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Критическое обновление безопасности PHP

graker — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:55:00 +0000

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?

Claude Code и технические инструкции

graker — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:50:00 +0000

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 And of course they all became outdated overnight too.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:

Wrote a manifest listing the screenshots from different sections of the site: which pages to take them from and under which accounts.
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.
He even wrote a script for the video, which records several pieces from different sections separately and then glues them into a complete intro.
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.
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.

PR на шиссот!

graker — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:30:00 +0000

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

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?

Новинки сентября

graker — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:45:00 +0000

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.

Синдром Рэя Уайза

graker — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:20:00 +0000

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.

44

graker — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:25:00 +0000

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!

Нейроотладка

graker — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:05:00 +0000

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!

Новинки августа

graker — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Китайские игры

graker — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

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 :)

Дуовщина

graker — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:15:00 +0000

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.

Доктурист разжился курсами валют туроператоров

graker — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:45:00 +0000

There's a new update in Docturist: we've added support for tour operators' exchange rates. What does it mean? Tour operators settle foreign bookings in a currency, dollars or euros. Which makes sense: they have to settle with foreign counterparties while the exchange rate keeps changing.

So the price of a tour is usually given in a currency, while the operator accepts payments in rubles, converting them into the tour price at some rate. Not at the Central Bank rate, of course, but at the operator's own rate, which each operator sets on its own (usually a few rubles above the Central Bank rate).

In Docturist you can keep bookings either in rubles — manually converting everything you need — or in a currency. And if you keep them in a currency, questions usually come up: roughly how much is the tour in rubles today? How much is left to pay? How many dollars of the tour price should be counted if the tourist paid $1000?

Until today, Docturist showed calculations at the Central Bank rate, purely for illustration, which is only good for a rough estimate. For an exact figure, you could enter the conversion rate manually and see the amount.

But why do it manually when you can take the rate from the operator's website and use it to get exact amounts? So we got busy and added support for operators' rates. Now, if exchange rates are supported for the tour operator the booking is made with, they take priority over the Central Bank rates and the user gets exact calculations (manual input is still possible and takes precedence).

From a technical point of view, writing dozens of parsers is, of course, not my favorite pastime. Somewhere there's an SPA with hydration after load, so plain requests don't see the rates and you have to hunt for an API. Somewhere foreign IP addresses are banned, so you have to hand the AI fixtures manually to test the parser. One site went and banned well-known hosting address ranges, so you can't just parse it from a live server. And somewhere there's even a bot protection script, and you can't get the page HTML at all without playwright/puppeteer.

It's unpleasant to wade through these thickets: you're not stealing anything, it's all purely for the convenience of users who bring money to these very operators. But there are so many restrictions, as if it were some terrible secret and not a USD/EUR block displayed right on the home page.

Anyway, the first dozen operators have been conquered and added to the service — both as an automatic per-operator parser in the queue and as a fallback to manual input. Plus plans B and C in case everything breaks or someone bans our IP.

We keep working!

P.S. And if you're interested in the Central Bank exchange rates, check out the Currencypotamus bot.

Доклад на ZelDevMeetup

graker — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:20:00 +0000

Yesterday the stars aligned just right and I managed to give a talk at the Zeldev meetup.

The talk is called «Robots write the code, but we answer for it» — based on my April article. I originally planned to give it in May, but this turned out even better — over these months I've added a few new ideas.

In my opinion it went quite well, I haven't lost the skill over a decade. Thanks everyone, especially the organizers for the opportunity!

The slides are attached below the fold, they're in a progressive HTML format, so you can view them right in the frame. I made the deck in Claude Design (where else would you make a presentation about neural networks?), which is probably why clicking back and forth through the slides works a bit oddly, not quite like in PowerPoint or Impress.

There's no video recording.

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.

Unleash my inner speaker

graker — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:40:00 +0000

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.

Одиссея

graker — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 10:10:00 +0000

The other day we went to see the new «Odyssey». The release in Russia is unofficial, sanctions-schmanctions, the ticket says a different movie title, but they show it all the same. At first I thought it would be a cam rip, but then I realized it wasn't a recording, since real people kept walking back and forth during the film.

Below are some details that could be considered spoilers. So if you don't know what this Odyssey is about but would like to find out on your own first, maybe better not to read on just yet.

What can I say. The movie is good. Overall the whole world liked it a lot, and so did I. Odysseus' adventures were trimmed in detail somewhat, of course, that's understandable, otherwise you'd have to make a TV series. But the main milestones are there, at the cost of only some of the details. The Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, the witch, Calypso, Hades, Scylla and Charybdis are all in place and in satisfying amounts (although Scylla could have been drawn better).

I was a bit puzzled why the Laestrygonians were put in full metal armor, but maybe it's so you don't confuse them with the Cyclopes. Agamemnon puzzled me too — he's always shown from behind, a head taller than everyone else and in shadow. A huge gloomy demon of war that descended into the movie from the pages of some comic book. It's unclear why he's like that, maybe to reveal the author's idea, but then he should have been shown more.

