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Today at 14:00 UTC (5 p.m. Moscow time) a critical PHP security update is coming out: https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-20-1

The update is so monstrously critical that no details are disclosed, so that nobody hacks absolutely everyone in advance.

So get your consoles ready, open your Docker configs and off we go, updating everything one by one.

But if vulnerabilities and updates keep pouring in like this, sooner or later we will really have to let robots loose on production and let them handle it themselves. Otherwise how is one supposed to keep up with all this?

After the «redesign for 600» updating Docturist has become much easier. Yesterday we shipped the integration with the Ferma fiscal data operator, which had been ready even before the redesign, but we did not get to switch it on. Now we have, and even the merge went almost without conflicts. Life is getting better :hat:

By the way, during integrations and deployments like these it has turned out to be very useful to involve neural networks in preparing the accompanying materials. I would never trust an AI to write my own articles: robot ears stick out of every sentence afterwards. But preparing an article like «How to use the feature from this commit» is a piece of cake. The text is technical, written precisely, and needs no literary flourishes. Here, for example, is a manual on issuing receipts: I hardly edited it by hand.

What is more, monsieur Claude can connect to Chrome and Playwright, so making screenshots can be handed over to the robots completely too.

As for the manual, Claude did not just make all the screenshots (although he did). When we finished and rolled out the new design, it suddenly™ turned out that screenshots of the service and even videos are elements of the design itself. Except the design is new now, while the screenshots and videos are old. Besides, the project blog already had several manuals from before the redesign. And of course they all became outdated overnight too.

I really did not want to reshoot all of that by hand, so I dumped it on Claude right away. And here is what he did:

1. Wrote a manifest listing the screenshots from different sections of the site: which pages to take them from and under which accounts.
2. Wrote a script that takes all or some of the screenshots from the manifest, logging in with the right account and opening the right pages.
3. He even wrote a script for the video, which records several pieces from different sections separately and then glues them into a complete intro.
4. If a screenshot needs an error that is hard to reproduce (say, a rare error from the fiscal data operator), he simply draws it by manipulating the DOM, about ten times faster than I would have figured out how. And if there is not enough test data, he generates it on the fly, or also inserts it into the DOM.
5. Now, if I decide to change the look of some page a little, or rearrange blocks, I just rerun the script* and immediately have a set of updated screenshots.
   And if I add a new section or feature, Claude takes the screenshots and adds them to the manifest as well.

Highly recommended, if you are not doing this yet.

*actually I do not rerun the script, I am too lazy. I tell Claude to reshoot the pages I need, and he reruns it himself.

The other day a PR of 610 files was finally defeated and merged! The result is a complete redesign of Docturist. The public part (the landing page and the blog) got a bit of it too, but first of all it is the whole inside: all the pages, forms and dialogs of the CRM itself.

This is one more example of how you can get carried away solving tasks with a neural network. Initially the idea was much more modest. The dashboard, also known as the desktop, also known as the home page inside the system, was made rather simple. This is what it looked like:

Of course, the travel agents reported that they did not use the widgets on this desktop at all. Only the links, to jump straight to the section they need. And I wanted it to be rather a quick access to important sections and information. So that some things could be done without leaving the dashboard at all.

That is what Claude Design and I took on. We rethought the contents of the dashboard to make it convenient and actually used, not just a place for links like the desktop in Win95. And the «before» above turned into a new «after»:

Now there are all kinds of metrics, and most importantly a smarter bookings feed. You can look at the latest bookings by date, or at the ones that need particular attention.

I did not hold back Claude's design impulses, so on top of that I got a new style at once. The previous style was built on the Color Admin theme, which I bought specially back in 2018. The theme has of course aged somewhat since then and lost some of its relevance.

Anyway, once there is a new look, you do not want to leave the other pages in the old one. And so, page by page, component by component, first with Claude Design and then with Claude Code, we brought the whole service to the new styles. And since just redrawing things is boring, we also rethought, improved and remade the components on the pages along the way.

