Token — a Unit of Irresponsibility
What a token really measures: how irresponsible a person is. Why you can't patch a field of irresponsibility with more irresponsibility — and what to do instead of dropping an AI agent on a broken process.
Ivan Roganov — Blog
Writing on engineering, tools, writing itself, and the occasional opinion — by Ivan Roganov.
Latest posts
Google Wakes Up
Google is launching the Googlebook. But the real story is why — while everyone watched the AI race, Apple quietly rewrote the laptop market with a cheap MacBook.
Code has always been worthless
For forty years we pretended software was the product. SaaS moved the price to the service. AI moved it past zero. The artefact is free now — what's worth paying for is knowing which code to write.
A lost computer
We had this amazing thing called a computer — precise, predictable, trustworthy. Then came AI, and the real danger isn't stolen jobs. It's erosion of responsibility.
Artificial whatteligence?
An entire field of human knowledge goes stale because of one misunderstood word. Nobody can define intelligence — so what exactly is this 'Artificial Intelligence'?
Leadership to insanity
Insanity is taking anything to the extreme. A manager's job is to keep the balance — let AI in, watch the people who worship it, and watch the ones who ban it.
Do you wanna embarrass the hell out of yourself?
Reading AI-generated slop at a birthday or a ceremony is the fastest way to ruin the room. People remember you by what you've done — not by a Wikipedia page.
How does we support?
AI-powered support and overseas outsourcing are a great way to lose your customers. Help is supposed to mean something — and a real US-based voice is easy money.
Tax The Which?
Tax every billionaire in the US and each person gets $8,700 — one time. Then nothing. So maybe the real problem isn't billionaires. Maybe it's your education.
A Distinct Taste of Life in Your Mouth
Humans have way more than five senses. One of them — the sense of life — usually sits dormant. And then LLMs arrive and suddenly wake it up.
From VHS Magic to Big Data Blockbusters: Why Modern Movies Have Lost Their Soul
A 212-tape childhood VHS collection, Requiem for a Dream at 13, and then Star Wars VII. How movies turned from a filmmaker's vision into Big Data slurry.
Why I Still Don't Believe in AI
A programmer's take on the AI hype: a system that needs constant babysitting isn't a working system. And 'AI everywhere' is just another kind of stupidity.
It's Impossible to Be Average, and AI Can't Help You
Out of 3,863 women, none matched the 'average.' Yet ChatGPT is designed to produce exactly that — the most average answer possible. Here's why that's a problem.
The Code Writes Itself Now — Just Don't Ask Why It Works
Nobody's actually writing their code anymore — the LLM is. And that's perfectly fine. Let it handle the boilerplate and stop pretending we're improving JavaScript.
Don't Even Think About Rewriting the Code? Seriously?
LinkedIn is clutching pearls over the idea of rewriting the U.S. Social Security codebase. In 2025? With LLMs? Let's wake up — rewriting business logic costs pennies now.
The Infinite Joke: Math, AI, and the Minds That Mock the Universe
A waitress served me infinite coffee. Which got me thinking: the universe doesn't accept infinity — but we do. That's the real joke, and AI isn't in on it.
The Illusion of Stability: What Disney's Decline Teaches Us About Creativity and Growth
Disney can't animate anymore. They ran out of ideas. Here's what that tells us about stability, creativity, and why standing still is the scariest place to be.
Will AI Really Steal Your Job? Let's Talk Reality.
People keep sending me doom videos about AI taking every job. Let's cut through the hype and look at what's actually happening with the money, the market, and reality.
Let's Prove to Your Laptop That It's a Bad Laptop
Yelling at inanimate objects changes nothing — and neither does yelling at your AI. If the output is wrong, you have only yourself to blame.
Ever wonder when life will finally get easier? Spoiler alert: it never does — and that's the beauty of it.
Life never gets easier — the better it gets, the more work comes with it. A take on resistance, cat poop, and why the path up is always more work, not less.
Let's Conduct an Experiment and Create the Principle of Quantum Uncertainty Right Here, Right Now
Think of a cat. Congratulations — you just created a state of uncertainty nothing in the universe can read. A short take on thought, AI hype, and creation.
How to Become a Bland Nobody with AI
Shove everything into Big Data and AI and you end up with gray average nothing. Hollywood, Nokia, and why instinct still beats dataset polish.
Are your ideas worth anything? And what about the age of AI?
Ideas are worthless — execution and selling are what make money. A blunt take on AI, startups, and why hiding in your little hole will get you nowhere.
Fast Fashion of UI and UX
UI and UX have turned into fast fashion — glossy effects that burn through GPUs, batteries and millions of dollars in power every day, only to be replaced next year.
LinkedIn — your best partner in scam
An open letter to LinkedIn's 'security' team: every report comes back 'Everything is fine' while obvious scam bots and real harassment are quietly left untouched.
