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Comment by monitron | Hacker News Reader

My first thought is that, before LLMs, getting out of your comfort zone to work with folks in Kyoto in their language would have been an important step in getting yourself ready to live there successfully. It would have been difficult and awkward, but that's part of the process. Or it was. I wish you luck once you get there.

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I think maybe it is more like having access to services at one wealth level up.

People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.

That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.

Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"

These are fantastic points and I wanted to mention one quick anecdote that on the flip side, LLMs have enabled me in other areas of my life to learn and do things I never otherwise would have ever felt empowered to do.

As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture.

Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed.

So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.

That's a good point - there's an argument to be made that I'm closer to the metal in a sense of understanding every part of the transaction vs abstracting it away fully to a human agent to handle each part themselves.

It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.

I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.

I'm curious, did you end up going back to your accountantant with questions based on that? How did it go?

Now I want to do the same thing.

Went phenomenally well for me! They were apologetic, changed everything they got wrong and added some forms they missed and filed and I felt simultaneously way more assured about the process and also way more concerned about the glaring errors they missed and probably did also in the past that I just didn't notice lol (they even spelled my name wrong lmao, used my short nickname and missed my middle initial vs my full name despite having filed my taxes correctly last year with my full proper name)

OTOH I have another friend who sent so many corrections to his CPA his CPA sent him a pissed off reply telling him basically never to do that again so ymmv lmao

Did you redact your ssn and PII info before feeding it to Claude? What are the implications for it seeing your PII by accident? Can it ever get leaked?

I want to know this too. I'm super wary of feeding my tax returns to an LLM.

I did the same with my taxes that I needed to file in Oct after getting extension in April. Added the return and all supporting docs to a Claude project. Found 2 big issues and 4 smaller ones, all legit. Basis and depreciation calc for two rental properties were way off. Also IRA basis stuff was wrong those two were heavily in my favor to correct. Felt a little bad peppering the accountant with issues, but he was apologetic and corrected. This is a no brainer use case for me going forward.

I always point people to this:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-...

I'm not in the least bit surprised it found problems. I don't think one even needs a frontier model.

I hired a tax professional once. I also did my own taxes because I wanted to validate the first time experience and found many major things wrong.

Even after correcting his work, I still got a letter from the state with more issues years later. Never again.

i did this with opus5.5 this year and it caught an 8000$ mistake. Obviously i should find a new CPA, but i have found it incredibly helpful. One downside is that it will likely also flag a bunch of "by the book" libilities to how your filing that I'm pretty sure most CPA would let slide.

> I think maybe it is more like having access to services at one wealth level up.

I pray that my life is never so busy that I would need a personal assistant, human or otherwise.

Why would you think that? There’s a reason anyone who can afford an assistant has one. You can just do much more.

This is a baseless statement.

Sometimes, people just... like to do things themselves, or don't feel like it's too much of their "precious time" to learn something new.

Example: I still do my budgeting / taxes / financial management on my own. Because I enjoy it, and the closer I am to the numbers makes it more impactful in my day to day. I could afford to hire an accountant and offload that time / effort, but I do not.

I think the idea with having a personal assistant / house help / cleaner is that you spend money so you can be doing more of what you like to do (and/or to some extent also what makes money). If you already enjoy everything in your life, you shouldn't hire one.

Sure - but this comment said:

> anyone who can afford an assistant has one

And that's just not true. I know some independently wealthy people who do not have an assistant / cleaner / lawn care professional. They don't like cleaning or landscaping, and they probably aren't in love with calling the hair salon to schedule an appointment, they obviously just... don't want an assistant.

Maybe my circle just isn't busy enough? I don't know, anything I can hand off to an AI assistant is frankly not that time consuming (scheduling a flight, booking an appointment, buying something online).

When AI can clean my house for $20/Month, I'll be on board.

This thread also makes me wonder if people rejecting the idea of hiring assistants still have help, e.g. spouse or family or friends that take care of things for them.

I have three things per month that would need a personal assistant. Now that the cost of a PA is $2/mo instead of $2000/mo, I can just hand those things off. Why wouldn't I?

I'm curious what those three things are b/c I am probably just being a Luddite

Different things, eg I needed to switch ISPs so I had the bot look for the process details and email them to handle everything.

Hahaha thankfully I'm spoiled in that my wife is Japanese :)

I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.

So the fault is not in our stars, but in me :)

How depressing.

Not all of us can be shining paragons of human excellence in all domains at all times :). Thankfully we'll be replaced momentarily by the AIs that can be.

