7 ms·
Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
https://xcancel.com/un1c0rnioz/status/2084686552299634805 https://xcancel.com/un1c0rnioz/status/2084686552299634805
- dexterlagan 2mo agoHad this song in my head, wrote some lyrics, hummed it into Suno, generated the song. I love listening to it. What a world. I make little tools like that all the time. My GitHub is filled with these little things I write or gen once never to be used again. Some of them I use daily (GitHub.com/dexterlagan). Since LLMs became decent I make even more of these. The more we move forward, the more people make things for their own use. I think it's cool. I see a lot of naysayers, but man, I have been waiting for this kind of tech since I was 10. Let's enjoy it I say.
- 6stringmerc 2mo ago[flagged]
- dang 2mo agoYou can't attack other users like this, no matter how right you are or feel you are, nor how justified or strongly you feel. Preserving a container for respectful interaction here is more important, and we need commenters to contribute to that, not destroy it. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this again, we would appreciate it. --- Edit: as your most recent comments have all been breaking the site guidelines in a similar way, I've banned this account. It's not ok to do that here. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
- reeeeee 2mo agoI understand your frustration, but I don't agree with the sentiment that AI-training should not be allowed without compensation. If I learn to draw, make music, build stuff, etc. I look at what others have done before me. I don't pay anyone either. Why should the AI?
- jdthedisciple 2mo agoI think devil's advocate would say because using the AI is more like Ctrl+C Ctrl+V whereas if you learn it yourself it's original. Not saying I agree, but.
- catlikesshrimp 2mo agoBecause you as an individual aren't a multi billion dollar company doing the same in all fields at scale. They are walling profiting from any intellectual work.
- claaams 2mo agoAn absolute insane take that I'm not convinced isn't astroturfing. When I download an mp3 of Metallica it's a massive crime but when ai does it millions of times it's just "learning".
- ksifjsjdie 2mo ago[flagged]
- dyzone 2mo agoI gave suno a shot and couldn't get anything good out of it. Maybe a skill issue. Can you share the song it generated?
- aidos 2mo agoYesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess. It’s a funny time to live through. A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden.
- m463 2mo agoI wonder. I remember before emissions, what's underneath a car hood was relatively organized and simple. Then with emissions it became a maze of vacuum hoses and so much other nonsense. then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again. In the other places, they added a second hood to hide the mess. There is some clean code out there, like maybe the seL4 kernel: https://github.com/seL4/seL4/ https://github.com/seL4/seL4/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4 "with an explicit goal of enabling comprehensive formal verification..." (and lots more stuff) maybe we can still have niches like this.
- toasty228 2mo agoIt was simple because it was inefficient and archaic. Reducing pollution is not "nonsense"
- m463 2mo agoNot criticizing function, criticizing elegance of the solution. Eventually with time elegance was achieved again. another analogy would be opening some computers to add memory/ssd/hd, as judged by ifixit
- ssl-3 2mo agoPC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though. I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card. Oh, so many fun evenings working out which devices could share IRQs and configuring software to work around the corner cases that developed. Serial mice, PS/2 mice, plus bus mice of several different varieties. XT, AT, and PS/2 keyboards. The veritable plethora of mutually-incompatible CD-ROM interfaces. A clock card: A whole friggin' card with a clock chip and a battery, just to keep track of wall time. (And the software to make it work.) I even remember SCSI, which was famously renowned for the number of goat sacrifices that were required to to make it work. (Except, I remember SCSI very fondly. CD burner, reader, 7-disc Nakamichi changer, flatbed scanner, DDS tape, and a few IBM Ultrastar 9ES hard drives all sharing the same bus? Sure, why not? It worked. But it took some care to get there.) It's simple today. Want more storage? SATA is easy (and everyone will make fun of you, but USB 3 works great for a hard drive in a desktop rig). m.2 is compact, and only has a couple of variations. Video cards -- even multiples of them -- just slot right into motherboards and they don't even have jumbers to configure. Sound cards are forgotten. RAM comes in standard forms that only change once every decade or so. Input devices, basic NICs, and video capture stuff can just plug in with USB. The USB ports themselves can be multiplied using hubs. It's pretty good today, isn't it? Am I missing something?
