ndrosen

I had a medical procedure scheduled for this past week, but I was uncertain whether it would be able to go forward because of my cough. If the anaesthesiologist said the cough was too severe, it would be canceled.

Accordingly, my priority this past week was quiet and rest, trying to get my cough to calm down. Annoyingly, the air quality in the Twin Cities remained problematic, so I couldn't sit outside on my porch.

So I stayed behind shut doors, near my air filters. I took showers with shower bombs infused with peppermint and eucalyptus. I drank oceans of tea to try to calm my coughing. I ate cough drops until I was sick of the taste. I curtailed my exercise.

I simply rested.

(My efforts were successful and I underwent the procedure last Thursday. I was recovering yesterday, which is why this collage is a day late.)

Image description: A door is ajar at night. Light outlines the crack, but the opposite of the door is a field of stars. An owl at rest sits peacefully in the lower left corner, eyes closed. Upper left corner: a blooming white poppy (signifying rest) with a glowing full moon shining at its center.

Quiet

22 Quiet

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Current Mood: peaceful

thewayne

Ah, a sad day. He was a marvelous actor and did a lot of work. Aside from the TV series Buffy, he appeared in the Apple TV series Ted Lasso, and from the AP article: "...Other notable roles included playing Geoffrey Howe, the deputy to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep, in the Oscar-winning “The Iron Lady.”

Head portrayed a prime minister himself in the sketch comedy show “Little Britain,” as well as King Uther Pendragon, the father of Prince Arthur, in the “Merlin” TV series. He also appeared in “Motherland,” Manchild,” and “Silent Witness,” along with acting in many plays, musicals, and recording music as a singer.

Head passed away 'due to complications from pneumonia'. He will be missed.

https://apnews.com/article/anthony-head-obit-buffy-vampire-lasso-a1c56edf560de048e730a2cf337e4223

thewayne

Well, the odds weren't good that it would see the light of day. I had just heard they were in development earlier this year. I was really looking forward to this, we enjoyed the original and the SG-1 series.

I still cringe whenever I'm in a theater and I see the MGM logo and Amazon with it. It just makes me sad. Perhaps it's better than MGM dying entirely, but not by much.

https://screenrant.com/stargate-amazon-new-series-canceled/

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26655048-darksight-dare-releases-on-audible-today

As mentioned previously, the Blackstone Audiobooks reading by Grover Gardner of "Darksight Dare" releases today as an Audible exclusive. It will have general release on other vendor platforms August 2.

https://www.amazon.com/Darksight-Dare...

Fast work on Blackstone's part!

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on June, 02

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26655048-darksight-dare-releases-on-audible-today

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26649508-more-academia-vs-bujold

This surfaced recently -- the UK crew who produced Biology and Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold (2020) follow up with Short But Concentrated #2, a second essay symposium on the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, edited by Una McCormack:

https://unamccormack.co.uk/?books=sho...

In the footnotes of one article was a link to an interview I'd forgotten, nice trip down memory lane:

https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads...

"[Written sources] ... frequently tell you far more about the person who wrote them than the subjects addressed." -- Temple sorcerer Learned Penric kin Jurald to Wealdean Royal Shaman Inglis kin Wolfcliff, discussing the pitfalls of academic research, in an ad hoc symposium over good white wine, fishing poles, and exploding earthworms, "Penric's Fox" (2017).

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on May, 31

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26649508-more-academia-vs-bujold

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

pegkerr

I'm going to keep this short because it's such a bore to go on and on about my personal health. And there have been too many collages on that subject this year. My sister once passed along a humorous observation from her brother-in-law, a retired pastor, about the dangers of visiting his elderly parishioners: you have to sit through the organ recital.

I would spare you, but there really isn't anything else I can do a collage about because the sudden flare-up of my spring allergies (I am violently allergic to tree pollen) necessitated the cancellation of all of my plans for the week. I didn't go out, I canceled walking with my friends, I didn't make it to church, I barely did my volunteer work, and I canceled a planned and much-anticipated day trip with a couple friends to a bird sanctuary in Wisconsin, which just SUCKED.

It's been very frustrating. I can't sit out on my front porch and eat breakfast. I can't go outside without wearing a mask. I spent most of my concentration on simply trying to breathe this week. In desperation, I got a virtual urgent care visit on Saturday to get a prescription for a steroid inhaler, but due to the holiday, it couldn't be filled until Tuesday.

I have several doses under my belt, and I'm starting to feel a little better, thank goodness.

Um. I did finish another chapter this week, and I'm quite pleased with it. That's something else to talk about, yes?

Image description: Background: a circle of the tops of trees silhouetted against a blue sky, seen from a view looking straight up. Top: dangling catkins holding birch tree pollen. Center: a woman's face, her eyes screwed shut, holding a tissue to her nose. Lower center: a blue medical mask, overlaid by an inhaler.

Breathless

21 Breathless

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Current Mood: sick

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)

thewayne

This came out two weeks ago, and I'm not commenting on it as I'm reading it right now: I just converted it to an epub and at 43,000 words it's about 80 pages long in a double-page format on my laptop. It's going to take some time to chew through and form opinions on. There's definitely a lot to think about.

In it, he quotes Gandalf! Some commentators have proclaimed it as a slam against Peter Theil who created the Palantir [company/system] and is decidedly using it not for the betterment of humanity.

If anyone would like a copy of an epub of the encyclical, send me your email address as a private message and I'll send it to you. It's only 95k, so easily fits as an attachment.

