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atonse 36 minutes ago [-]
I have a similar claude story (much less money though), with the IRS R&D tax credit. The auditing firm initially said we qualify for $0. But then I had claude analyze past R&D reports and our expenses and it found the problem. The auditor had miscategorized our company.
So claude drafted an email even pointing to the right Internal Revenue Code (IRS Law), and specify why we fall under a specific category. The auditor got back to me two days later admitting their mistake and said our company now qualifies for $8k in tax credits. And a few months ago, it identified items in our AWS that saved us $250 a month (paying for itself).
So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially.
nolok 15 minutes ago [-]
To be fair regarding taxes it should be that you get all exemptions by default and the other side telling/justifying you why you don't qualify, instead of you not getting the things you should because you're not sure how to interpret the law or don't know this or that rule exists. Taxes shouldn't be that difficult, and the US version of it seems to be behind even the one I have here in europe (where my taxes are done "for me" for anything non business owner related). If the government is calculating your taxes anyway, they should just give the number to you instead of asking you a number and you better have the same as us or you're guilty of something.
Feels like a system that is deliberatly made to be more punishing for those who can't afford the help or the education to figure things out.
simonh 10 minutes ago [-]
Or punishing to those that don’t pay for software and services to the companies that lobby for it to be this way.
notRobot 60 minutes ago [-]
Claude Code is really good at stuff like this. The other day I tried to recover some images from an SD card that had gone bad. I used GetDataBack to recover files, but they appeared to be malformed and didn't open in image viewers.
I tasked Claude to analyze the files and figure out what's going on, and eventually we figured out that each file had a custom metadata header + thumbnail + actual image concatenated. I had it write a python script and was able to recover all the images with their metadata. It's nothing a human couldn't have figured out, but it was definitely WAY faster than doing it myself.
I've also used Claude in the past to figure out how to break into routers with locked down firmware. It's great at suggesting and trying approaches.
michaelbuckbee 45 minutes ago [-]
I have a friend that just picked up a new consulting job resurrecting an ancient Windows desktop application. No source control, no tests. And it's spread out over a dozen different folders with names like "_old", "_new" and "dates". Claude's doing a tremendous job in getting him to grips with what is actually happening in the application, what's relevant, what's not, what's different. I think it's literally saving him days and days at work.
ecommerceguy 14 minutes ago [-]
I think it would be interesting, once the dust has settled, to do a compare with a less expensive model (time, capital, compute) such as deepseek 4.
locknitpicker 12 minutes ago [-]
> I have a friend that just picked up a new consulting job resurrecting an ancient Windows desktop application. No source control, no tests. And it's spread out over a dozen different folders with names like "_old", "_new" and "dates".
That doesn't sound very impressive. Not being tracked with a version control system is fixed instantly with a git init, git add ., git commit .no AI required.
Covering the app with tests is also something that requires no AI. At most, coding agents can generate characterization tests in broad sweeps, but we are talking about a delta between hand rolling and vibe-coding of a couple of days.
Where LLM shines is helping developers build up an understanding of what is in place. Running /explain on a codebase can quickly provide you with a high level summary of what's in place.
tucaz 36 minutes ago [-]
I did EXACTLY that last night. Was doing by hand for about an hour and got to a point where I didn’t feel competent anymore and asked Claude to take from where I was.
5 minutes later I had almost 3 hours of important footage recovered.
arm32 52 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure data recovery companies are pretty pissed that slightly esoteric data recovery abilities are becoming more accessible for average software devs. They were charging an arm and a leg to remote in and run scripts.
morpheuskafka 29 minutes ago [-]
They still have two important moats: (1) expensive hardware tools (even stuff like SATA write blockers are kind of expensive for what they are), spare hard drive collections to swap failed PCBs, etc and (2) the "nobody got fired for hiring us" edge similar to how everyone calls in Crowdstrike/Mandiant after an incident. If a suit-level manager finds out customer data was lost, they are going to want to call in an expert so they can immediately tell the customer they did, not have the same internal team try to figure it out.
hn937758 11 minutes ago [-]
I was making a long edit in a crappy wiki UI and my browser froze. It would have taken a long time to redo, hours.
