1. October 14

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    Elasticsearch: A Second Chance at Metrics

    Elasticsearch as a search engine can be debated for a long time. But it turned out to be unexpectedly good for storing metrics: I'll tell you how we launched TSDS under a load of more than a million metrics per second, what problems we encountered and why we eventually had to go inside Elasticsearch and Lucene.

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    The Benchmark as a Weapon of Mass Delusion

    The E2E benchmark, beautiful graphics, impressive RPS and the first place in the table easily create the feeling that the technology is objectively faster than competitors. But what exactly does the E2E benchmark show: the actual stack performance, the quality of the selected scenario, or the ability to prepare the test correctly?

  2. October 15

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    A Little Man in the Era of Large Language Models

    In Russian classics, there’s a character known as the “little man.” A large system is moving forward, great decisions are being made, and somewhere down below, there’s a person who just wants to do their job properly. With AI, we’re now in roughly the same situation: there’s a big race going on around us, and we, the little people, need to somehow adapt to a world where AI has already become part of development — and still manage not to end up in a psych ward.

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    Am I an Engineer?

    In an hour, the agent does the work that I used to do in a week. And for the first time in my career, I caught myself asking a question that’s silly to say out loud: am I an engineer?

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    The Boundary Between Symbolic and Statistical Intelligence

    The dominant paradigm of LLM development assumes that the growth of solution quality is linearly related to the growth of the power (and cost) of the underlying model.

    The talk challenges this assumption by showing that with a well-thought-out engineering architecture — the distribution of tasks among short-lived agents, the accumulation of structured state, and strict symbolic control — comparable-quality results can be achieved at a fraction of the cost of models.

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    Critical Thinking in AI Times

    I am going to talk about the controversial but possible impact of modern AI variants on human memory and thinking, as well as about reasonable strategies for developing one’s own thinking (including critical thinking) under these conditions.