timelets

TIL: The Dragon Slayer

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:02:17 GMT

Пьеса Шварца "Убить Дракона" написана по мотивам одной из самых распространенных в мире сказок "The Dragon Slayer":

He discovers that a seven-headed dragon who lives on a mountain in the neighborhood demands: periodically a maiden asa sacrifice, else he will lay waste the entire country. The sacrifice has been agreed upon and the lot has fallen to the princess. The king promises that whoever saves her shall have her hand and half his kingdom.

-- Stith Thomson. The Folktale, 1978. UC Press.

This probably goes back to the Minotaur myth.

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TIL: Personal animosity matters

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:53:36 GMT

In the early 2000s, Huawei survived Cisco's IP lawsuit because it partnered with 3Com, whose CEO Bruce Chaflin hated John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco.

“An alliance between 3Com and Huawei was attractive to both sides. Huawei would get the immediate legal protection of 3Com’s deep patent portfolio; 3Com would get Huawei’s lower production costs and its connections to the vast China market. Soon after the two announced their joint venture, called H3C, 3Com’s lawyers filed a motion to intervene in the Cisco case, calling 3Com an interested party.”

--- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”

Ultimately, both the 3Com alliance with Huawei and Cisco itself failed, while Huawei survived and prospered by copying technologies from the West and selling them to the rest of the world. But in the beginning, the Cisco lawsuit looked quite scary because it threatened Huawei's very existence.

“Ren told his trusted deputy, Guo Ping, who was now Huawei’s executive vice president, to get to the US as quickly as he could. Ren invoked the fable of ancient Chinese military general Han Xin*, who had accepted the humiliation of crawling between another man’s legs to prevent a deadly fight.”

* The fable of General Han Xin’s humiliation, known as "crawling between the legs" (胯下之辱), tells of a young, poor Han Xin being challenged by a bully in his hometown of Huaiyin to either kill him or crawl through his legs. Choosing to endure this shame rather than waste his life on a petty killing, Han Xin crawled through, later becoming a renowned military strategist and rewarding the man for testing his resolve.

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TIL: The Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (1987)

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:31:22 GMT

Introduced in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine required television and radio stations holding broadcast licenses to present "contrasting viewpoints" on controversial issues of public importance. “The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine did not directly enable Fox News through a change in law for cable. Instead, the 1987 repeal (and subsequent deregulation in the 1990s) encouraged a media environment where, for the first time, a channel explicitly targeting a conservative audience with a specific ideological viewpoint was commercially viable.“

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TIL: mental and physical fatigue induced by social media

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:53:50 GMT

Your Key Survival Skill for 2026: Critical Ignoring

A pioneering 2021 study found that just 30 minutes of phone scrolling tires us out psychologically, actually reducing our ability to exercise. One 2022 paper concluded that a half-hour of social-media use before training caused enough mental fatigue to affect the hand-eye coordination of elite volleyball players.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/critical-ignoring-social-media-7e236f52

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TIL: терпение в сказках

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:31:41 GMT

В западных сказках терпение как черта характера или линия поведения чаще всего принадлежит женщинам/девочкам. По-моему, это противоречит Библии, где Ева, не в состоянии терпеть искушение, срывает запретный плод. С другой стороны, это хорошо согласуется с Одиссеей.

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TIL

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:15:20 GMT

Sergey Brin spends significant amount of time chatting with Gemini.

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Speaking of Elon Musk, the fucking moron #2

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 02:27:28 GMT

“Propaganda does not provide information that is meant to be believed by the people it is addressing. Propaganda mostly provides signals of in-group loyalty.

To be effective at this, propaganda often has to be implausible. Information that is true is believable on its own. But propaganda has to be so patently false and far-fetched, so exaggerated and misleading, that repeating it sends the right signal to other people: the signal that one feels committed to a certain group.

Propaganda provides the masses with traits that allow them to recognise each other. But beyond this, fighting propagandistic falsehoods with the truth actually reinforces the signal’s reliability by implicitly telling people who want to prove themselves faithful precisely what not to say. Propaganda acts as a badge to express which group we belong to.
”

--- Hanno Sauer. “The Invention of Good and Evil”, 2024.

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TIL

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 06:19:05 GMT

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html

While nearly every other industry has become more productive since 1968, productivity in home-building — the amount of work done by one worker in one hour, essentially — has declined by half. The country is barely building enough to maintain the status quo, which is some four million units short of need, according to Freddie Mac.

This is mostly due to regulations.

The barriers to building housing fast... weren’t technological, but institutional.

If I were the president...

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TIL

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 04:25:30 GMT

Before the full-scale war, Gazprom was the sixth most profitable company in the world, behind Saudi Aramco, Apple, Berkshire, Microsoft and Alphabet. Now, it's losing money.

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Нифига себе!

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:08:41 GMT

“Postumus was a lion-like champion. He seemed not to care a fig for anyone. He even dared to speak out straight to my grandmother Livia herself.”

Robert Graves. “I, Claudius.”

