I work with a Go monorepo and set up Bazel for a couple of services that used CGo. It took a while but was painless to set up.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#532Back when GPT-2 was released, I tried figuring out how to fine tune it. I found a google notebooks template, scraped a bunch of data from r/ChangeMyMind and asked it to change my mind on different topics.
I was dumbfounded that it actually tried doing that. Obviously GPT-2 wasn’t great at it, but the writing was on the wall quite literally.
Unfortunately, I was too broke to invest in stocks, but I did pivot my career quite a bit.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#533I have a large token budget as part of my work. A coworker was scanning some repos for vulnerabilities as a test. He found a scary looking remote exploit in a popular project and shared it with me for a second opinion. I spun up a local instance of the project and ran the POC against it: nothing. Turns out it needed some configuration knobs tweaked to lower some security protections. So I told the AI what happened, a…
Sorry, what does POC mean in this context? I don’t see an earlier combination of words for which that would be an initialism.
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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#534Still waiting. Maybe some day.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#535I run a remote-first ecom business with a dozen or so team members.
About a year ago, one of our account managers had a life issue, ghosted us, and she held a fairly critical role in the business and gate-kept a bunch of knowledge to some high value vendor accounts.
Because we ran our ops in Google Workspace, we essentially had off-the-shelf RAG and was able to get answers to a lot of things by asking Gemini to go through all her emails/docs/calendar/meetings, reverse engineer what she did, and create an onboarding doc for her successor.
This happened once more a few months later when one of our analysts broke his wrist on vacay, and we were again able to replicate what they did to cover for their absence, this time dabbling in AI agents ("gems") to do a bunch of the regular simple tasks and again it covered things without too many issues.
I def expect Amazon/shopify to at some point replace all of us brand owners with AI bots if they can, but we'll see how long the gravy train goes on.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#536I had an old 1st gen Amazon Firestick in a drawer for years, it had updated to the latest software and there were no public root exploits. I spent a day bouncing between Claude and Codex and they researched, downloaded kernel sources, tried exploits and eventually got root via "FBUF/VCHIQ kernel zero-write primitive to patch live kernel memory". I was able to make the root permanent, debloat the amazon apps, downgrad…
Can you share that on GitHub?
And get sued by Amazon while they're at it?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#537[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty great. (Though that's also the kind of hands-on troubleshooting step/fix that a person could just google for and find pretty easily back before the internet got all fucked up.)
Your parenthetical really describes my experience with AI searches. 5+ years ago I could find most things within one or two quick searches, now it takes so many that of course I'm going to reach for AI because that's the only way to get back to my baseline efficiency.
I learned to troubleshoot furnaces late one cold night in 2004 using Google, while a worried wife and a couple of sleeping kids loomed over me like a dark cloud. I learned what thermocouples are, what they do, how they work, and how to test them; all of which was new to me. A few hours later I bought one from the Ace Hardware a few blocks away and fixed the furnace with confidence.
And that was awesome. Thanks, Google! :)
I don't know where the change happened. It certainly wasn't overnight.
Where Google used to be magical and other search engines quickly improved, it all kind of turned into shit.
It really seems that I was getting better, more-direct results from Altavista 30 years ago than I do with top-flight search engines today. (That's a deliberately low bar, chosen because Altavista wasn't even intended to be "good" back then. I mean, it started as just as a side project at DEC to demonstrate that their Alpha hardware was able to index the entire World Wide Web.)
So lately, I've been doing the same thing as you: I'm increasingly using ChatGPT to do this basic fact-finding stuff. In this way, it mostly operates the search engine for me, but it lets me drill down through a sea of terrible search results to find something useful fairly quickly.
It's still not great -- I still have to reject mountains of bullshit. But it's better than alternatives, and I can reject the bullshit with conceptual descriptions instead of trying to get Google to do what I need it to do (what it used to do).
It feels all wrong using an LLM to do this stuff, but whatever. I'm still getting stuff done.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#539My oh shit moment was when I realized that powerful people are willing to bet the entire civilization based on 95% lies and 5% vague preliminary data.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#540I've let it do some commands against a local NUC before, just to see if it knew why something didn't work (it would've taken me ~15-20 mins probably. Not too bad). It took ~18 seconds to think, then ran two commands, and noted what the issue was. Even a 10 yr old could understand what the problem was.
I realized that LLMs were pretty good at calling the right tool, and running the right verbose command to figure out what and how.
Kind of like finding a specific SO post that had your exact problem, and the solved comment is heavily upvoted