zomia.news

3mar2024

Ente alternative photo hosting. Still a long way from Apple Photo, but cross-platform, privacy-centric and with a clear business model

25feb2024

JavaScript bloat in 2024

It's a painful review of the state of the modern web. Hard to believe that every time when I try to open the JIRA my browser downloads the 50 Mb of JSs.

10feb2024

The "sailplane problem of modern Image Generation AI". Right after appearing of model Image Generator AI have tried to generate the photorealistic image of the sailplane. But that was impossible 2 years ago and still impossible today (but lot better). That last attempts examples (DALL-E and MidJourney)

DALL-E MidJouney

29jan2024

Portable EPUB

Despite decades of advances in document rendering technology, most of the world's documents are stuck in the 1990s due to the limitations of PDF. Yet, modern document formats like HTML have yet to provide a competitive alternative to PDF. This post explores what prevents HTML documents from being portable, and I propose a way forward based on the EPUB format. To demonstrate my ideas, this post is presented using a prototype EPUB reading system

During my work in LitRes (Russia's largest ebook store) we had EPUB as an internal format for storing books in MyBook.RU. The main problem for us was validation: there's just too much things that you can do inside the EPUB, and the validation process was difficult. As a result we came to almost the same decision: we just cut off all the "suspicious" elements from the files and have our "Light EPUB" format.

10jan2024

Population change in EUR

Interesting picture. What I see here:

  • west Germany increasing
  • west France is growing
  • all the big cities are a magnet for the people: Berlin, Moscow, Madrid, Belgrade, Stockholm, Kyiv, Praga, Warsaw…
  • the coast of the Mediterranean increases in Spain and France
  • most of the Balkan countries are in decline

20dec2023

The AI trust crisis

If you've ever experienced Facebook showing you an ad for something that you were talking about out-loud about moments earlier, you've already dismissed everything I just said. You have personally experienced anecdotal evidence which overrides all of my arguments here.

Here's a Reply All podcast episode from Novemember 2017 that explores this issue: 109 Is Facebook Spying on You?. Their conclusion: Facebook are not spying through your microphone. But if someone already believes that there is no argument that can possibly convince them otherwise.

I've experienced this effect myself - over the past few years I've tried talking people out of this, as part of my own personal fascination with how sticky this conspiracy theory is.

From my point of view: the only model of development for the future of AI is open source. Especially because of trust issues. People are really afraid of AI, and without a deep understanding of how it works, it's impossible to bring it into society.