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TIL

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 05:07:07 GMT

One foot == one light nanosecond.

https://youtu.be/iRVfaR3N5K4?si=a5fweNjSJ1FtKB2f&t=2245

Key concepts: manifold, events, metric, lattice.

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TIL: Surveillance society

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 04:40:46 GMT

Cities of China* — 626m cameras to 1.43bn people = 439.07 cameras per 1,000 people
Hyderabad, India — 900,000 cameras for 10,801,163 people = 83.32 cameras per 1,000 people
Indore, India – 200,000 cameras per 3,302,077 people = 60.57 cameras per 1,000 people
Delhi, India — 449,934 cameras for 22,547,000 people = 19.96 cameras per 1,000 people
Singapore, Singapore — 109,072 cameras for 6,080,859 people = 17.94 cameras per 1,000 people
Moscow, Russia — 214,000 cameras for 12,680,389 people = 16.88 cameras per 1,000 people
Baghdad, Iraq — 120,000 cameras for 7,711,305 people = 15.56 cameras per 1,000 people
Seoul, South Korea — 144,513 cameras for 9,988,049 people = 14.47 cameras per 1,000 people
St. Petersburg, Russia — 75,000 cameras for 5,561,294 people = 13.49 cameras per 1,000 people
London, England (UK) — 127,423 cameras for 9,648,110 people = 13.21 cameras per 1,000 people.

https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/

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Сегодня я узнал

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 04:31:54 GMT

что нас в детстве обманывали советские писатели, когда говорили, что муравьи не бродят по ночам. Еще как бродят! ChatGPT не даст соврать.

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TIL: people vs sharks

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 22:46:13 GMT

As of 9 years ago, on average sharks kill four people a year. At the same time, people kill 70 million sharks a year.

https://youtu.be/fbm6Y42vcqI?t=77

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TIL

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 07:37:00 GMT

Charles Perot was 67 when he published his book of fairy tales.

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TIL: the most instagrammable place on earth

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 17:20:45 GMT

is Milan. London is #2, Paris is #3.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/s-pore-loses-top-instagrammable-spot-in-the-world-now-ranked-13th

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Putin delenda est

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 04:22:54 GMT

DER SPIEGEL: The war itself isn’t being questioned.

Gudkov: No, the attacks on Ukraine and the massacres play no role. The Russians have little compassion for the Ukrainians. Almost no one here talks about the fact that people are being killed in Ukraine.

DER SPIEGEL: Can you quantify that?

Gudkov: The share is just 1.5 to 2 percent of respondents. And only an average of 10 percent of the population feels guilt and shows empathy – Russian society is amoral. Of course, they don’t want war, but people behave submissively, passively and don’t want to engage in open conflict with the state.
....

Despite all the fear, the Homo Putinus hopes that Putin will protect the country from the West and lead it out of the economic crisis, as he did during the first years of his presidency.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/opinion-researcher-lev-gudkov-russians-have-little-compassion-for-the-ukrainians-a-066c08c6-60f4-48e1-853a-d2b3d67bd6b8

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TIL

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 21:06:47 GMT

I've played with ChatGPT a bit and find it to be a useful writing/editing assistant. It definitely helps generate various versions of paragraphs that would've been difficult for me to produce on my own.

In the meantime, the bot has a limitation that Google or somebody's got to exploit for business.

"I'm sorry, but I am unable to provide information about events that occurred after my knowledge cutoff in 2021. As a language model, I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access current events. My responses are based solely on the information and knowledge that I possess at the time of my creation."

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TIL: Why isn't the world covered in poop?

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 02:20:05 GMT

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СЯУ: 4%

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 05:39:35 GMT

Доля россиян, которые считают, что донбасские сепаратисты или российские военные сбили малайский Боинг рейс MH17, равна доле пакистанцев, которые считают, что теракт 11 сентября 2001 года в Нью Йорке совершили арабские террористы.

На этом вопрос современной российской культуры можно считать закрытым.

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TIL

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 05:09:39 GMT

No matter how long a log stays in the water, it doesn't become a crocodile.

--- Proverb of the Bambara people of Mali

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199539536.001.0001/acref-9780199539536-e-1322

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TIL: 听其言而观其行

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 09:00:59 GMT

"Listen to what he says and watch what he does."
via https://twitter.com/AlexGabuev/status/1578830173767888896

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TIL: Vanishness!

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 06:44:57 GMT

( Read more... )

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TIL: projector

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 07:35:17 GMT

My lord was pleased to represent me as a great admirer of projects, and a person of much curiosity and easy belief; which, indeed, was not without truth; for I had myself been a sort of projector in my younger days.
....

I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy. Every room has in it one or more projectors; and I believe I could not be in fewer than five hundred rooms.

--- Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift. 1726.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm
Part 3, Chapters 4-5.

Note the meaning of "projector".

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TIL

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 18:46:44 GMT

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. - Seneca

via Remchukov https://youtu.be/fggfPTemnWA?t=3255

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