Essays
A comprehensive benchmark comparing six Windows versions on identical Lenovo ThinkPad X220 laptops reveals that 25-year-old Windows XP outperforms Windows 11 on most metrics, exposing the cumulative performance cost of modern OS features, security layers, and telemetry.
Programming
Automation-induced skill degradation — long documented in aviation — is now quietly taking hold in software engineering. As AI tools absorb the "boring" parts of coding, the underlying cognitive muscle built through those tasks atrophies invisibly, often without the developer noticing until a crisis moment.
Hardware
A hands-on project building a custom ESP32-based automatic transmission control unit with WiFi configuration, solving noise, protection, and usability problems that plague existing DIY solutions.
Essays
A comprehensive review of every physical storage medium for long-term data archiving, from floppy disks to enterprise LTO tapes and thousand-year M-Discs, with honest assessments of longevity, costs, and practical recommendations.
Essays
The untold story of James D. Johnston, the Bell Labs engineer who co-invented perceptual audio coding alongside Karlheinz Brandenburg, built a portable music player three years before the iPod, and was largely erased from MP3's history.
Essays
The history of Soviet game consoles from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, covering pioneering devices like the Palestra-02, Turnir, Elektronika Eksi Video, and the Videosport series that introduced millions of Soviet children to electronic entertainment.
Linux
A personal account of switching from Windows 11 to Artix Linux, covering the frustrations with telemetry and instability that prompted the move, the distro selection process, technical challenges encountered, and unexpected benefits discovered along the way.
Essays
A candid guide on how the performance review process really works in IT companies, and how to strategically position yourself to consistently receive top ratings.
AI
Mathematics professor Vladimir Krylov explains why LLM hallucinations are a fundamental mathematical property rather than an engineering defect, and discusses the future of AI model competition, reasoning limitations, and the path forward.
Popular Science
In spring 1981, a 1950s strategic bomber with a giant cylindrical barrel on its back prepared for its maiden flight over a Zhukovsky airfield. This absurd-looking machine was the VM-T Atlant — without which the Buran space shuttle would never have reached orbit.
Management
An analysis of real-world LLM usage data across 527 employees over 7 months, revealing that API access is 8.5x cheaper than subscriptions, image generation consumes 64% of the budget, and the ROI on corporate AI deployment reaches 2800%.
Design
A detailed critique of Apple's icon design decisions in macOS Tahoe, examining how adding icons to every menu item violates fundamental UX principles — from lack of differentiation and cross-app inconsistency to illegibly tiny details and confusing metaphors.