Essays
A Remote IT Worker's Custom Desk
An IT professional's journey to building the perfect ergonomic desk with a deep cutout to eliminate dangling elbows and shoulder strain from years of remote work.
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Essays
Jabber Calls in a Docker Container in 5 Minutes
A step-by-step guide to deploying your own XMPP server with encrypted audio and video calls using Snikket in Docker, including TURN server setup to disguise voice traffic as HTTPS.
Mathematics
Meet the Scutoid! It's Part of Your Body
In 2018, scientists discovered a new 3D geometric shape called the scutoid — a strange hybrid of a prism and a pyramid that epithelial cells use to efficiently pack curved tissue surfaces in living organisms.
Finance
ICN Holding: The Cringiest Financial Pyramid Scheme in the World
A financial analyst investigates ICN Holding, an investment firm claiming 23x returns over 20 years, revealing a web of offshore opacity, unverified performance claims, and client accounts that actually lost money while the S&P 500 surged 158%.
Essays
The Vibe Coding Revolution Is Cancelled
An essay arguing that vibe coding is nothing revolutionary — similar processes have existed for decades, and LLM-powered coding tools are merely a response to the demand for more developers, not a driver of change.
Management
Why Do People Go to Work? Five Types of Motivation According to Gercikov
An exploration of Vladimir Gercikov's influential framework for classifying employee motivation into five distinct types, explaining why universal motivation systems often fail and how managers can align incentives with individual drivers.
Science
Why Plastic Recycling Is a Big Scam
Only 5-6% of plastic actually gets recycled, and the petrochemical industry has known since the 1970s that recycling was economically unviable — yet spent decades and millions promoting the myth.
Essays
Hello Scammers, This Is an Applicant — Should I Tell You the SMS Code? — No Thanks, We'll Do It Ourselves
A parent recounts how scammers compromised their child's government services account during university admissions season by impersonating the admissions office, and shares five practical safety tips for applicants and their families.
Essays
Communicating with a Sociopath: A Survival Guide
A philosophy professor with 30 years of experience dissects the behavioral patterns of workplace sociopaths, offers concrete survival strategies, and examines why traditional ethical frameworks fail when dealing with manipulative colleagues.
Management
On the State of IT in 2025
A veteran developer with over 20 years in the industry gives an unflinching assessment of what went wrong in IT — inflated salaries, inexperienced hires, speed over quality — and what the market correction will look like. Essential reading for anyone entering the field or managing teams today.
DIY
To Build a Ship from Wood, I Need 350 Hours and 50 Thousand Rubles. But I Won't Sell the Finished One: To Me, It's Priceless
A senior systems administrator at YooMoney shares his passion for wooden ship modeling, detailing the hundreds of hours, specialized tools, and thousands of rubles each model requires — and why he considers his handcrafted ships priceless.
Essays
If You Have More Than 5 Calls a Day, It's Time to Quit. Or Start Doing This
A practical guide to combating meeting overload in remote teams, covering why excessive video calls drain productivity and how to replace them with asynchronous communication, structured agendas, and conscious meeting refusal.