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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   730 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 13, 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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When American Indians acquired "lined composition book" technology, they used them to produce art remarkably similar to that of a typical schoolboy.

I was really hoping this was leading up to the cool S appearing in a mid-1800s notebook.

I appreciate all of the effort ZorbaTHut put in to this site's backend but I don't think it should bear the brunt of his effort this week, rather focusing on his other two roles managing Microsoft Outlook and the FAA's communications systems.

Is this fun? The US has grounded all flights nationwide as of my morning JST, attributing this to a communication failure. According to articles I've read this is the first such occurrence since Sep 11, 2001, except for one period lasting a few hours a few years ago. The National Weather Service is (or was as I am writing this) also down.

The attributed reason is "communication issues." I guess this is feasible but seems like a smokescreen, but then my tinfoil hat hasn't been used for a while. Anyway happy Friday. The requisite joke: What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh.

Edit: I don't like to wipe my own posts but Mods just remove this if necessary; it may not belong here depending on how things play out.

Edit 2: Discussion here.

@WhiningCoil we've talked about local AI here before. Are you still messing around with it? I found an old article by Brad Wardell ("old" meaning August, so stuff about specific models and graphics card pricing is going to be wildly out of date). But maybe it's worth a skim for you. Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_XL is a surprisingly capable local model, there's apparently a Qwen4 coming very soon, and in the interim Qwen3.8-Flash-Next can run surprisingly-faster-than-molasses given its size.

Also, are you still on the retrocomputing/retrogaming stuff? I bought some OpenRouter credits to mess around with the larger open-weight models that I wouldn't be able run locally. As part of that, I pointed GLM-5.3-Flash and DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017 at reversing/documenting some old DOS/Win9x networking software (I had a DOS client and a Windows server, and the site that held the reverse has rotted off the WWW) and was stunned at how quickly it got things going in dosbox/wine, and figured out the basic details of the packet formats and how everything worked. In a couple of evenings and about $15 of credit I'd got a pretty thorough description of the protocol. This makes me think they might be an option for solving weird problems like adapting old networking systems or unpicking old file formats, if you find yourself needing to do any of those sorts of things.

Man, I'm so busy with work, kid and baby, I've barely touched any of that.

We have a local model on our network at work. But "local" is still running on a workstation with way more VRAM that I'll ever have in my home lab. It writes tests ok. I have no faith in it's ability to adhere to design principles though. Still, it almost tempts me to get a dedicated AI server for home if I ever decide to quit and do my own thing. I was flying when I was slinging code on one branch, and having the AI write tests for me on another.

The retro projects I've seen AI make short work of lately are insane. Recompilation projects for Mechwarrior 2 and 3, emulating PowerVR cards with pixel perfect accuracy. People are vibe coding this shit in like a week or two, and I'm deeply curious about their workflow. The AI haters are in full route, just glad that finally after decades of poor options, they can play old games that defied every attempt to run on modern Windows.

All the same, I enjoy coding too much to offload more than the busywork like unit tests onto AI. And so far, I can also still easily outcode the local models.

Today is the 15th anniversary of Fenton's run across Richmond Park, London. There are so many elements here that consistently make it funny to me: the fact that the cameraman doesn't laugh until right at the end, the off-camera shouting getting increasingly more desperate, the deer start moving, leading to the big reveal of Fenton the dog nailing life, and his out-of-breath owner desperately trying to catch up while dropping exasperated "Jesus Christ"s... it's a great video.

It got me thinking about virality, as in, would this video still do the kinds of numbers it's clearly capable of doing if it were released in current year? Would the uploader be able to resist adding a bunch of tiktok "FAAAA" sounds or other nonsense over it? So much about what makes the video good is how understated everything is. It just kinda happens--nobody is directing the action or commenting on it. Mr. Beast would probably edit it significantly. Would people be able to sit through the first 16 seconds of the video, a bunch of boring, everyday, out-of-focus deer, before we even hear the first "Fenton!" without abandoning it and scrolling for more interesting content?

I like to think so.

Well I enjoyed it. My issue with the beginning wasn't that it was boring or out of focus, but that the camera shake threatened to make my eyes bleed.

Worth though.

Do you think there will be a window of opportunity to use AI to rewrite HPMOR with Malfoid before the whole AI thing either implodes or explodes?

It would be hilarious if in the rewrite they're doing the blood purity test and the results demonstrate that magic really is weakening due to mixing with muggleborns, and Harry has to overcome all his biases about racism and come to terms with HBD as a true fact about the world.

You can do it right now.

Yes; Fable 5 is good enough to do this.

Why HPMOR and not HP?

Because it's so much better? I dropped Harry Potter after book 5 because Harry goes all emo; I only read the last two books because HPMoR was coming out and I wanted to understand the lore.

From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 27:

So his father had been a bully.

And his mother had been shallow.

Maybe they'd grown up later. Good people like Professor McGonagall did seem to think the world of them, and it might not be only because they were heroic martyrs.

Of course, that was scant consolation when you were eleven and about to turn into a teenager, and wondering what sort of teenager you might become.

So very terrible.

So very sad.

Such an awful life Harry led.

Learning that his genetic parents hadn't been perfect, why, he ought to spend awhile moping about that, feeling sorry for himself.

Maybe he could complain to Lesath Lestrange.

Harry had read about Dementors. Cold and darkness surrounded them, and fear, they sucked away all your happy thoughts and in that absence all your worst memories rose to the surface.

He could imagine himself in Lesath's shoes, knowing that his parents were in Azkaban for life, that place from which no one had ever escaped.