- spottedmarley 2mo agoClaude is MacGyvermaxxing
- reader9274 2mo ago"Come on Rebecca, you did not lose your phone"
- LunicLynx 2mo agoIf this happens often for you (it does for me) I can recommend a garmin watch. It also can find the phone based on signal strength. If the app garmin app is running in the background it can also play a sound on your phone, but the signal strength part saved me many times.
- visiondude 2mo agocool, that’s like the Phone Buddy app for Apple Watch
- flyinglizard 2mo agoI routinely use the RSSI indications in my UniFi WiFi (thoroughly recommended) to find various kids devices around the house. You go by AP first (each section has its own), then each room tends to give its own RSSI, give or take.
- unqueued 2mo agoI used bluez and bash to lock xscreensaver using some very minimal bash. It wasn't my idea I believe people on the Gentoo forums were doing it. But you can just loop over something like `hcitool rssi "$MAC"` and project it somewhere, there's a variety of ways. I like using dunstify with the -p option to persist on screen. I think it's really impressive what these agents can do, but you should also consider whether you're asking it to burn tokens reinventing the wheel for you, or making a pretty wrapper around a wrapper.
- 59nadir 2mo agoPeople who don't know things are usually very impressed by solutions that LLMs come up with. I saw one recently that was very impressed that their chosen LLM took screenshots of their vibe coded game to check results, when it's clear from what they were saying the LLM could've literally just read the framebuffer instead, and that's trivial to set up.
- burnte 2mo agoThat's because people like me were doing that and writing about it 20+ years ago. Everything from Claude comes from human minds.
- DonsDiscountGas 2mo agoYes, technology at step N is built from technology at step N-1. Always has been.
- asd1287 2mo agoThis is just plagiarism. No new step exists at all.
- burnte 2mo agoAgreed. I love that. I'm where I am because of billions of humans before me cutting paths. Its why I like building for the next generation.
- pessimizer 2mo agoYou're replying with a trite cliché to a comment saying that this particular technology was step N-(20+) being built at step N.
- ksifjsjdie 2mo ago[flagged]
- notawaytothink 2mo agohttps://xcancel.com/un1c0rnioz/status/2084686552299634805 https://xcancel.com/un1c0rnioz/status/2084686552299634805
- chkaloon 2mo agoI did that a few years ago when my wife lost her fitbit in the woods. She knew the approximate area, +/- 50ft. Thick brush. Using a BT meter on the phone led me right to it like a metal detector
- ohthehugemanate 2mo agoI use rssi to find my stuff regularly. There are a ton of android apps to do it. I also use it for room presence detection with homeassistant (using the BLE in my ESP32s and Shelly switches).
- grepfru_it 2mo agoBluetoothctl in Linux. Have done exactly this 15 years ago to find my lost phone (: Also wrote a cheap 30 line shell script to allow playing videos and music to “follow me” from one room to another with well placed raspberry pi’s, 11 years ago
- GordonS 2mo agoWhich Android app would you recommend?
- asd1287 2mo ago[dead]
- 2398aG 2mo agoOP works at a robotics company, hence the inability to use Google search and "git clone" to find dozens of ready made apps, some of them years old.
- Dig1t 2mo agoFor most people talking to Claude is a much better experience than doing a Google search.
- marcosdumay 2mo agoLLMs are a much better experience than what web search has become nowadays. And they probably are a better experience than what standard search could ever be. But yeah, that doesn't mean they are doing much more than search.
- Dig1t 2mo agoWell I'm saying that asking Claude is a much better experience than the old Google search style of looking at 10 blue links. They are doing more than search insofar as they are: 1. Reasoning about your question and trying to identify intent 2. Doing the search and accessing multiple search results for you 3. Formatting a response based on your intent and in the way you specify This is collapsing many steps that humans used to have to do on their own. It's more ergonomic, and gets to a better answer, faster.
- yndoendo 2mo agoGoogle search as become nothing more than a shitty AI by design. Alternative search engines are the only means to actually navigate. I can still find core material using an alternative. Don't worry, Google is now embedding that AI into Android's core. Rinse and repeat, expect the same results.
