Tag: blog

Adrian Tchaikovsky is Coming to Bulgaria

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I had the chance to get autographs from Brandon Sanderson and Julie Kagawa, and I may soon have the opportunity to see Adrian Tchaikovsky as well. He’s coming to Bulgaria for a book signing on September 8th. His most acclaimed work, Children of Time, is on my to-read list, and I might give it priority so I can at least start it before the signing.

So far, I’ve found that the event will be on September 8th at 7 p.m., at Club Grapmophone, Budapesta Street 6. It feels like this has to be correct because the numbers line up so well: 9/8, 7, Budapesta 6. The source, however, isn’t the publisher, so we’ll have to wait for confirmation.

GPT-5 is out

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I tried it in an 8h coding session. It performs worse than Claude 4 for me, and it’s slower. It made me wait for 10 minutes at a time. Eventually, I gave up, used my brain to understand the problem properly, and hand held Claude to a solution, which took about 1h. I think I lost most of my time with GPT-5 in loops where it fixes one thing at the expense of another while the general approach looked sufficiently sound to fool me but not sufficiently sound to eventually work in all cases.

This might be due to high traffic and not because the model is worse. I’ll give it another chance when the hype fades.

Daily Harvest

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been preparing the next batch of books to read for a week. Tried to use the Marie Condo approach and only ordered books that are likely to bring me joy.

  • Michael Connelly’s Nightshade features a new detective. I personally didn’t feel the need for anyone other than Renee Ballard but looking forward to meeting Detective Stilwell
  • Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid. I felt like reading another Frieda after the series about Freida Klein
  • 2 books by Nicci French – these are 3.5-rated and probably less great than the other 10 I finished. I still feel good about them and think I’ll rate them higher
  • Raymond E. Feist’s latest

Offline bugs

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

The path to Makedonia hut is marked with QR codes. Somehow, the authors of these brand new signs managed to create trial QR codes and they no longer work.

So, for the years to come, tourists will scan these to see spam. At least they point in the right direction.