Rakhim's Blog
Rakhim's Blog
Rakhim Davletkaliyev
Hi, my name is Rakhim. I'm a staff engineer at IQM Quantum Computers. I'm building Exotext.com and Minifeed.net.
Latest Posts
If global large-scale human communication continues to be concentrated within large social media platforms and content providers like YouTube, human languages may become sort of irrelevant in that space. Sometimes I Google for something...
I know, I know, this sounds controversial. But hear me out. A few years ago a new trend in UI design emerged where related elements would appear more and more detached and unrelated to the things they are meant to point to. Here's a...
Recently my partner's trusty old 5K iMac died after 8.5 years of service (Radeon gpu is fried). At first I thought it was finally time to get one of those cool little M4 Mac Minis, but then decided to conduct an experiment. I gave up my...
This is an excellent video about modern UI/UX: "The Hidden Cost of 'Clean' Design." I highly recommend watching it and checking out Ilia's other work. I agree with nearly everything in the video, including this standout quote: If you...
There are two smartphone features that I consider sacred and believe they must never fail: phone calling and the alarm. There is an unspoken contract between users and vendors. Sure, innovate away, change the UX at will, whatever. But...
When I'm searching for docs, 95% of the time a single example would suffice. Yet, 95% of the time I can't find one in any official source. It seems that by default formal technical documentation is targeted towards someone who's deeply...
Apple's first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface —...
Some folks have gone all-in on AI-assisted coding. I've seen some tweets (not sure if sarcastic or real, to be honest) expressing disgust about the prospects of ever writing code by hand anymore. The common argument I hear is that this...
In anthropology there is a notion of high-context and low-context cultures. A high-context culture is a culture or society that communicates dominantly through the use of contextual elements, such as specific forms of body language, the...
Unless someone wrote an article about that exact thing, a plain full-text search engine cannot answer a question like this: What animal is featured on a flag of a country where the first small British colony was established in the same...
Over the past few years, Google has done a surprisingly great job of making YouTube less interesting and engaging — and in turn, less addictive. Maybe they've got some ethical guidelines in the top management now? If so, well done,...
People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products...
Half Life and Half Life 2 are my favorite games. I've played them through multiple times. I played Half Life 1 for the first time in 1999 or 2000, can't remember. My computer at the time could barely run it. Nowadays, it's a struggle to...
I made a little puzzle game called Knight Ride. You can play it here: knightride.rakhim.org. A few months ago, I started learning game development with Godot and began building a chess-inspired game. Game development is new and...
Google is usually criticized for its relentless collection of personal data. It's an important and widely discussed topic, but I’m surprised there isn’t another common criticism: its responsibility for UI & UX design and its...