Author: romanov

  • I spent a week building a typing game with an LLM. The game was the easy part.

    I spent a week building a typing game with an LLM. The game was the easy part.

    Reading Time: 4 minutesSo I built a typing game. It’s called Train Typing, it’s free, no ads, no sign-up, recommended for kids 3 and up, and it’s live at type.avtomatik.org if you just want to go play with it. But honestly the game itself isn’t really what I want to write about. What I want…

  • How Github was hacked

    How Github was hacked

    Reading Time: 5 minutesTo understand that first we need to trace the sequence of events before it’d happened. And, God, there were MANY: Coincidence? Outages stopped only after May 26. Looks like the hackers were trying different approaches since at least February or actively pulling the data from the servers. And while the Github CyberSecs…

  • Hidden Gem: Namba Yasaka Jinja

    Hidden Gem: Namba Yasaka Jinja

    Reading Time: 2 minutesI walked Shinsaibashi-suji Shopping Street at Namba, Osaka many times but this time I noticed a small banner at the end of the street advertising Yasaka Shrine with a big Lion Head’s like shape stage. Usually I don’t look at such things because of the huge amount tourist and visual noise in…

  • Was it finally fixed, Vercel?

    Was it finally fixed, Vercel?

    Reading Time: 2 minutesIt seems not a day goes by without some cloud outage or critical vulnerability issue. Let’s try to analyze the recent CloudFlare outage (not again 😩) caused by the react server components. The issue is very critical. Basically any unauthorized client can execute an arbitrary code on the server.

  • Code that took down the Internet

    Code that took down the Internet

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis issue could’ve been detected on the early stages by a simple linter rule or later in a pipeline by configuring some code quality analysis tool but somehow CloudFlare neglect simple hygiene. So many questions to the quality processes in the company… Related posts: Straggling with C++ experimental features Some thoughts…

  • What hyperscalers are hiding from you? Tell about recent waves of internet services outages.

    What hyperscalers are hiding from you? Tell about recent waves of internet services outages.

    Reading Time: 3 minutesJust for the last month we saw 2 global internet outages with AWS (us-east-1 region) and CloudFlare (global network outage) causing availability issues for many popular services e.g. X, ChatGPT, Spotify and even MC terminals. While the world moving forward with the AI adoption it’s not a coincidence it’s a consequence. Postmortems…

  • Dangling pointers/references, undefined behaviour, memory leaks, segmentation faults, bad access, SIGABRT, Release optimizations and other C/C++ BAUs

    Dangling pointers/references, undefined behaviour, memory leaks, segmentation faults, bad access, SIGABRT, Release optimizations and other C/C++ BAUs

    Reading Time: 2 minutesWelcome to the real world of C++ programming, my friend. Debugging is by far the one of the most advanced and undervalued skill in programming if it’s not the most. If you’re not familiar with all these terms in the title you’re innocent person and didn’t smell a cannon powder yet. Let…

  • I’ve applied Neural Style Transfer to Return To Castle Wolfstein

    I’ve applied Neural Style Transfer to Return To Castle Wolfstein

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteTLDR: It looks great but not playable. It’s aesthetically pleasing but screen is hard to read and you can miss some important details (e.g. bullet shoots or mission objectives) that hard to read due to the style is being applied. I’ve converted some torch models to the CoreML format and also…

  • I’ve brought neural style transfer to the Q3A engine — and the results are wild.

    I’ve brought neural style transfer to the Q3A engine — and the results are wild.

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteImagine Matisse, Picasso, and Van Gogh stepping into a 3D arena: the iconic shooter reborn as a surreal, living museum. Brushstrokes meet rocket jumps. Art meets chaos.

  • Liquid Design 26 is all about Bugs! 🐛🐛🐛

    Liquid Design 26 is all about Bugs! 🐛🐛🐛

    Reading Time: 2 minutesIt looks like everyone is doing vibe coding these days.Even big enterprises like Apple are no exception. The amount of code an average developer generates—thanks to LLMs and the internet in general—has gotten out of control. Many still prioritize deployment over testing. But with great power comes responsibility.The number of subtle and…