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PaperclipPerfector
13hr ago
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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.
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.
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