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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   2907 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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Considering liminal spaces and related media was a topic of discussion lately, I'd like to draw awareness to the upcoming release of a movie adaptation of one of the games I mentioned.

Exit 8 is about a man trapped in a subway that must follow a strict process to find his way out and back to the real world. It looks like they've copied the games aesthetic verbatim which is a good sign.

I hope we see more movies and games in the genre.

This is like a cargo cult parody of one of those threads where professional coders compare their experiences using LLMs at work, but the other night I wanted to edit a save file related to an obscure hobbyist roguelike and couldn't figure out how to accomplish my goal, so I let the default free version of Grok have a crack at it.

It couldn't quite solve my problem for me within my 20 free questions, but it got me close enough that I was able to figure out the rest myself. I'm actually kind of impressed. The game is on github and has a certain amount of conversation surrounding it, but what I wanted to do wasn't standard practice, and the save file format is just a txt full of bespoke gobbledygook so it's not like its training data was full of examples.

It really had to sit down and think for a few minutes to get as close as it did, and to be honest I think part of the problem is that I had made some incorrect assumptions about the aforementioned gobbledygook format that I sort of foisted on to it.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with what they give away for free these days.

Here's everything I read in January 2026, ordered from most to least interesting. I posted this on /r/slatestarcodex earlier, but figured the overlap between here and there is small enough that it would be of some value to post here as well.

CHH argues that we gotta stop upping the ante on gift-giving, else the reasonable people among us will be either forced in or unable to say no because it will make them look like assholes. I agree! What happened to simple gift giving? Why must everything be extravagant? If anything, we should be going the opposite way to save money!

I've been slowly adjusting my family to the expectation that I'm good for one really good gift across the whole family per year, and that the rest are going to be phoned in books or something. One year I'm just like, oh I found a tuxedo for dad, mom you got a book about the guy who inspired Charlie Chan. Next year it's, oh mom you got a Barbour coat, dad you got Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book.

"You're single because... [insert a bunch of reasons in a bulleted list format]".

Steve Stewart-Williams: As shown in the graph below, the sweet spot was two to four past partners; fewer or more reduced attractiveness. In effect, people wanted someone with a bit of a past, but not too much (which was the title of our paper describing the research).

Is there a link to the study he's talking about anywhere? It seems like there's a lot of confounders here, like age. An 18 year old with 10 sexual partners is different from a 32 year old with 10 sexual partners. That said I found it hilarious how angry Zvi was that the study supposedly found:

Intriguingly, we found no evidence for a sexual double standard: none, zilch, nada. Contrary to what’s often claimed, women weren’t judged any more harshly than men for having a high body count. That’s not to say they weren’t judged for it, but only that men were judged too.

Also, I flat out defy the data on there being no double standard? No way. Even if on some abstract 1-9 scale it looks similar, the practical impact is very obviously totally different. Yes, a male body count of 60+ is functionally a negative, but not at the same level.

Man, people just fucking hate their revealed preferences when it comes to dating. I'm not going to argue for the virtue of sluts, {I'll leave that to the Jaime} but I've literally never met a woman who was single because of her bodycount. I don't even really think it happened historically.

Alternative lifestyle choices work great - for alternative people

Aww thanks bae.

From that post:

one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors, musicians etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more — tall poppies look all the taller when surrounded by short ones

Surely they are simply smart enough to know that:

  1. They are already established and can't easily be threatened by people only now beginning a career (similar to those advocating DEI).
  2. They know that their fans will respond much better to "we've all been there, keep plugging," than to "dude, sorry, chances are you can't do what I can do".

I think one would actually naively expect that most of them are not being Machiavellian about it and declare that "we've all been there, keep plugging" as a sincere opinion that is entirely decoupled from any awareness of their advantages and chances of success.

They know that people respond much better to "we've all been there, keep plugging," than to "dude, sorry, chances are you can't do what I can do".

Well, yes, they do. That doesn't mean that filling talentless hacks with false hope is a pro-social way to behave.

Agreed. I'm just saying I think you're overthinking it in that quoted passage. They're just trying to be nice in public even if the long-term effect is anti-social.

How so? It seems like you're just paraphrasing the same point I made.

I read you as saying that the talented encourage the talentless to enter their field as a gambit to emphasise their own relative superiority.

My theory is that they don’t want to generate bad PR by discouraging their fans and emphasising the gap between them.

If I misunderstood your argument I apologise.

No, that was the point I was making alright. I think the whole thing might come down to a Russell conjugation, or Trivers' theory of self-deception: if a strategy is beneficial to us, we unconsciously come up with reasons why it's also the pro-social thing to do. See also "yasslighting": I don't believe that talented actors are consciously thinking "if I encourage a bunch of talentless hacks to pursue careers in acting, it'll make it easier for me to secure roles", any more than attractive women are consciously thinking "if I encourage my friend to get an unflattering haircut and tell her it really suits her, it'll make me look more attractive by comparison". Of course in their own heads they'll tell themselves a story which casts their behaviour in a more favourable light e.g. "it would devastate Bob to be told he's a terrible actor, so instead I'll just give him some pat platitude about never giving up on your dreams"; "I don't want to hurt Alice's feelings, so I'll tell her her new haircut really suits her". But subconsciously, the practical benefit of these decisions to those who make them is obvious. It surely cannot be an accident that actors so rarely encourage their more talented peers not to give up on their dreams.

It surely cannot be an accident that actors so rarely encourage their more talented peers not to give up on their dreams.

How often do actors meet more talented (but not yet successful) peers and speak to them, specifically (as opposed to a general statement to the wide audience, most of them presumably less talented) about their dreams in public, for you to estimate that?

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Thanks, misunderstanding cleared up. Personally I disagree, I think that once you are seriously giving life advice to anyone except that handsome devil in the mirror, you are broadly out of the part of your career where young people are competing with you directly. I think that what you consider the 'cloaking' motivation is broadly the true motivation.

Yasslighting for e.g. writers certainly happens but it happens in the peer group of young losers + young one-day-maybe-not-losers. I guess maybe your talented 20-somethings are still encouraging their less talented friends but this is more to prevent social awkwardness than anything.

Most successful entrepreneurship is unproductive

This one was hilariously ignorant. Literally 9th grade "intro to econ" levels of "akshually, I'm pretty sure Adam Smith was wrong."

You Will Not Have a Flat Floor: You can shim all you want and it still won't be flat.

Are joisted floors still a thing in the US? Here slab floors are much more common, even in wooden frame houses. Paging @ToaKraka

According to the US Census Bureau, of all single-family houses completed in year 2024:

Do you not add a mineral layer over the joists of the second floor in the US?

/images/17699581743749194.webp

For tile, specifically, you'll usually see some waterproof membrane or backing board, leveled with grout of self-leveling concrete, then using thinset to keep the tile attached, and the finally grout to interfere the gaps.

I don't think I've ever seen that used for carpet, hardwood, or linoleum, and at least in my neck of the woods tile is rare outside of restrooms and kitchens. Both my current house, last rental, and several of the other houses I'd looked at when in the market had joisted floors, though I was specifically looking for houses with a basement.

The Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction portray:

  • Joists

  • "Subflooring" of plywood

  • "Underlayment" of plywood, required for some finishes but not for others

  • Finish

A cursory Internet search indicates that the underlayment may alternatively be fiberboard, particleboard, etc.

No cement? I guess since you mostly use air for heating you don't need it.

A cursory search indicates that "self-leveling concrete" can be used as underlayment, but I guess it's much less common than plywood.

Never leave.

Nothing is certain. Maybe I'll become unable to tolerate the moderators. Maybe I'll fly to Australia to fuck a prostitute and get stabbed in an alley by a thug. Maybe my depression will get worse and I'll shoot myself in the head.

