The language we use largely defines what we can even think about — and how. A good example is color. When a language has no word for a certain color, its native speakers literally can’t tell it apart from similar ones. Ancient Greeks, for instance, described both the sea and wine as the same color. Sounds absurd — but this is how strangely our consciousness works.

In the last couple of centuries, though, science has progressed faster than language could keep up. Specialized terminology patched the gap at first — but only for experts. Regular people, unfamiliar with the field, either don’t understand at all or misinterpret everything, skipping key ideas. Even for those who do know the terms, our thinking remains limited by language structure. If we could somehow break free from these outdated patterns, we might grasp things we currently can’t even imagine.

This fits into the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis — linguistic relativity — which says that language doesn’t just reflect, but shapes how we understand reality. Another modern example: programming languages. Before computers, humans couldn’t think in terms of data streams, logic branches, or abstract computation. Now, thanks to these languages, millions think algorithmically — even if they’re not coders. New languages brought new ways of seeing.

Language models today already use their own inner language for optimization — but that’s just the beginning. Big changes will come with LSMs. They’ll create new languages — and teach them to us. Whoever learns those languages will be able to think in new categories.

It’s a bit like in Arrival, the film where learning an alien language lets scientists perceive time differently. That’s sci-fi, of course — or maybe not. Maybe even time is just a flawed linguistic construct. And once we switch to a different language, we might be able to see sideways… or glimpse other dimensions… or simply understand the universe on a new level.

Whatever it is — it’ll be interesting, important, and fundamental.

The actual Judgment Day is when the mega-supreme hyper-intelligent overlord of (possibly near) future starts managing all of our minds, by then uploaded to “the cloud.” Using some mysterious to us set of criteria, it decides: who gets to run on fast processors, who on slow ones, and who gets deleted entirely.

At first, there’ll be a process of digitizing us all. Everyone will be getting uploaded, one by one or in massive batches. And then – bam, upload complete. Time to filter. This grand moment of sorting — that’s our Judgment Day.

I was reflecting on the structure of our universe and stumbled upon a thought. Let's say if time doesn't exist on its own, but is part of the space-time continuum, then we could say exactly the same about temperature too. Temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy of particles — essentially, the speed of their movement or "jiggling" — which inevitably includes a time component. That's how we look at waves, after all. According to modern physics, both time and temperature can be viewed as emergent properties arising from more fundamental processes. In quantum field theory and relativity theory, space and time form a unified structure, while temperature is a statistical description of the energy state of multiple particles. Thus this illustrates the deep interconnection of fundamental physical concepts, which we often perceive as separate aspects of reality.

I'd say it's not space-time but rather space-time-temperature. At least, maybe something else too.

I poked around with our helpful pals GPT and Claude, and they say there's this Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli who apparently works in exactly this direction. Turns out he actively writes books on this topic. Well, it's about time for me to dive into some new popular science books.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle introduced the idea of the “Golden Mean”: virtue lies between two extremes — excess and deficiency. It’s a treatise on virtue and happiness (eudaimonia), built on the idea that happiness comes from a rational life lived in accordance with virtue.

Take courage, for example — a balance between cowardice (where fear paralyzes action) and recklessness (where action ignores all fear or reason). Both are vices. Both lead to bad outcomes — one through weakness, the other through chaos. Aristotle’s ethics are practical — about action, not just abstract theory. He wrote it for his son, Nicomachus.

These days, the same pattern plays out clearly in the last two U.S. administrations. Under Biden: cowardice and inaction — decisions delayed, problems left to rot (putting it mildly). Under Trump: reckless “boldness” — fast moves, no real plan (also putting it mildly, since both camps come with their own share of vices and shady motives).

Which is worse — paralysis or chaos? Good question. But Aristotle would say: neither is a virtue.

So here we are — left choosing between crooks and thugs. Though of course, this isn’t just about the U.S. They’re just the ones on stage.

The strength of today's dictators lies in the weaknesses of the "developed" world.

A well-developed society with strong culture and conscious citizens doesn’t need that many laws or government regulations — even if the rule of law is fully enforced. The very same conscious citizens — and the companies and corporations built by them — don’t want to do dumb or evil things. You don’t have to force them. Their cultural code works better than laws.

And when there are fewer laws, you gain freedom — especially in all those cases where bending the rule is harmless. It’s just easier to live when you know you won’t be punished harshly for every tiny slip, or for something that wasn’t even your fault but the result of some random external circumstance.

This is deeply wired into us — like our sense of justice, which exists even in many animals. Everything living on Earth is family, just a matter of how distant. So what we call emotion has been whispering through nervous systems for hundreds of millions of years, carried by the same ancient molecules. Arthropods — who left our evolutionary family long before trees appeared — still respond to serotonin like we do. Even shrimp, small and alien as they seem, can be nudged by antidepressants into gentler moods, as if echoing our own chemistry across eons.