An Ars Technica article on the encyclical:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/citing-gandalf-pope-leo-says-we-must-disarm-ai/

The inevitable Slashdot page on the encyclical:
https://slashdot.org/story/26/05/26/0441241/pope-leo-warns-of-risks-from-ai-in-42300-word-encyclical

And the actual encyclical!
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

thewayne

Oh, boy!

This guy is apparently an ultra-nationalist type and decided to do a Tank Day promotion. In South Korea, this was something that happened in 1980, a time when South Korea was being ruled by a military dictatorship. There was a brutal crack-down on pro-democracy protesters and a lot of people died when an unidentified person ordered troops to open fire on the protesters. A lot of people also just disappeared and still haven't been accounted for.

The CEO decided to 'celebrate' Tank Day, obviously a severely tone-deaf idea, which included special Tank Day tumblers and mugs. The public responded with videos of said tumblers and mugs being destroyed with hammers and such, along with other Starbucks merch being destroyed. The article goes on to report people getting refunds on prepaid gift cards and deleting their Starbucks smartphone apps. When word finally reached the USA HQ, he was fired. Starbucks Global announced that the CEO was no longer employed by the corporation and was no longer in that role.

The company that owns just over 2/3rds of Starbucks South Korea, Shinsegae Group, saw their stock take a 5.5% dive in trading.

From the article, "...Shinsegae Group Chairman Chung Yong-jin also issued a public apology.

“I deeply bow in apology as the representative of the group,” Chung said. The marketing “deeply hurt the public, the bereaved families, and the victims of the May 18 demonstration.”

Also from the article, the President of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung said on Twitter that "...he was “enraged” by Starbucks’ campaign and demanded it apologize to families of people killed during the uprising."

One more lesson on how to utterly ruin your high-paying career.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/19/starbucks-korea-head-fired-after-tank-day-promotion-sparks-public-uproar.html

jsburbidge

One of the signs of the progress of AI through some areas is the visible degradation of what has before been, not great, but at least competent. Sometimes one sees signs of this where one least expects it - though in retrospect it is certainly something one should have expected.

Like most technical people who have a LinkedIn profile I reasonably regularly get relatively random e-mails (originating as messages on LinkedIn) from recruiters who want to know if I might be available for a position.

Usually these are not very good matches. People who promote positions with required skills that appear nowhere on your CV because you do development work in the financial sector are executing the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass by spamming a long list of targets which are marked with only general tags in a context where good matches are hard to find. However, they are humanly understandable queries. They read like form letters, but they contain concrete details which show that a human mind was behind at least the general form of the template, or they are clearly a standard form that was broadcast to a large mailing list.

Recently I've had a trickle of something else. They come from real recruiters - i.e. not scammers - who have several years in their positions and have a reasonable history on LinkedIn. But the texts look different.

They don't have any information about the client, or position, in question. If it weren't for the background of the senders, this would lead me to suspect scam attempts. (Those usually offer very vague positions, frequently "at the executive level", to people with skillsets that in no way would match the offered position.)

What they do have is details scraped from my CV scattered through the first paragraph or two. But the details don't quite fit, semantically.

Consider "I'm reaching out on behalf of our client who is looking to bring on board an Engineer II. They are impressed by your background in application development". Nobody wants to bring an Engineer II on board; that's an internal title at TD with no meaning outside that context. What they would want would be a senior software developer. Likewise, from the same email "Your expertise in C/C++/C# and work on transaction processing really caught their attention" just isn't what anyone would say. Nobody actually wants all three of C, C++, and C#; if they aren't interested in only one, it will be C/C++ (for optimized close to the metal development, or large legacy codebases) or C++/C# (enterprises with large blocks of both in their current codebases). Plus, clients don't recommend candidates to recruiters; it goes the other way, and recruiters don't let them know about you until you have expressed interest.

Or consider, from a different e-mail "Our client is currently hiring for a position that aligns with your skills, particularly in Unix and Software Development." That's not how anyone would promote a position. A sentence like that requires really concrete, and usually slightly rare, skills for it to make sense. If you replaced "Unix and Software Development" with something like "LALR Compiler design" the sentence would make sense, even if it still sounded rather buzzwordy and vague. Usually, the recruiter aiming at a senior hire focusses on describing the position, not the applicant, something like "Our client is expanding their automated trading system on a C++/Linux platform and needs several strong team leads to spearhead the project".

These are, of course, AI generated. Established recruiters who used to spend days identifying and contacting candidates for their clients are now clearly telling AI agents to generate "personalized" contact letters for matches from probably AI-driven searches and then sending them out without doing any sort of detailed editing. And those e-mails are almost indistinguishable from scam e-mails, because the generalization characteristic of AI slop wipes out the sorts of concrete details which used to reflect the attention recruiters had to pay if they wanted to get placements. With this approach, the recruiter can replace quality (such as it was) with quantity.

I don't think it will work. The problem with this sort of use of AI is that the hit taken from sounding "off", even very slightly, and by poor coordination of detail, will drive off more potential applicants than you might gain from being able to spam more such targets.

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ndrosen

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Reading

2026 52 Card Project: Week 22: Quiet

RIP: Anthony Head, known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer among many other things

Amazon cancels the new Stargate series before it fully starts production

Darksight Dare releases on Audible today

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more Academia vs. Bujold

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2026 52 Card Project: Week 21: Breathless

Testing needed in advance of code push!

Pope Leo issues an encyclical about artificial intelligence

S. Korea Starbucks CEO sacked after disastrous Tank Day promotion

Another misuse of AI

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June 2026

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