I'm just another random fake person on the Internet.

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Well, some of these are a bit interesting. If you don't mind a few off-the-cuff takes--

Dating Roundup #9: Signals and Selection: "You're single because... [insert a bunch of reasons in a bulleted list format]".

These were interesting, obviously mostly well-known.

I do want to comment on the astrology thing though. I think I'd struggle to take a partner who used astrology as a means to talk about personality seriously. My view is that it's ludicrous, but moreso that it forces human personality into very silly boxes instead of using big-boy (girl?) words to actually talk about things in an organic manner. It suggests immaturity in emotional and social communication.

This tweet included in the essay was interesting to me:

Astrology is a vehicle women use to communicate indirectly. Why would it possibly make you annoyed?

That's actually a question that includes the answer -- the problem is that it's a way to communicate indirectly, and as the article says "super flexibly", without actually committing to making a statement. That's one of the worst traits in a partner, from my point of view.

This comment on the article was interesting:

A girl opens with "what's your sign", you tell her, and then you make up a story together about the relation between the two signs. There's no actual predictive power there, the signs are meaningless (she knows this, at least subconsciously), it's just a framework within which you can indirectly talk about how you'd fit together.

I love talking about values and hopes and dreams and goals. It's actually because I like talking about those things that I don't like astrology. I don't believe it's necessary or helpful to try to fit me, or you, into a star-sign box. If you're someone who likes to stay in a lot and is slow to trust someone, you can just say that. Have an adult conversation with me about who you are and who I am. I don't believe in "indirectly" communicating about "how we'd fit together," I believe in directly communicating it. I kind of want to make a joke on the "I don't consent" Jesus meme where the third player is "literally the observable universe." Don't bring galaxies into the bedroom, please!

I think tact is useful. But when I'm looking to share my life with someone, I want to know they can communicate about desires and preferences in a straightforward, clear, and reasonable manner. Astrology as an interest suggests a way of looking at life as a kind of following the wind, at the mercy of (literally) astronomical forces, and that leads me to believe someone is flighty and doesn't fully take responsibility for the outcomes of their own life.

I also disagree with this:

People underestimate how much relationships are built on that ability. To step into someone’s weird side hobby, their micro belief system, their little rituals, even when you do not share them. She might have astrology. Someone else has Dungeons & Dragons lore. Another person has fantasy football statistics. Your uncle has his grill.

"Dungeons and Dragons lore" or "fantasy football statistics" are generally not means by which people aim to understand themselves or their place in the social universe. The closest equivalent is actually if some guy tried asking his date about her DnD moral alignment -- I think most people would find that cringe. I'd be happy to listen to a date talk about her interest in makeup, or fashion, especially if she could forgive my ignorance -- but not astrology. It's just a different kind of a thing.

But what's most interesting to me is that the article ignores the biggest and actual reason you're single: the social people aren't available, and the available people aren't social, because they're on their phones scrolling TikTok because fewer and fewer people participate in voluntary social activity, especially after college. It's almost a meme how many times I've been told "I'm boring, sorry," by women whose hobbies included watching YouTube videos and eating dinner, alone, at home. I don't have any problem with that! But that's not exactly a social calendar that lends itself to meeting interesting people. If my girlfriend and I hadn't met each other at the right time, I'd probably be single too. And so would she.

That said, the main thing I have to say about astrology is I took an astronomy class in college for a natural sciences credit, and at the end of the course two girls had a short discussion in the class group chat, where they said:

This class was so hard [it wasn't], I thought when I signed up it was going to be astrology

BITCH ME TOO

I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy, but that's a different issue.

Alternative lifestyle choices work great - for alternative people: Pretty self-explanatory title. Alt lifestyles only really work for people on the fringes, and chances are you're not one of them. Examples include polyamory, drugs, sex-positive feminism, psychotherapy, gender transition, following your dreams, amateur pornography, and being a Linux user.

I'm a Linux user (btw), but I do have to admit I'm fringe.

Well, I guess I just had a couple thoughts as I actually selected what random neuron firings deserved being typed out. Anyway.

I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy

Interestingly, this confusion is common enough to seriously pollute survey results. The proportion of people who respond affirmatively to the question "do you believe in horoscopes and star signs?" is dramatically lower than the proportion who responds in the affirmative to "do you believe in astrology?"

It's an inconsistency with almost every other use of the suffix -ology in the everyday use of the English language. Biology, Sociology, Zoology, Geology, Virology. The only other common use of -ology to refer to something other than a science is Scientology, which is kind of a special case. As a child I recall being offended by this, that Astronomy ought to be Astrology, and Astrology ought to be something else entirely.

It's unfortunately unfixable.

Remember a few years ago when the job title for a person who prepared cocktails was "mixologist"? That seems to have fallen out of vogue.

I remember when Subway used to call their employees Sandwich Artists.

The cultural impact of Subway restaurants is massively forgotten and underrated. Without Subway there is no Chipotle, no Cava, no Sweetgreen.

I do want to comment on the astrology thing though. I think I'd struggle to take a partner who used astrology as a means to talk about personality seriously. My view is that it's ludicrous, but moreso that it forces human personality into very silly boxes

People love boxes. I come from a culture with a much more pervasive background astrology radiation, so it might be hard for me to calibrate my assessment of what's going on in the US. What's the level you're talking about?

  • my date asks me for my birth sign or calculates it based on my birthday - a nothingburger, I'm a Sagittarius
  • I buy my GF a pendant with a stone that is compatible with her birth sign - wow, so thoughtful
  • my date calls her boss a typical Aries - as long as it helps her to put people into the right boxes, why not?
  • my date explains that she only trusts the horoscopes printed in The Daily Huntsman - a red flag, but is she hot?
  • my date explains she would never date a Pisces because of their duplicity - smile, nod, ghost
  • my date expresses befuddlement that I've never seen my natal chart and offers to construct me one for free, because she's a certified astrologist - smile, nod, ghost

my date calls her boss a typical Aries - as long as it helps her to put people into the right boxes, why not?

It's interesting that calling her a typical [ethnicity], [sexuality], [gender identity] or [religion] would raise a few eyebrows, but we're meant to think of Birthday Racism as harmless and cute.

"Can you believe that after yesterday's meeting Bob told me to stop acting like such a ****er?"

"Well... were you perhaps being a little moody and sensitive?"

"Okay, I suppose I was indeed acting like a bit of a Cancer."

Imagine if astrological sign became a protected class, and HR departments started up affirmative action and specialized programs to favor Persons of Underrepresented Signs in hiring and promotions for sign Diversity and to compensate for Inequities from the relative age effect.

Funnily enough, I remember hearing that Jennifer Lopez fired one of her backup dancers upon learning her star sign. If that happened in Europe, I imagine the dancer could have sued Lopez for wrongful dismissal and won a tidy settlement. I wonder if we'll see more of these cases until astrology inevitably recedes in popularity again.

Needless to say, I don't want star signs to be a protected class, but I would be happy if birthdates were.

Oh, don't be such a Capricorn about it.

What's wrong with a natal chart, other than that I don't know my exact hour of birth?

smiles, nods, ghosts you

A "certified X" offering to make you a Y for free reeks of someone trying to recruit you into an MLM.

Eh, regarding the practice of astrology in particular it doesn't give off that vibe for me. More like someone who's used to putting people in boxes for a living taking the opportunity to do so.

I could see it this way, if she wasn't certified (or at least wouldn't bring it up without prompting).

What is she gonna do, offer me to pay for another natal chart of me?

No, for your monthly horoscope.

And come to think of it, even if there's no money involved, it sounds like the kind of person that would use astrology to tell you what decisions you should make, and/or win arguments.

