Fun

Антропики всех забанят?

graker — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 05:14:00 +0000

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?

RTS Дачники против слизней

graker — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:20:00 +0000

As part of preparing for my talk, here's an example of vibe code, so to speak. I came up with a few small ideas and tossed them not even into Claude Code, but just into a Claude chat to discuss — and it went ahead and built a game demo in 15 minutes. We polished it just a tiny bit, and here I am sharing the result.

It's an RTS/base defense game: gardeners (played by my usual characters) have to defend a greenhouse from slugs attacking in waves. Stock up on cucumbers, buy units, squash slugs while the greenhouse is still standing. Of course, it's only a prototype, Claude made the characters out of emoji, and there isn't much variety either. But — tweak the balance a little, add map generation, buildings, art, sounds, and…

Even so, here's what you can do with an agent in, I repeat, just 15 minutes.

It's all written in JavaScript, Claude demoed it to me right in the chat. A little over 800 lines of code — and that's including all the texts and lines, HTML and styles. Plus the game logic, and even a pathfinding algorithm that leads the slugs to the greenhouse (flow field).

You can play it right below the fold.

Про омофоны и господина Ши Ши

graker — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:55:00 +0000

After the previous post about English idioms I was thinking about homophones in Chinese, which I keep learning. The syllable shì immediately came to mind, which means pretty much anything. Well, for instance,

是世市室事试式示誓柿

all of these sound like shì and can mean to be, world, city, room, matter, to try, type, to show, oath, persimmon. And that's just one tone.

If you add the other tones (shī, shí, shǐ), you get no fewer than 40 different common meanings, all written differently but sounding (within a tone) the same. Even the number 10 — 十 — is shí as well.

That alone blows your mind a little, but while digging into how many different words sound like shi, shy or shii, I found this wonderful poem.

石室詩士施氏, 嗜獅, 誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時, 適十獅適市。
是時, 適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅, 恃矢勢, 使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍, 適石室。
石室濕, 氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭, 氏始試食是十獅。
食時, 始識是十獅, 實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。

It looks like an ordinary Chinese poem that you or I could read over breakfast, if only we knew how :)

That said, this particular poem is easier to read than others. The thing is, it reads as

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

That is, 92 syllables, and all of them sound like "shi" in different tones!

According to one version, it was written in the early 20th century by the linguist Yuen Ren Chao; according to another, it was written by one Hu Mingfu, and the linguist published it and later refined it. They say this humorous little verse is perfectly grammatical, but for obvious reasons pretty much nobody can understand it by ear.

Russian and English sources translate it a bit differently; here's the English version from Wikipedia:

In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

And on video platforms you'll easily find clips of all sorts of people trying to read this poem aloud.

I'll keep learning this wonderful language!