But these are all trifles, of course. What can be said overall — director Nolan shot «The Odyssey» in a very modern way. And I don't mean the mixed cast everyone complained about. You barely notice it, by the way: well, Helen doesn't look much like Diane Kruger, so what. What I mean is that the director gave Odysseus a modern, humanistic mind. Throughout the movie the hero grieves not for his comrades who fell in the war, not for his crew, whom he himself doomed to wandering and death with his vanity. And, generally speaking, not even so much for Telemachus, Penelope and Ithaca.

Odysseus grieves and suffers over the ravaged Troy. That they beat and killed everyone there way too hard, should have gone softer somehow. And they cheated with that horse too, totally not cool. And that's why he's now ashamed to come home and look his wife in the eye. Who apparently also has a modern mind and would surely be ashamed of such a disgraceful cutthroat.

This dose of humanism seemed a bit odd to me. It isn't fitting for an ancient warlord, a vain one at that, to suffer over a plundered enemy city. Because in his ancient worldview that's the expected and legitimate goal of war: achieve it and you'll cover yourself in martial glory. Not in humanitarian soul-searching.

But the movie, I repeat, is good. Because it's well made, and the authors expressed their idea in an interesting and skillful way. Because if you don't come up with new readings of a source that's almost three thousand years old, then what's the point of it all?

By the way, I have my own reading too :)

Новинки июля

graker — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:45:00 +0000

And here's a short review of new TV shows. In July, of course, there's again nothing to watch, but a few things are still worth a try.

Silo

Popular sci-fi where citizens live in a multi-story silo pierced by a spiral staircase, yet nobody sings Led Zeppelin songs. And when someone goes outside — on their own or by force — everyone asks a very important question: will they wipe the window with a rag on their way out or not? The show is decent, although it can put even me to sleep. The third season came out in July and is airing now.

The Dark

A miniseries that has nothing to do with the famous German sci-fi show. It's a crime drama, rather grim and on a grim subject: an insidious killer maniac murdering teenagers in a small Scottish town. Not a masterpiece by any means, but in my opinion its rating is lower than it deserves. Worth a look if you're into grim detective stories.

The Westies

The 80s. The main characters are the Westies, an Irish ethnic gang from a New York neighborhood with the colorful name Hell's Kitchen. There they cross paths with Italians, Colombians and even Irish independence fighters. On the plus side — the Irish accent, plus Titus Welliver in one of the roles. On the minus side — J.K. Simmons just doesn't pull off the gang boss role for me, he's too cardboard and at times cartoonish here. The same goes for the Italian underboss. Which makes the show look rather run-of-the-mill, though it could have been better.

Lucky

A crime road movie in TV show form, so to speak. The main character, Lucky, is always running — from the authorities, from gangsters, from herself. But she's also chasing — her husband, who drugged her and made off with a pile of money. All in all, everything is pretty standard for this kind of story. Timothy Olyphant is in the cast, but there's too little of him. The lead is Anya Taylor-Joy from the fun show «The Queen's Gambit». As watchable as it is skippable.

Ann Droid

A comedy about a battered android assigned to look after an elderly woman. Ann the droid is played by Diane Morgan, the esteemed Philomena Cunk of British television. In my opinion it turned out pretty funny, I watched it in one go and laughed out loud in places. All in all, quite recommendable.

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe

It's not a cartoon, it's just the poster. A «Big Bang Theory» spin-off starring the supporting characters of «The Big Bang Theory». Comic book store owner Stuart, the huge geologist Bert, the nasty lisping physicist Kripke, and Denise, whom nobody remembers. They have to fight, or at least somehow survive, an apocalypse that Sheldon, Leonard and Howard accidentally unleashed on the planet. I've only watched the first episode so far. Honestly, with all due respect to the authors, the jokes are all pretty predictable and bland overall. The only bright moment is when Penn and Teller suddenly showed up — but even that only emphasized that the show is bullshit.

That's all for July. You can also browse the list of new shows and premieres in the @tv_botopotamus_bot bot. By the way, I recently added pagination to it. Now you can see what came out not only today but also yesterday. Or what's coming next month. And there will be something to watch there :)

Обновления в Ботопотамах

graker — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:20:00 +0000

The other day I managed to do some solid work on Botopotamus.

First, I've added a new public bot: meet Currencypotamus. It takes the XML with exchange rates from the Central Bank, parses it and shows it to you. There are plenty of such bots, but ~~this one's mine~~ the trick is that during the window when the Central Bank usually publishes new rates, this one keeps knocking on its door. And if you subscribe, it'll notify you right away when the rates are out.

This can be useful for making decisions, for example, in the travel business. Rush to pay for bookings now or put it off till tomorrow? Currencypotamus will tell you in Telegram or in Max.

Second, I've thoroughly reworked the platform itself. I made a modular architecture — now each botopotamus is added as a separate directory with all its logic isolated inside. With access to shared features: cron, cache, queues, events, statistics and so on. A module is a bot feature, while the bots themselves are added from the admin panel: enter the Telegram and Max credentials, click the features you need — and the bot is ready.

