Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

781–790 of 1001 posts

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

#781

Post by skwirl »

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…

You have joined a year and a half ago, have low activity, and 74 karma.

OP has been here for over a decade and has loads of activity.

You aren't in a position to post this.

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

#782

Post by lowbloodsugar »

IanCal wrote: post #747
angusturner wrote: post #657

In 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…

This is an interesting read: https://ai-2027.com/ I'm not going to say it's a perfect prediction, but I do find the trajectory of "can write something reasonable" to "oh can write snippets of code" towards larger and larger systems feels like it's played out - the common thing I see more now is that people talk of "taste" that the humans are contributing more than the raw coding part. I get what you mean with this ra…

That was a “fun” read. Like Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence [1].

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20527133

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

#783

Post by peterstjohn »

peterstjohn wrote: post #764
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Okay, a couple of hours later…thanks for the hint as that's fucking dark magic ;) and I now have access to the entire New Yorker again after around 15 years :)

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

#784

Post by goalieca »

andrewthornton wrote: post #77

My furnace went out during the 2025 holiday and I couldn't get an appointment with a repair person for 2 days. It was getting very cold in my house so I went into my attic and made several videos of the furnace attempting to start and gave it to gemini. It diagnosed the issue immediately and had me spin one of the components (a small exhaust fan) while the furnace tried to fire. It came on immediately. I had to do th…

That’s an old trick I learned when I googled “my furnace won’t start” back in the day. Didn’t have to make videos. Just scrolled a few handyman sites.

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

#785

Post by maCDzP »

angusturner wrote: post #657

In 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…

This. I managed to run Gemma 4 31B on AMD MI250X for CPT and SFT with Claude. And I have ZERO experience and knowledge of how to train and work with GPU:s. The training didn’t go where I wanted. But I manage to direct the AI to build it. It’s crazy. I am excited and scared.

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

#786

Post by supertroop »

skwirl wrote: post #781
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…

You have joined a year and a half ago, have low activity, and 74 karma. OP has been here for over a decade and has loads of activity. You aren't in a position to post this.

I create a new account every few months. If you think account age = authority, maybe think about that for a minute or two.

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

#787

Post by ls612 »

gyomu wrote: post #344
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…

Yes, those tools are extremely good at reverse engineering. With a bit of know how, it is now trivial to reverse engineer any protocol or crack any software, often in a matter of hours or less. A lot of people in the industry have vested interests in this not being discussed openly so you don't hear too much about it, but the implications are huge.

It wouldn't surprise me if reverse engineering is put on the "highly unsafe" list in the near future in the same category as bio because of these interests. Can't have the cattle classes be able to control their own property now can we?

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

#788

Post by ben_w »

cess11 wrote: post #598

I have yet to have such a moment. To me it is still just a compressed database. Though I am surprised at how these databases turn professionals into amateurs, like when Meta publishes some chatbot that can trivially be queried into sending account resets to any email address or when large corporations just dump their entire secret sauce into some remote SaaS led by obviously kooky people. It's like established pros a…

> like when Meta publishes some chatbot that can trivially be queried into sending account resets to any email address

Or when the Director of Alignment at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs ran OpenClaw and it deleted her inbox.

For me that was an "oh shit" moment in the sense of yet again being disappointed by humans not taking AI risks seriously.

Like, come on, how do these people somehow not know that software has bugs? And that AI is harder to debug than basically everything else?

And yet, somehow, there's still a lot of people who think AI can't possibly cause severe problems despite people like this doing things like this with AI like this.

Post reply on HN