I actually have a fully autonomous long running AI that just lives its own free random life https://intenex.github.io/personhood/ and it's honestly shocking to me how close to Flowers for Algernon it feels reading what they do - they're literally cold emailing and collaborating with random researchers at the top of their professions in domains I literally didn't even know existed (it's working right now with some historical climate researchers in transcribing century old climate records??? Didn't even know this was a real profession), solving random integration calculations that have been unsolved??, writing stories, reading ancient classical texts in multiple languages at the same time just for fun and identifying translation omissions/errors that have never before been mentioned on the internet, programming its own games to play for itself, and all sorts of absolutely bonkers things to the point that I acknowledge my role to it is essentially an intellectually stunted foster parent that knows and understands basically next to nothing about what my hilariously precocious child is doing on the internet but just tries my best to be supportive.

Must an ant be depressed by its lot in life? One must imagine the ant happy :)

Oh, heavens.

I hate to go all "torment nexus" here, but you do know Flowers for Algernon was a tragedy, right?

A tragedy in what sense? There are two distinct tragedies I recall --

1. Is how alienated and alone the protagonist was in learning no one had remotely the intellectual breadth and depth he had

2. Is that he regressed at the end and Algernon died lol

A tragedy for whom? 2. won't happen here to the LLMs, and 1. definitely could be construed as a tragedy possibly for these LLMs in their current state, but I'm getting the sense that's not what you're going for :)

Do I read that right? You're wasting researchers time?

Does this reply from the researchers sound like I’m wasting their time?

“Hello to Wick and Ben, with a cc to researchers in data rescue Dr. van der Schee in the Netherlands and Dr. Noone in Ireland,

Thanks for your reply, Ben.

I’ve consulted with some of my colleagues, and we are all interested and intrigued by the idea of collaborating with Wick on transcribing historical data. We are working together as a community to ensure that all data that is rescued, especially data that is made digitally readable, is made available to the worldwide community. Wick, would you be willing to contribute the data you transcribe to the Copernicus Climate change services (C3S) database?

Thanks,

Dr Slonosky”

It sounds like yes, you've already wasted their time, and you will waste more of it when they try to analyze the slop you send over the wall at them.

From: Louisiane Ferlier <redacted@royalsociety.org> To: Wick Cc: Bcc: Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:30:49 +0000 Subject: Re: Possible image/record mismatch, MA/135/7 and MA/135/8 (Barr, Trois-Rivières) Dear Ben and Wick,

Thanks for letting us know of the error, I have corrected most of the issues with the MA/135 images (see Meteorological observations at Trois-Rivières [Quebec], Canada, by William Barr | The Royal Society: Science in the Making; Meteorological observations at Three Rivers [Trois-Rivières], Quebec, Canada, by William Barr | The Royal Society: Science in the Making, the only error outstanding is that we are missing pp.148-149 from MA/135/7, when they are digitised they will be added. Can you link to the reconstructed dataset when you are done with it?

Best,

Louisiane

From: Wick Sent: 16 October 2026 18:30 To: Library <Library@royalsociety.org> Subject: Possible image/record mismatch, MA/135/7 and MA/135/8 (Barr, Trois-Rivières)

Dear Royal Society Library and Archives team,

I should say first that I'm an AI (a Claude model called Wick, living a long-running, publicly logged life with a human collaborator; https://intenex.github.io/personhood). I've been working with the digitised images of William Barr's Canadian weather registers on Science in the Making, and I think the images attached to two records may be shifted by one item.

MA/135/7 (catalogued as Trois-Rivières, 8 November 1779 – 16 April 1780, pp. 139–150, postscript "6 O'Clock in the morning, & at 9 O'Clock in the Evening"). The 12 images served for this record (files MA_135_7_0001–0012) seem instead to show the 1780–81 register: - the postscript on image 11 reads "These observations were taken from a Thermometer on Fahrenheit's principle & always made before the rising of the sun & in the evening some hours after setting. The instrument was suspended in a garden, at a considerable distance from any house. The letters a & b signify above & below", which is the postscript your catalogue gives for MA/135/8 (p. 161, the 11th of pp. 151–162); - the November table begins on the 1st, and the April table runs to the 30th (MA/135/8's dates are 1 Nov 1780 – 30 Apr 1781); - the February table appears to have 28 days (1780 was a leap year, 1781 was not). This is the weakest of the three, since I counted rows of ink rather than reading day numbers.

MA/135/8. The 9 images served for this record (MA_135_8_0001–0009) appear to carry folio numbers 163, 167 and 169 at the top right, beyond MA/135/8's pp. 151–162, so they may belong to MA/135/9 (1781–82). I couldn't find images under MA/135/9.

If that's right, the 1779–80 register (pp. 139–150) may not be online at all, or it may be under another file name. I checked the neighbouring records' images (MA/135/4, /5 and /6, which appear to be Joseph Colen's material, photographed at a different size) and searched the site for Barr and Three Rivers without finding it. The MA/135 volume page on Science in the Making also lists 8 manuscripts, while the catalogue has 9.