I've added localization: the language is detected from the user's message, and if a bot has several languages, you can switch manually.

I've slightly improved the monitoring bot: now if a site goes down, the bot pings it more often for a while — to detect sooner when the site is back up.

For these changes, I've put together a new Botopotamus landing page. The old one was purely about the monitoring bot, the new one is about bot development. And the public bots each got a mini landing page. I think Claude Design did a pretty good job, personally I keep getting mesmerized by the flying elephant.

We keep working, a couple more useful bots are in the pipeline.

Нейросети и анализ кода

graker — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:15:00 +0000

Yesterday I was estimating a group of ~40 tickets. All of them were created from an AI code analysis report on a large Drupal project. The project is about 10 years old, the codebase has evolved all this time, 20 subdomains, integrations, APIs, content synchronization — all in all, a cool project.

The report is structured, the neural network checked the project for all four horsemen of the apocalypse: Vulnerabilities, Bugs, Slowness and Dirty Code. Originally the report produced many more tasks, but I slapped won't fix on about 30% of them right away. There were glitches and misunderstandings of the context. But 40 tickets still remained.

Most of them are also tasks of the very lowest priority, like

a custom module doesn't declare a dependency on something like paragraphs;
somewhere in the code a brazen programmer called \Drupal::service() instead of using dependency injection;
somewhere deprecated Drupal versions haven't been removed from the supported versions, and so on.

There were also a few more serious issues:

a couple of N+1 problems;
several XSS vulnerabilities (only accessible to admins, but still);
several places lacking checks for whether a key exists in an array (spamming the log with warnings);
and even one timing oracle vulnerability.

Yes, dirty code is a sign of dirty thoughts :) Yes, it would be nice to clean it all up. But apart from 3–4 issues, it adds up to more than a hundred hours of work in total, and the payoff is slightly cleaner code, tidied-up legacy, a bit less tech debt and fewer warning/debug entries in the log. It's nice, of course, when the client doesn't mind such a spring cleaning. And all honor and glory to the account managers who can convince the client of the need for such cleaning when its value to the end user is roughly zero.

And these reports still leave a strange feeling. They do find something. But so far these reports bring much more fuss than benefit.

Задача трёх тел

graker — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:40:00 +0000

To broaden my horizons and out of general interest, I watched «3 Body Problem» the other day. It's a TV series based on the famous book by the Chinese author Liu Cixin, so I watched the Chinese adaptation. Not the Netflix version, which exists too.

At first I wanted to read the book, but I figured it would take very long — so I decided to watch. I didn't notice right away, though, that the Chinese version has not the usual 10–12 episodes, but a whole 30. The book, however, really is very famous — the first in a trilogy. Oh well.

The genre here is science fiction, as scientific as it gets. About scientists. Something strange happens to them at the start of the series. Some kind of dissonance, or, on the contrary, an emotional catharsis. After that, some of them have accidents, while others even declare that their science doesn't exist and kill themselves. It's all mysterious and very suspicious, maybe there's a conspiracy, but whose — reptilians, the Illuminati or hostile Western intelligence services? Unclear.

A scientist and a policeman set out to figure out what happened. And while the scientist cares about physics, metaphysics and the deeper meaning of what's going on, the policeman is more down to earth — whom to catch and punish for the deaths of smart, talented comrades. At least at first.

There's plenty of mystery at the beginning, and the first episodes strongly reminded me of the old Strugatsky brothers' book «Definitely Maybe» («A Billion Years Before the End of the World»), where an insidious universe itself punished scientists so they wouldn't poke their noses where they shouldn't. But the plot here is original, not some clone, so it's not that simple.

There's also a Fringe vibe — that gorgeous sci-fi show from the late 2000s. But that's in moderation too: pleasant, without fawning, let alone copying.

I also liked the opening titles and the cool Chinese song in the background. Very atmospheric. I don't know what the song is about, I probably need a few more years of study to understand something like that. But in the series itself I managed to catch some Chinese words and phrases I already know behind the dubbing. Which is pleasing, of course.

Having watched it, I was a bit surprised that they stretched the story over a whole 30 episodes. Maybe that's typical of their TV production — I don't know. The Netflix version didn't drag it out. Then again, its IMDb rating is currently 7.5 versus 7.6 for the Chinese version. The long version has its advantages too — unhurried pace, atmosphere, contemplation. I'm a bore, I like it.

It's also somewhat confusing in places that some seemingly serious moments are peppered with lulz. Perhaps that's also a tradition of a culture I'm not very familiar with.

But overall it's good, and the take on the global problem it raises is original too. It won't blow your mind, but it's solid and useful for broadening your artistic horizons.

Too bad there's nothing in the news about a Chinese adaptation of the second book in the trilogy, «The Dark Forest». But the second season of the Netflix production seems to be coming out this year. So I guess I'll have to watch the Western version too. And we will, it's interesting after all.