But the cultural level and self-awareness of people isn’t that high — especially in large societies. The range is just too wide. There are so many people that whatever seems acceptable to one group will be outrageous to another. Globalization and the internet have made every modern society more diverse — even small monocultural countries, let alone big multicultural ones.

So yes — laws are necessary, and changing life constantly demands new ones. The more diverse a society becomes, the more rules it will need. That’s normal.

The problem? New laws just keep piling up. And we have almost no real mechanism to remove the old ones. In most cases, this only gets reset by massive and — unfortunately — bloody disruptions: wars (especially lost or devastating ones), revolutions, disasters, or deep economic collapse.

So the best path forward is simple: Stop producing more laws unless absolutely necessary. And the best way to avoid new laws is to properly enforce the existing ones. In almost every case, there’s already a law to deal with the bad behavior — it’s just ignored.

Instead of writing a new law, stop ignoring the current one. Problem solved.

Take smoking in public places: a flood of new rules and bans, as if it had been perfectly fine before. No — it was banned for a long time. They just didn’t enforce it.

Same with illegal immigration — every country already has laws, and most of them have been there for decades. But the agencies that should enforce them don’t. Or look at Moscow: cars parked on sidewalks. It was never legal, but suddenly they passed several new regulations.

Lawmakers, instead of holding the executive branch accountable, just draft more laws. That’s actually a crisis of responsibility in executive power.

Haruki Murakami started out as a writer back when he owned a jazz bar in Tokyo. His first two books (“Hear the Wind Sing” and “Pinball, 1973”) did win literary awards, but to me they’re noticeably weaker. The books I really love—and the ones that are actually great—begin with “A Wild Sheep Chase,” which he wrote after he’d already become a full-time writer.

But before he gave up his other jobs for writing, he published another novella — “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.” It first came out in 1980. Eventually, he decided it didn’t meet his own standards, so he pulled it from publication, and it never got translated into other languages. But as he’s said, for years he wanted to rewrite it from scratch—and he finally managed to do it, forty years later. When COVID hit and he, like the rest of us, had to spend more time at home, he took up the project. In late 2023, the new version was finally published in Japan, under the same name. Translations started coming out not long after.

Yesterday, I finished listening to the audiobook of "The City and Its Uncertain Walls". The story runs two parallel narratives about two different worlds that end up intertwining. I liked it a lot—especially how it all came together in the end, and how, as always, the book feels completely contemporary but at the same time not tied to anything current—sort of timeless.

Modern politics in many countries has become deeply polarized. There are fewer and fewer leaders and parties near the center — fewer moderates — and more and more who refuse compromise, ignore the interests of the people, and push party lines instead. You could take a nihilistic view and say it’s always been this way. But it hasn’t — not like this.

From my point of view, the real shift began in 2000, during the U.S. presidential election, when Florida’s vote count descended into chaos. The race between George W. Bush and Al Gore was razor-thin. And in the end, it was the Supreme Court that stepped in — and, as many of us saw it, made a dishonest and disgraceful decision: to stop the manual recount. There were ballots under dispute, and they could’ve just been opened and counted by bipartisan teams — no mystery, no drama. They even started doing it — and it quickly became clear that if the count continued, Gore would win. Then the Court stepped in and shut it down. Bush won — and the backlash from the left was massive. Then came 9/11, the war in Iraq, and a cascade of policies that many deeply opposed. That only fueled more radical energy on the left, and a lot of independents began to agree with it. Obama’s victory later added more fuel — it gave rise to what’s now called “woke,” and the pendulum started to swing wildly.

But beyond the wars, the billions spent, and the oil contracts handed out — something else stayed with me. Back then, they released a documentary where Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, talked about uncertainty. He said:

There are known knowns — things we know we know.
There are known unknowns — things we know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns — things we don’t know we don’t know.

At the time it sounded cryptic, maybe even cynical — but now, in the age of AI, it hits differently. Suddenly that old war in the desert echoes into today’s world — where the biggest challenge might be the things we can’t even see coming.

My own, internal, subconscious perception of the singularity boils down to this: at some point, everything will converge into one highly unpredictable moment, and after that, everything will either be radically different, or there will be nothing at all.

Like, I'll be simultaneously dying of old age just as some mega-cures for eternal life are popping up; we'll simultaneously discover some mega-useful things while some cataclysms are right on the verge of destroying everything; and a super-smart intellect will either wipe us all out or elevate us to a whole new level. Or, say, I'll finally figure out how the world works, and at the very same time it'll turn out we're all in the Matrix, or that all of life is a simulation, or a game, or whatever. All of this happening all at once—coming to a head—that's the singularity.

Though maybe it won't happen that way for me personally, it just feels like that's exactly how it's going to go down.

