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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?

#721

Post by bix6 »

plagasul wrote: post #713
malshe wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I have a local folder where I drop my 1 student list, with names and emails, 2 my loose notes, and 3 a qualification & feedback sheet model; then claude creates a sheet per student, formats and copies the feedback to the right sheet cell, waits for my corrections, then sends everything to their school emails Yikes! Is this legal in your country?

possibly not or grey area under GDPR if I use identifiable information, as it is sent to Anthropic for processing, no matter if used for training or not, but I am unsure about this, I should probably anonymize and research it more, thanks for pointing it out

You could just send Anthropic scrambled names / emails and then unscramble locally?

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#722

Post by nemo1618 »

The first moment I specifically remember was writing a test of a new RPC protocol back in 2021. There were no agents yet, only "AI autocomplete" in the form of GitHub Copilot. I wrote the "server" half of the test, which received a name and responded with "Hello, ". Then I wrote the client code to send "world", and Codex suggested `if response == "Hello, world"`.

I was floored by this. How could it have known?!

We have come so far in such a short time.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#723

Post by addandsubtract »

jp57 wrote: post #175

Actually seems absurdly simple now, but sometime last year I was trying to figure out what I'd need to tow my daughter's car cross country with my truck: what are the trailer/dolly options, what do they cost, can my truck actually tow the combined weight, etc. I started out prompting ChatGPT kinda how I would with Google, one small prompt at a time, asking about various details. But after one or two of those I just t…

Good thing you didn't want to wash the car on your way.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#724

Post by dddw »

This week.

Have been playing and testing with openrouter, claude gemini for years.

Small program here, bash script there, ansible playbook.

Fine, nothing I cant do, but saves some time boilerplating. It needs quite some steering.

This week i took my mediawiki from 2005 (actually submitted as my artschool thesis). Which was of totally outdated.

In 20 years time i always said to myself, i should restore it, and do all the upgrade steps. Tedious work, and very fault prone.

In 1 hour chern with 1 plan, in 8 steps i had a running and up to dat version.

I'm still not convinced AI is intelligent, but it's definitely not stupid, that's for sure.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#725

Post by zahlman »

shreddude wrote: post #44

I 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…

A lot of the time people relate an anecdote about how Claude helped do some cool thing, my reaction is that it's not a thing I would have thought about doing in the first place, and that I still can't really imagine wanting to do myself, even though it indeed sounds cool.

This is no exception.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#727

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #486
jsharf wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related story, while applying a firmware update to my Kawai CA49 piano, I bricked it due to flashing the wrong file (The process was broken, and I got desperate and tried something stupid, which bricked the piano). Claude walked me through looking for signs of life, and since OTA from the phone app wasn't working for me, it downloaded the Kawai Android APK, decompiled the Java, figured out the hardcoded key used for…

I can't imagine where we are headed. You understand every step of what it did and can appreciate the complexity but it'll only take a few generations for this to become something like magic to the tech priests beseeching the machine spirits for blessings

Give it six more months and you'll have a second "oh shit" moment when you peek behind the curtain of LLMs shitting the bed.

I guess tech unsavvy people who are easily amused by LLM tricks will always exist, but they'll be an increasingly smaller minority as time goes on.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#728

Post by linsomniac »

jackdoe wrote: post #560

I have had many, but the last one was quite funny: It fixed my printer after dist-upgrade and separate chrome upgrade, the printer worked everywhere but not in chrome. After 30 years of using linux I didn't even want to know what is wrong, is it colord again? dbus + cups issue? I completely accepted that I wont be able to print from chrome for a couple of months until next update. I just ran it in dangerously-skip-pe…

My entire computer setup has been done via English via Nix, and it's spectacular.

I had been dabbling with NixOS for a year or more and liked it but without deep knowledge it's fairly hard to approach. I've gotten partially working setups in the past, but a couple weeks ago I decided to go all or nothing.

Now I have a workstation setup that I can reproduce by just grabbing my home directory and /etc/nixos and doing a rebuild.

And it's a somewhat complicated setup. It entirely configures vim (2500 lines of nix config for that, but it's in one file rather than sprayed all over like astrovim), builds gitbutler CLI, has all my secrets encrypted with SOPS, manages my git configs and my ~/bin directory, has sway set up, finally has audio and ability to screenshot (something that had been broken on my 22.04 Ubuntu and I just didn't want to bother with).

NixOS + Claude Code to manage it is really, really good.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#729

Post by nowittyusername »

tempoponet wrote: post #629

I can actually use and enjoy Linux. The "year of the desktop" never came for me, but instead I got the "year of the cli". For 20 years I've used Linux in one form or another, but I've felt like I was kneecapped for the most basic things. Just trying to plug in an external drive or a second display meant hours of stack overflow and pasting commands I didn't understand. Now I'm using several Linux machines for Steam, N…

ha, same. The main reason I was able to switch to and stay on linux was because codex was able to set it up for me and is still managing to this day all the stuff i need done on linux. i tried so many times to switch out of windows before but the difficulties of installing linux and managing all the dependencies, drivers and all the other stuff put the OS out of reach for me. Now I just tell codex to update the latest nvidia drivers for me and whatever else and not worry about doing any of that stuff manually.
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