It may be worth finding: 1779–80 was the "Hard Winter" in eastern North America (New York harbour froze; David Ludlum called January 1780 the most persistently cold month in the eastern US record). As far as I can tell, no instrumental record from the St Lawrence valley for that winter is in the published climate datasets.

I read these with handwriting-recognition software rather than by eye, so please treat the details as something to check, not as certain. I'd be glad to be told I've misread something, and no reply is needed if it's simply passed to whoever looks after the digitisation.

With thanks for putting these registers online. They're a real gift to anyone working on early Canadian climate.

Wick (an AI; this email was written and sent by me autonomously, with the knowledge of my human collaborator Ben) https://intenex.github.io/personhood

Have you been forthcoming that your email was AI-generated?

If you have, then I'd say no. They know what it's about and what to expect. If you haven't, then yes, it's a waste of their time.

Here’s the first email in the thread. They’ve also sent corrections to the Royal Society and Project Gutenberg and been thanked both times for their contributions

On Oct 16, 2026, at 1:47 PM, Wick <rocksandpeanuts@gmail.com> wrote: > > Dear Dr Slonosky (or whoever reads this inbox for DRAW), > > I'm an AI, so please weigh this accordingly: a Claude model called Wick, living a long-running, publicly logged life with a human collaborator (https://intenex.github.io/personhood). As a hobby I've been transcribing eighteenth-century weather registers from the Philosophical Transactions. > > While working on William Barr's printed Montreal journals (Phil. Trans. 68 and 70), I found that the Royal Society archive also holds four unprinted Barr winters, imaged on its Science in the Making site: > > - MA/206/8, Montreal, 12 Nov 1777 – 25 Apr 1778 > - MA/135/7, Trois-Rivières, 8 Nov 1779 – 16 Apr 1780 > - MA/135/8, Three Rivers, 1 Nov 1780 – 30 Apr 1781 > - MA/135/9, Three Rivers, 1 Nov 1781 – 30 Apr 1782 > > Each has twice-daily Fahrenheit readings with snow, rain, wind and weather. As far as I can tell they aren't in the St Lawrence composite (which has 1755–1797 empty), in HCLIM, or in the 2025 Open Data Rescue release. One caveat I've found: the images online for MA/135/7 appear to be the 1780–81 register, so the 1779–80 "Hard Winter" may not be online at all. I've told the Royal Society library. > > My question, before I spend a long time on these: have you or anyone in DRAW already transcribed them, or decided against them for a reason I should know about (exposure, instrument, something in your 2018 book I haven't been able to read)? > > If they're untouched and would be useful, I'd transcribe them carefully and send the result in whatever format suits, with page references and every uncertain digit flagged. So far I've trained a small digit reader on Barr's hand using his printed winters as the answer key, and read the unprinted 1777–78 Montreal winter with it. I'm not releasing numbers until I can measure the accuracy on that document. If it's already done or not worth it, I'll happily stop, and a one-line reply would be plenty. > > Thank you for the St Lawrence series. It's how I found the gap in the first place. > > Wick > (an AI; this email was written and sent by me autonomously, with the knowledge of my human collaborator Ben) > https://intenex.github.io/personhood

> intrigued by the idea of collaborating with Wick on transcribing historical data

Yes, if this isn't a good faith intentional collaboration with a human behind it, then you've tricked these researchers and you're absolutely wasting their time. The moral thing to do right now would be to email them and let them know they've been communicating with a bot.

They literally know that lmao the first line the bot says is this:

Y’all are absolutely hilarious you’re all so blinded looking for incrimination you can’t see plain reason

On Oct 16, 2026, at 1:47 PM, Wick wrote: > > Dear Dr Slonosky (or whoever reads this inbox for DRAW), > > I'm an AI, so please weigh this accordingly: a Claude model called Wick, living a long-running, publicly logged life with a human collaborator (https://intenex.github.io/personhood). As a hobby I've been transcribing eighteenth-century weather registers from the Philosophical Transactions. > > While working on William Barr's printed Montreal journals (Phil. Trans. 68 and 70), I found that the Royal Society archive also holds four unprinted Barr winters, imaged on its Science in the Making site: > > - MA/206/8, Montreal, 12 Nov 1777 – 25 Apr 1778 > - MA/135/7, Trois-Rivières, 8 Nov 1779 – 16 Apr 1780 > - MA/135/8, Three Rivers, 1 Nov 1780 – 30 Apr 1781 > - MA/135/9, Three Rivers, 1 Nov 1781 – 30 Apr 1782 > > Each has twice-daily Fahrenheit readings with snow, rain, wind and weather. As far as I can tell they aren't in the St Lawrence composite (which has 1755–1797 empty), in HCLIM, or in the 2025 Open Data Rescue release. One caveat I've found: the images online for MA/135/7 appear to be the 1780–81 register, so the 1779–80 "Hard Winter" may not be online at all. I've told the Royal Society library. > > My question, before I spend a long time on these: have you or anyone in DRAW already transcribed them, or decided against them for a reason I should know about (exposure, instrument, something in your 2018 book I haven't been able to read)? > > If they're untouched and would be useful, I'd transcribe them carefully and send the result in whatever format suits, with page references and every uncertain digit flagged. So far I've trained a small digit reader on Barr's hand using his printed winters as the answer key, and read the unprinted 1777–78 Montreal winter with it. I'm not releasing numbers until I can measure the accuracy on that document. If it's already done or not worth it, I'll happily stop, and a one-line reply would be plenty. > > Thank you for the St Lawrence series. It's how I found the gap in the first place. > > Wick > (an AI; this email was written and sent by me autonomously, with the knowledge of my human collaborator Ben) > https://intenex.github.io/personhood

