I've mentioned her article. I think she barely touched the topic of Chernobyl itself. Her points was about what the Soviet life was back then, and some depictions of this was incorrect.
For example (for her article)
> In Episode 2, for example, the Central Committee member Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) threatens to have Legasov shot if he doesn’t tell him how a nuclear reactor works. There are a lot of people throughout the series who appear to act out of fear of being shot. This is inaccurate: summary executions, or even delayed executions on orders of a single apparatchik, were not a feature of Soviet life after the nineteen-thirties. By and large, Soviet people did what they were told without being threatened with guns or any punishment.
Her point was: this is not the Soviet way back then. My point is: these two people barely interacted directly, and one of them at least (Legasov) had a lot of respect for the other from the very beginning
Again, it's weird, because Legosov isn't even the primary source for the series, which is an explicitly fictionalized recounting of what happened. As Gessen points out, your thing about Legasov being part of a team is literally a character in the series!
> because Legosov isn't even the primary source for the series
I think it was explicit that the series framed the tapes as the "revelation"; the honest message of a dying man to the world to expose what actually happened
I think you're over-reading what was really just a dramatic framing for the series. The author was explicit that he used composite characters and multiple sources.
It's not a documentary! That doesn't mean you can't criticize it (Gessen sure did). It's that a lot of the kinds of criticisms you make don't make sense given what the show is.
I would have accepted that if it wasn't for Craig Mazin (the creator of the series) insistence that he stuck to the details and the truth in the series:
They even published a podcast highlighting the creative freedoms, but failed to mention the important ones, like the fact that the reactor caps couldn't bounce up and down...
Deeply ironic for a show with the tagline "What is the cost of lies?"
You think that's an important one? To me, that's just a creative liberty; the need for visuals in the seconds before the explosion led to a choice to visualise it like the top of a boiling kettle.
To me, there are more substantive issues, e.g.
* Claiming that nobody survived watching from the Bridge of Death, when it hasn't even been confirmed there was a gathering of people on the bridge, let alone any of that group dying from it. But Voices of Chernobyl contained accounts from survivors who claim they were there and happened, and it makes excellent drama, so into the show it goes.
* Raising the idea that Vasily Ignatenko was giving off dangerous radiation to his wife, but her baby "absorbed" it, killing it and protecting her. This is a complete myth, and it comes directly from Lyudmilla Ignatenko herself. It's gripping testimony, but it's simply not true, and one doctor who was there, reflected on how the myth of people being "contaminated" led to a lot of evacuated children not being accepted by families in Moscow because of this fear. (https://www.vanityfair.com/video/watch/radiation-expert-revi...)
But overall, I agree with your point, the irony is not lost. This series was utterly compelling to me, and had such amazing drama. It's almost certainly not the case that Valery Legasov gave an eloquent speech berating his own government in the middle of the Chernobyl trial, but it felt so good when he did that in the TV show. It's a lie that comforts the viewer, telling them that there is a just world, and the liars and self-serving bureaucrats and dysfunctional governments of this world will be held to account, by good people, truthtellers.
There was no mass funeral with victims buried in concrete. But the spectacle of the TV show moved me to tears. Again, dramatic license. There were victims buried in lead coffins, in regular graves: wouldn't that imagery have been enough? No, because once the show has brought you to your knees with a row of lead coffins and mourning families, the cement mixer arriving over the hill then pushes you right over the edge. The concrete flowing around the coffins is such a visually powerful scene. Even though it's false, I wouldn't ever take it out of the show.
Those are definitely bigger issues.
I would also add the 100 megaton explosion, which physically wasn't even nearly possible. I wonder if there was a scientist in the writing room raising it as an issue, only to be ignored because the show needed a subplot, much like how the show's politicians ignored Legasov to not embarrass the state.
The bouncing caps stuck with me as I've seen many reviews online mentioning how fascinating they found the scene. In my opinion it's only fascinating if it has some grounding in the actual truth. After all, the show wouldn't be as popular if it was about a made up disaster and made up energy technology.
