Vanya K.

Things I Do

Random Projects

2016, 2018: Pythontutor and Snakify, sites that help pupils and students in Britain, India, Russia etc. learn Python.

2018: L****a at Rostelecom.

2016: Commuter’s alarm app for sleeping in public transport.

2015: Kontador, an iPhone app for cyclists.

Capture the Flag

CTF is a great way to teach people the fundamental basics of computers work—from low-level networking to OS architecture to modern web-development.

Since 2018 I work on Ugra CTF with talented folks from [team Team], designing everything (badges, scoreboards, landing pages...) and creating tasks.

I also teach CTF for beginners at Moscow Polytech. Guest lectures are welcome, just drop me a line.

Sometimes I play CTFs with PEPE_BOYZ from MIREA institute.

Music

I play and write music. There are some pieces on Bandcamp.

Always looking for a jam session!

Everything Else

From time to time I design posters and stuff.

Instagram Stories! (Now self-hosted)

Occasionally I do drugs.

Random Advice

If I were you, I would...

• Become a member of the Free Software Foundation.
• Boycott The Coca-Cola Company.
• Use Tor for casual web surfing. It works fast enough while also preventing you from being tracked. Ungoogled Chroimum is a great option for every other case.
• If you are using Android, try flashing AOSP without Google’s apps.
• Don’t work for Palantir. It’s a shitty company ruled by a person who drinks African children’s blood.
• Read PsychonautWiki before trying any drugs and obey the responsible use principles. Don’t drink alcohol.
• Learn vim and switch to emacs with evil-mode.

But what do I know, right?

Meeting People Is Hard

It was easy when I was in my kindergarten. It was of tolerable hardness in the school days, when I did olympiads and the like. But since I moved to Moscow, things had changed and now I have become kinda anxious about it. (Special thanks to random dialog with a friend at 3PM, now I have realized!).

Tinder

Tinder is a very scary place. It makes me feel both worried for the future of the human race and frustrated. In ≈1.5 years I have had some interesting conversations here and there and even went out with somebody—alas, almost every single person I matched with (but one!) turned out to be pretty uninteresting and I felt like I am wasting my time on something stupid (which was true, actually). Use with danger and in case of despair only.

University

I thought it would be better, really. Turns out, students of Moscow Polytech are all generic, they listen to same music, dress and behave alike, which means that almost all of them are not my type. What the hell am I doing here?

Going out

Works for me, but I rarely have the mood and the courage to come and talk with strangers. Usually this leads to fun stories with an unpredictable finale. Try fetching a beer in your local bar to see what I mean.

Stochastic method of untangling wires

This is a very nice and comfortable way of socializing. Meet me if you want to learn about it.

On Modern Web

Modern web is a disaster. And while it’s ten years too late to stop the shit-train of SPA’s, 10-megabyte requests and practically obfuscated code that literally every single site is trying to run on your computer, it’s never too late to grumble!

However, modern JavaScript is indeed eloquent.

The Fractal Potential

One day I was sitting on a bench and talking with a buddy about the nature of things, the will, the universe, the our wonderful human brain—the usual deep things. Consciousness is a pretty limited thing, so naturally our process had hit the boundaries of reason—we realized that when our thoughts became all fuzzy and impossible to complete as if a tiny piece was always missing.

And everything around began to shatter and break apart. It was hard to even imagine a concept that popped in my head, let alone say it out loud in a cohesive manner, inventing nonsensical metaphors and idiotic abstract devices on the way. That’s when I realized the difference between an ideal world and the world we live in. The fractal potential.

Whenever one’s thinking, they are just taking random things and naming them, more or less (see religion, science, philosophy etc. — they are just putting tags on everything). And to name a things means to reach the level at which it exists, to examine it and to step a bit higher so the big picture could be seen. You start small and then just constantly ascend towards more and more complexity. A loop: get, analyze, name, take that to the new level, repeat. Steps on your imaginary ladder get smaller and smaller the higher you get (no pun intended, I am sorry) until the ladder gets flat. That’s the limit, the boundaries of (my) silly and pretty useless brain. And that’s exactly where the loop becomes recursive, like a straight arrow that got sucked into Mandelbrot set by accident and turned into a incompresensible mess pointing at all the infinitely many possible directions at once.

This shouldn’t happen in my idealistic model of this place. Loops, not recursion, please. It’s just unfair—funny how huge and unexplored everything around us seem to be yet it’s just some ten-minute-bench-talking away from being sucked into a bottomless abyss of nonsense.

I felt desperate for a moment, finished my cigarette, and then we went back to the appartment.

Call Me by My Name

I wanted my handle to be short and somewhat memorable. So I took my last name: k------o; shortened it the way the word internationalization is shortened to i18n: k6o; finally, I put a zero in the end to avoid possible confusion: k60. It’s stupid, I know.