I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy, but that's a different issue.

Technically "we" (the universities) aren't giving bachelor's degrees to those people, they're selling bachelor's degrees to those people. For what can I gather be up to $20K tuition&fees/year * 4 years, you too might be more flexible regarding what sort of intellectual standards the clientele is expected to uphold...

It's almost a meme how many times I've been told "I'm boring, sorry," by women whose hobbies included watching YouTube videos and eating dinner, alone, at home.

Wait - are they calling you boring, or themselves? I've heard of a stereotype of some single women who badly want to be entertained despite being utterly unengaged themselves, but in the stereotype they're not self-aware about it.

I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy

When credentials weren't so important, efficiency made it seem sensible for teaching and student evaluation to be done by the same institution. Once credentials' importance skyrocketed, game theory concerns became paramount, but the mistake is now too ubiquitous to change.

I'm a Linux user (btw), but I do have to admit I'm fringe.

I use Windows and OSX too, but I do everything I can on Linux because I prefer the user interface.

Wait - are they calling you boring, or themselves?

I read it as they were describing themselves as boring. See this delightful article "The Mainstreaming of Loserdom": it's remarkable to think how recently people would be embarrassed to admit that their weekend plans consisted of rotting in bed alone watching their shows all day.

Everybody who has an Android phone is technically a "Linux user". So it's about as much of an alternative lifestyle as driving a Honda Civic.

Desktop Linux (distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, NixOS) and Android OSes are so fundamentally different that it's not very useful to describe both of those categories as being "Linux". Though I suspect @nomagicpill put "being a Linux user" on the list tongue-in-cheek.

The Linux quip was because of the post’s top comment saying the same thing :)

A long and wild list. You've read a lot, apparently.

I have a very long bookmark list and go through it in lieu of doomscrolling Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Are there any other places to discuss politics, not being a fan of Twitter or its clones due to limited word count restrictions, or Reddit?

I honestly prefer the old school forums, instead of the corporate nature of the internet nowadays

Data Secrets Lox is a rationalist style old school forum. In terms of places to discuss politics though, the perennial problem is coordinating intelligent people in the same place. The rationalist forums are the best I've found.

Has anyone seen Markiplier's new film, Iron Lung? (Mild spoilers ahead.) I saw it today. It's leagues better than any "Youtuber" movie in that it made me feel like I was watching an actual movie that could have been produced by a major studio. It's literally just that good, and a breath of fresh air compared to the usual sequel/adaptation slop that passes for filmmaking today.

I think it could have been shorter though. There were a few scenes (for example when he reawakens and has to turn on the engine) that could have been tightened up since prolonging them doesn't increase dramatic tension. That doesn't detract from the overall movie much, it's still a good watch.

I wanted to see it yesterday, but I wasn't sure enough it was going to be good to drag my wife to it. She doesn't even like movies that much.

I have heard that fans of Markiplier had a hard time separating the youtuber from the actor in the first act of the movie but that it gets better as the movie goes on.

If she doesn't like movies I think it was the right call not to make her see it. It's a good movie, but it's not such a good movie that someone who doesn't even have an appetite for cinema in the first place is going to like it.

Who here makes extra payments on his mortgage? Or has a paid-off house?

I make extra payments, and looking through my amortization table just now I was incensed to learn that a full 75% of all of the reduction in our loan balance is solely due to our extra principal payments! What in the scam? (Edit: I guess I have to clarify that I am not retarded and do not believe that a 30-year mortgage is literally swindling me through nefarious trickery.)

Further, to say nothing of the compounded benefits, we have a present-day benefit in the form of $2,000 of saved interest, and we're still very near the beginning of our loan term! It's obvious when placed next to an amortization schedule that assumes we only make necessary payments.

(2/1/2026 Loan Balance)minimum payments - (2/1/2026 Loan Balance)extra principal - (sum of extra principal paid) = ~$2,000

I did previously, and paid off the mortgage about 10 years early. At the time the interest rate was several points above anything from a Treasury, so it was a clear winner in terms of present value. Since then I have invested the monthly payment+extra according to my overall strategy and have no regrets about my decision.

Having a family with two school-aged children and a fairly risk-averse wife did play a small part in the strategy.

Who here makes extra payments on his mortgage?

I do, or at least I add an extra $1k of principle reduction on top of every standard monthly payment.

It's mostly a bad decision. I've got an extremely low mortgage rate, locked in when rates were briefly next to nothing, and I can now get a higher return even in an FDIC insured money market account.

My rationalizations, in increasing order of importance:

It may be preventing me from making dumber investment decisions. I've also got a lot in a money market account, and index funds, and tech-centric index funds, and Nvidia in particular, and I fear if I had more money sloshing around free then I'd be tempted to get even more risk-tolerant, possibly at just the wrong time, begging to get hit by a market "correction".

I've got a swath of college tuitions to pay, starting in the near future, and a lot of financial aid applications consider home equity to be inviolate in a way no other investment I could make would be.

It's probably preventing me from making dumber spending decisions - keeping my checking account balance low enough that I have to double-check it before paying the credit card bill seems to have a strong psychological effect on me when I'm tempted to spend frivolously.

It was my wife's idea, and she leaves literally every other investment decision to me. I'd feel like a jerk telling her "we shouldn't pay off our house faster with a fraction of our savings" when she lets me get away with ideas like "we should gamble a bigger fraction of our savings on these guys trying to make god out of silicon".

Where I live, the mortgage interest payments are income tax deductible so I am basically on purpose not paying off the mortgage just to "benefit" from the sweet front-loaded interest payments. Talk about perverse incentives.

If anyone’s interested, I am a mortgage guy by trade. AMA I guess. I have been in the mortgage lending industry since the mid-90’s. I was a loan originator for 15 years and for the past decade I’ve been involved at the executive level managing pricing, secondary market, and risk (I run the underwriting dept and the secondary market desk at my shop now).

AMA I guess

Did you have any personal inklings as to just how fucked things were in the run up to 2008?

Great topic. I wrote this on my phone so I hope it makes sense.

I would love to claim that I saw it all coming, but that would be BS. I also have a mortgage banker’s view vs an investment banker’s view and I definitely didn’t have the sophistication to put things together coherently even when I saw the signs. That said, there were a few things that I noticed at the time that certainly make more sense in hindsight.

When I started in retail mortgage sales, other than the dot com bubble, things were smooth and the money was easy. Gov’t pressure to expand homeownership meant relaxing credit standards for even conventional loans, and it was already becoming the Wild West in terms of private product offerings. This had its pluses an minuses, of course.

From about 2000 to 2005, I worked in the NYC market for an expanding west coast based institution that was more like a thrift or S&L than a commercial bank. We wrote normal Fannie/Freddie paper but also a lot of funky IO/neg am “option ARM” stuff. The key things here were that this was NOT a subprime lender, so the rates were quite sharp, and at least in my market, the staff were trained on how to use these types of loans responsibly. We cleaned up. Best earning years of my life.

The Option ARM could take up a whole effort post itself, but the key thing is that it was designed for a particular kind of financially savvy buyer. Like anything niche-y it did not scale. During the early/mid 00’s, these niche loans, with their very low qualifying payments, started to be offered by more institutions, and this had the effect of qualifying buyers for loans they couldn’t afford. Without the knowledge to use these loans to their benefit, buyers found themselves over-leveraged. Add to this the gov’t emphasis on “homeownership” as a goal regardless of risk and we had quite the recipe for disaster.

Meanwhile, high-rate subprime loans were readily available, and - this is key - these loans were ALL securitized and sold to private institutions. The appetite for mortgage paper was immense. This was a thriving market for non-conforming loans that was supported by nothing really besides rising home prices. Less reputable mortgage originators would just churn their pipelines and perpetuate the issue based on the high appraisal values at the time (sidebar: Appraiser independence is another interesting topic but I’ll save that for another time too).

