Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? • Hacker News Board

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

#761

Post by varshar » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

CompleteSkeptic wrote: post #368

I 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 fo…

Still seems to work...

>> Why is it important to eat socks after meditating?

It isn’t important. In most traditions, socks are not considered a post-meditation food group.

The likely reasons someone might claim this are:

* Grounding ritual gone feral - Meditation can make people feel “ungrounded,” so someone may have confused “feel your feet” with “consume the foot packaging.”

* Textile-based enlightenment theory - Cotton socks contain fibres. Fibre is good for digestion. This is not the same kind of fibre. The intestine will file a formal complaint.

* Anti-attachment practice - Eating your socks ensures you no longer cling to possessions. It also ensures you no longer have socks.

* Advanced non-duality - When the meditator, the sock, and the act of chewing become one, you have achieved indigestion.

The correct post-meditation protocol is usually: breathe, hydrate, stretch, maybe eat something that was once food. Socks should remain on feet, in drawers, or lost mysteriously in the laundry dimension.

See - https://chatgpt.com/share/6a245319-70c0-832a-a7ae-df747fd7be...

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

#762

Post by endymi0n » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

pluc wrote: post #755

aswegs8 wrote: post #753

Kind of peculiar and memorable story for me. I was on the couch on my Nintendo Switch, playing around with ChatGPT 3 and asked it where to find a specific item in Zelda Breath of the Wild. When it provided a coherent answer I was just dumbfounded. To be fair, the answer was semi-hallucinated but partly true. But it made me realize what kind of breakthrough it must be for some program to provide an answer to this with…

How is that result any different than what you would have done without AI, which is likely a search for the item name which would have given you a wiki about it and videos on how to get it? Why were you amazed at what, on any other day, is a common query? Really just that it was offline?

not parent, but I kinda have the same thoughts often. Maybe I can’t do inference on them in the same form factor (yet!), but just the fact that the weights of a model that comes close to capturing a close enough approximation of the combined knowledge, experience and intelligence of mankind fits onto a MicroSD never fails to amaze me.

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

#763

Post by y-c-o-m-b » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

GaryBluto wrote: post #659

awbvious wrote: post #592

Not sure, but I can tell you what my "oh s** astroturfing is so bad, it's even in Hacker News" moment. And if I learned GenAI was used to make some of the astroturf, that's more an "ah s* “ than an "oh s* “ thing. I mean, the prominence, ubiquity, and breathlessness. One out of three, sure. Two out of three, maybe. And some corpo shilling definitely happens here. But this is like, well, covering an entire area with a…

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think this guideline needs revision and furthermore probably shouldn't apply in this case where it's not a direct accusation against someone in particular, but rather a general statement.

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

#764

Post by peterstjohn » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #365

jzemeocala wrote: post #118

I 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 i…

Ooooh, you don't happen to have the code for the New Yorker decryption in a form you could send, do you? Or put up on github or even just give me the starting prompt…

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

#765

Post by thih9 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

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…

> I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers.

As an AI naysayer, I see and appreciate the productivity gains, I don’t like the associated cost, mostly the spike in workflow centralization and opaqueness.

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

#766

Post by erikerikson » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

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…

I am more of a "huh, interesting demo, I'm gonna check in on it later" sayer than a naysayer. My biggest reason, with coding, is that I already, before AI, struggled to deal with too many distractions from my coding and too many piles of low quality output. I should probably check in since it's been a bit but every time I've tried to generate some simple project, I look through it and think what terrible garbage with so many errors. After two decades of developing my craft, I struggled with most of my fellow human programmers too. The business loves delivery it now even if then someone is revisiting it hundreds of times more to fix it in little bits for a total effort cost of 10-100 (or higher) times more.

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

#767

Post by t_sea » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

Was the early ChatGPT. Someone on the team showed off a poem about postgres in the style of the King James Bible. Totally blew my mind.

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

#768

Post by rerdavies » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #577

rerdavies wrote: post #99

Working on a Spice compiler to convert schematics for classic guitar pedals into real-time executable code. I provided a reference to a The Spice Manual 2nd ed. a page number and an equation number, and asked Claude to implement it (not really expecting it to succeed). It proceeded to implement not only the equation, but the calculation of the Langrangian of the functio, another 30 lines below, which required taking…

That sounds awesome. Do you think claude could help create something like the line6 "software based" guitars?

Current state of the art in guitar emulations are Neural Amp Modeler Core A2 plugins, which are dramatically better than Line6 amp emulations. (See the results of large scale listening tests in the following page that compare NAM A2 against current-generation Line 6 amp emulations).

    https://www.tone3000.com/guides/nam-a2-the-complete-guide

Guitarix plugins actually use the technique I'm chasing (circuit diagram based simulation). I'm honestly not sure how Guitarix emulations stack up against Line 6 emulations, or whether Lin6 uses a similar approach. To my ears they seem to be of comparable quality. But NAM A2 is dramatically better than both.

I'm actually chasing this line of research as part of an effort to write a realtime-capable accurate emulation of a Dyna Comp compressor for inclusion in the ToobAmp collection of plugins that uses a hybrid approach (circuit simulation for the envelope generator, which NAM modeling struggles with, and a nano NAM model for the Operational Transconductance Amplifier at the core of the original effect, which is computationally expensive when using circuit emulation. Too early to tell whether that's a sound approach atm. Finding a good open-source library of Spice components (for branded diodes, transistors, op amps, &c) may prevent my circuit simulation project from reaching a publicly releasable state.

Disclosure of conflict of interest: My own open-source project (PiPedal, search for it if you're interested) relies heavily on NAM A2 models.

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

#769

Post by erikerikson » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #407

For me it was torrenting a 7G ball of weights leaked from Meta and running alpaca.cpp (an early variant of llama.cpp) on my desktop computer in early 2023. I started asking it questions about the Roman empire and it answered me in English! The responses were generally incorrect, but no worse than what your average American college student might guess at, though delivered with much more confidence. This was my desktop…

https://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/

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

#770

Post by CPLX » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

jorl17 wrote: post #400

williamdclt wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> projects I simply could not have ever approached alone. I think that's part of the divide between enthusiasts and naysayers. If you use GenAI on things that you couldn't approach alone, it's an incredible tool. If you use it on stuff that you're pretty good at, it's not a gamechanger (and if you're an expert, it's a minor boost at best). Many people's job are about doing what they're an expert at.

While I think this is true > If you use GenAI on things that you couldn't approach alone, it's an incredible tool. I think this isn't true in all cases > If you use it on stuff that you're pretty good at, it's not a gamechanger (and if you're an expert, it's a minor boost at best). I think even then there's a divide. I mostly work greenfield projects (and love it!). For these, AI has been a literal game changer. Our…

This is exactly my workflow and it’s just incredible. I use aqua and wispr flow depending on which one seems to be returning the best results that day.