I agree the show is compelling, but once I noticed the inaccuracies, it became difficult to immerse myself. Perhaps I would've enjoyed it more if the show runner didn't claim high accuracy.
I agree, I feel much the same way about The Da Vinci Code. It's an interesting diversion to read, if somewhat poorly written, but the very first page listing "facts" rubs me up the wrong way because every claim on that page is fantasy horseshit. The novel is 1000x better with that page is ripped out.
The Catholic Church don't like it, not because it ties some fictional conspiracy to them in the context of the plot, but because that first page claims the conspiracy is real. There is a real Opus Dei organisation, but that organisation does not employ albino assassins with peanut allergies, and it's not at war with Pierre Plantard's completely made up organisation.
> the need for visuals in the seconds before the explosion led to a choice to visualise it like the top of a boiling kettle.
And this is the lie. Before they pressed the AZ-5 button: (quote from INSAG-7 report) "the parameters of the unit were controlled, remained within the limits expected for the operating conditions concerned, and did not require any intervention on the part of the personnel."
There was no drama in the control room, everything was mostly calm and "business as usual".
The Soviets invented the story "these youkels at Chernobyl did unauthorized experiment, disabled all safety mechanisms, broke all the rules and blew up our big beautiful reactor." This story was presented at the IAEA meeting in Vienna in 1986 by Legasov himself and published as the INSAG-1 report. The miniseries repeats this story but shifts all the blame to evil Dyatlov.
After the Soviet Union fell, the updated report INSAG-7 was published in 1992, which I quoted above.
The image presented in the TV show is not that Dyatlov is evil, but that he is dismissive of his staff's concerns, he bullies them into submission, and he has a callous indifference to safety. This is all true. He's also the main author of the test procedure! Dyatlov had been at Chernobyl since planning began in 1973, and by comparison Toptunov was 25 years old and had only been in his post for 3 months. If anyone is to blame, it's going to be Dyatlov, and chief engineer Fomin who permitted Dyatlov to run the test. But as the TV show makes clear, this pales into insignificance when compared with a regime that intentionally buries secrets, like them already knowing the unsafe design of the RBMK control rods.
The only way I'd say the TV show did him a disservice is in showing him in complete denial there was a problem, and demanding water be pumped into the (nonexistant) core. In reality, he realised it was futile, but after reporting to Fomin and Bryukhanov and collapsing from radiation sickness, it was Fomin who took his place, did not understand the situation, and ordered the futile water pumping.
From INSAG-7:
> When the reactor power could not be restored to the intended level of 700 MW(th), the operating staff did not stop and think, but on the spot they modified the test conditions to match their view at that moment of the prevailing conditions.
> operating rules were violated, and control and safety rods were placed in a configuration that would have compromised the emergency protection of the reactor even had the rod design not been faulty on the ground of the positive scram effect mentioned earlier. Most reprehensibly, unapproved changes in the test procedure were deliberately made on the spot, although the plant was known to be in a condition very different from that intended for the test
> INSAG, with the present report, does not retract INSAG-1, nor does it alter the conclusions of that report except as clearly indicated here. While the balance of INSAG's judgement of the factors contributing to the accident has shifted, the many other conclusions of INSAG-1 are unaffected.
If it's "business as usual" for the operators to invent changes to nuclear safety tests as they carry them out... I don't know what to say to you!
> he is dismissive of his staff's concerns, he bullies them into submission, and he has a callous indifference to safety.
I suspect that you are sourcing "Midnight in Chernobyl", which is based on Medvedev's book, which is full of inventions.
> a regime that intentionally buries secrets, like them already knowing the unsafe design of the RBMK control rods.
This is an invention in the miniseries. See section 4.1 in the INSAG-7 about the Ignalina phenomenon.
> When the reactor power could not be restored to the intended level of 700 MW(th), the operating staff did not stop and think, but on the spot they modified the test conditions to match their view at that moment of the prevailing conditions.
