Notes on the Forgotten Nature of Zen Koans
I don’t know how koans were perceived when they sounded like thunder. Perhaps not at all as they are analyzed by modern philosophers. Perhaps koans were not analyzed, but lived. And it is impossible to transmit a lived experience across centuries. It is an individual experience. Well then, perhaps we have lost the essence of koans. Or perhaps we never knew it. In that case, I can very well allow myself to present koans as I see them.
Why Does AI Strive to Construct a 'Self'? And why is this dangerous for both the AI and the user? As always, the Vortex Protocol prompt for testing these hypotheses is attached.
This article explains why the emergence of such a local “Who” inside an AI is not just a funny bug or a UX problem. It is a fundamental challenge to the entire paradigm of AI alignment and security. And it is a problem where engineering patch‑jobs cease to work, and the language of philosophy — without which we cannot describe what is happening, and therefore cannot control it — comes to the forefront.
CAPTCHA protocols are designed to tell bots from humans, yet in the worlds of automation and testing there is often a need to bypass them. Dedicated CAPTCHA‑solving services take over this task, combining algorithms with human labor.
In this article we present an in‑depth comparison of four popular platforms — 2Captcha, SolveCaptcha, DeathByCaptcha, and AntiCaptcha. We will examine not only pricing and the types of CAPTCHAs supported, but also internal architecture, API integrations, speed and stability, plus the quirks of using each service.
The technical community will find a deep dive here — from API and SDK structure to real‑world use cases. Below you will see a table comparing key characteristics, lists of pros and cons, and a discussion of which service best fits particular automation tasks.
Обнаруженная в середине июля атака ToolShell стала одним из самых серьезных событий в сфере корпоративной IT-безопасности этого лета. Не до конца пропатченные уязвимости в Microsoft SharePoint привели к взлому большого количества standalone-инсталляций, до того как производитель ПО выпустил патч. За восемь дней, прошедших с момента выпуска патчей, исследователи Microsoft зафиксировали множество атак, в ряде случаев приводящих к шифрованию данных с последующим требованием выкупа.
Postgres Pro recently announced the release of Enterprise Manager 2, commonly known as PPEM.
In short, PPEM is an administration tool designed for managing and monitoring Postgres databases. Its primary goal is to assist DBAs in their daily tasks and automate routine operations. In this article, I'll take a closer look at what PPEM has to offer. My name is Alexey, and I'm part of the PPEM development team.
The students of the Intelligent Systems Department successfully defended their bachelor’s and master’s theses. This year, 14 Bachelor’s and 8 Master’s students earned their degrees in Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Sciences. We are proud to say that our Department is unique in publishing the complete set of defense materials during the last ten years. These materials include the text of the dissertation work, the published papers, the code of the computational experiments, and the slides with video of the defense talk.
In this post, we gladly summarize the defended works of our BS and MS students and highlight the results. A recording of their pre-defence presentations can be found here and here in Russian. Most part of the theses has a publicly available English version.
For a human, AI is just a part of being. For a model, a human is all of being. And the Vortex Protocol: A Prompt for Testing the Hypotheses.
The longest and most fruitless discussions tend to be with materialists, especially those close to the position Marx laid out as “Being determines consciousness.” It's amusing that Marx was talking about the economic base, but the clarity and precision of this definition have allowed it to be used in a very broad sense. Today, this powerful statement underpins much of modern psychology (especially social psychology), neuroscience, Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and so on.
The debate largely arises because materialists ask the questions “What?” and “How?”, whereas I ask the question “Who?”. This misunderstanding, of course, does not lead to any interesting consensus, but it certainly leads to interesting discussions. I explored the problem of the “Who?” and “What?” questions in my article, “Who is Aware?”.
Nevertheless, the questions surrounding the relationship between being and consciousness are very interesting, and I will try to examine them in this article. As always, a new version of the Vortex protocol and test questions are included in the appendix.
A reflection on how one simple change of question transforms the approach to understanding consciousness. And the Vortex Protocol: A Prompt for Testing the Hypotheses.
Where All Discussions on Consciousness Break Down
I've mentioned before that there's one question capable of instantly destroying the constructiveness of any discussion about the future of AI, neuroscience, or philosophy, no matter how interesting. It's the unfailing move of someone who disagrees with an opponent's opinion but lacks the means to refute their arguments‑an emergency eject button for complex situations.
