Author: Yesim Semchenko

Reading was a way of transporting myself to different worlds as a child. From the outside, you would think that – I was walking from one room to another with a book in my hand. When in fact I was travelling from my house to another land, experiencing another season, and another life.  I could…

After playing the game Eliza, I came across a study from this year. They found strikingly interesting results (particularly the first one), quoting from their abstract: ‘In a large sample (N = 830), we showed that a) participants could rarely tell the difference between responses written by ChatGPT and responses written by a therapist, b)…

Ever thought about what therapy with an AI might actually feel like? In 2025, it’s not that wild an idea, but when the game Eliza dropped back in 2019, it probably was pretty futuristic. Here’s the twist: instead of chatting to a computer screen, you sit across from a real person, a proxy, who reads…

Visual novels are unique genre of games that invite you to step inside a story and shape its direction through the choices you make. Each decision leads you down different narrative paths, allowing you to explore various outcomes. The level of agency you have can vary from game to game, offering everything from subtle influence…

The Widow’s Boutique is a historical visual novel set in Christiana (modern-day Oslo) during the 1820s. The narrative is meticulously researched and thoughtfully crafted, which is no surprise given that the writer, producer, and CEO holds a PhD in history. This expertise is evident in the authenticity of the storytelling. I spent nearly 11 hours…

If you want to search for a course to take, with so many options on the Internet, you can have choice paralysis. To simplify your decision-making, if allowed, you can scrape the data and make comparisons more conveniently. Let us say that you are searching for online data science courses on Reeds. And this is…

Hello! In one of my previous blog posts, I wrote about how to send personalized mass emails. However, in that blog post, we were taking the list of emails from a csv file. What if you have your list of emails in the PostgreSQL database? Imagine that you have a schema and under that schema,…

Hello! I recently came across EDAMAM and found out that it offers a free API for developers (not unlimited though) for nutritional analysis! After signing up, you create an app, and get an app id and app key. By using those along with the endpoint, it is possible to find out the nutritional analysis of…

Why? Google sheets are widely used due to various reasons such as being free of charge and allowing multiple people to work on them. But if you want to document each move for your future self and/or for your colleagues, connecting to Google sheets via Python can be a good idea. The benefit of having…

Plotly is an interactive data visualization library in Python, R, MATLAB, Perl, Julia, Arduino, and REST. I prepared a short notebook in Kaggle to show its usage and how the output looks like. I used the dataset indicating Covid19 World Vaccination Progress from Gabriel Preda. Initially, I created a static scatter plot with seaborn so…