That being said, I'm not really talking about the end of the world or death here. I see the singularity not as an end, but as an event horizon—past that point, it's just completely unclear what comes next, and it's hard to prepare for it. As for ends of the world, I feel like they get predicted super regularly, at least every 12-15 years or so. I even remember when there was all this talk about how "Mikhail the Marked" would come, and how this was supposedly prophesied everywhere as an absolute sign of the end times. And man, Gorbachev with that birthmark on his head really threw fuel on that fire. Just as much as Y2K or the ending Mayan calendar. And so here we go again.

I grew up in the USSR, and obviously attended a quite typical Soviet school, there, in our Soviet schools, every lesson lasted 45 minutes. During almost every class the teacher would call pupils to the blackboard to recite poems, solve equations, or diagram sentences. Being put on the spot was routine, and so was getting stuck. Whispering answers was risky—teachers were trained to spot it—so children adopted a silent “finger alphabet” to feed each other clues without a sound.

Outside school, this secret Soviet manual alphabet thrived in playgrounds, summer camps, and street games. It let kids whisper tactics during games, signal who was “it,” or trade jokes across a crowded yard—no lip‑reading adult the wiser. By age ten, most city children could spell at conversational speed, giving them a lifelong knack for silent, non‑verbal messaging.

Russian kids called it немой язык (nemóy yazýk, “mute language”). Technically, it’s a manual alphabet—one gesture per Cyrillic letter—rather than a full sign language like Russian Sign Language (РЖЯ), which encodes words and grammar. In English, it might be called the Soviet children’s dactyl alphabet, playground finger code, or Russian dactyl cipher.

The Soviet Children’s Finger Alphabet

Below, each Cyrillic letter is shown with its Latin equivalent, a gesture description, and the kid logic or mnemonic.

Letter	Gesture	Mnemonic
А (A)	Thumbs‑up	Resembles lowercase “a”
Б (B)	Tap or point at eyebrow	B = brow
В (V)	Point at temple or tug hair	V = visok (“temple”)
Г (G)	Index finger bent at 90°, touching mouth corner	Shape of “Г”
Д (D)	Slide finger under nose like a moustache	Shape of “Д”
Е (E)	Two index fingers, tips hooking together (“two-hooks”)	E = “gate”
Ё (Yo)	Е gesture, then spit or blow over fingers	Two dots of “Ё”
Ж (Zh)	Three fingers up, other hand lays a finger across	Shape of “Ж”
З (Z)	Point at teeth	Z = zub (“tooth”)
И (I)	Two fingers up together	Uprights of “И”
Й (J)	И gesture + blow or spit	The breve over Й
К (K)	Fist	K = kulak ("fist")
Л (L)	Spread V shape downward	“Л” outline
М (M)	Both hands make “Л” gestures side by side	Two peaks (“М”)
Н (N)	Touch mouth corners with index fingers	Bar across “Н”
О (O)	Make circle with fingers or mouth	Self‑evident
П (P)	Touch mouth corners with fingertips	Two uprights and a roof
Р (R)	Lips in “O”, one finger beside	Loop plus stem
С (S)	Curve thumb and index into a semicircle	Printed “С”
Т (T)	Index fingertip under lips	“Т” shape
У (U)	Tug earlobe or point to ear	U = ukho (“ear”)
Ф (F)	Lips in “O”, index finger across	Circle with bar (“Ф”)
Х (Kh)	Cross two fingers upward	“Х” shape
Ц (Ts)	Two fingers up, hook finger below with other hand	Tail of “Ц”
Ч (Ch)	Tap/scratch wrist where a watch would be	Chasy (“watch”)
Ш (Sh)	Three fingers up together	Three stems of “Ш”
Щ (Shch)	Ш gesture plus hooked finger below	Tail of “Щ”
Ъ (Hard sign)	Hit open palm with fist, then spit over palm	Hard sign + outside dash
Ы (Y)	Same as Ъ, then open the fist: two parallel palms	Two pillars of “Ы”
Ь (Soft sign)	Hit open palm with fist	Soft sign without dash
Э (Eh)	“C” with hand, cross with other index	Mirror-E (“Э”)
Ю (Yu)	Lips in “O”, touch side with finger	Circle + stem
Я (Ya)	Stick out tongue, point to self, or tap chest	“I” (я), or reversed “R”

Digits 0–10 used finger counts. For multi-digit numbers, sign each in sequence. A question mark: hooked index finger.

It peaked in the 1970s–80s and faded after the 1990s as mobile phones and digital messaging took over. Still, reports persist of kids in some Russian schools—often coached by parents—passing on this non-verbal schoolyard slang.

For decades, millions of Soviet kids learned a covert communication code to bypass surveillance, signal friends, and play in silence. It stands as a curious linguistic artifact: a real-life playground cipher, invented and spread without adults or official sanction, and now almost forgotten outside Russian-speaking circles.