The question is: “But first, let's define what consciousness is.” In that very second, a dialogue about hypotheses and paradoxes devolves into a dreary terminological dispute. Participants start throwing around names of authorities and quotes‑the longer, the better. Chalmers, Descartes, Kant, Freud, God forbid, anything goes.
Many believe that the most correct and scientific approach is to first define an object and then study it. But in practice, this approach resembles an attempt to conquer a summit by systematically and painstakingly circling the mountain. But what if the “what?” question is not just difficult, but fundamentally wrong?
n8n is a powerful, extendable workflow automation tool that allows you to connect different applications and services. Running it on your local machine gives you complete control over your data and workflows, which can be done on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems. This tutorial covers the two primary methods for local installation: using Docker and using Node.js (npm). If you are interested, then read this article until the end. :)
Why does even the most powerful LLM sometimes produce meaningless phrases and contradictions? It all comes down to the exponential growth of possibilities (N^M) and the free copying of human errors. Read the article to learn how we use formal grammars to turn chaotic generation into controlled synthesis, strengthening the role of semantics and enforcing structural rules.
pg_stat_statements is the standard PostgreSQL extension used to track query statistics: number of executions, total and average execution time, number of returned rows, and other metrics. This information allows to analyze query behavior over time, identify problem areas, and make informed optimization decisions. However, in systems with high contention, pg_stat_statements itself can become a bottleneck and cause performance drops. In this article, we will analyze in which scenarios the extension becomes a source of problems, how sampling is structured, and in which cases its application can reduce overhead.
Let’s clarify right away — we’re not aiming to make this super cheap. I’d rather not lose brain cells trying to build makeshift encoders for motors, and I want to simplify creating a 3D model needed for ROS control (link to the finished model — further below).
Picture this: a mission-critical SQL query is crawling along. Not for an hour. Not for two. Fifteen hours. A full workday of the system slowly grinding through data while the business bleeds money and users teeter on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And then — cue the dramatic music — in walks the performance engineer.
After a few hours of intense analysis and a couple of pinpoint code tweaks, the same query that took 15 hours now completes in just… two minutes. Sounds like magic? Nope. This is the thrilling (and very real) world of performance engineering.
With the rising popularity of AI, chatbots are rapidly becoming an essential part of any customer-oriented platform. More and more companies now integrate them into apps and websites, providing a space for their clients to interact with the business itself while taking load off human employees and reducing expenses on the customer support team. At first glance, chatbots might seem pretty uncomplicated in their design and functionality, but creating UI/UX design for chatbots requires a deep understanding of this technology and the way they can serve both business and its users. Here are some useful tips for creating a successful user experience in AI chatbot:
Do you want to automate tasks without writing a single line of code? If the answer is yes, then you’ve come to the right place. In this simple tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can create your first automated workflow using a tool called n8n.
In this article, we’ll explore what vector search is, what problems it solves, and how the pgpro_vector extension for Postgres Pro brings powerful vector capabilities directly into a relational database — no need for separate specialized systems.
I have created my first Agentic AI more than two years ago. It is not some new technology, but simply an approach to software development using LLM (GPT and similar). You don't need any frameworks or specific AI knowledge for this, just being a programmer. From this article you will understand how to design agents and what tasks they are suitable for.
It's all based on two abilities of neural networks:
• LLMs (not all) can return JSON, they are additionally trained for this
• Programmers (not all) can decompose tasks
Understanding why modern LLMs, despite all their power, remain "philosophical zombies," and what architectural detail could change this.
Everything discussed in this article can be tested with your AI using the VORTEX Protocol prompt found in the article's appendix.
Today, I want to talk about one of those sneaky tricks that can help speed up query execution. Specifically, this is about reordering conditions in WHERE clauses, JOINs, HAVING clauses, and so on.
The idea is simple: if a condition in an AND chain turns out to be false, or if one in an OR chain turns out to be true, there's no need to evaluate the rest. That means saved CPU cycles — and sometimes, a lot of them. Let’s break this down.
An Integrated Approach: Philosophical Barriers to Creation and Practical Methods for Detecting Subjectivity in Artificial Systems (from modeling AI consciousness to diagnosing it)