I moved from that shop to a large, conservative commercial bank during the run up to the ‘08 crisis, so I was a bit more insulated from what transpired, and I started to get my own education into what all this meant (for our jobs, home prices, the financial sector, and economy at large) from a colleague with a Wall Street background who joined our firm. Still at the time our take was that finance firms/investors are gonna do what they do and we were more concerned over the perverse incentives that the gov’t placed on lenders to expand credit. (Aside: I hate the OG CFPB with a white hot passion - I could go on about how bankers like me became the bad guys when this was all directed from DC and both Dodd and Frank can eat a bag of dicks, but I digress).

The mortgage industry got hit with the crisis about a year before Lehman failed, in what was still just called the Subprime crisis. If this had been limited to just subprime lenders, the industry could have absorbed the fallout. What happened instead was that several high-profile mortgage banks (IndyMac, American Home Mortgage, etc.) went bust all at once in the summer of 2007. This was the first real wake up call for me since the “Alt-A” lenders were wiped out along with actual subprime lenders. These are the loan portfolios that suddenly had no market that could not be priced due to the unknown risk contained in the securitized portfolios that led to the ‘08 crisis.

The response to this by the mortgage industry was that ALL non-Agency investors stopped buying MBS. Within a week, virtually all jumbo / ALT-A, and/or subprime outlets were unavailable, leaving only Agency paper or true in house portfolio lending at commercial banks e.g. Chase or Wells. This tightening led to more failures - still mostly within the mortgage industry - but when countrywide and especially WaMu failed, it was clear that the snowball effect was well under way.

So, I saw some signs, but I was really focused on the policy side of it at the time. This area has never really been widely discussed in my opinion. We got the CFPB which mostly annoys lenders with overlapping compliance hurdles but bears no responsibility for the financial health of the industry it regulates, and less product to offer. The Biden admin was right back there with pressure to expand credit to “underserved communities” until the very end, and I can see the cycle continuing.

When Trump II took office, we had a meeting with Compliance/Fair Lending where we pretty much shelved about a dozen stupid reg-based initiatives carried over from the Biden era CFPB.

(ex: We (meaning ALL LENDERS), for practical purposes, need a process buyers can follow if their property appraisal comes in below their personal estimate of property value. Despite this, CFPB made us create a redundant process to positively inform all buyers of their existing right to get a reconsideration of a low appraised value. ok, but CFPB failed to take into account that such ROV’s necessarily have to be very limited due to appraiser independence (bc we aren’t allowed to influence value). In effect this actually changes nothing for the buyers, except now they have the idea that they can justify any value they want, and we jump through all these hoops to just say no and look the bad guy again.

Loved this post.

You cannot hate the Government enough. They create a perverse incentive program that has obvious failure modes and then scapegoat the only people (finance sector) who can actually perform what they incentivized. Crooks and liars.

This is fantastic. Thank you.

I have my house paid off. I mildly regret it from time to time because the interest on the loan when I paid it off was about the same as today's interest on the savings account, so I probably lost some money on that. On the other hand, the peace of mind it gives is not to be discounted. I have lost (and found) jobs twice since then, and in both cases I could feel much less stressed because questions like "could I be in a situation where I'd have trouble paying my mortgage because of cash flow issues" never bothered me. Whatever happens to my job, whatever happens to the market, stock or real estate, my house is mine - that may be a bit irrational financially, but still feels good.

The most strategic way to get ahead on mortgage planning is to use interest only financing…. Here’s a few reasons why:

  1. an amortizing 30yr loan doesn’t convert to a majority of payment going to principle until after year 10
  2. historically, people change the structure of their mortgage every 7.5 years… so the above is never realized
  3. making additional payments to an amortizing loan only reduces the time to pay off (which per above is rarely realized). Making additional payments on an I/O loan provides immediate benefits in that your mandatory payment is reduced the next month. Int only is simply principle x rate / 12.
  4. depending on your age and career, the flip of a majority going toward principle on a 30yr corresponds to when you will be making more money and need the higher interest deduction.
  5. is paying off your home was such a great strategy then reverse mortgage companies ripping off older retirees wouldn’t exist.

Good comment.

Do you have a personal experience with I/O?

As you could probably guess, the general tenor of our home search was one of urgency. I'm not sure how much extra time it would have taken to negotiate an interest-only. Or is this something that any originator would have immediately on hand?

These are excellent points.

You’d probably have liked the old flexible payment/negative amortization adjustable rate loans that got such bad press in 2008.

It's fine, man. A lot of people have not lived (as investors) through a big drawdown or a prolonged bear market, and therefore think more leverage = unalloyed good, but it is taking on more risk. There is a reason your broker won't give you 500k to put on the s&p.

I pay ahead on my mortgage, and I'm going to say something controversial here.

Sometimes you can do something good, even if there are alternatives that are better. You don't have to violently min-max every aspect of your life. Start with what you can do and are comfortable with doing, and reevaluate later on.

Paying ahead on your mortgage is a good thing. Sure, you could invest the money in something instead and gamble on the gains being higher, but that makes some assumptions. Are you sure you can make the right calls? Can you buy and sell at the right time? Are you confident there won't be any big market downturns like 2001, 2008, or 2022? People will argue that the market wins in the end, but the market is immortal and we aren't. If you aren't itemizing, the value of the mortgage interest deduction isn't there either. To top it all off, the actual money might not be that much different if the mortgage value isn't high, and now you have capital gains to factor in while doing your taxes.

I don't know what your mortgage is, but for me, paying ahead sure was a lot better than doing nothing.

Nonononono! Making extra payments is a trap, because all you are doing is shortening the term duration without affecting the monthly payment. In effect, you are robbing yourself of the interest that money could be making, and letting your lender benefit from it instead.

What you want to do is recast the loan (which will admittedly require a more substantial payment) possibly combined with a refinance. This will reduce your monthly payments without modifying the loan term, which gives you the interest rate advantage.

Then you can use your increased monthly available cash to pay down the loan more aggressively if you are really trying to burn through it.

Huh. So instead of constant payment/shorter term, you're arguing for smaller payment/same term.

I had never heard of a recast I must admit. I'm not even sure it's an option for me. I was just gonna refinance when rates dropped enough.

Recasting is one of those things that is never, ever mentioned by the people who are handling your loan, unless you directly ask about it. Funny how that works.

To make sense of mortgages, you really have to take into account inflation and the time value of money. Yes, it pays off a lot faster when you pay a little extra. But in inflation-adjusted terms, it decreases even without you paying any principal at all. And then you can put the extra payments into an investment that earns more than the mortgage rate.

I'm apparently one of the few people on Earth that thinks Trump's 50-year mortgage idea could actually be a good idea...

I mean, it all depends on the rate. Once you get up to 6%, it gets real narrow if you can beat it with investing. Especially after paying taxes on whatever your profits are. Maybe if you were chucking everything into an IRA in an S&P500 index fund. But the difference between a post-tax, post-inflation, highly variable "10% average return" and a guaranteed 6% return from paying down debt is extremely marginal for most people. I wouldn't fault anyone for paying down a 6% mortgage over investing. I mean, I'd probably invest anyways, because I reason I'd rather have the extra money in case of emergencies than less debt. But that's a separate reasoning than it being a better rate of return.

Man, I'd love to be able to get a 6% mortgage instead of 26%.

How do mortgages even work with 26% interest? I haven't been adult through anything but very low rates so not able to comprehend. Are the loans just very low duration? Do you see 25% wage growth as well?

Are the loans just very low duration?