- therein 2mo agoYeah it is pretty bizarre. On Android nowadays, when you click on some article that pops up as a notification, it takes you to Google and does an AI query to fetch you the article and then you see the content in Google. I hate it.
- speedgoose 2mo agoYes you can do that. It’s a standard feature on my Garmin watch. I can access it in a few button presses, sometimes two if it’s the last action I used.
- varjag 2mo agoSo GIMP kept crashing on me when importing 48 bit TIFFs. I threw a trace at Codex (without so much as a local GIMP repo) from which it figured out that the culprit was thumb preview handling code. It suggested turning off two non-obvious to me options that would circumvent that codepath it indeed worked.
- pengaru 2mo agoIt's not like this is an unknown gimp problem - conventional search turns up plenty of results describing this class of bugs and advising to disable the previews.
- hollow-moe 2mo agoYou don't need to give it a local repo to work from, it'll just hammer the forge web interface to look at the code :)
- varjag 2mo agoI know and that's what it did. This is just to point how minimal effort from my side it have been.
- sixothree 2mo agoI've had nothing but trouble with Mouse Without Borders on my Surface Pro. I let ChatGPT loose to try and find the reason. It found some wifi power settings that affected it and some other stuff. Those fixed some issues but I was still getting disconnects. It found some events in the event viewer, connected them to an open github issue. So I had it download the code and fix the issue. It eventually fixed two separate issues. And I had it replace the installed MWB with the compiled one on system startup. Things seem to be working great. Also, nothing sucks like Mouse Without Borders holy heck.
- cmyk_student 2mo agoHi! Would you be willing to share one of those TIFFs? If we can reproduce the crash, we can try to fix it.
- tracerbulletx 2mo agoWhile I don't think this is novel I am a believer that AI has changed computing forever in the same way the tweet implies. I now use my own video compositor to edit videos instead of after effects https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/ https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/ use my own ecommerce and landing page builder for my businesses. that I use in production. https://modelpad.app/ https://modelpad.app/ Cancelled by Strength App, Zwift for indoor bike trainer, and strava for running apps and built my own app that brings all 3 together and works better. https://coachsamsyn.com/ https://coachsamsyn.com/ Among about 100 little smaller tools. All of these are released and work. Some of them have other customers. One of them has 1000s. There is absolutely no way I could have done all of this without AI. I don't really consider most of it too be slop, ive been an engineer for 20 years. I care a lot about the details and the underlying properties of the system. I had shipped my side projects years before AI that had real users so I have a good idea of what it takes to ship something end to end that people can actually use. It's mostly about the details and ease of use and the last 20% is the hardest. Some of us know that from our day jobs but it is different when you have to it all yourself and be responsible for every choice.
- green_wheel 2mo agoYeah the ability to build bespoke apps in a reasonable amount of time is awesome. Cool stuff!
- amelius 2mo agoSomehow, on HN, suggesting to use an LLM to solve some problem gives you negative responses. But then ... posting to HN that you've used an LLM to solve a problem is OK?
- profsummergig 2mo agoSeems like the divide between the voters who vote in the Primaries and the voters who vote in the actual Election. Vocal minority vs. Silent majority.
- nozzlegear 2mo agoGoomba fallacy
- twister2920 2mo agothank you, nice to put a name to this phenomenon
- amelius 2mo agoDoes it also apply to the case where you have a single number: upvotes minus downvotes?
- twister2920 2mo agohuh?
- zamadatix 2mo agoI can't say I've seen the same universally, but, if it is s trend, it would seem one invites discussion between humans on the site while the other seeks to minimize it.
- wat10000 2mo agoMost of the responses here are negative. Seems consistent.
- 2mo ago
- gitowiec 2mo agoI have a bad Ethernet cables through unused chimney from my apartament to the basement. The workers I asked to pull it just did it brute force and 2 of pairs are broken. When I was chatting with Claude to see if I can use it somehow to send Ethernet packets one of the Claude responses was to use broken cables as a pilot to pull fiber channel!
- KellyCriterion 2mo agoNice one :)
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2mo agoI tried this in my house that has ancient copper telephone lines. I was trying to get some level of walled ethernet. I wanted to use the existing wires to pull new ethernet as is discussed here, sadly the builders had stapled them to the interior studs when they ran the telephone lines back in the 70's.
