Blog Engine Upgrade

By Robert Ellison.

ITHCWY has been running on ASP.NET 4.8 for a long time. I've been putting off the upgrade as the official Microsoft documentation says something close to 'your funeral'. Visual Studio Copilot added a modernization agent. It claimed to have generated a plan, but the file it insisted it had just written was hallucinated. So I rolled up my sleeves and did it the hard way.

Hard is an overstatement. I did some much needed refactoring and jettisoned a bunch of dead code. The regular Copilot (via Claude Sonnet 4.5) was a big help on things that didn't exist any more or needed to be done differently. The new OutputCache refused to disengage until I entirely killed the default and I need to spend some more time there. It seems to matter which order you enable server features which is moderately terrifying but probably doesn't need to be touched often. It's certainly better than poking around in web.config and hoping for the best. If you're reading this then it has been served by asp.net core 10.

Probably some subtle things are broken and it usually takes a while to mop everything up after a migration this big. If you run into any problems please get in touch.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Blog Engine Upgrade Migrating from ASP.NET 4.8 to asp.net core 10 )

San Francisco to Lake Tahoe

By Robert Ellison.

Some snow on the way to TahoeMeta: Hyperlapse of a thirteen hour drive to Lake Tahoe from San Francisco (Rivian Drive Cam)

Hyperlapse from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe:

I-80, SR 49, SR20, I-80 some more, SR 267 to Kings Beach.

This didn't look like a terrible idea the morning of December 26 (Boxing Day), the weather forecast was good. Google Maps predicted a little under four hours. Then it started to snow. And then there were many crashes, I-80 shut in both directions and the resulting jam took over six hours to clear.

Most of the hyperlapse runs at a 80-130x speedup. The jam portion is over 1000x.

In case you are insane here is the full drive, minus charging and food stops:

Shot on Rivian Drive Cam, post-processed as per this post, edited in DaVinci Resolve Studio, music hallucinated by Eleven Labs.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: San Francisco to Lake Tahoe San Francisco to Lake Tahoe )

Links for December 2025

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, December 21, 2025.
Mission Local: Which street will S.F. name for Claude? Vote here in the official poll.

Market Street, surely? #anthropic

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Visual Studio November Update – Visual Studio 2026, Cloud Agent Preview, and more

I may have solved the AI productivity paradox. Coding agents are neat, but Visual Studio now needs a multi-gigabyte update every time you run it. #ai #productivity

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Links for December 2025 Shared links and news on I Thought He Came With You for December 2025 (Robert Ellison's Blog). )

Rob's Basilisk

By Robert Ellison.

Rob's Basilisk

Roko's basilisk is the improbable theory that advanced AI in the future will punish anyone who failed to help speed the development of the AI.

I'm coining Rob's basilisk, which is the far more likely theory that AI will eventually torture people who made it watch home security cameras. Here's a gem from mine:

"The day began with regular neighborhood activity, including several individuals walking by. Early morning saw garbage collection services, with a person in a yellow vest moving green garbage cans and later a blue recycling bin was picked up. Around 7:34 AM, a person exited the Garage, and shortly after, a green Rivian SUV pulled into the driveway, with a resident exiting the vehicle as the garage door opened. Throughout the morning, numerous people walked dogs, including one with a black dog on a red leash. Later in the morning, a person was seen putting a green suitcase into the trunk of a white SUV, coinciding with an Amazon delivery truck driving by. In the afternoon, a person was observed taking a picture of the house. A UPS delivery person delivered a package around 4:50 PM. As evening approached, a cat was spotted walking across the Backyard, and two people got into a white pickup truck from the Garage. The day concluded with continued pedestrian activity and several trains passing by, including a person seen holding a glowing blue object in the evening."

Nearly a decade ago I whipped up a script to send my Nest footage to the Google Cloud Vision API. The twist was that it only notified me when it saw something novel. It was pretty chatty to start with, and then every few weeks I'd get an alert that it had spotted an ice hotel or ballistic missile submarine. At that point I turned it off (maybe this will save me one day).

Some terrible part of me wants to build a RAG database of Google Home Premium Advanced notifications so that I can do the same thing in prose, and never miss anything unusual on my street. A more practical part realizes that the glowing blue object is probably a phone.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Rob's Basilisk Rob's basilisk posits that future ai will punish people who forced it to watch home security cameras. )

Games Publishers, Let me pay More for Less!

By Robert Ellison.

Me, recently

I just finished Alan Wake 2, and while it's a pretty good game this took me well over a year.

It's not (mostly) because I'm still not that great with a Xbox controller. It's a long game and I'm pretty busy. Astonishingly at the end it wants me to play the whole thing again, which seems to be a bit of a trend. It also wants to sell me expansion packs which is completely missing my section of the market.

I would happily pay you twice as much if the game was half as long.

Sadly I'm a completionist and I'm not going to stop halfway through unless the game is bad (e.g. No Man's Sky. I already have a job. I'm not going to find and smelt minerals to weave wiring to eventually twenty hours later turn the light on in my space cabin). But I'd love to play more than one game a year.

Also, making more content is lazy. Taking a scalpel to your plot and getting to the essential core of the story takes skill and guts.

Publishers, please take my money!

(PS, man, I loved Firewatch. More like that please.)

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Games Publishers, Let me pay More for Less! Games are too long, and there is plenty of fat to cut to make premium short versions for the time poor. Please. )

California November 2025 - Proposition 50

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, October 19, 2025.

Californians react to Prop 50Meta: ITHCWY official voter guide to the November 2025 special election in California (Proposition 50).

Public approval of Congress hovers in the teens, but instead of kicking them out, we reelected incumbents 97 percent of the time in 2024. Representatives fear primary challenges more than voters, and they spend much of their time fundraising for the next election.

We could get rid of gerrymandering, impose term limits, extend House terms, and introduce federal funding for elections.

Instead, we have Proposition 50. This introduces a completely partisan redistricting of California with the intent of counteracting a similar effort in Texas. It expires with the normal redistricting that will follow the 2030 census, although who knows if that will actually happen. It will likely spark repetition in more states.

With much regret, I'm a yes on 50.

It will be impossible to fix America's creaky democracy once it no longer exists.

I'm not in favor of quietly returning to the status quo in 2030. We have learned how much of our system depends on good intent, and this must change. Demand a citizen-driven constitutional convention. Resist the failed state that we seem intent on becoming.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: California November 2025 - Proposition 50 Official ITHCWY voter guide to the California November 2025 special election (Proposition 50). )