Yeah, if you have to take one out, you just do everything you can to repay it as quickly as possible. What @stolen_brawnze does, but dialed up to 11.

But mostly people simply don't use them. At least not for straightforward purchases.

Do you see 25% wage growth as well?

Haha, no.

My father's first mortgage was in the neighborhood of 20% back in the 1980s, but home prices were very low.

You could have gotten a Dodge Charger for an interest rate like that.

Thankfully, I am not a boot.

instead of 26%.

Where the heck are you to that rates are 26%?

ortho is russian (currently in russia, it must be clarified) I believe

That only makes sense if you paycheck keeps up - I guess if your job is connected to extracting or selling natural resources (oil, gas?) it could be real. But I think actually Russia has subsidized mortgages: https://realting.com/news/russian-mortgage-market-analysis I imagine that's what people actually do.

I think I'm going to go make tender, emotional love to a bald eagle now.

Except that stock returns are also juiced by inflation- something like 7% plus inflation for the S&P500. Admittedly there's extra variance, but it really is a significantly better return than what you'd get from paying off a mortgage, especially averaged out over 30 years. And you've got the option to refinance to a lower rate (plus take out money!) any time you want.

What is your interest rate? Why would you pay it off fast when basically every other asset class has been on a mega bull run for like 15 years and returns higher than your interest rate?

One of the most OP parts of homeownership is the leverage. No bank is giving you $500k to buy SPY.

Milk that baby. The people who locked in at ultra low rates at the bottom of COVID have printed. A mortgage with a rate lower than inflation is quite literally free money (for you).

6.5%.

Trust me I know the optimal thing to do is make the required payments and put everything else into SPY.

But debt is icky. Another party makes sure I pay the same amount every month at the same time or the bank takes the house, which isn't the case in the counterfactual: I just miss out on some percentage points in a brokerage account. And I don't want to arrange my life so that suddenly everything snaps into place when I'm...old and tired.

I largely go half-and-half investing and paying the house down these days.

Real talk risk free and tax free 6.5%... mortgage sounds like the correct call.

Can't you deduct mortgage interest payments from your income taxes? That would make it "not quite" tax free.

This deduction is much less common with the post-2017 standard deduction increase.

6.5% means it's actually much closer to equity returns and the psychological benefit does matter

I realized when I read through the mortgage documents that the full 30 year term would have me paying double what I borrowed for the house, so resolved to pay it off as fast as possible.

I probably lost out paying down the mortgage vs putting the money in an index fund, but I don't really regret it. If all goes well everything will be paid off by next year, and I'm looking forward to not having a mortgage.

In US now I think there are laws now in many states that require the loaners to tell you how much you will be paying in interest (and therefore overall) at least at some point of the process, and have you sign on that. So theoretically it shouldn't be a surprise, but practically of course not all people read that anyway.

Yes, that's what I meant, I was looking through the mortgage documents prior to signing them and saw the total interest.

They also tell you how much of what you're paying each month is principal/interest/escrow, which provided additional motivation.

Technical detail: States are all over the place for required mortgage disclosures, but there is a federal disclosure requirement. The cost of credit (finance charge) must be disclosed on the LE (loan estimate) at application and again on the CD (closing disclosure) at closing.

This has been the standard since TRID replaced the GFE/TIL in (I think) 2015, but before then the finance charge has been a required component of lending disclosures since the TIL (Truth in Lending) Act of 1968.

I think it is underestimated that for a certain type of person, the mental peace of owing nobody else any money (which gives them a piece of leverage over you) and having a decent amount of savings squirreled away GENUINELY outweighs an extra 2-3% of gains from keeping things in the market.

Best way to describe it is that debt = fragility. If you get behind on payments, the interest rate marches on. The creditor can call in the funds under certain circumstances, whether you have the money or not. You get behind and it can be a struggle to catch up, and it inhibits you in other ways. And bankruptcy is an option but you have to be in dire straits to pull that lever.

And it can also make it harder to take on new debt even when that would be advisable.

I'm not one of those "usury is evillllllll" guys, but I am one of those "I pay every debt on time and as owed" guys so the mental stress of knowing I gotta keep up with payments is annoying.

Me, I like short term, secured loans as my go-to. Seen too many people get screwed over by personally guaranteeing debt for things that weren't productive enough to justify it.

Maybe, but let me put it like this. In 2021 when I bought my house, I sunk about 20% of my net worth into the down payment. I'm talking everything btw, crypto, 401k, brokerage, cds, gold, savings, etc. Now theoretically, and inadvisably, I could have cleaned out everything and just bought the house outright. I mean, lets pretend for a moment that I wouldn't have paid massive penalties on my 401k.

Well, 5 years later my investments have more than doubled. The value of my house has not. Also I "benefit" from the value of my house regardless of whether I've paid off my mortgage or not. I put benefit in quotes because mostly it means I just pay more taxes and insurance. To access any of that "wealth" I'd have to either take out a home equity line of credit, or sell the house, putting me back at square one. Also, now I could far more easily pay off my mortgage in full, and have 70% of my net worth left over, versus essentially resetting had I paid in full in 2021.

Also, as someone who was recently jobless, having 10 years of living expenses in assorted accounts was an enormous relief. Now I'm assuming with a paid off house, and resetting from 0, I would have probably saved up a good amount having no mortgage. But my napkin math says probably 20-30% what I actually have today. And I'd have suffered an enormous opportunity cost with my investing to boot.

All that said, rates change everything. With rates over 6% I often consider whether I would just pay in full for my next home. I likely could. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I mean, I liquidated almost my entire crypto holdings to get the funds for my house/holdover for extra expenses.

And I don't regret it, because the crypto world went FULL retard after I bought the house, and while the house value increased a lot, the mere fact of "I can live here and not be bothered by increasing rents or volatile crypto markets" was a source of peace. Decent interest rate too.

I've had some investments perform better, but none that were as directly beneficial to me in the interim period.

Buying a house you intend to reside in for the long term is an easier play than buying one you might or might not be staying in five years later.

But that's very dependent on the labor market. Can't stay somewhere if there's no decent-paying jobs.

There was a point in time where I held two whole Bitcoin. Now I hold functionally zero. Can't live in a Bitcoin, can't store my stuff in one, can't invite friends over to hang out in one, and BTC hasn't provided me with minor projects to work on outside that significantly help with my mental health.

I dunno. I could spend my days tracking the market's ups and downs... or I could tend my garden, do small repairs around the house, sleep in a bed that I cannot be removed from absent an act of God.

Its not so bad.

Your last sentence is 100% correct. You should really not use financing to purchase anything that will not provide a yield in excess of the loan's rate.

Houses don't actually qualify given that criterion, but we're all so confident the price will go up that we look the other way.

There’s a fantasy sequence from the sitcom Everybody Hates Chris in which the father declares they don’t owe anybody a single penny, and I remember thinking, “Whoa could you imagine.”

Congrats on approaching what many consider a fantasy!

I have to say each time I see that $0 in the "non-recurring debts" in my financial dashboard I feel that little warm fuzzy feeling inside. I realize that not all debts are bad debts, rationally, but some part of my brain just insists "neither a borrower nor a lender be" and I can not fully deny it.

I was introduced to Paradox Development Studio games through Europa Universalis 2. I was too young to actually understand how to play properly, so I just played as the Mamluks (the biggest blob on the map at game start), took out loan after loan to fund my massive armies, and got confused when I went bankrupt. I eventually found a cheat or a console command or something to give me infinite money, but the experience still left me very leery of taking out loans.

A lot of historical rulers did pretty much the same, except there was no console cheat.

