On life

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!

Duolingo suddenly told me that today is, it turns out, the 7th duoversary of my registration. Seven years ago I came to Duo to learn some German and got hooked for about two years — I don't remember exactly anymore (same as German, ha-ha-ha).

It was interesting and fun, and here's an old post about it that I just dug up. Some of it did stick in my head: I deal with German-language websites almost every day, and I still recognize familiar words.

But at some point I stopped practicing. And recently the interest came back in the form of a desire to learn Chinese. A pity, of course, that such desires show up more often the less time you have to act on them.

But while I still have a little time, I'm holding on and practicing. And the app is good, yes — since it stuck with me for so long.

By the way, if anyone's interested, besides various languages Duo has added chess, math and music theory courses. I already know how to play chess, I've had enough calculus for a lifetime, but music is something I could try.

Time to unleash my inner speaker. I'll be giving a talk at the https://zeldev.ru/agentikus meetup in a week. The talk is based on my April theses, so to speak — almost half a year has passed, and I have things to add.

The last time I gave a public talk was probably around 2015. So I'll have to prepare: I'll be drawing the slides with pebbles in my mouth like Demosthenes. Hopefully it'll turn out interesting.

Yesterday Kontur.Elba suddenly distinguished itself.

I have two accounts there, an LLC and a sole proprietorship, on different emails but the same phone number (that used to be allowed). On top of that, Diadoc and Extern for the LLC hang off one email. Kontur Bank for the sole proprietorship hangs off the other. And so, some time ago, Elba started pushily offering on login to "merge accounts" into a common, unified, invincible Kontur account. And I usually have no time for that, I just want to log in, do what I need and get out quickly. So every time I politely declined. Figuring that this "merge", if anyone needs it, isn't me, and all I'd get from it is hardship.

And that's pretty much how it turned out. Yesterday I log into Elba to do some work and see that the polite decline option has suddenly disappeared. Got it: you don't want to — we'll make you. Well, I logged in, what else could I do. And instantly a complete and irreversible merge happened: they replaced the sole proprietorship's email with the LLC's, trampling all uniqueness checks. So now you can log into the sole proprietorship with the LLC's email, and you can't log into the LLC account at all. I tried going into their unified account, added the LLC there via a digital signature, but it won't log me into Elba from there. It just opens the sole proprietorship account and that's it. Such a wonderful merge has come to pass.

And on the first of the month I usually send out invoices and make certificates of completion. Plus there's a letter from the tax service to answer. And then this. I immediately wrote to every support channel — how am I supposed to work? Some say: change the email in your Kontur account and try again. I changed it, tried, got the same result. Reliable, stable.

In another chat they immediately suggested I write an application for a login change, stamp it and send them a scan. I asked how it happened that you can't handle the obvious account-merge scenario, and I'm the one who has to run around with applications? They answered evasively and couldn't help.

So while I was torturing support in all the chats and by email, almost the whole working day went by. By the end of the day they fixed it, yes. I had to go into the Kontur account and add the sole proprietorship's digital signature (there's a gotcha of its own there, I'll tell you another time), and that finally let them separate the conjoined twin accounts of the sole proprietorship and the LLC. The best vibe surgeons were separating them, the operation lasted almost 5 hours. They managed it by the time I'd even got through to phone support and asked everyone to double-check properly.

But they managed, yes. By the evening I finally generated my documents.

You've probably already guessed what I'm getting at? If you worry that you did something less than perfectly, don't. Here's a nationally known group of companies handling an account merge scenario like this (and it's been going on for several months). So you'll do just fine. And even if not, whatever breaks can be fixed. And as everyone knows, only those who do nothing make no mistakes.

A post in support of everyone suffering from impostor syndrome.

I've been watching World Cup match highlights on Rutube. Watching whole matches takes too long, and they're mostly on late anyway, so highlights are just the thing. I tried YouTube, but you run into fakes and all sorts of junk, so I had to go this way.

Ads on Rutube are very aggressive, I get shown at least 3 ads per 6–8 minute video. And the one that comes up most often is some strange ad with Yura Borisov. I must have watched it about 20 times by now, and the most interesting thing is that I still don't know what it's advertising. There's something about fashionable, then something about eternal. But right at the moment when they should name what's being advertised, the "Skip" button becomes active for me :)

So people got together for a shoot, invited a famous actor, who was probably paid a lot of money. They did all of it, recorded it, edited it. And at launch nobody thought to check that the company's name is heard (or at least shown) before most viewers skip the video.

And you're still worried you'll do something wrong in your work? Don't worry, you'll do just fine!

Happy Programmer's Day, programmers! 

Today we can all bathe in torrents and smash up internet cafes!