Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 08

The key mistake in adopting AI — misunderstanding delegation

2026-10-08T10:11:23+03:00

For example: what I need is a configured, tested, reliable SaaS application. I don't need ChatGPT for that. I need someone who will take responsibility for the result. Whether they use AI or not is a secondary question.

Delegation: hiring a person or a company to take responsibility for the end result. When I delegate, my working time goes down and my free time goes up. The responsibility for reaching the goal is on someone else.

The "I'll do it myself with AI" approach: install, develop, test, deploy, damn it, I've hit the limits, oh, something's crashing, and all the other joys of software development (if you know, you know). Working time goes up, free time goes down, and all the responsibility is still on me. That's anti-delegation!

An example for non-programmers. I need a clean home. I can grab a vacuum cleaner, a broom, a mop, and clean in my free time. But I don't want to! I want to go to the movies and delegate the cleaning to someone, so that when I get home, everything is sparkling.

Empirical proof that AI doesn't increase productivity

2026-08-08T11:19:13+03:00

To avoid wasting your time, let me give an important definition. Productivity is how much money you earn for the time you put in.

If you earn $1,000 in 160 hours without AI, let's call that your baseline productivity: 1X.

If you earn $5,000 in 160 hours with AI, your productivity is now 5X.

If you earn $1,000 in 80 hours with AI, your productivity is now 2X.

If you earn $1,000 in 160 hours with AI while producing 10 times as many "tasks," "code," "pull requests," "posts," or whatever it is you produce — you haven't become 10 times more productive. Your code has become 10 times cheaper.

And why is the proof empirical? Because I keep seeing programmers start saving tokens, waiting for their sessions to reset, juggling different accounts. Why don't they just throw $10,000 at tokens, if AI increases their productivity — meaning their earnings — so much? Well, if I put $100 into something and earn $1,000, then putting in $200 should bring in $2,000! It's a money printer. But no matter how many tokens they throw at it, they can't earn more. So their productivity hasn't increased. The price of the output has simply plummeted.

The Cheapest Item

2016-02-08T21:45:00+02:00

In the Soviet Union, ice cream cost 7 kopecks, a bus ride cost 5 kopecks, and a box of matches cost 1 kopeck. Small change made sense.

I remember in the ’90s, when coupons were still the national currency (coupon is short for “Kuchma stubbornly keeps deceiving the people.” Don’t know who Kuchma is? Finish your homework and I’ll tell you.), kiosks had coupons with denominations up to 100 coupons stuck to their display windows, crossed out with an X. That meant those bills were not accepted.

Over the last 15 years, the hryvnia has depreciated 15-fold. Roughly speaking, everything has become 15 times more expensive. Even if in 2000 you could buy something for a few kopecks, now it has become 15 times more expensive. Add inflation on top of that.

I recently saw a sign hanging at the checkout in one supermarket: “Coins in denominations of 1, 2, and 5 kopecks are not accepted.” I was slightly taken aback, sank into memories of the nineties, and didn’t think to take a photo. The very next day the sign was gone. A supermarket has no right to refuse money that is officially in circulation in our country.

But I started thinking about something else: what is the cheapest item now? Can you buy anything for 1 kopeck? For 10 kop.? For 50? In the photo below, the cheapest item costs 2 UAH 89 kop. — one stick of the most puke-inducing “Jacobs” coffee. I couldn’t find anything cheaper than that in the supermarket.

I haven’t carried change for many years now. I specifically buy wallets that don’t have a coin compartment. It isn’t much use, and it takes up an unjustifiably large amount of space.

What’s the cheapest item you’ve seen? Do you carry change with you?

KhNURE from a Bird’s-Eye View

2015-11-08T15:03:00+02:00

A beautiful video, and the weather is perfect for filming. I didn’t know these things could fly that high. Shot on 07.11.2015. Somewhere there among the tiny little people is me, too: I was passing by.

The video authors’ channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdrmwTDk_0E9UgnqUtTf71A There’s lots more interesting stuff there about Kharkiv.

Live Not by Lies

2014-02-08T00:34:00+02:00

Last week I got a message from a good friend who lives abroad. Like, “why are you bad-mouthing Maidan, it seems like something good.”

The phrase “something good” really grates on the ear. This conversation was already after the nighttime dispersal of the students, the deaths of people, people being burned alive, the seizure of administrative buildings, calls for physical reprisals against certain groups of people.

I even started worrying about people who don’t know Russian, since they’re deprived of access to objective information about the events taking place. It is known that foreign media operate with an eye on the Washington Regional Committee.

Let’s look at a small example of how information is organized on the internet. Flickr is one of the most popular photo-hosting services. Below is the search result for the keyword “euromaidan” (in Latin letters): http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=euromaidan

What do we see here? Peaceful demonstrators have gathered in the square under their national flags, at a field kitchen girls are feeding passersby, a little Christmas tree made of flags. It seems like something good.

Now let’s look at the photos for the very same keyword, only typed in Russian letters: “евромайдан” http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=евромайдан

Here the peaceful demonstrators are already holding clubs, firing rockets at the police, shooting at them with homemade guns, throwing bottles of incendiary mixture, tearing up the pavement into cobblestones to throw at people.

And this is not some kind of coincidence. This is the result of attempts to present “Maidan” to the whole world as something “good.”

I Took a Photo

2013-01-08T17:28:00+02:00

To designers who sign off on an interface like this, all non-English-speaking users are pygmies. They think they can shove a surrogate, a fake at us and we’ll be happy with it and settle for it.

That’s where the whole great meaning of “I took a photo” in Instagram is hidden.

Started an article on TBB on Wikipedia

2009-05-08T10:17:00+03:00

I created an article about Intel Threading Building Blocks on Wikipedia: TBB. I still need to add some basic stuff, the history, and an example of use. If anyone has anything to say on the subject — join in!

Usually I write an article in my personal sandbox and then publish it. But yesterday I messed something up somewhere, and the article ended up in the main article space, where it was immediately nominated for deletion for being unencyclopedic (there were two sentences there). Now, in a panic, I’ve added another couple of paragraphs.

Soon I’ll write a few posts here about TBB and about using it.

P. S. I also started articles a while ago about SystemC and about Sergey Shchelkanovtsev.