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Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#362I am, admittedly, word oriented so my moment may be a little different from others. I asked llm to estimate my political orientation and belief system from my stylometric footprint. It got very close to unnerving and that was with me carefully removing pieces I thought were problematic.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#363I was never dismissive, it always seemed pretty cool at each step
Maybe in 2024 I was amazed to see it one shot unique snippets of code
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#364Running local LLM in 2023 and I heard folks talking about interfacing LLM to tools. I wrote a system prompt and told LLM it can call some tools. If it wants to call a function to output func(params...) and do so in an XML tag. I provided a few examples, none of this JSON soup we get today. Then told it I'll provide it the result in a RESULT XML tag and it should use that to answer. Wrote up a harness around that and I had a local model interacting with the outside world. Oh wow! Everything else today about MCP, Agents is all an extension of that thought. Using function calling, I built an agent. I defined a data structure that represent rooms and how they are connected. The room will be marked as dirty or clean. Then I would place the agent in a room and the agent will decide if to go left, right, down or up and into a room. Once it got into a room, it would decide if to clean it or go to the next room. Repeat until all rooms are clean. Basic toy of CS101 AI vacuum agent. It worked!
So being able to get real world input/output to the model and having the model being able to make decisions in a loop and to be able to do it locally. I have been screaming like a mad man ever since.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#365I 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…
>Claude walked me through examining the some of the original software in GHIDRA,
I wanted to be able to decrypt the files on The Complete New Yorker magazine DVDs. The old software was WinXP only, and crashed by the time you turned to page 3 or 4. It walked me through using Ghidra on the relevant dll, mapped out how it was using Blowfish, what the credentials were that it was passing, and re-implemented all of that in a python script.
Now all the files are in plain pdf.
Right now, it's helping me write an extension to the mkv specification for embedded scripts and modify VLC to be conformant, so I can watch Black Mirror Bandersnatch. Already have a buggy implementation, about 3 days in.
I've also had it add BEP 46 mutable torrent functionality to Transmission (and to some extent, to the WebTorrent library).
These are all well beyond my abilities to do casually, and probably beyond my ability to do even if I spent the next 18 months doing nothing by grinding away at it.
I only replied because I thought it curious that Claude apparently favors Ghidra.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#366[flagged]
What was?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#367I had bought some Anthropic credit and waited a year to use it. The week before their expiration I fired up Code and spent $3 the first day and the remaining $22 the next day.
Putting a ReAct loop with tool calls in my terminal wad and is the biggest a-ha since I learned to make compilers, and before that, how to code.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#368I helped train some of the first "magic" models at OpenAI[1] and it was a wild ride. We were a pretty sane + skeptical team and we weren't totally convinced the models were as general as they seemed, but the query that convinced me (and later got included in the paper[2]) was "Why is it important to eat socks after meditating?" (something that almost certainly did not appear on the internet before).
An interesting follow up would be when did you realize GenAI wasn't as good as you thought in that "oh shit" moment
[1] co-author of InstructGPT/RLHF/ChatGPT
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly, I used gen ai to review a real estate purchase. I provided Zillow listing photos and serial numbers of all appliances, the electric panel, and a few additional not pictured areas that I took during the walk through. I prompted the AI to write a report as if it were a home inspector and it actually did a better job and identified some issues the paid 750 usd inspector missed.
From pictures alone? What are some examples?
It noticed a flooding area due to low grass by the walkout door. It noticed mixed 15 and 20a receptacles on the same circuit. It noticed warped siding and recalled circuit breakers still in use.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#370Running ComfyUI and some ImageGenAI and realising how you can use it to generate anything from any aspect of pr0n and various fetishes to making up fake news about basically anything. And real enough to convince the masses.