.

For pro-regime users, it’s a nuisance, of course. Not a major one, though, since the pro-regime Russians tend to have their domains in the .ru zone, and have them registered at the Russian providers.

Anti-regime users, including bloggers, foundations, and other organizations, on the other hand, need to have their domains registered abroad, and have no other choice. Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications watchdog (serving as the censorship agency for the regime) is blocking anti-Putin publications left and right, and has, on numerous occasions, subpoenaed the domain registrars based in Russia to stop providing services to those violating the Russian regulations¹.