That is how we got a PR of 610 files. Which of course wore me out with reviewing and testing. In the nutshell, the points of my talk (in Russian) on this topic still hold. You have to test, structure, decompose. But not looking at the generated code, as Robert Martin advises, does not work out for me just yet: I checked every screen, inspected the changes, the tests, the front end, and in each part I found something that was not done quite right, or did not work, or caused some new problems.

But in the end I checked everything, tried it by hand and shipped it. So now Docturist has not only a new, rethought, modern design, but also all kinds of usability bits, including:

— Docturist remembers and shows right away the set of tour operators the agent works with most often, no need to search through autocomplete every time.
— / or Ctrl+F immediately starts a search across all data (pressing Ctrl+F again starts the browser's native search).
— Booking documents can be generated and signed right from a popup on the desktop, without having to open the booking.
— The calendar works better on mobile devices (the mobile calendar is simply made anew).
— The profile page is finally split into 5 sections by the topics of the settings.
 

I am happy with the result, and now updates can be rolled out more often again, without reviewing such huge PRs. Overall the redesign took about a month and a half. Next up are the integration with an online cash register service (already done) and a dark theme (also done). Let's go!

Docturist, a smart planner for travel agents

For the last few days, reports of fierce bans from Anthropic have been popping up everywhere. Some authors report annoying bans in their channels. In several themed communities many people share how they got banned alive. On Habr they write that the whole of Hong Kong is being banned for using VPNs, and we in Russia are getting caught too. Someone from Yandex even complained they had to switch to GigaChat Codex.

Numerous reviews also say that a new claude.ai account now requires showing your passport and social security number and handing in biomaterials. So, dear friends, maybe neural networks will not replace us after all: we will not pass on skull shape.

On the one hand, take that, robots! I have not forgotten how to code by myself yet. On the other hand, I would like another month of vibe coding my little new video game at night…

I am holding on so far, though: since August I have been hearing from different people that they are getting banned. And I myself forget to turn on the VPN every other time, keep discussing Russia's traffic filtering boxes with Claude, make it install the Ministry of Digital Development certificates and parse resources that do not work from abroad. But apparently the robots will start suspecting something soon.

By the way, my current subscription runs out on Monday, so I will be squeezing every last drop out of it all weekend!

P.S. So how is everyone coping, colleagues? Codex, Cursor? GigaChat? 一个鲜为人知的中国神经网络? Human-hand-coding?

And here is the monthly series post: September brought plenty to watch.

Last Seen

A gloomy small-town drama for fans of gloomy small-town dramas. About a missing daughter and a dad who has been searching for years for where she went. With an Australian flair and accent. Watchable.

Slow Horses

Jackson Lamb is back with the sixth season. Witty and engaging as always: if you have to choose what to watch, this is it. Besides, in the first episode Ho plays Ghost of Tsushima at work. Separately approved.

Golden Axe

If your old-school nostalgia has not kicked in for a while, here is a good reason. An animated adaptation of the ancient mega-game about a joyful side-scrolling beat'em up as a huge barbarian, a huge amazon, or a not so huge old man with an axe. An extra joy was that the heroes could ride beasts and beat enemies on horseback. Apparently, that is what the cartoon is about.

Personally, the trailer gave me all the nostalgia I needed, so I am unlikely to watch it. But if you are interested, the old man with the axe is voiced by Matthew Rhys, who, by the way, got three Emmys this year, for Widow's Bay and The Beast in Me.

Neagley

The Russian internet has not quite decided how to read her surname, but the season is already out in full, right after the last episode of Reacher. It is a spin-off about his former colleague from the dangerous military police service, Frances Neagley. Who is now a private detective. The spin-off does not drop the baton, Reacher was shown at the start and hidden right away. Well made, all those Ballards could learn a thing or two.

Line of Fire

A new series about a family fully employed by the US government: mom, dad and the kids serve as marshals and agents of the FBI, the Secret Service and the Department of Justice. This wonderful plot construction made it possible to cram five uninteresting stories into the frame instead of one interesting one. But it does have a conspiracy of reptilians, the Illuminati and some other secret services, and September would not be complete without one.

