The AI brought back code I lost 30 years ago
He lost the source code for his macOS 8 PowerPC programs three decades ago. The AI decompiled the binaries, turned them into a web app, and then converted them to Dylan with OpenDylan.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasCheck my unanswered support tickets and filter my feeds on cron
A self-hoster runs AI cron jobs that sweep the internet for things he cares about, check his support system for unanswered tickets, and browse X and social media to filter the valuable posts - though he admits the X timeline filtering quality is low even on a top model.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI moved his whole wiki to a new server and kept the history
The AI downloaded 28 gigabytes from his old DokuWiki host, converted the pages, links, and images to Markdown, and stood the wiki up on his own server with page history dating back to 2006. The job ran under light supervision while he was out.
An autoformalizer produced a complete Lean version of a 2019 paper
A researcher ran his LLM based autoformalizer on a 2019 mathematics paper and produced a complete Lean formalization of it. The finished formalization is linked from his university page. The note is short, but the artifact is public and complete.
The AI saved a streamer's whole video archive before Twitch deleted it
He had the AI download every video still left on a Twitch streamer’s channel, since Twitch only keeps archives about three months. The AI ran OpenAI speech-to-text twice for about $80, then made an HTML page summing up the public background the streamer had mentioned on stream.
The AI built the HTML editor I could not find anywhere
He needed a free HTML editor to paste in HTML code from the AI, but the ones he found were poor. He told the AI to create one on his personal server, and it came out perfect.
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running; one now hosts a persistent tmux session.
Astra upgraded my old OnePlus 3 to LineageOS 18 in 10 minutes
He let Astra control his old OnePlus 3 over ADB. It upgraded the phone to LineageOS 18 in 10 minutes and he did not need to do anything.
The AI fixes my music library for me through my own tool
He built a small web tool on top of an API for his music library, with an MCP connection. He can ask the AI to check for missing artwork, sort out the genres, or fix the track numbers.
The AI added a chat server to his self-hosting stack in about 20 minutes
The AI with OpenTofu and Docker added Prosody to his self-hosting stack in about 20 minutes; it works.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.