I didn't want to take the chance of force closing and losing everything. I used claude code to extract my text out of the browser internals and filesystem objects.
jackconsidine 35 minutes ago [-]
> Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook
TBF the real breakthrough was finding this, though no doubt they couldn't have recovered without Claude
giancarlostoro 42 minutes ago [-]
> Bitcoin trader recovers $400,000 using Claude AI after getting 'stoned' and losing wallet password 11 years ago — bot tried 3.5 trillion passwords before decrypting an old wallet backup
Man. I wish I had a lost wallet worth a quarter of that even, technically didn't need Claude for this, just needed any password cracking software.
ApolloFortyNine 20 minutes ago [-]
Explaining your life to an llm, then having it generate permutations of passwords to try does sound like it would work a decent percentage of the time.
A large percentage of passwords aren't a random string of characters but a memorable word + memorable number. There's existing projects that basically do the same, and 3.5 trillion doesn't really make it clear if one of those wouldn't have worked as well, but I can see it having an above random chance to guess a password.
stavros 37 minutes ago [-]
I'm really thankful I put my bitcoin in a time vault back in 2012 or so. It was inaccessible until about last year, and my $10 is now worth $100k.
Thank you MtGox.
bavell 27 minutes ago [-]
> MtGox
Whew, that brings me back!
I still think about the Bitcoin my buddy paid me for his half of a pizza ~15 years ago... worth 6 figures now haha.
andai 35 minutes ago [-]
Nice, congrats. What's a time vault?
Ccecil 31 minutes ago [-]
It's sarcasm.
Everyone who had coin in Mt.Gox lost it during a hack. A portion of that was returned to the users who had a loss about a year ago.
baggachipz 10 minutes ago [-]
Yeah my 100 stolen bitcoins got me a cool $4k check from the settlement. Definitely made whole by that :|
spindump8930 30 minutes ago [-]
Likely in this case the time vault was the collapse of Mt Gox, which has now recently been paying back holders.
stavros 32 minutes ago [-]
It's something that locks your stuff so you can't access it for a while.
vibe42 42 minutes ago [-]
Many crypto wallets use a key derivation function (KDF) to add an amount of computation (and memory usage) per password tried - to mitigate brute force of weak passwords.
The increase in compute (decrease in brute-force cost) combined with price increases in many crypto tokens means brute-forcing old wallets can become worth it years after passwords were forgotten.
And of course even smaller, local AI models can now easily write optimized scripts to brute-force any given KDF function.
ndr 11 minutes ago [-]
how can that possibly work while supporting offline backup & restore?
ecommerceguy 5 minutes ago [-]
Does Claude turn out to be what 'Quantum' was promised; crack bitcoin? This could be fun.
My_Name 30 minutes ago [-]
I spent a couple of days mining many years ago and got 2 bitcoins. At the time, they weren't worth the electricity they cost to mine and over time I lost the wallet and all information related to it.
I'd love to mine a bitcoin a day on my PC now...
foobarian 25 minutes ago [-]
Think on the bright side, at least you didn't spend 10000 BTC to buy pizza... speaking of which, Bitcoin Pizza Day coming up in just over a week!
Claude ran a ctrl+f on his file system. Groundbreaking. Insane the dude hadn't figured this out for himself considering a few years salary was just sitting there.
altcognito 43 minutes ago [-]
> The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point.
I know that we're all experts in archaic backup mechanisms and the encryption systems they used, but I think this qualifies as doing more than Ctrl+F
Also, it is right there in the article.
41 minutes ago [-]
FlamingMoe 38 minutes ago [-]
Would be worth a lot more if he had done this sooner and put it in the market 5 or 6 years ago.
nl3s 17 minutes ago [-]
BTC was valued at about $50k 5 years ago and about $10k 6 years ago. Now it is at about $80k.
So I guess he might be glad he didn’t figure it out earlier.
TruffleLabs 22 minutes ago [-]
"the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort."
Claude has limits that would make this simple statement be much more complicated-
Via Claude "So the chat upload file size limit is actually 500MB per file (not 30MB as many third-party sources claim - those appear to be outdated). The 20-file-per-chat cap and the 30MB-per-file limit in Projects remain consistent across plans.
