So, first time in like 5 years, I’m hiring a team. This time, I lead Answer Quality at Perplexity; preempting the “but frontier models are made by other companies”, yes, sure, but almost nobody gets to play with all of them to choose the best one. We do. https://t.co/28A31GKsSt
@sarahlol1863603 This is not true. For several hundreds of years, Orthodox Church of Russia was the number 1 state religion and served the government faithfully. During the Soviet times, it was the second official religion and enjoyed tacit support in exchange of snitching on the churchgoers.
@LapisLazAlter There is only one truly touristy Balkan country though and it’s Montenegro.
Also software code does not count as export but Belgrade is by now in top 10 IT hubs in Europe, with SWE salaries higher than in, say, Barcelona.
@kkocos Не ну политические представители россиян за рубежом существуют. Их никто не выбирал, они занимаются какими-то своими делами и участвуют в разработке ограничительных законов для соотечественников в Европе. Все как дома в общем.
@potsofbasil Yes, that’s real. There is even an official government app to write these letters. https://t.co/xbC5mcmraN has some details and even the most notorious political prisoners were allowed to receive these letters and respond.
@Koreios@TTBN_GAMING Sure they are lightning bolts *wink wink*. Two other symbols denote the Sun🌞btw . For some reason though the Slavic guys who tattoo all these four symbols on themselves together also tend to shave heads really closely!
@suchenzang Typical Kolmogorov complexity of the code has always been defined by the length of the tickets in JIRA. With coding agents, engineers are learning this fact for themselves.
@CameronCorduroy Interestingly, a year ago the financing of screwworrm-related projects roughly doubled. And, well, it got through this excellent Panamanian barrier inside humans who crossed the Darien gap in record numbers for a few years…
@Lekapib@Meelsie143 As per Sapkowski, the only true way to create a fantasy map is to bring a pile of sand to your room, piss on it and record the result so that it’s both random and with a correct hydrography
On the fiction side it’s mostly modern SF&F (whatever wins the Hugo/Nebula Awards, plus a set of maybe 10 authors I follow, @maxgladstone, @naominovik and their network most prominent) — it is a genre with its well-defined tropes but for me it’s closer to human condition in 2026 than “serious” prose. I have also read a lot of the foundational works in the genre starting from the 19-century German Romantism and up through Jules Verne, Stephenson, Zamyatin, Welles, Tolkien, Bradbury, Ursula le Guin, Zelazny, @GreatDismal…
On nonfiction side my favorite is probably “are we smart enough to know how smart animals are”, with “inviting disaster” a close second. It’s way harder to find a non-finction book which is worth the time investment though: I wrote pop sci for a while and I’m deeply sceptical of books offering sweeping new theories of how world works for the public.