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19 Sep 2026

Fairy Tales

Patronymic

Vadim first saw Shahnoza Karimova in a rectangle on Teams. The meeting was in Russian. The client was from Tashkent, and Vadim had been put on the project for two…

19 Sep 2026

Fairy Tales

Fear and Loathing in the Broom Closet

At some point I realized I had too many vacuum cleaners. The number itself was irrelevant; counting is a bourgeois habit. The trouble was that every one of them had…

28 Jul 2026

Life lessons

A Request, an Order and the Right to Refuse

Do not issue an instruction nobody intends to carry out. Every such order reduces the weight of the next one. The system learns fast: a formal demand can be ignored…

28 Jul 2026

Life lessons

Fact and the Novel in Your Head

Words have a literal sense and a function. The philosopher of language Paul Grice noticed that conversation works thanks to unspoken cooperation. We assume that the other person is telling…

28 Jul 2026

Fairy Tales

The Pull-Up Bar

Technical justification of stubbornness I have a younger daughter. If she wants something, she goes for it without seeing obstacles. Let me phrase that carefully: not overcoming obstacles — literally…

28 Jul 2026

Life lessons

The Body Is Not Transport for the Head

Intellectual culture is used to talking about thinking as if the body merely delivered consciousness to the desk. In fact sleep, movement, pain, food and hormonal state take part in…