Canned Dragons

A personal weblog by Robert — a mere Christian, aspiring minimalist, inveterate notetaker, budget audiophile and paper airplane mechanic.

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  • The Intelligence Is Still Artificial

    The opinions on AI that you find on the internet tend to fall in the extremes of the other side. Either AI is the downfall of humanity or its savior. My thoughts on the subject, as on many others, ride in the middle of the road.

    In my professional life, AI has been a great equalizer. If you know the problems you are trying to solve, absent the knowledge of how to actually go about doing that, AI can be the bridge between concept and reality. It would take me many hours to probe the depths of the Azure cloud through labyrinthine Log Analytics workspaces to find the causes of a spike in ingestion costs. With the Azure MCP and Claude Cowork/Code, it’s done in minutes.

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  • Canvas Attack

    Matt Blaze

    Extremely glad I didn't have students submit their coursework via Canvas, or use it to manage grading, this semester.

    May 8, 2026, 2:23 am 6 boosts 39 favorites

    Hacktivism can sometimes be understandable. Yet it amazes me that some people would think that to attack school teachers and students is to live a meaningful and purposeful life.

  • A Show of Respect

    Whether marching for a Sikh holiday, visiting a Jewish children”s center or attending Divine Liturgy, I’ve never seen a politician put so much effort into respecting the faith traditions of others as Zohran Mamdani. New York is such a diverse city and you truly get the impression that the mayor sees the strength of this. In the words of one commenter, he really knows how to make people feel seen.

    Today marks 205 years of Greek independence. I was grateful to stand in solidarity with Greek Orthodox New Yorkers at the Divine Liturgy, commemorating this triumph of self-determination.

    — Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) 2026-04-26T22:24:58.761Z

    It’s exciting to keep up with what Mamdani is doing in New York. His agenda feels like a sea change in political priorities. I hope to see positive effects coming from the work his adminstraction is engaged in. 

  • The Perfect Indie Pop Song

    A few weeks ago, I saw Mark Robinson from Unrest/Air Miami/Flin Flon open for the Wedding Present at the Motorco Music Hall in Durham. Although the bill clearly stated that Robinson would be playing Unrest songs, imagining him doing those songs without the two other band members, Phil Krauth and Bridget Cross was challenging. Whatever images I could conjure didn’t match the actual show.

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  • Olly Thoughts

    Olly, the developer of the Pagecord blogging software, just published a post on something I was thinking about with regards to music. I’m not buying a lot of physical media these days, but when I do, it’s usually CDs. I just went to a new record store called Hunky Dory that just opened downtown near me, but they weren’t celebrating Record Store Day. I wasn’t sure about going because I didn’t think I would buy anything. So I can relate to Olly.

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  • You Could Do Anything

    Shelly Ridenour penned an article for Qobuz on the stellar alternative albums from 1991. One observation that I found particularly poignant from having grown up during this period was around the change that Nirvana’s Nevermind brought to mainstream music with regard to gender dynamics.

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    Fediverse reactions

  • The Collection

    Everyone has been posting about the Aadam Jacobs collection. Since I love indie music from the 90’s, I’m certainly going to spend some time with the massive 10,000 live recordings collection. I went to the page on the Internet Archive and one of the first recordings I saw was neo-classical band Rachel’s at Lounge Ax. I bought The Lounge Ax Defense and Relocation compilation created to save the venerable Chicago club when it released. I’ve spun that disc hundreds of times. The song Rachel’s contributed to the comp, “Those Pearls…,” is probably my favorite by the band.

    Immediate download. Let’s get this exploration started.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Portland Town

    One of my greatest joys in 2026 has been the release of new material by British riot twee band Heavenly. I’ll admit I approached the release of this year’s brilliantly named Highway to Heavenly LP with a certain amount of skepticism. After decades of radio silence, it’s hard to know what to expect from a long-time favorite and easy to be disappointed.

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  • The Foresyte Saga

    My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation of The Forsyte Saga that aired early in the aughts and starred Damien Lewis, among others. The generation spanning historical drama scratched my itch for vast and ambitious period pieces.

    Last night, we watched the first episode of Masterpiece’s The Count of Monte Christo, hoping it would do justice to the sprawling epic that is one of our favorite books. The initial entry into the series seems promising. After the episode, a trailer for the new Masterpiece adaptation of The Forsytes aired. It was kind of a disappointment. It had the feel of Netflix period drama, with characters and situations that seem all-to-modern. One thing that always gets me as far as anachronistic elements go is the close cropped beards, even though there were no electric beard trimmers at the time. If the dudes look like guys you would find at Lifetime Fitness, I have a hard time suspending my disbelief.

  • Attie

    I just signed up for access to Attie, a new AI-based app from Bluesky, which allows you to shape your feed on the social network using plain language. To be honest, I wasn’t that excited about the app when it was first announced. It can be hard these days to sift through the AI hype to locate the value in some of these propositions.

    Then I came across an old quote I had saved about blogging. Henrik Karlsson wrote in 2022 that a blog post “is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.” Karlsson was sparked to this realization after writing an essay about Ivan Illich and systems thinking, and being introduced to it by many who wanted to discuss the topic.

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