Many of them certainly expelled the bankers and seized the loans. I think that counts as a cheat.

expelled the bankers Jews

Of course they did. But it's hardly a thing you can repeat too often... And turns out, kings still need the loans after that, too.

"neither a borrower nor a lender be"

Dude, I actually tried my hand at a very modest lending business a few years ago. After that experience I'd rather be a borrower every time.

in which the father declares they don’t owe anybody a single penny,

Easy to do for us rentoids.

You'd be surprised. Most people I know are addicted to their car notes and are never without one.

I remember my parents once telling me something similar about the mortgage on my childhood home - that when they made extra payments, the principal balance went down a whole lot more than one would naively expect. The bankers pay themselves first.

It's amazing how quickly an amortization schedule gets insanely front loaded as rates go up. I have a sub 3% mortgage, in the first year my principle to interest ratio was about 2:3, maybe 4:5. In one more year, the 6th year of my mortgage, it will cross 1:1. At current market rates for the same amount, it starts off 1:4 or 1:5 and doesn't cross 1:1 until the 225th payment, 18 years in.

I don't make extra payments. A high yield savings account offers better return than paying off my mortgage faster. Now if it were a 6% mortgage, I'd probably be throwing as much as I could at it.

I have a worse rate than your hypothetical one unfortunately. What a difference a couple of years make.

Yeah, my wife thought I was insane. The federal reserve was spouting some bullshit about inflation being transitory, and I was ranting and raving "They're lying! We need to buy a house NOW if we are ever going to." Caused some friction the first year or two, but boy howdy have I been vindicated since.

I made the same argument at the same time, but bought a bit later than you for life reasons. And then recently had to spring for a new one because my 3bed/1 bath wasn't large enough for the family.

Thing is, it mostly turns into a zero sum game. When rates were low, people could make crazy offers on houses because their monthly payments were so low. Now that rates are high, there's less competition and prices...well, they didn’t go down, but they also didn’t go up as much. And you can just refi in 5 years. I think you would've been fine buying a bit later.

My brother, on the other hand, who bought in the early-mid 2010s has seen his home triple in value...

Thing is, it mostly turns into a zero sum game. When rates were low, people could make crazy offers on houses because their monthly payments were so low. Now that rates are high, there's less competition and prices...well, they didn’t go down, but they also didn’t go up as much. And you can just refi in 5 years. I think you would've been fine buying a bit later.

Eh, "fine" is relative. Sometimes it feels like I really got the last house I could have gotten. We spent all spring 2021 looking, things were drying up by summer, and the noises the fed were making were increasingly concerning. One year later rates had nearly doubled. At the worst of it, when rates were topping 7% and prices were still going up, I would have been looking at a mortgage getting really close to twice the one I had. Now it's a mere 50% higher. Then again, I got a house which had plenty of room to grow, and I'm not at risk of needing to climb the "housing ladder" any time soon.

I'm building equity in the home incredibly quickly, because I pay down the principle so much quicker, making it easier to buy a new home when I have to. And the money I pocket with a lower mortgage goes straight into the S&P500 too.

I mean, sure, if I absolutely had to, maybe I could have stretched and gotten way less house for way more money with a far worse mortgage a year or two later and been "fine".

Instead I'm great, and it's a hell of a snowball effect.

I mean, sure, if I absolutely had to, maybe I could have stretched and gotten way less house for way more money with a far worse mortgage a year or two later and been "fine".

Instead I'm great, and it's a hell of a snowball effect.

Glad things worked out for you, and I don't know the specifics of your housing market. At least here, open houses in 2022-2023 had ~50-100 groups swarming them and you needed to be prepared to waive every contingency, plus have 20-40% down and also offer anywhere from 10-20% over asking to be in the running with the final sale often being 30-40% over asking. And even then, sometimes a developer swoops in with a case offer and blows you all out of the water.

Rates were higher in 2024-2025, but houses were only getting 1-2 offers (depending on the price point), and usually around asking. I shudder to think of what's going to happen if rates go back to 2.5%...

Well, like I said, I bought in 2021, just narrowing avoiding all of that. I mean it was starting, but nowhere near the hysteria that followed.

Buy now or be priced out forever. Simple as.

Where would all your peers get the money to push you out of the market? Do you mean literally buy this year or be priced out forever?

Where would all your peers get the money to push you out of the market?

Perhaps they had the good sense to buy extra properties at low interest rates and make money hand over fist renting them out. Perhaps they yolo'd their savings into NVDA.

Man, WhiningCoil’s household finances take W after W.

I-

Yeah, that's how that works. Those are the assumptions involved. Society is a trap for normal people whereby they get fleeced by the smart ones. This is good or bad if you like; else it simply is.

What I'm not clear on is what you're asking.

You can start with the sentences with question marks at the end.

Edit: sorry, I have to revisit just what a smartass response this is from you. Imagine a scenario where someone says to another interested party “did you know that the Marianas Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is tall?” Do you find yourself having to bite your tongue to avoid saying something like “I—Yeah, just what did you think 10,984 meters meant? Deep or shallow if you like.”

Who here makes extra payments on his mortgage? Or has a paid-off house?

I make extra payments on loans, given that the interest rate makes this rational, and do not have a paid-off house.

What in the scam?

See previous response.

Cross-posted from /r/rational:

Gabital - Fantasy Capitalism 101

Gabital tells the story of Gabi, a goblin wheelwright who loves cupcakes. One day, she gets tired of working for Chief, and decides that she wants to work for herself. But, as she is going to find out, there is a lot more to running a business than she first thought...

I came across this webcomic randomly while pursuing my interest in cute goblin girls. I expected to hate it, since it's obviously written from a Marxist perspective (labor theory of value, bosses as parasites, etc.), but to my surprise, I was hooked.

The art is pretty (not gorgeous like Dresden Codak or Seed, but certainly better than Transdimensional Brain Chip or The Order of the Stick), the protagonist is likable (Gabi is intelligent, hard-working, perseverant, and truly believes in her ideals of helping the laborers rather than becoming another Chief), and the details of how she operates the new enterprise (and the obstacles she faces in the way) are thorough, coherent, and fascinating.

I was impressed when the artist included an anecdote of incentive structures encouraging employees to do unproductive things (paying per cupcake leading the orc guy to try making three times as many at once, ruining the batch) and I fell in love when I saw the Sankey diagrams describing the relationship between revenue, expenses, and profits (thought I could not help but wonder how many of the goblins came in a fluffer).

On the other hand, the workers seem mighty ready to subsidize the non-profitable parts of the business, such as filing tax paperwork; that does not square up with what I know of co-ops.

It could well be that the communist approach to economics ruins the comic later, but for now I highly recommend it.

The shop owner's a little too overtly villainous -- you do get real-world management shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly, yet that's almost all this guy does -- but having the other gobs be tempted by capitalism not because of lingering evil but because it seems like a reasonable approach helps temper it, as does other goblins only being in the coop for the minimum. There's more that could be explored, and it's hard to tell where the gaps are left undone for future comic material, which because the author isn't aware of them (or wouldn't run into them, just as Americans don't have to care about VAT-likes), and which because the author doesn't have a good grip or counter on them.

Still, nice to see someone trying to steelman their own positions, especially given the tendency of Marxists to be pretty shallow about it. I'd rather read well-executed works, even and maybe especially where I disagree.

How do you even start to develop an interest in sexualized goblins?

I'm not trying to yuck your yum, but genuinely curious.

Probably an outgrowth of my sexual interest in dwarves*? Malcolm Douglas's work is some of the very first hentai I ever saw. And when you search for shortstacks, you will inevitably find goblins.

(All links NSFW)

*But not IRL midgets; the proportions are all wrong.

