site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1083 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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats