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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15125 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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This is where we get into the bad. In diagnosing what was going wrong with the attempted fix, it got allllll into mess that was actually pretty low probability. Suggested permissions issues, suggested problems with registry entries. A couple of them were low risk, and at the time, seemed like they could be plausibly related, and I did mess with a couple things. Others were the ugly. No, Mr. Bot, I am not going to just delete that registry value (especially after I did a little non-LLM side research on what that registry value actually does).1

In the end, when I told it that I was balking on doing what it wanted me to do, it suggested that I could, in the meantime, do one of the standard procedures in a different way. Of course, it thought that doing this would just be a step toward me ultimately having to delete that registry value. But I figured trying this alternate procedure at the very least couldn't hurt, and indeed, it helped by giving me an actual error code!

The LLM thankfully helped me decode it (likely faster than a google search), which allowed me to adjust my fix. This was actually the key step, after which, I was able to understand what I think was going on and manage later hiccups. Unfortunately, the LLM didn't grasp this. It still was set on, "Great! Now you're ready to delete registry values!" Sigh.

There are some LLM fundamentals that aren't taught but maybe should be. one of them is that if you even sniff that the LLM might have strayed an inch in the wrong direction then you need to start a fresh context chat. In fact even if things go well once you've moved through a few steps of the process you ought to start a fresh chat. Always be starting a fresh chat.

We might need to come up with a catchy cartoon name for this strategy, otherwise it will lose the memetic war to bumbling Ralph Wiggums.

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