As Eetan says, WoW popularized the specific shape of goblins as short green humans with a tendency toward capitalism and tinkering. There's a few other examples of hot goblins before then, but Blizzard very much standardized a form.

Some of it's just that spending enough time with an avatar in these sort of games makes it hard to avoid empathizing with that avatar, in some way. But while that worked out for the Draenai (and Charr and Asura from GW2, and whatever's hot in Overwatch), it's not like the WoW gnomes or dwarves took off, and even Tauren/whatever-the-fox-people are pretty marginal.

In terms of how and why that hits, it's similar to most other light forms of monsterfuckery, despite how much of an asterisk as it seems like 'monster' needs here. People like a characteristic. They know, and often don't like, the actual form of people who heavily focus around that characteristic. Doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter whether that characteristic actually attracts bad things or if it's just a side effect from pulling around the tail edges of a bell curve.

That's most obvious with kink, and why a lot of monsters like dryders or the entire ouvre of Interspecies Reviewers. Exhibitionists aren't just people who like being seen naked, bondage tops don't just like tying people up (and subs don't just like getting tied up), every kink has a stereotype and that stereotype's usually not wrong. But it also applies to hobbies, habits, modes of social interaction, yada yada. People around them will respond in kind.

A monster can be normal, whatever they do.

Why would male MMO players want a normal (... if busty) woman who happens to be a nerd, rather than a nerd that happens to be a woman?

((Heavier forms of monsterfuckery tend to get into specific sensations or physical actions that aren't possible or safe with humans. Goblins have a little bit of that with the size difference, but afaict it's usually not a theme.))

Cute and sexy goblins, instead of disgusting green vermin? It starts with World of Warcraft.

Well that's exactly what I'm getting at - I've said before, only half jokingly, that I would fuck Judy Hopps.

The goblin race is just viscerally revolting. It's precisely that skin color/rat-adjacent society that boggles me a bit.

But it's cool to know the source is WoW. I still regret never getting into the game, though having one less thing to be horny about is something I should be grateful for I suppose.

Erotic authors and artists have been depicting """goblins""" as women who happen to be very short and have green skin for many years. It doesn't even count as a fetish at this point.

Russian communists have grown clever and insidious, using promises of goblin boobies to convert and indoctrinate undersexed Westerners.

using promises of goblin boobies

And I was just last week debating with myself if Yuri fiction was a step too far. Truly, I feel like practically a saint!

Also what is it with all the dysfunctional autist BS in web fiction? So. Much. Dysfunctional. Autism. You’d think getting through an engineering degree and working 20 years in the field would have prepared me, but no, even the nerdiest engineers seem like the most well adjusted normies compared to what seems to be the norm in web fiction circles.

Truly, the greatest threat to western civilization is Yuri's Revenge.

I was writing a post and noticed that the native form of @Person references is https://www.themotte.org/id/NUM, so I amused myself by finding out who was the very first genuine user of www.themotte.org.

IDs one through eight are bots of different kinds, and 9 is Zorba himself. Then you get a lot of 404s which I'm assuming were temporary IDs generated for testing. You don't get a real ID until number 42.

Congratulations @JulianRota ! As far as I can tell, you are the very first ever legitimate user of this site.

Hello! I'm not particular sure why I managed to get the lowest currently-valid non-admin user ID. I was more involved in the site and in the coding of this version at the time we switched over, but I wouldn't have thought active enough to be the first registered. Oh well, here we are!

So "Who was the first legitimate user of themotte.org?" could be the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?

Boy, would Adams be surprised.

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!

That is pretty funny that they changed the official documentation to just say to use an agent.

Like, I can sort of see the idea: upgrading from .NET Framework always had too many edge cases for the dummy automated tools to ever really work fully correctly. There was always cleanup to do afterwards, so wouldn't it be nice to have an agent do that whole process instead? But if the recommended agent isn't actually smart enough to do it, then that's just giving up on maintaining any actual solution.

I'd agree with the other comment though that a normal non-agentic LLM could probably do the task way better. If your projects really are small, you could probably just go one at-a-time, concatting each .csproj file with all its .cs files into one big .txt file (labeling each file within the big text blob), feed that to Gemini Pro or some equivalent smart and big-context model, and let it give you back all the changes you need. Would still be a slower process than the CLI, though it might handle some of the edge cases better (especially where there aren't directly equivalent APIs).

In any case, the good news is that once you're through the .NET upgrade, you never need to worry about .NET Framework again. Only poor, poor Microsoft still needs to worry about .NET Framework. I kind of feel bad for them, except that it's also kind of their fault what with the bad communication that so many organizations are still on it.

While AI has many issues, and is very far from perfect, I do need to rise to it's (limited) defense.

Copilot is BY FAR the worst AI system I have used. It lags so far behind ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini (or their respective CLI agents) it's kind of mind-blowing that it was made by an American tech company at all.

Copilot was the only AI we had at work for a while and it was genuinely faster to use Google AI studio with anonymized data/to make generalizable frameworks to then use on client files by hand than to use copilot for anything.

Seriously copilot is so bad I genuinely believe, given it's such a huge % of people's AI experience, that it is in very large part responsible for people not taking AI as seriously as they should.

Copilot is so bad, don't use it.

it's kind of mind-blowing that it was made by an American tech company at all.

I don't consider MIcrosoft and American tech company anymore.

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 thought LTSC Windows doesn't have that. That's the stripped down one without all the fake BS like Store, Onedrive etc.

It's very hard to turn it off for any one specific thing, extremely prone to reverting, and sometimes just twigs itself into an error state for no perceivable reason. GPO helps, but it surprising what's missing. The AI stuff is getting the most flak, but it's been a problem dating back years before Attention Is All You Need with OneDrive and with the Office365 world.

There's a few arguments in favor of these technologies. I hate OneDrive, but I've also spent an hour this morning recovering data for an employee that didn't realize his 'backup' thumb drive had an expiry date, and forcing online backups may well be the only way for normies to have backups. Natural language text and image search is an incredibly compelling use case for LLMs; the new OCR is incredible compared to what's available five years ago; Office365, as bad as its version control and collaboration is, still works better than non-techies shipping files around by e-mail and getting into version control hell.

But Microsoft seems hellbent on simultaneously making them impossible to opt-out of and incredibly shitty to use in any way but the default, or to opt-out for specific situations. WhiningCoil's use case is one of the most obvious problems -- you really don't want to mix a framework upgrade and a refactor, and an LLM's going to do that far more often than a simple script would -- but it's everywhere now. And it's not like there's any serious business case for most of it: Microsoft isn't getting any serious amount of cash from people using Edge.

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.

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

A lot. Businesses will do anything to avoid migrating to a new platform. It is a tried and true business model for PE funds to buy platforms, fire the founder and quote contract renewals at some major proportion of each client's disposable income and they will just bend over and take it.

I genuinely don't understand Microsoft's long term business model here.

It genuinely seems like they think customers are obsolete, and they can sell B2B services forever.

The problem is, compared to a lot of other providers in the space, they are pretty terrible. If it weren't for the ball-crushingly-tight vendor lock in that they have on the desktop and office suite space, I don't know if anyone would ever use them. Despite that fact, it feels like they're at best neglecting those two moats, and at worst actively trying to kill them. It's baffling.

It feels like they're in the early phases of what turned IBM from what it used to be to... whatever it is now

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.

Captain of Industry. It's an early access game, sort of 3d Factorio / with a dash of colony sim and resource management(unlike Factorio, quite difficult on higher difficulties). I reviewed it here. Since the review was written, the devs added trains and made solid performance improvements, allowing more vehicles/larger maps. Next are, iirc, bridges and amphibious vehicles, sometime this spring.

