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PaperclipPerfector  23hr ago (text post)   783 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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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.

I disagree. Fable's prose is readable and unlikely to get details wrong, but it is kind of dull. Maybe a crowd of agents with a 87,500-word rulebook would produce something qualitatively better, idk, I'm poor and just rerun the same prompts on LM Arena dozens of times. I'm not a masochist, a lot of the results were fun for me in the moment, but there was precisely one result out of hundreds by now where I actually loved reading it. Maddeningly, generation crashed mid-work, so I couldn't even find out which model it was, but I've seen Fable's take on the prompt and I'm certain it wasn't it.

I am specifically talking about Fable 5, not 5.1 or 5.2, which have degraded creative writing capabilities. Fable 5 is the only model that has made me cry.

Interesting. I should start paying attention to the versions too, though even before the 5.1 release I don't remember seeing anything that truly struck me from Fable, and I'm very sentimental.

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.

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