Worth watching if you need to fall asleep quickly. Or if you want to see Peter Krause, a veteran of the legendary Six Feet Under and the undeservedly forgotten The Lost Room. Where else would you see him these days?

And briefly about the returns, of which there are many in September:

— Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen and MobLand are back with second seasons
— Stranger Things: Tales from '85: nobody liked the first season of the cartoon, so Netflix immediately released a second one
— If for some reason you do not like mediocre cartoons, you can watch South Park, back with its 29th (!) season
— You can tickle your nerves with the 13th season of American Horror Story
— The cozy police story set in Belfast, Blue Lights, is back with season 4
— And today the sequel to the sequel of Scrubs comes out (the second season).

That is a lot to watch. But if you get through it all, information about new shows, premieres, returns and schedules can be found as always in the TV Botopotamus bot on Telegram or on Max.

Watching detective series from the 2000s has become hard.

First, good luck finding a watchable one you have not seen yet.

Second, every one you find is sure to be struck by the «Ray Wise syndrome» (yes, the one who killed Laura Palmer)

What does that mean? Say I am watching Life, the one with Damian Lewis. After Band of Brothers, but before Billions. A cool little police procedural. But what do I see:

— Oh, this guy is from Person of Interest.
— And this one is from Burn Notice.
— And this one was in Castle.
— And these seven in a row are from Supernatural.

And that is it: as soon as the brain latches on to a familiar face, you can stop watching the episode. Because this one standout supporting actor was almost certainly brought in to play the villain. The rest is clear.

The only thing that is not clear is how to watch.

P.S. And it is the Ray Wise syndrome because with him it always works.

I grew up a little today, and here is what I want to say. In autumn, as usual, I again didn't manage to complete everything I wanted to. Neural networks are like this: with them you can fail to get done far more than without them.

Mia Romanovna started kindergarten, so there may be a little more time. But so far she has brought back a bucket of snot from there: enough for everyone.

I am sitting at home, working through my personal record PR of 600+ changes. Fortunately, the shore is already in sight, thanks to the tests and perseverance. I would like to get it merged in September.

Russia's traffic filtering boxes have been raging lately. Some time ago I wrote a monitor bot for quick notifications in Telegram (or Max) that a site is down. But for a couple of weeks now almost all monitors keep sending false alarms. You go to check, and everything is fine. Everything is fine, but the site cannot be seen from the bot's subnet. And 10 minutes later all is well.

But we do not lose heart, we will overcome everything. The main thing is to keep looking at the world with curiosity and humor. Which is what I wish you too, dear friends!

Neural networks keep mercilessly replacing us. This time, in investigations and debugging.

Given: an editor lost a bit of content. Clicked something and everything was gone. Never happened before, and here we go again.

— Hey Claude, here are cleaned-up database dumps from several sites, an editor was doing something on the master, and content disappeared on several sites. Find where it went and figure out what the editor clicked. Just be careful, it is three gigs.
— Avec plaisir. And I will not parse the dumps, don't you worry.

He looks at the content synchronization logic. Spins up mysql containers in Docker on his own, loads the dumps. Unwinds the page revisions across the tables. 15 minutes later he writes a report: right here, on such-and-such date and time, the editor unsubscribed from the content and everything was gone. Here he restored the subscriptions, but it was too late, ha-ha-ha. And here is what to configure so that it is never too late again. But that is for another time, for now, sorry, the content cannot be brought back. Thank you, you are welcome, write again.

And how could this be automated even further? Let him into production, perhaps, and into Jira, so that he explains it to the editor himself? Some people, I know, already do, but we are still scared to let him into production. And not every project allows it anyway.

And what comes next at all? What did they do in Frank Herbert's books to completely ban all these computers?

upd: Humans in leather are still needed after all.

A thorough study of the report revealed several problems that the AI decided not to explain and that, in principle, cannot be explained by the report's findings. I dug deeper myself into places the neural network could not reach and found a bug in a third-party SaaS service used in the project.

I think Claude would have found it too, but who would let him in there.

I feel mighty. Take that, robots!

Not that much watchable came out in August, but there is something to watch. And it is all returns.

