logoalt Hacker News

jorl17yesterday at 2:08 PM1 replyview on HN

Recently, I had bizarre situation: I wanted to play a game from my childhood on Windows 11, but, without changing two booleans in the settings, I could not reliably move my in-game cursor. The catch is that to change those values in the settings, I needed to move my in-game cursor. So I was stuck.

After digging around, I found a file that looked like it could be the settings file, but it was not plaintext.

Naturally, I told Claude all the options I knew existed in the settings and told it what I needed it to change.

After about 10 minutes poking around my system and the file, it correctly identified the bits (not bytes!) that corresponded to the two settings, and flipped them on. It. Just. Worked!

(Well, then I found out I actually needed to do quite a lot more than flipping those bits, but I still found it worth sharing).

I have many more experiences similar to these. LLMs are an amazing superpower.


Replies

txomonyesterday at 2:30 PM

I have a similar experience. I'm playing minecraft lately and I have patched already like 5 issues in the server that I would never put together time to trace/debug/understand/fix, including some o(n^3) integration between mods that was lagging the server. Same thing for utilities, managing backups, etc.

show 1 reply