Made this pseudo black hole visualization graph with the famous gravitational lensing effect from Interstellar yesterday, started at 9am finished at 5pm. I know nothing about GLSL, I don't think I'm even capable of programming my v1 of this with the lensing effect, let alone later adding some of the swirling texture bits, or even the random Doppler effect to the stars.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
861–870 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#862[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#863I showed Codex CLI to my brother who is not a tech person at all; he's never before touched code. He successfully built a somewhat complex app with it that works well.
Before, I was certain that a non-techy person would get stuck somewhere along the process. But I was proven wrong.
I watched him a bit while he was working on it. He interacted with Codex in a very different manner than how I would. Since he knew none of the technical details, he would use very vague and shallow wording. But that was not an issue. Codex also allowed him to make use of git, despite of him having no idea what git is.
This has changed my view of Codex' abilities significantly. I often hear people comment that AI seems intelligent in domains you don't know much about, but turns out to be stupid when you actually know the domain. This was not the case here at all. Despite of my brother completely ignoring the technical details, the AI built good code that fulfilled the requirements well.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#864While pair programming, we spent about 2 hours looking at one function, trying to optimise it. We made a hell of a lot of changes trying to cut it down from 400ms to under 40ms. Ended up getting to to around 22ms but that was as much as we could squeeze.
... and I got up to go back to my desk, AS A JOKE I highlighted the function and said "make this faster". 12ms. Blown away.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#865I saw it come up with a really clever solution to an obscure problem seemingly based on a single hard-to-find blog post where that wasn’t really the focus. (It actually improved upon the author’s implementation too)
Using it to proofread a manual on a highly specialized thing I wrote also surprised me. Excepted utter failure but it pointed out my own consistencies and had a lot of good findings.
I have trouble believing how this is possible even with a decent understanding how it works.
It also makes me start to question if human intelligence is all it’s cracked up to be.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#866I had Claude build a private podcast station for me. It integrated with Gemini to create a script for the show, based on a topic of my choosing, each talking segment ends with a presentation of the next song, which is played via Spotify, and is selected to have some sort of tie-in with the previous discussion. A tts model generates audio files based on the script, and a playlist is generated to play local file audio…
I use Kokoro TTS to turn text (articles, HN threads) to mp3s to listen to while doing chores, it's been great.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#867Probably when it was able to reverse engineer a bunch of firmware from scratch and it was unable to explain how and why it was able to reason through it.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#868I bought an Alesis QS8.1 super cheap in perfect condition (was a top grade digital piano/synth in the 90s). and then i realized that ALL of the software (which i collected from defunct websites and archived on github) related to it was ancient and after a while of getting tired of using WINE every single time i decided i wanted a cross platform modern equivalent that did everything that several of these different pro…
With stuff like this, do you honestly not feel that you've probably been tricked and that someone else actually did this? Don't get me wrong, I think AI can do some surprising things, but with stuff like this, often it just stole the code and the steps without attribution, it didn't figure it out. There'll probably be a blog post detailing exactly how to do this somewhere and Claude just copied the steps and code. An…
I appreciate where you’re coming from but no, I don’t believe so. I have had Claude do some incredible reverse engineering on very proprietary niche firmware blobs that aren’t generally available to the public. One of the really interesting reasons why I don’t believe that it’s simply regurgitation but rather iterative novel synthesis is because of the dead ends and blind alleys that led to success. It feels a lot more like “Claude has read every tutorial on Ghidra and Radare2, and has memorized the ARM architecture and datasheets for all of these microcontrollers”. Misidentifying, say, which subfamily of processors it is based on the IVT, only to course correct when I give it the VID/PID of the device booted into DFU mode.
One piece of gear, Claude found a hidden and highly useful diagnostic screen. This took a few iterations too. It found the existence of it based on just running “strings” against the firmware image but needed a few rounds of me going “I tried what you suggested but this is what happened instead”. Searching Google, DuckDuckGo, and GitHub for any of the strings that were on that screen or any of the named constants associated with that screen in reverse engineered source led to exactly zero hits.
More entertaining, Claude and I together also nailed down the source of a PTP synchronization bug in a piece of equipment a few months ago using the main UI .exe (written in pascal, of course), an ARM Linux image from the real-time controller in the box, and some pcaps from it interacting with other devices. The vendor released a patch a few days ago, without me having reported the bug.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#869In 2017 I worked tirelessly with my colleagues to implement and replicate the first transformer paper. Yesterday I left Opus 4.8 to go do some architecture research, with GPU access. It replicated and trained a credible baseline. It implemented some ideas I'd been thinking about, and wrote custom CUDA kernels for them. It read and summarised dozens of related papers. It has since run dozens of experiments, with minim…
> It replicated and trained a credible baseline
...
> The prospect of recursive self improvement feels more to real to me all of sudden
you really don't understand why these are two completely different tasks?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#870I could go on and on, but Claude recently decompiled the firmware of my camper van, documented all the CAN interfaces, then programmed an ESP32 module to talk to the van’s integrated systems (power, HVAC, lighting, tanks). That sort of embedded systems integration is completely out of my wheelhouse. I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers. I use Claude every day both professionally as a Solution Architect and person…
Because work just became unfun. You are context provider to LLM.
What is exactly your work? Give context to llm, review, update context. Navigating some sort of super intelligence thru your company's harness is not the same as writing code and creating ideas from scratch. And I don't understand what's fun in that
Yes, you can ship software faster, make corporation even more money. Why is this even important for regular worker? I liked the craft itself