Candidate Experience: Fail!

At some point I applied for a job with Gallagher Insurance, but got ghosted. Many months later, I received their Global Impact & Career Insights- Q3 Newsletter; so clearly, they had my email address from their job application system.

Gallagher IT is probably unaware that their HR system exposes candidate information publicly. As, when I tried clicking on the "manage candidate profile" link at the bottom of the email, I was directed to Stephen Asshole's candidate page.

Well done Gallagher!

This is what web professionals would call, asshole design.

LLM Brain Rot and You

It's been a while since I last posted on AI, LLMs, and chat bots. Here's what I've been up to. I use Gemini to help me write business letters, and at work I use ChatGPT as a SQL and AMPScript code assist tool. ChatGPT is decent for helping a non software developer learn the quirks, in's, and out's of programming languages and scripts. It has not been smooth sailing. Each day I use ChatGPT with version history enabled, it seems to forget what it just said in its last response to a question or prompt and automatically starts correcting itself if you provide it with its own SQL query to make updates to.

The hallucinations are by far the worst bug in the LLM. ChatGPT proactively adds field names and table aliases that don't exist in the original query or prompt. It also uses SQL commands that aren't available in SFMC's version of SQL. And, after I have already specified that the query needs to work with SFMC's SQL (based on T-SQL), it gives me SQL that I already know can't run in SFMC. I have to remind it each time it does this with an additional prompt that the SQL can't start with "with" before "select". 

Anyhow, even with its flaws, dev time has been greatly reduced from a few days to a few hours in most cases.

The prompt you give it is only as good as your understanding of how a tool or process works. Using an LLM is a lot like using a mobile device app's GPS. Sure, the GPS gets you to your location with turn by turn directions, but it doesn't teach you how to navigate a map by yourself. How many times have you heard people say, oh I don't know where [location] is, I just ask the maps app to get me there?

It won't help you think critically or write professionally unless you ask it how it analyses text or data before giving you a response. Even then, it seems bound by programmed how to.

7% Capital Gains Tax and now a 9.9% income tax on high earners

In 2023, the WA state legislature passed a 7% capital gains tax on the sale or exchange of long-term capital assets such as stocks, bonds, business interests, or other investments and tangible assets (source). This led to the exodus of several very large companies and high net worth individuals relocating out of state.

All it would take for the WA state legislator to lower the income threshold for the 9.9% income tax (Senate Bill 6346) is to pass a new amendment bill through the standard legislative process.

Our state has an unhealthy appetite for spending with the pretext that it is for social causes.

Milton Friedman on spending money

"There are four ways in which you can spend money. 

You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. 

Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. 

Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! 

Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government." 

--Milton Friedman 

The US Tax System Described With Beer Analogy

I posted this on another blog site back in 2009, and it is still relevant today.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

Podcasts & audiobooks for the commute

Another year and a 3x/week commute to the office. I spend anywhere from 2-3 hours (avg 2.5, max 4) each day I have to drive work.

I have managed to polish off quite a few audiobooks since the beginning of the year:

Cabin Pressure: The Complete Series 1 (BBC)

The New One Minute Manager (1 hr)

A Blink of the Screen by Terry Pratchet (fiction)

Even More Laughs (standup comedy compilation)

Comedy, Volume 2 (standup comedy compilation)

Twelve Months by Jim Butcher (fiction)

Bayou Moon by Ilona Andrews (fiction, #2 in series)

On the Edge by Ilona Andrews (fiction, #1 in series)

The Law by Jim Butcher (fiction, #17.5 in series)

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson (fiction, #3 in series)

Wingfeather Tales by Andrew Peterson (fiction)

The Institute by Stephen King (fiction)

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (fiction, #1 in series)

The Original by Brandon Sanderson (fiction)

Food for Thought by Alton Brown (autobiography)

Legion by Brandon Sanderson (fiction, 1-3 in series)

Terciel & Elinor by Garth Nix (fiction, #6 in series)

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samrin Nosrat (nonfiction, cooking methodology)

Podcasts

The regular channels

• Marketplace
• Freakonomics Radio
• Unexplainable by Vox Media
• Gastropod
• Table Read

New in 2026:

• Once We Were Spacemen w/ Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk
• Voices from DARPA

Newly subscribed fictional podcasts:

• Incoming
• The Lovecraft Investigations
• Kakos Industries
• Mirror Falls (fictional Canadian slice of life)
• The Bardic Hearth
• Last Dance

7000 Subreddits go dark and nobody notices

By the time you are reading this, last week's effort of subreddits (imagine shareable links that can be commented on by many within a Reddit community) going private where only the Mods can see content and its subscribers can neither see nor access the subreddit). 

Reddit changed its API usage policy so that it now charges $0.24 per 1,000 API calls; whereas for the past x-number of years API usage was free to developers. Most for-profit companies will charge for API calls; sometimes this is baked into the service contract for enterprise platform licensing and sometimes API usage is charged at the per user per month/year/time period rate. It is not unusual to see online platforms doing this. Even Google charges for its Maps API.

Apollo is a freemium app; meaning that sure, there are features of the free version of it. But, to get access to other features, Apollo Pro costs a flat fee of $4.99 and Apollo Ultra has a subscription cost of $1.49/month or $12.99/year. The app's paid features allow users to manage multiple accounts (Reddit's app only allows one user account per current login session). Apollo has 1.3 million to 1.5 million monthly active users, and of that 900,000 daily active users. Each Apollo user consumes about 10,000 API calls per month to Reddit servers. The Apollo app makes about 50 million API calls per month.

App developers like to point out that Imgur's API pricing is much lower; but they fail to also disclose that Imgur is a free image hosting app. Imgur isn't charging customers to use their services for image sharing because the site is ad supported. 

Here's a thought. Why should Reddit shoulder the maintenance and server costs for all the API calls made by 3rd party vendors?