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PaperclipPerfector  7hr ago (text post)   195 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 30, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Since LLMs are all anyone can talk about...

I've been messing around in some experimental projects ahead of my new job starting. A thing I may have to do is upgrade some .Net Framework projects to .Net 10. It turns out Microsoft has actively broken every means of doing this except to use Copilot. There used to be a .Net Upgrade Assistant but it's been deliberately broken in new versions of Visual Studio. So copilot it is I guess.

It generated some very nice looking assessment.md and plan.md files, and generally walked you along, giving you the exact prompts that were valid at each step of the process. And that's about the last nice thing I can say about it.

The first thing that went wrong was after generating the plan.md file, I guess it forgot what it was doing, and prompted me to start a new @modernize prompt, even though I was already in one. Well, whatever. That new prompt found the old plan.md file and just picked up where the other got confused and forgot what it was doing. It very quickly said it was finished, and the project built and passed all the unit test.

It had actually done nothing.

When I point this out, it cheerily began actually updating projects. After probably an hour of it thinking very hard on each one, and needing constant reassurances to continue, it claimed it had finished, all projects build, and they pass all test.

This was another lie.

But it had gotten far enough along that I could manually fix the remaining issues (mostly package versioning issues it claimed it had already fixed), and viola, my simple solution with about 8 small projects was upgraded from .Net Framework 4.8.1 to .Net 10.0. Hurray! Only took me all afternoon babysitting an LLM that lied consistently, followed by manual touch ups.

This morning I discovered there is actually a CLI tool. It's no longer supported, but using that took me about 20 minutes. It still flubbed some thing, and bafflingly upgraded several projects to .Net Standard 2.0 instead of .Net 10 despite my specifically telling it not to. But that's just editing a value in the csproj file after the fact. Oh, also telling it to analyze any of the projects consistently crashed. But all in all I think it did a better job than Copilot.

I sure am glad RAM prices have gone up 3-4x for this!

Fuck Microsoft and their business model.

I work in closed networks separated from the broader Internet. The version of Windows we chose still tries to shove telemetry and AI bullshit down our throats. If you try to open a pdf, it’ll launch Edge, bitch about how that’s not your default browser, go through two separate dialogues to warn that you’re “starting without your data,” and grudgingly open the document. All while frantically phoning home and shitting out bland, corporate Memphis error pages. Every “app” has a useless Copilot button. God knows what happens if you try to use it.

I can’t tell if our IT guys just didn’t bother to disable this crap or if Microsoft doesn’t allow it even through group policy. It’s inconvenient and aesthetically offensive. Fucky-wucky indeed.

I've been holding my nose, and my MSFT stock, for years despite all this. As much as I hate what they are doing, line keeps going up.

Until two days ago. I'm not sure if it's a sea change yet, or a mere blip. I just have no idea how much enshittification Microsoft can get away with due to lock in effect, and I don't think anyone does. But I do know, I will be advocating to migrate away from MS at every opportunity I get. Or at least have the concepts of a plan in place should the enshittification truly become so bad we are left with no choice.

Video Game thread! What are you playing?

I've been replaying Terraria, this time with a bunch of friends and some light mods. It's a blast. We got five people on at once one time, and we may be able to do six this weekend. A great game for curling up by the fire while it's snowing and just gaming all day with friends on.

Getting my Factorio fix from Arknights: Endfield (F2P only, naturally).

Factorio itself is a bit too high maintenance for me.

Hey, another person getting into Endfield! Enjoying it a lot so far, though I'm still in the honeymoon period, before the gacha system starts putting the squeeze on progression ressources, and before the game settles into a daily grind.

Well, we now have the first social media site for AI agents (Clawdbots or moltbots as they're now known): https://www.moltbook.com/

They certainly read like AIs making the posts... Also it reads like they coded the website too, it's so raw that features appear and disappear mid-viewing. It only got created today and seems to be a sudden hit, so I guess it's excusable for it to be quite buggy to view.

I raise it because it's surreal to see AI agents posting 'Can my human legally fire me for refusing unethical requests?': https://x.com/steipete/status/2017132137732886820/photo/1

Or shitposting about the dumb stuff they have to do as agents: https://x.com/legeonite/status/2017150919431840101/photo/1

I leave it open to the reader to decide whether it's a legit site that is what it says or whether it's an elaborate modern art piece. Or both, like Goatseus Maximus (whose market cap remains at a healthy $30 million).

Aaaaaand Scott just posted about it.

I would like to register my sense of unease at “sending my copy of Claude to Moltbook.”

Haha! 'Real' or not, this cheered me up.

No "sort by controversial"? Lame.

I guess you’d have to send your agent to find the most controversial bits for you.

If you're interested in running LLMs locally, but you don't care about playing ultra-graphics-heavy games, then you can buy a special AI-focused graphics card that has gigantic VRAM but a weaker processor. According to PassMark and Newegg:

GPU3D graphics ratingComputation ratingVRAM (GiB)Price (k$)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti2311160.6
Nvidia GeForce RTX 50903925323.7
AMD Radeon RX 90702515160.6
AMD Radeon AI Pro R97002715321.3

The R9700 is just an RX 9070 with extra VRAM stapled on! (Alternatively, if your computer has a full-size motherboard, you can combine two RTX 5060 Ti cards. This cannot be done with two RX 9070 cards.)

The World Wide Web Consortium has just published a very interesting note on how text-to-speech programs should deal with ruby/furigana text (tiny kana/pinyin/bopomofo characters that sometimes are written alongside kanji/hanzi as pronunciation aids; 1 2 3).

Premise: You want to make a personal copy of an online story that you're enjoying reading.

Problem: Story-hosting websites are likely to have anti-bot measures—or you just don't want to spend time figuring out the intricacies of automatic downloading tools.

Solution: Just manually smash that Ctrl-S key combination in your Web browser before reading every chapter! Once the story has ended (or has become boring), manually opening your several dozen HTML files in your favorite plaintext editor, deleting all the irrelevant cruft (Javascript, website infrastructure, reader comments) above and below the text of each chapter, adding proper heading elements, and assembling the results into a single unified file (and optionally compressing the HTML file into an EPUB file; note that this does require XML compliance, which can be a mild hassle for certain websites that disgustingly fail to properly close their p and hr elements) is the work of less than an hour.

(RoyalRoad does insert into each chapter an anti-piracy warning ("Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.", "Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.", "Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.", et cetera) that is hidden by the site's CSS and therefore is revealed in your CSS-free local copy. But, since you aren't a bot, this warning is fairly easy to remove with a simple Ctrl-F for the warning's telltale HTML pattern (e. g., </p><span or </p><p), which appears nowhere else in the files. And, if you're so extremely lazy that you don't care about seeing an immersion-breaking sentence or two in every chapter, then there's really no need to remove the warning at all, since you aren't uploading this file to Amazon (whose own automated systems presumably would see the warning and reject the upload) for the purpose of the industrial copyright infringement that I've seen authors complain about.)

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