An Abysmal State of Modern UI
Modern UI is an unpredictable mess — swipes do different things in every app, buttons jump around the screen, and SEO bros churn out '101 tips' to make it worse.
Problems in the IT Industry
A solution to a problem is something that makes the problem go away. In IT, we skip that step — we pile on tools and processes while nobody learns the trade.
The Grand Circus of IT Hiring
IT hiring has become a circus where common sense takes a holiday and absurdity is the norm. A short tour of the acts — from Facebook to Netflix to Jonny the junior.
Stop Making Excuses: A Rant on Developer Ownership
A blunt rant on programmers who blame everyone but themselves: responsibility, professionalism, and why excuses are a one-way ticket to burnout.
Cloning Linux by Hand
How to clone Debian Linux by hand, without third-party tools: dd, partprobe, sgdisk, e2fsck, resize2fs, and a bit of Go — for when you wake up stranded on a desert island.
Taming QEMU with an Iron Fist
A hands-on tutorial on driving QEMU virtual machines straight from Go via libvirt — no virsh, no clunky wrappers, just clean JSON in and JSON out.
Fear and Loathing in RDP
How RDP has quietly evolved over the last ten years: versions from NT 4.0 to 10, useful mstsc flags, shadow connections, security holes, and the future of Windows administration.
Tightrope Walker on NVMe-over-TCP 2.0
Round two of beating up NVMe-over-TCP. A real test bench made of two Dell PowerEdge boxes, a 10-gigabit network, kernel 5.16, and answers to the questions you raised.
HTC Touch Pro 2 in 2022: A Guest from the Past
Buying a brand-new HTC Touch Pro 2 on eBay for $40 in 2022 and diving back into the lost world of Windows Mobile, PDAs, Palm, Nokia, and offline dicts.
Don't Be Cringe
Tips and personal stories on not being a clueless bore on an international team: accents, dictionaries, idioms, jokes, emails, names, and the little things that bite.
Is Everyone Lying? More Adventures in Tormenting NVMe
NVMe is more than just a fast disk — it's a protocol. Here's how to expose an NVMe drive over the network through plain TCP, using nothing but your stock Linux kernel.
Setting Up Your Own Mail Server with docker-compose
How to stand up your own mail server using Mailu — a curated set of docker containers with postfix, dovecot, roundcube and everything you need. Step-by-step, with the landmines marked.
How to Learn to Write Articles (for Tech Blogs and Beyond)
A practical guide to writing articles: five elements of good writing — from storytelling and reading tons of literature to developing your own style and dealing with critics.
Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown): Interview on Math & Code
Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown, on applying math in business and programming, computing integrals in your head, and building a massive channel.
Bad Advice for Teaching People to Code
How to teach programming without killing the spark: three idiotic claims, understanding vs. rote memorization, and why 'couldn't learn' is a cop-out.
Building Your Own TV Studio with Blackjack and…
How a sysadmin turned pandemic video calls into a full-blown TV studio: Jitsi, Restreamer, BlackMagic, SDI cameras, and broadcasting to 2,000 employees for under $7,000.
What Should We Actually Be Afraid of in AI?
Why computers can't think, what's actually dangerous about AI, and how we quietly handed machines the right to choose for us — from TikTok recommendations to hiring systems.
Bad Advice for Manual Writers
Why people don't read manuals, how to make docs even worse, and why you should write decent ones — a satirical reverse-advice take on documentation.
Hire, Don't Filter Out — Mind the Comma
A blunt take on IT hiring: why AI resume filters are killing the process, why you should hire without idiotic interviews, and how to motivate programmers like actual human beings.
Learning Blazor by Building Something Useful. Part II
Part two on Blazor: WASM binary pitfalls, Razor gotchas, component communication struggles, lifecycle traps, and the state of the ecosystem.
Sharing (into) the Console
Useful console services for sysadmins and developers: terminal streaming via seashells.io, file transfers through transfer.sh, and what to do in the console while you're waiting for a deploy.
Learning Blazor by Building Something Useful. Part I
Part one of how, instead of yet another ToDo list, we built a useful IoT relay control system in Blazor: Entity Framework, MVC controller, server-side rendering, and C# instead of JavaScript.
Digging Into the Compiler Source — How the Go Scheduler Works (Part II)
Part two of the series on Go's task scheduler: breaking down G, P, and M, thread parking, system calls, netpoll, and sysmon — all based on runtime source code.
How to Build a Career by Helping People
Transcript of a live talk about building an IT career: from fixing a PHPBB forum at 14 to landing contracts without interviews — why helping people works better than any resume.
Leveling Up — Rust and Windows API
Continuing the compact-programs series: building 2048 in Rust with windows-rs, creating a native window via WinAPI, and wrangling the message queue.