Dark Matter

A guy chasing some kind of matter ends up in an alternate reality. Where he has a different life, and in it he lives through different versions of his fate once, and again, and many more times. But it all turns out, guys, not right, not the way it should be. A sci-fi thriller, decent ratings, the second season is out. I have not properly watched the first one yet, but I am watching.

Lioness

Another work by Taylor Sheridan. With such productivity he could outshine neural networks with his sheridanslop. Though his stuff usually turns out to be of decent quality. Lioness may not be reaching for the stars either, but it is quite watchable. Of course, the series is about conspiracies of reptilians, the Illuminati and all sorts of secret services.

The third season started in August, and this time the evil secret services are, of course, ours, Russian. I have not watched much yet: they showed the fighting in Ukraine, a swarm of drones, and Sheridan himself even grabbed a rifle and played a little movie war.

7/10 or so, worth a look, but I would not call it a must.

Reacher

Now this is a different story. Jack Reacher is back with the fourth season: a huge veteran roaming American towns and villages with nothing but a toothbrush in his pocket. On his travels he keeps stumbling over yet another conspiracy of reptilians, the Illuminati and secret services. And of course he tramples the enemies in his way with size 15 boots.

It is shot quite well, an old-school action flick about the last action hero, a little vaccine of masculinity for viewers spoiled by agendas. By the way, in September a Reacher spin-off comes out, «Neagley», about the character of the same name from the previous seasons. Apparently for those who for some reason got tired of watching a mountain of muscle and listening to soldier jokes as simple as an axe, but still like the setting.

Vigil

A detective story about women investigators, sailors, a British submarine and where one could possibly vanish from it. And not without conspiracies of you know who.

The third season is out. A murky series, even though it comes from the creators of Line of Duty. I think I did not even get through the second season.

Ted Lasso

One of the kindest, nicest and at the same time funniest comedies of recent years, with Jason Sudeikis, is also back for a fourth season. Which, by the way, was announced at the 2026 World Cup final, where he and Coach Beard ran around the stadium at half-time.

Still very good and fun, even if you are not really into football.

And that is all. Premiere and return dates can be found as always in the Telegram bot @tv_botopotamus_bot or in TV Botopotamus on Max.

Here is what I found out while studying. Our language, like many others, has the verb «играть» (to play). A universal one: you can play games, or the trumpet, or football, or even play a role. English has to play, French has jouer, German has spielen.

It turns out that Chinese, to make things more interesting, has no such word. I mean, the word 玩 (wán), to play, to have fun, of course exists. But it is good only for games: 玩游戏 (wán yóuxì) is to play games, 玩手机 (wán shǒujī) is to play on the phone (or just to zone out in the phone). Video games work too. But not the trumpet.

It turns out that Chinese has many different words for different kinds of playing, and the right word depends on which part of the body you play with :) Well, that is, on the specific action. And everything covered by a single играть/play/jouer/spielen turns into:

— 打 (dǎ): playing with the hands: basketball, volleyball, tennis, cards. Works for video games too.
— 踢 (tī): playing with the feet, for example kicking a football: 踢足球 (tī zúqiú)
— 下 (xià): moving pieces, for example in Chinese chess: 下象棋 (xià xiàngqí)
— 弹 (tán): playing musical instruments, but, surprise, not all of them, only those you pluck or press. The piano, or the guitar.
— 拉 (lā): playing musical instruments with a bow or by stretching: the violin, the accordion.
— 吹 (chuī): and this one is for wind instruments, the saxophone or the flute: 吹笛子 (chuī dízi). In short, where you have to blow.
— 敲 (qiāo): for percussion. By the way, 打 (dǎ) works here too, it is with the hands after all.
— 演 / 扮演 (yǎn / bànyǎn): playing a role. For example, 扮演警察 (bànyǎn jǐngchá) is to play the role of a policeman.

And in case that does not seem enough, there is also 耍 (shuǎ): in some places it means fooling around, and in other regions people simply say it instead of the general 玩 (wán).

What an interesting language, I will keep studying it. By the way, the other day I got to the verb "can", "be able to", and that certainly made studying out loud at home and in public places spicier :)