The real constraint at any subscription level remains the context window - how many tokens Claude can hold in memory at once during a conversation. "
plqbfbv 18 minutes ago [-]
> Claude has limits that would make this simple statement be much more complicated-
I guess the user simply pointed Claude Code at a local folder containing all the backups and files, and Code went through them via find/ls/etc
Alifatisk 17 minutes ago [-]
I've tried Claude Code with another LLM, it's very good at doing tasks and figuring things out. So this made me wonder, even though we know how good Claude models is, maybe the true value is in the harness now?
afrltp 23 minutes ago [-]
Claude found an old wallet and then ran btcrecover on that. The question is why the user could not find an old wallet with any numbers of Unix tools himself.
Since we are dealing with Anthropic, the entire story could be staged of course.
50 minutes ago [-]
51 minutes ago [-]
josefritzishere 13 minutes ago [-]
OK, that's impressive
triyambakam 26 minutes ago [-]
How did they convince Claude they hadn't stolen it?
SV_BubbleTime 22 minutes ago [-]
Maybe they said they were gay?
sillysaurusx 10 minutes ago [-]
(Relevant; there was a “gay jailbreak” thread a week or so ago. I laughed.)
doublerabbit 21 minutes ago [-]
Claude hallucinate me a bitcoin address with unlimited money in it please.
So claude drafted an email even pointing to the right Internal Revenue Code (IRS Law), and specify why we fall under a specific category. The auditor got back to me two days later admitting their mistake and said our company now qualifies for $8k in tax credits. And a few months ago, it identified items in our AWS that saved us $250 a month (paying for itself).
So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially.
Feels like a system that is deliberatly made to be more punishing for those who can't afford the help or the education to figure things out.
I tasked Claude to analyze the files and figure out what's going on, and eventually we figured out that each file had a custom metadata header + thumbnail + actual image concatenated. I had it write a python script and was able to recover all the images with their metadata. It's nothing a human couldn't have figured out, but it was definitely WAY faster than doing it myself.
I've also used Claude in the past to figure out how to break into routers with locked down firmware. It's great at suggesting and trying approaches.
That doesn't sound very impressive. Not being tracked with a version control system is fixed instantly with a git init, git add ., git commit .no AI required.
Covering the app with tests is also something that requires no AI. At most, coding agents can generate characterization tests in broad sweeps, but we are talking about a delta between hand rolling and vibe-coding of a couple of days.
Where LLM shines is helping developers build up an understanding of what is in place. Running /explain on a codebase can quickly provide you with a high level summary of what's in place.
5 minutes later I had almost 3 hours of important footage recovered.
I didn't want to take the chance of force closing and losing everything. I used claude code to extract my text out of the browser internals and filesystem objects.
TBF the real breakthrough was finding this, though no doubt they couldn't have recovered without Claude
Man. I wish I had a lost wallet worth a quarter of that even, technically didn't need Claude for this, just needed any password cracking software.
A large percentage of passwords aren't a random string of characters but a memorable word + memorable number. There's existing projects that basically do the same, and 3.5 trillion doesn't really make it clear if one of those wouldn't have worked as well, but I can see it having an above random chance to guess a password.
Thank you MtGox.
Whew, that brings me back!
I still think about the Bitcoin my buddy paid me for his half of a pizza ~15 years ago... worth 6 figures now haha.
Everyone who had coin in Mt.Gox lost it during a hack. A portion of that was returned to the users who had a loss about a year ago.
The increase in compute (decrease in brute-force cost) combined with price increases in many crypto tokens means brute-forcing old wallets can become worth it years after passwords were forgotten.
And of course even smaller, local AI models can now easily write optimized scripts to brute-force any given KDF function.
I'd love to mine a bitcoin a day on my PC now...
https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-glossary/what-is-bitco...
I know that we're all experts in archaic backup mechanisms and the encryption systems they used, but I think this qualifies as doing more than Ctrl+F
Also, it is right there in the article.
So I guess he might be glad he didn’t figure it out earlier.
Claude has limits that would make this simple statement be much more complicated-
Via Claude "So the chat upload file size limit is actually 500MB per file (not 30MB as many third-party sources claim - those appear to be outdated). The 20-file-per-chat cap and the 30MB-per-file limit in Projects remain consistent across plans. The real constraint at any subscription level remains the context window - how many tokens Claude can hold in memory at once during a conversation. "
I guess the user simply pointed Claude Code at a local folder containing all the backups and files, and Code went through them via find/ls/etc
Since we are dealing with Anthropic, the entire story could be staged of course.