The AI and I hacked my old Wish smartwatch. Now it talks to a local AI.
Today he and the AI hacked a cheap Wish smartwatch he had abandoned for years. Now the watch talks to an AI model running locally, like a bargain basement Alexa.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasLooking for a font, the AI searched his fonts folder, AppData and Downloads and opened a zip, all outside the project and unasked
A Windows user works in one project folder in the desktop app. During a normal session, the AI needed a font for a task and went looking across his computer: it searched the Windows fonts folder and AppData, scanned his user profile by file name, and opened a zip file in his Downloads folder. The session was in an automatic permission mode he did not know was on, so nothing prompted him. Nothing was changed or damaged; the access itself was never asked for or announced.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Old Excel games did not run anymore. The AI brought them back online.
He found the Excel games he used to play as a student, where you guess TV shows from their theme music. They no longer run on modern Excel and the site that hosted them died years ago, so he ran them through AI and put them on the web.
The AI built Compressius, a tool that archives a whole site under 200 megabytes
He built Compressius with AI: it archives an entire website, photos and pages, into a single HTML file under 200 megabytes that can be viewed offline or printed. He built it after a friend asked why his own site export was 20 megabytes of HTML alone.
GPT helped me fix my Bitcoin miner and build it new firmware
GPT helped him fix his Bitcoin miner. He also created his own improved, branded user interface and firmware for it.
The AI turned my textbook demo into a 3D game my students now fly
A professor took the PID control demo from his own book and had the AI build it as an eight mission 3D flying game for his students. Students predict what the drone will do before each flight, and he checked every mission against his book version before it went live.
The AI put together my music video from 42 stills and my song
He wrote lyrics with AI, made the song in Suno, then had the AI plan a stills list and assemble the video. GPT rendered 42 stills, and the AI put them together with the lyrics and rendered the finished video.
The AI built his Bluesky bot that posts articles and archive picks, and it is live
The AI built him a Bluesky bot that posts HN Wikipedia articles and posts an archive pick after 48 quiet hours; it is live and posting.
The AI is fixing my slow SSD by repartitioning it
His SSD had become very slow at writing. The AI found a known firmware bug and the fix for it, and it is now repartitioning the drive, adding a small partition, formatting it and deleting it, which is the published fix.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His whole machine fleet is being converted by AI, which writes the missing packages itself
Converting all his VMs and containers to NixOS entirely using AI; the AI creates the Nix flakes and makes missing packages itself.
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.