Recently updated blogs

In the past several years I've seen a number of posts attacking the company AirBnb, which is fine, but often they go further and attack the general concept of short-term housing rental outside of hotels. These posts have struck me as oblivious at best, and sometimes even callously indifferent. I rarely hear arguments in favor of short-term housing rental outside of travel industry promotion, so I wanted to give my …

I have just come back from a short break in Alnmouth, and where we were staying had a “4D Sudoku” puzzle. The website for this puzzle is long gone, the Twitter account has not been updated since 2011, there does not appear to be any solution anywhere on the internet. I was on my own.

How to use multiple Erlang/Elixir versions in Windows

Hi! Here’s the game we’ve been working on for 6.8 years! You can see the launch trailer and all the details on the store page, but for some reason what I feel like sharing here is the very quickly knocked together trailer I made for the developer commentary, which comes with the Special Edition of the game. It just feels like the sort of thing long time blog followers might …

Anton Podviaznikov namevalue tableBordernone tableWidthinitial tableFontSizeinitial tableCellPaddingBottom0.8rem tableFirstRowColor#555 noteHeaderPropsnone linkIconyes slugcv About Engineer. From Ukraine. SF->NYC->Miami. Work Experience 2017-2021Mulesoft/Salesforce 2014-2017Runnable 2011-2013CircuitHub 2010-2011Montora 2007-2010Eclipse/Sigma Education 2008-2010Master degree in Software Engineering. 2004-2008Bachelor degree in Software Engineering. Contact Websitehttps://podviaznikov.com [email protected] GitHubpodviaznikov LinkedInpodviaznikov

Six years ago I spent a week training a neural network to write blog posts and the results were terrible. Now with LLMs I want to see how much easier and better the results are.

“Things I’m Not Eating Anymore” is a photography project I hope will also serve as motivation to continue improving my overall health and eating habits. You can read the first post in this series that does a much better job of explaining all that, here. For a brief period during elementary school, I attended after-school care at Mrs. Murray’s house on the Main Street of my hometown. She watched a …

I'm really proud to announce that my new book, Dinosaurs to Chickens: How Evolution Works, is out now. This is a book that I would have devoured as a kid, as it makes critical connections between modern and prehistoric animals. Growing up it felt like we learned about two totally separate groups of animals: extinct dinosaurs and living everything else. The dinosaurs had their time, and now modern species had …

At this point we may have recorded all of the instrumental parts. I mean, we reserve the right to add a trombone here or a french horn there, maybe a synth part, etc., but for now we have got all the instruments recorded according to the current plan. Next month we’ll work on backing and […]

I carried out a preliminary excursion a few days in advance of Terminalia. I wanted to check if there was any safe and legal route I could take from the Beech Woods to Fulbourn Road. The Beech Woods are immediately South of the Worts Causeway, a road which sits on the boundary of the City and South Cambs District, at the Southern extremity of Cherry Hinton City Council Ward. But …

WHAT I SMELL: L’ÂME D’IRIS opens with a tender embrace of cashmere iris, warmed by a subtle kiss of mandarin. Dreamy from the first spritz, it feels like a celestial whisper. As time unfolds, the soft perfume is gently powdered with violet, replacing the mandarin’s sparkle. A familiar note of makeup emerges, fresh and promising, hinting at a glamorous evening ahead. Yet, this is no ordinary night; it’s an opera-worthy …

One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient …

A search engine is a vast mechanical Turk - a reinforcement learning engine that uses human activity to understand the web. PageRank used signal from links created by people, but once people started using Google at scale, that usage itself created far more signal: which results you clicked on, how you changed your searches to get better results, and what else you searched for before and after. That then applies …

In yesterday's post, we looked at a vintage photoshoot from the mid-'50s that featured some rather peculiar bikinis. Today, let's travel further back in time while staying on the same topic, as we explore a feature published in Life magazine in its July 9, 1945, issue. The cover model, 20-year-old Paddy Ellerton, sported a striped panung bathing suit with trunks that buttoned up the sides and the magazine included an …