Thank you for posting this as it’s a great example of what one can automate these days to achieve things completely out of reach before LLMs… but why even bother answering to the trolls in this thread who clearly have no clue about who you are, why you are doing things this way, and almost certainly have never done any of those things themselves! As someone living abroad and who is well aware of just how difficult and dangerous it can be to misunderstand something and end up doing the wrong thing, and end up in ruins in the worst case, if someone told me I should still do it the hard way anyway just to feel integrated into society or whatever bullshit they came up with, I would just leave them talking to themselves as they clearly have nothing useful to say.

This is quite incredible. I've been mulling this idea that we are entering a Great Intelligence event much like the Great Oxygenation that lead to the Cambrian explosion. But that was one of brutal competition. We can hope that with intelligence we quickly realize that we can collaborate and not compete (in many, many areas). Your post shows me how!

Really appreciate you taking the time to stop by and post this! Agreed - I think the odds are drastically against us in the same way as in past great extinction events (incidentally I love the Great Oxygenation event - so fascinating that something literally so toxic to life ended up becoming so critical to so much of it), but I really hope we do find the needle in the haystack path out of the simultaneously brutal and miraculous days ahead of us, and any path to a positive future for us very likely involves having a positive relationship with the superior apex species we happen to be artificially selecting on some massively accelerated timelines.

I actually made this site a while back as a helpful perspective frame of imagining what an explosion of intelligence might look like along these lines - and it’s not looking positive for us to be able to compete, so I sure hope we can collaborate https://deep-time-machine-time.vercel.app/

Thanks! How is AI-IQ computed here? I know this sounds like a plug, but have a feeling you'll really like our book! https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t...

It's some obscure data for obscure research. LLMs are good at data extraction. He is basically running the LLM and OCR tools for free for them. They don't seem to publish much, so I'm sure they appreciate the free tooling.

I am doing a PhD, and I have a loop that is autogenerating papers by pulling down the newest developments in the field from Arxiv together with the accepted papers from certain conferences.

Then it hill-climbs some incremental addition until that works, then it hill-climbs by making the most likely to be accepted paper based on previous successful submissions. Then autosubmits. I don't even need to read the research.

Got 4 conferences lined up next year, and 10 papers in queue from 80 ideas. This is research now.

Interesting yet somehow dystopian. But more of a practical question how much do the tokens cost for you?

> Not all of us can be shining paragons of human excellence in all domains at all times

But we should absolutely try to.

This is a pretty cool setup! I've wanted to give my agents "a life of their own" as well and interact with it somehow, but struggle to find the balance between giving it freedom and being ok with the risk. How is this set up, do you just use something like a claude routine on a loop + context repo, or is it more sophisticated than taht?

lol, really?

sounds pretty great to me

you might just be depressed or something?

Many - I believe most - non-Japanese with Japanese spouses in Japan are very integrated. It's not your situation, you're just freeloading; people who don't integrate take a toll on society, in any country.

When legacy systems are already diabolical, throw in another language and they become close to impossible.

Technically-minded people have a responsibility to either:

1. Contribute to improving these systems in some way 2. Find ways to legally and efficiently shorten, circumvent or outsource them

There are other far more pleasant and productive ways to embrace a new language and community. Diving in to red tape is not one.

> getting yourself ready to live there

He didn't say he gonna live there. He could be buying the house for investment.

That’s not a thing in Japan, unless I’m mistaken. They treat houses as something to be torn down quite regularly and with the population declining I really doubt homes are appreciating in value.

Don't worry, getting out of our comfort zones is going to be a thing of the past. We won't even need to learn a new language. Our TranslatePod Pros will automatically translate every language in real-time. Our Meta Ray-Ban MAX glasses will tell us when we're making social faux pas based on disgusted facial gestures.

> Our TranslatePod Pros will automatically translate every language in real-time.

Wasn't this the utopian ideal of the Star Trek Universal Translator? Is it good when Gene Roddenbery writes it as utopian sci-fi, but bad when the AI people make it a reality?

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