- toast0 2mo agoYou can run 100mbps with only two pair, if you have something on at least one end which you can tell to only negotiate to 100.
- bestham 2mo agoThis is true. But you can also run gigabit ethernet over a single pair (1000BASE-T1) often called SPE. The transceivers are more expansive than normal four pair gigabit and the official cable requirement is Cat6A but even if the headroom is lower it will work on lesser Cat levels.
- toast0 2mo agoSingle pair ethernet exists, but it's hard to find products with it. Would be nice if there were more media converters available.
- gervwyk 2mo agoCant wait for it to find my car keys
- videoai34095 2mo ago[flagged]
- edot 2mo agoSo what’s the goal of a bot post like this? If you look at its user account, you can see it has some links to some of its websites which I assume are scams of some variety.
- e12e 2mo agohttps://xcancel.com/un1c0rnioz/status/2084686552299634805 https://xcancel.com/un1c0rnioz/status/2084686552299634805
- nektro 2mo ago> Out of ideas, I asked Claude how I could find it. It suggested tracking the Bluetooth signal strength, then wrote me a meter in about a minute. two sentence horror
- arcfour 2mo agoWhenever I ask an LLM to do something and it manages to 1-shot something ingenious/perfect, I get this weird feeling of happiness tinged with looming existential dread echoing softly in the background.
- justsomehnguy 2mo agoNot a comment about just effing calling your own number from any of the office phones. sigh
- chowells 2mo agoGood lord, the damage LLM use has done to deep thinking is amazing for such a short time. Maybe if it stayed hard to find your phone, you would have put some time into considering the root cause of the problem: you put an employer MDM on your phone. Except, well. Now it's their phone. You just pay for it.
- jeffbee 2mo agoClaude has discovered "bluetoothctl scan on" amazing. Worth every cent.
- owaiswiz 2mo agoA few weeks ago, I lost my bluetooth earbuds in my house somewhere. It was still connected and nowhere to be found. In my case, it wasn't able to come up with it, but fortunately I was, and had it build a local webpage that does "hot or cold" with a 0-100 score. And it worked first try! Found them in like 2-minutes. Also made for a fun day of hot-and-cold hide-and-seek games with my niece after i had it built that concept as a sideloaded ipad app :)
- faidit 2mo agoReminded me of the tech in this https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoMany apps already do that, and the LLM is trained with them (and a million others). No astounding news here.
- tripleee 2mo agoknowing what I know about social media there's a 75% chance this story didn't even happen
- nzoschke 2mo agoCodex helped me reverse engineer the BTLE protocol for a decibel meter. Now I can visualize the volume on the dance floor from the DJ booth. https://github.com/nzoschke/sgtm https://github.com/nzoschke/sgtm
- fdddddang 2mo ago[dead]
- tdhz77 2mo agoAt some point I realize how far I have come as an engineer. I find this solution to be the worst answer. The right answer is to look at the WiFi signal. No coding required.
- fragmede 2mo ago2026, Year of Linux on the desktop, thanks to AI!
- PeterStuer 2mo agoNeat! But why not just call the phone? Was it on mute?
- JanTurnherr 2mo agoi wanted to extract the text of a book on holydays. so i had no flatbed scanner arround.I downloaded the adobe scaner app. it was a desaster. then i just gave the raw images to claude and it extracted the content absolut perfect... it didnt even used to many tokens. its funny but also concering how many apps seems to become completly pointless very fast...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- classified 2mo agoBluetooth? If Claude is so smart, why didn't it suggest just calling the number? But that wouldn't have sold its astonishing ability to miss the obvious and take the scenic route.
- vikramkr 2mo agoFind my exists for a reason. Idk when the last time I had my phone not on mute is. Years? How often do you hear ringtones in public anymore?
- dooglius 2mo agoThere are already apps that do this, I've used them before for this
- agenticworldcup 2mo agoStarted my career in wireless comms back in the day. And I remember wanting something like this, thinking "this is so dumb, the sensor is here, I just need the code to extract the signal". Well now you can just prompt for it.