And Lesath would be imagining himself in his mother's place, in the cold and the darkness and the fear, alone with all of her worst memories, even in her dreams, every second of every day.

For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.

Was it right to do that to anyone, even the second most evil person in the world?

No, said the wisdom of Harry's books, not if there's any other way, any other way at all.

And unless the wizarding justice system was as perfect as their prisons - and that sounded rather improbable, all things considered - somewhere in Azkaban was a person who was entirely innocent, and probably more than one.

There was a burning sensation in Harry's throat, and moisture gathering in his eyes, and he wanted to teleport all of Azkaban's prisoners to safety and call down fire from the sky and blast that terrible place down to bedrock. But he couldn't, because he wasn't God.

And Harry remembered what Professor Quirrell had said beneath the starlight: Sometimes, when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been... But the stars are so very, very far away... And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time.

Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful.

And Harry couldn't understand Professor Quirrell's words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn't be forced to operate in that mode.

You couldn't leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.

You had to stay and fight.

And from chapter 43:

Godric had defeated Dark Lords, fought to protect commoners from Noble Houses and Muggles from wizards. He'd had many fine friends and true, and lost no more than half of them in one good cause or another. He'd listened to the screams of the wounded, in the armies he'd raised to defend the innocent; young wizards of courage had rallied to his calls, and he'd buried them afterward. Until finally, when his wizardry had only just begun to fail him in his old age, he'd brought together the three other most powerful wizards of his era to raise Hogwarts from the bare ground; the one great accomplishment to Godric's name that wasn't about war, any kind of war, no matter how just. It was Salazar, and not Godric, who'd taught the first Hogwarts class in Battle Magic. Godric had taught the first Hogwarts class in Herbology, the magics of green growing life.

To his last day he'd never been able to cast the Patronus Charm.

Godric Gryffindor had been a good man, not a happy one.

Harry didn't believe in angst, he couldn't stand reading about whiny heroes, he knew a billion other people in the world would have given anything to trade places with him, and...

And on his deathbed, Godric had told Helga (for Salazar had abandoned him, and Rowena passed before) that he didn't regret any of it, and he was not warning his students not to follow in his footsteps, no one was ever to say he'd told anyone not to follow in his footsteps. If it had been the right thing for him to do, then he wouldn't tell anyone else to choose wrongly, not even the youngest student in Hogwarts. And yet for those who did follow in his footsteps, he hoped they would remember that Gryffindor had told his House that it was all right for them to be happier than him. That red and gold would be bright warm colors, from now on.

And Helga had promised him, weeping, that when she was Headmistress she would make sure of it.

Whereupon Godric had died, and left no ghost behind him; and Harry had shoved the book back to Hermione and walked away a little, so she wouldn't see him crying.

You wouldn't think that a book with an innocent title like "The Patronus Charm: Wizards Who Could and Couldn't" would be the saddest book Harry had ever read.

Harry...

Harry didn't want that.

To be in that book.

Harry didn't want that.

Because I dropped the original HP while it was still releasing for a lack of interest, but HPMOR was the high point of my idealism and I still remember it fondly. Because I would find it hilarious to have Yud's magnum opus amended by an AI that is disapproved by him.

The good old days of logging in to WoW 1.6 and leveling up my character on CS_Office…

https://youtu.be/kcCz1UtuTrs

Man the sound of the AWP is forever burned into my brain.

I'm not at work right when the Great Outlook Outage of 2026 happened. Such a shame.

I mean, I actually work with real human beings, in person, so it wouldn't have been as simple as taking a nap while on the clock. But a good fraction of medical work in the NHS revolves around email, and God knows what the hell is going on there.

Well it is good to see the not so bright people that decided to procure office 364 suffering.

That's why local Exchange and AD servers are superior.

I was glad to hear of the outage - finally I can get some real work done without interruption! But then again, Friday is usually my productive day to begin with because many people take fridays off, and besides Teams is still working so it's not actually that quiet.

Yeah we've just kind of moved what should have been an email into a dozen teams group chats with lengthy paragraphs of text.

My favourite take on the alleged Jensen Huang honeypot operation so far:

I met my wife at a Popeye’s in Skokie, Illinois. I was in Skokie doing standup, she was in Skokie for reasons that she’s never explained. She walked up to me, and — in heavily-accented, broken English — said “You Jeff Mau? I blow you. I blow you now — hurry, let’s go!”

That’s not the type of thing that normally happens to me. I’m no troll, but it’s not like I commonly get unsolicited offers of oral sex. And while this woman — my future wife, Jane Baseball — was what rural folk might call “barn fodder”, it still seemed strange. But she was insistent: “Let’s go! Blow time!” she wailed. “Blow time now, get you things! Hurry!” I honestly went with her mostly to get her to stop yelling about blow jobs in public.

After receiving what can only be described as a “surly” blow job next to the dumpster behind a Popeye’s, my future wife yelled “Okay — the end! You marry me now!” When I expressed shock, she only yelled louder: “I BLOW YOU, NOW WE MARRY! LET’S GO, GET YOU THINGS!” When I tried to explain that that’s not how it works in America, she shrieked “I AMERICA! I AMERICA, BORN HERE! FLEENT CEE-TEE, MEE-SHEE-GAN!” I considered pointing out that people from Flint don’t call it “Flint City”, but I was also kind of afraid of seeming racist.

Does this kind of thing actually happen? The subtle approach doesn’t always work either as a honey trap, you got to research your target better. For me, it depends on what kind of food they show up with. If they know my taste they’ll be let right in.

I wish I was important enough to be the target of a honeypot attempt.

Does it matter if she has blue hair and the scales err?

It matters to ME.

Beggars can’t be choosers!

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