TheDimkaBlog

задумавшийся мальчик

When we look at politics, we often think it’s a battle of opposites — left versus right, right versus left. But pointing out what the other side is doing wrong, even very skillfully, is still easier than offering a solution that’s better — especially one that’s better in the long term. The left often correctly highlights what the right is doing wrong, and the right just as often does the same to the left. When power…

We often throw around the phrase "Western values." It's a bit of a mess, really, because "the West" supposedly means Western Europe and North America, yet these values are embraced by countries that are technically not Western at all—Australia, New Zealand, and even South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. But if you actually think about what these Western values are and where they come from, you'll see they genuinely did …

Well, let's suppose that somehow, it has been proven that we live in a simulation. So what? Some of us, of course, want to believe that it's like in The Matrix, and that outside the simulation, there is a real, fleshy you living in the "real" world. Ooooh. It's a bit absurd, of course, but even if that's really the case, such a scenario isn't particularly good anyway. Let me explain. If we compare what we observe i…

Artificial Intelligence has been around for many years. However, usually the moment it becomes available to ordinary consumers, it is no longer called AI, and it becomes algorithms, or even just services. And these are all manifestations of so-called narrow AI. Over the last year or so there has been a special buzz about AI based on LLM - Large Language Models, and although everything there is not so trivial, the mai…

Why do dictators and various unsavory characters hold power in many countries? In some ways, this has always been the case historically. These countries simply have not politically matured yet. However, there are places that have experienced periods of enlightenment and progress. Or even when the same oppressor was not so viciously greedy, only to be followed by someone worse. The persistence of dictatorship is due…

I always have some idea, or hypothesis, within which I think about almost everything else. Like a kind of overarching theme, some kind of background philosophical direction. And right now it's the theme of "Self Sufficiency", on all levels. This is how I explain it to myself. It started with the advancement of countries that at some point broke out of the Middle Ages and rushed forward to build a better world. And …

Imagine that, for example, when the energy produced by your own, say solar panels, water is collected and purified. Groceries you grow yourself. In the kitchen there is a huge machine like an agro-cabinet. It grows a variety of enhanced produce. Richer in vitamins and containing all the necessary nutrients, it grows quickly and it's all automated. Waste is recycled and fed back into the system. Clothing and miscellan…

Humans, as well as all other species, were forged in a fierce battle for existence and survival. Our brain is a machine for solving problems, overcoming difficulties. We spend our whole lives solving problems. And if everything around us is arranged quite well for us and there are few natural difficulties, we will be solving invented ones. It will take no less energy, but it will be of little use. However, we can, t…

We have an area in the brain that helps with a whole bunch of different cognitive tasks, like complex planning, emotion regulation, working memory processing, logic in decision making, etc. And it only develops when we do things we don't want to do, the more we don't want to do them the better it develops. You could say it's a muscle of willpower and discipline. But the correct name is Dorsolateral Prefrontal Corte…

I started writing a personal blog 25 years ago, in 1999, and I've been writing regularly ever since. I feel as though I haven't written enough in public, since some of it was published privately or only to small groups, or it wasn't in English. Main struggle for me is to overcome inner censorship in order to write and publish the thoughts that preoccupy me a lot. While I have been writing every day for the last 6 mon…

On this day in 1492, the Muslim stronghold of Granada surrenders to the armies of Castile and Aragon ending more than 700 years of Islamic rule on the Iberian Peninsula. 500 years later I have left the USSR for the west