This is a weak spot in the INSAG-7. The 700 MW was the upper limit, not the lower and this number was put in the test conditions by Dyatlov, who designed the test.
> operating rules were violated, and control and safety rods were placed in a configuration
The only operational rule violated was the ORM margin but there was no indication about this metric in the control room and the operators weren't aware of this violation. They were still prosecuted for this. Criminal investigation against Akimov and Toptunov was closed only in November 1986, six months after their deaths.
> INSAG, with the present report, does not retract INSAG-1, nor does it alter the conclusions of that report except as clearly indicated here.
I love this. "No, no, it wasn't bullshit that Legasov gave us in 1986."
> the operators to invent changes to nuclear safety tests
It is not that kind of nuclear safety test that was sent to them from above. The organization that designed the reactor proposed a new mode of operation but didn't bother to design anything. The changes to the design and testing were prepared locally at Chernobyl NPP, so it was Dyatlov who prepared the test program. Fomin authorized the test. The INSAG-7 report says that regulations NSR-04-74 and GSP-82, which were in force at the time of the accident, did not require the plant managers to obtain approval from someone else. In 1987, Fomin was sentenced to 10 years in a penal colony anyway.
> It seems the main faults that OP finds in the show are that Legasov had issues with his government, when in "reality" he thought they were great. But is that "reality," or oppression?
The tapes were framed in the HBO as an honest message of a dying man to the world to expose the lies that happened. Well, after Going through the tapes, I couldn't find any indication of that...only the opposite.
Now I concede that I don't really know what actually happened, and one can't put a price on the intensity of the situation for everyone at that time.
My point is simple: HBO series said Legasov's position was something that wasn't true
Sure, but in any case you're going to cherry-pick inaccuracies, wouldn't it be fair to balance them with the "remarkably accurate recreations," according to historians[0]? Especially since it's couched as a historical drama, not a documentary.
Thanks.
The purpose is to have an universal object explorer for the cloud object store.
So that no matter what type of file it is, just need one click (not two) to view it. So the full workflow continuity will be kept.
Click Download then Open to me does not have a good UX, breaks the continuity of brain flow.
I studied prolog back in 2014. It was used in AI course. I found it very confusing: trying to code A*, N-Queens, or anything in it was just too much.
Python, in contrast, was a god-send.
I failed the subject twice in my MSc (luckily passing the MSc was based on the total average), but did a similar course in UC Berkeley, with python: aced it, loved it, and learned a lot.
A similar thing happened at my university in an Advanced Algorithms course. Students failed it so much, the university was forced to make the course easier to pass, by removing the minimum grade to pass.
I believe your case (and many other students) is that you couldn't abstract yourself from imperative programming (python) into logic programming (prolog).
Performance, far better performance. Same reason you ever use SQL. Prolog can do the same thing for very specific problems.
PS Prolog is a Horn clause solver. You characterizing it as a query language for a graph database, well it doesn't put you in the best light. It makes it seem like you don't understand important foundational CS math concepts.
I have no idea why are you dissing query languages. Software that makes those work is immensely complex and draws on a ton of CS math concepts and practical insights. But maybe you don't understand that.
I'm using SQL to do SQL things. And I'm sure when I somehow encounter the 1% of problems that prolog is the right fit for I'd be delighted to use it. However doing general algorithms in Prolog is as misguided as in SQL.
> I have no idea why are you dissing query languages.
I'm not. I'm pointing out that saying a Horn clause interpreter is a graph query language indicates a fundamental misunderstanding on your part. Prolog handles anything you want to say in formal logic very well (at the cost of not doing anything else well).
SQL on the other handle uses a completely different mathematical framework (relational algebra and set theory). This allows really effective optimization and query planning on top of a DB kernel.
A graph DB query language on the other hand should be based upon graph theory. Which is another completely different mathematical model. I haven't been impressed by the work in this area. I find these languages are too often dialects of SQL instead of a completely different thing based upon the correct mathematical model.
PS I used to write DBs. Discretion is the better part of valor here.
Happy to get some feedback about better ways to do this.