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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1260 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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So how did LLMs impressed you this week? My case - I had lost original 3mf, but had OrcaSlicer temp folder, which ironically orca can't open. I ask codex-cli to try and reconstruct a proper 3mf. For my astonishment is did on the second try.

A lot of the newest hotness has been a little too automated for my tastes, and haven't had much free time, so mostly screwing around with older configs.

Successes :

  • Writing's still surprising me. The prose quality is still lackluster, and there's been very few times where I haven't wanted to revise whole sections, but I've gotten into the mid-5k word and low-10k word ranges with a coherent plot, characterization, and escalating tension.
  • Some of that's smut, with its lower bar (hurr hurr), but some of it isn't.
  • And, perhaps more useful, includes criticism of things I've written conventionally. Sometimes pretty biting criticism!
  • Simple webdev stuff has kinda worked. I'm not a webdev guy, and a lot of my requirements are stupid (oh boy aspnet, I sure do love aspnet!) and use cases simple, but it hasn't really mattered whether Grok, Claude, or Qwen for simple one-off-stuff that's just meant for a short-term use.
  • FRC students have been using it on and off. I try to emphasize the limitations and make sure they understand what the code is doing, and sometimes it's just not capable of handling their goals, but it's been useful as a reference tool in environments where a lot of the info is outdated or outright wrong. Which is weird, given the general code quality of FIRST-specific tools...
  • Been vibe-coding (vide-building?) a homelab rebuild. My current home server setup is very traditional (installing things without wrapping them in four layers of containerization, like an animal), and I'm probably gonna stick with that, but it's been helpful to see how the other half lives, and a lot less frustrating than trying to get the right docker flags and commands from the normal documentation.

Failures :

  • Very long form writing is struggling. Took a shot at phailyoor's trial, but while there's definitely some battles won against the old exponential explosions from context window scaling, most of the 100B+ param models go from 4 t/s at the start to <1 t/s by 5k words in. Which wouldn't necessarily be a critical problem, since I can just run it overnight, except the models also sometimes go wonky -- either looping around the same few paragraphs repeatedly, or adding tangents -- that make the most naive attempts at setting up a 'run-and-forget' run unpalatable.
  • Spacial manipulation is Not Doing Great Bob. I had a problem that was effectively two axis of living-edge hinge, and to be fair that's a weird and uncommon problem, but it's ultimately either calculus or solvable by exhaustion (or Fusion360, which is nearly the same thing), but even the closed models just panicked over it and tried to send me to completely unrelated tools.
  • Similarly, TRELLIS2 and Hunyuan3D are simultaneously impressive and absolutely useless. Sometimes they fail to produce a useful image, and that's mostly understandable (as funny as it is for extrapolated magnets to end up monopoles or video game characters to turn Janus-faced literally), but they can often give nice-looking models... that are absolutely unusable, with complete disconnections, unnecessary duplicated 'layers' of meshes sharing the same texture, random islands of tiny features, so on.
  • Ironically, either my expectations for smut and fiction are higher than for professional writing, or the LLMs are worse at it, specifically. I've beaten the purple prose, em-dashs, not-x-but-y, and weird misplaced detailed from some form-letter grade business writing stuff out of even pretty dumb LLMs. But sometimes you can get an LLM to make surprisingly detailed conclusions that are pretty far outliers (discount code: knot) and then other times it misses really obvious stuff (including an actual 'how make babies'-level problem, and that was in an M/F attempt!).
  • Weirdly bad at picking out names. Whether for characters, for programs, even individual variables. Not necessarily unimaginative, but repetitive (why does GLM love the name Kael?). Dunno what the hell's going on there.
  • Trying to get something like VideoContext-Engine running. Still screwing it up. Not an LLM problem, just haven't had the time to figure out Yet Another Stupid Cuda Fuckery.

Try build123 for cad cam

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