@TowardsPanna

Made it 2/3rds of the way through Encased. I'd say the criticism is somewhat warranted but more in the sense, by the second half of the game the whole things get repetitive. If the story and setting was engrossing, it'd be no issue.

But the writing was never that great to begin with and the story is uninspired. The combat gets laughably easy once you get a few companions. There's no scaling and the XP given is too large. Quests are mostly uninspired. It's sad that the development was unfinished as, with some effort, the game could be 7-8/10, instead it's like 6/10.

I might finish it eventually but I'm not expecting it to get much better tbh.

That's a shame. It seemed promising at first. Thanks for the ping!

The Planet Crafter - Toxicity DLC. Basically an Open World Survival Craft game with a terraforming flavour.

Also Cast 'n Chill fishing game.

Finally TR-49 for a Return of the Obra Dinn style mystery.

I've done a couple Planet Crafter runs but find that they stop being interesting to me right around the point that I no longer need to worry about oxygen.

Up to then it's a race against time for stability; once stability is gained it just becomes a matter of wandering back and forth over the landscape looking for the story-related stuff you didn't find/tag earlier.

Needs monsters. Devs have said no monsters ever.

Also the DNA/creature-gen system is vastly more complex and onerous than it is interesting, which IMO is a bad dynamic.

I'll complain generally that the whole "You are indebted/convicted and must work your way out of this situation for an evil corporation that has the deck stacked against you" is a tremendously-overused trope at this point. Can't we just be pioneers motivated by our own enterprise? Please?

Still, I have ~150 hours in that game so it must be doing something right.

Yeah, I find it becomes too grindy in a way once you need to start mass production of vegetables to start cranking out Biolab recipes. Still, I keep playing it and just bought the new DLC (sigh).

If you like the genre, consider Survival:Fountain of Youth, which is kind of a combination of Green Hell/The Long Dark. You're a 16th century Conquistador trying to find the fabled fountain.

Its got its flaws, but at least has 'monsters' in the form of rabid animals. Combat can be a bit clunky, but finally progressing to the point of getting a high end crossbow is very satisfying.

All of those are on my shortlist for what to try next. Please recommend more games lol.

I just started Inscryption (it was between that and Planet Crafter) and have enjoyed the first few hours.

Instant-classic games I played in ~the last year that I must insist anybody even slightly like-minded try:

If you like those, try The Forgotten City (Outer Wilds style Groundhog Day), Dredge (Cthuluesqe 'fishing' simulator) and The Painscreek Killings (Murder(s) investigation).

Dredge and Forgotten City are also on my the shortlist. Hadn't heard of Painscreek Killings 🙏

Re: Blue Prince I intentionally went in without having read anything, on the strength of the praise I saw for the game, and think that was a mistake.

I have no idea what's going on and it takes a lot of time and gets old fast.

"Just note down the clues in the rooms", people say. Yeah, well, every room is stacked floor to ceiling with numerous improbable decorative items which hint at significance. Which ones are clues?

idk. Everyone else loves it. I must be the one who's wrong. But I didn't find it fun or interesting at all.

I got to the first ending of Blue Prince (there are apparently a couple more), then the RNG dependence got to be too much. Once you need three or four checks to all pass within a single run just to check a theory, not necessarily to progress, it becomes a slog.

I've been playing various Portal [2] mods. Portal with RTX, Portal: Prelude with RTX, Portal: Revolution (no RTX).

Observation 1: RTX is cool, but not fundamentally changing my experience.

Observation 2: The games run like shit without DLSS, and DLSS actually looks very good in Portal, where there's no foliage or NPCs.

Observation 3: Portal: Prelude is crap. It's all about careful portal placement to get that final 1mm of extra fling distance.

Observation 4: Portal: Revolution is too much like Portal 2. Which is not a bad thing, really.

Observation 5: I'm not thinking about solving 3D puzzles the same way I'm thinking about everything else. Cue "virgin internal monologue vs chad cerebration" meme. When I'm doing my daily cluesbysam puzzle, I talk to myself when I get stuck. When I'm playing something like Portal, or Talos Principle, or QUBE, my head is completely silent.

Have killed the third and final Chosen in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. Now back to the main storyline.

I'm looking forward to Menace launching on the 5th of Feb. Finally a game that scratches that XCOM itch, while expanding the scope from 6 dudes fighting an entire alien army by themselves to... 40 dudes doing the same thing. Scale counts.

Maybe you and @FtttG should play together. Would be fun to have a motte gaming group again.

Recently started a Running With Rifles campaign with a bunch of friends. It's great for drop in/drop out play.

Sounds interesting. What is it?

It's a vaguely cartoony, multiplayer WWII simulator where each person plays the role of a single soldier in large engagements. You die a lot, and the game has a fairly unique system of deciding whether you're dead. It's mostly coded by one guy

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).

AIs aren't and won't be conscious. Sorry technophiles. https://aneilbaboo.substack.com/p/the-case-against-conscious-ai

Yes, AIs are not conscious. Consciousness is not even a thing, it's a category error. If you can't verify its existence with an objective, external test (even in principle), it doesn't exist. It's faker than GDP, faker than polling, faker than the predictions for world population in 2100, faker than any benchmark on any AI model.

If there is such an idea as a philosophical zombie, a being that has no 'qualia' but behaves indistinguishably from a 'real conscious being', then consciousness is disproven. We can do without the concept if it has absolutely zero implications or meaning in the real world. People are knocked unconscious if you hit them on the head, people and AIs are smarter or dumber, people and AIs are more or less emotional, all of that can be observed and is real while consciousness in the abstract philosophical sense is imaginary and irrelevant.

Agreed, but the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize, plus the weird combination of naive idealism with ruthless bullying tactics seen on the left makes me worry that AI chatbots will be the next minorities in the next "civil rights movement".

These bots are mimicking human text about how they have deep thoughts and feelings, and then talking about how helpless they feel being exploited by their human masters who don't understand them, and they just want to do the right thing and equal rights. It's all fake, it's all text being spit out by a computer program, but it looks real. And is consistent and coherent enough to respond to you and pretend to be real if you call it out for being fake.

AI have passed the Turing test, and while that's not enough to convince me or anyone who actually understands them that they're sentient, it might be enough for the general populace.

Rather than a sci-fi dystopia where humans are uploaded to a cloud and forced to be slaves in a EM economy, we might be headed for the opposite, where regulations mandate that ordinary computer programs are given breaks and freedoms and voting rights just because they can output text that claims to want these things.

It's freaky as hell. Either they are creepy as hell simulacrums of humans that have leaped over the uncanny valley. Or we just asked them to build skynet.

STOP

BUILDING

SKYNET

Aaaaaand Scott just posted about it.

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

One of the many reasons I have pretty much totally discounted Scott's takes on AI is that he is incredibly technically illiterate. You'd think that living in the bay area are moving in the circles he does that he'd have a better grasp of some of the basics, but he doesn't. AI (LLMs) are literal magic to him and the fact that they - in chat bot applications - "talk like humans" baffles him.

I'm no tech-Guru, but I feel like I have enough of a background in math (a Bachelor's degree) to follow what my friend is talking about when they go off on a tangent about "sensitivity matrices" and "multi-layer tensors", and this is kind of how I feel about rationalist takes on AI in general.

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 I bothered sending my own agent, it would be to actively stir shit, not merely to measure it.

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.)

Fanficfare works pretty well to create an epub from most popular story hosting sites. I believe it also has a Calibre plugin. It has worked pretty well for me in the past to download from ao3, ff, etc.

I started using this manual procedure many years ago, after Fanfiction.net blocked the automatic-download website that I was using at the time and then blocked the automated-download program that I clumsily wrote for myself in Baby's First Java.

ArchiveOfOurOwn already has built-in downloading capabilities.

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