That's Life

Yulia Kleban, a marketing, brand and communications specialist at Projector Institute, spoke about her experience of consciously chosen unemployment for 7 months. The girl shared the insights she gathered during this period.

We are used to perceiving billionaire Elon Musk in two guises: a genius who moves this world forward and an eccentric media figure who forbids and allows something on the social network X (formerly Twitter). After the entrepreneur brought Donald Trump to power, he received his third role — political. The word «role» is very important in the story about Musk, so we will return to it later. Until the inauguration of the newly elected US president, which will take place on January 20, Elon lives in Trump’s residence, participates with him in important negotiations and will soon be engaged in cutting US government spending.

On December 23, the Centralized Database of Ported Numbers (CDB) resumed its work. On December 20, the Ukrainian State Center for Radio Frequencies (UDCR) conducted technical work to increase the capacity of systems involved in processing applications from subscribers changing operators. This was due to the abnormally high demand for porting numbers to the lifecell network in December, which significantly exceeded the technical capabilities of the Centralized Database.

The idea for this interview was born spontaneously when the girls approached dev.ua CEO Stas Yurasov at this year’s IT Arena with a question — is he the same person who now heads the Kyiv IT cluster? We became curious — who is this mysterious leader who currently oversees the association of capital’s tech companies? After several attempts, dev.ua managed to contact and talk to Serhiy Yashchuk, who became the CEO of Kyiv IT Cluster in September. He told how he became the head of the Kyiv cluster, what has changed in the organization since the start of the full-scale invasion, what requests cluster members make, what tasks the organization sets for itself for 2025, and what businesses can expect in the near future.

Former IT worker Lyubov Kolosovska founded the organization «Batteries, Surrender» in 2013. Since then, it has grown from a small eco-initiative to a nationwide movement that provides centralized collection and recycling of batteries from all over the country. According to Kolosovska, managing and scaling this project is extremely difficult, and there are many reasons for this — they were discussed in an interview, in particular. Nevertheless, this process is moving steadily, which can be seen in the numbers of batteries exported abroad for recycling, the increase in the network of points and the number of volunteers involved, and the joining of new retail chains to the project, stores that are the main source of collection of used batteries. dev.ua has been arranging an interview with the founder of the «Batteries, Surrender» movement for over a month, because she has virtually no time and resources left for media activity. But when we finally managed to do it, Lyubov Kolosovskaya told us about a number of things in the process of recycling batteries that cannot be found on the Internet.

Last week, Google announced the release of a new quantum computer chip, Willow, that opens up amazing possibilities for a surprised humanity. Willow is capable of completing a computational task in less than five minutes—a process that the company says would take one of the world’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years (a ten followed by 24 zeros), which is longer than the age of the universe. dev.ua has collected several opinions from IT professionals and an economist about how this invention can be useful or, conversely, threatening.