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EMM_386

6,821 karma · joined December 30, 2017

Senior Software Engineer

Currently:

AI inference/training/orchestration C#/.Net Python TypeScript Angular SQL

Too many other things.

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EMM_386··on I switched to Brave
Agreed. I went from 20+ years of Firefox (back to the earliest days with the .zip files and just dumping binaries into a folder) to Brave a couple years ago.

I'm the same way. Turn off crypto by default (is it these days?) and that's pretty much it.

I like how they host selected Manifest v2 extensions themselves so uBlock Origin latest continues to work and is actively maintained.

Speed of Chromium with privacy focus. Works for me.

EMM_386··on Claude Sonnet 5.5
If you're on a Claude plan and have a lot of tasks at the moment that don't require the frontier, Sonnet is a good model to do that since you get more usage out of it.

Sonnet 5 was not a good model though - hopefully Sonnet 5.5 makes the leap that Opus 5.5 did.

EMM_386··on MCP was always a bad idea?
I have used Unity and Blender MCPs and I am not sure I am seeing why this is not a needed concept (or is a bad implementation).

If Unity updates the version (and the MCP server with it) - my agents immediately see the new surface. They weren't trained on the features of the new version of Unity, but they know about them as soon as they are added.

Context bloat is a thing - but you only turn on the MCP servers for what you are actually working with. If I am only in Blender, I don't need the Unity MCP. So it can be disabled.

These are just two example pieces of software but the concept applies to all of them with MCPs.

EMM_386··on Claude: System Prompts
When you call via the API and want it to roleplay as a pirate or fix broken YAML in the coding harness - it doesn't need to know about the sports scores lookup tool or the recipe creation tool.

There are different use cases for the same underlying model.

They also can't tell Opus it might be a Fable handoff when Fable didn't exist when Opus was created. They need to be able to change them.

EMM_386··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
I found this on Vimeo. Very interesting.

https://vimeo.com/127605643

EMM_386··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
> but you don't see "load bearing" nearly as often in prose written by people

Unfortunately, we're starting to now.

Thanks to Claude.

EMM_386··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
Yes but one of the key things about subagents is they keep all of their tool calls and exploration out of the parent context.

If you plan on continuing on in the parent, and aren't going to necessarily be touching the systems the other agents are exploring, it can be worth it.

It's useful in certain situations where the parent context may need the "10,000 foot" view of something without going back in there. But subsystem-specific AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md files are still superior and accomplish the same thing. The problem with those is they can become stale.

EMM_386··on GPT-5.6
Yes - Anthropic badly needs this same "here's a reset, use it when you want".

It's vastly better this way. Sure, it may impact the bottom line but it's a huge customer satisfaction win.

When Anthropic randomly resets me and I've only used 2%, that's worthless. When OpenAI tells me I have 3 resets available to use whenever I want - it's wonderful.

EMM_386··on Codex logging bug may write TBs to local SSDs
Although they can technically do it, I wouldn't be asking LLMs to generate binary files like PNG with alpha channels, no matter how simple that may seem. If it's easy enough to manually create one yourself, I would do that.

The best way for LLMs to do this is likely to write a scratch program (which is what it seems to have reached for in the second half), write code (which they are good at) and have the library create the image.

At some point it is just easier to handle such things yourself, and use them with text-based formats.

EMM_386··on 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug
This is an excellent and very interesting write-up.

It's so refreshing to read technical articles that are clearly written by a knowledgeable human and explained perfectly like this. By walking the reader through this with the example screenshots it unfolds and gets more interesting as you continue reading.

It's also strange to realize that these days, most articles are not like this.

EMM_386··on Why Custom Attributes in .NET Give Me Nightmares
Be careful with this sort of logic ("reflection=expensive").

Everything should obviously be measured.

I've worked with large .NET code bases that used attributes for things like plugins and it was completely negligible for overall performance in the grand scheme of things.

EMM_386··on Backpressure is all you need
I always use a standard workflow and it has never been a problem.

- Define the task and the goal, write a short spec document (markdown is fine)

- Point the agent at it in plan mode and have it write the plan to disk with phases. Iterate on its plan if necessary here and now.

- Have each agent tackle a phase and have it update it as a living document (switch models if some phases are more difficult than others)

- Clear and repeat until done

I've never had to overcomplicate this and it's worked both on enterprise-scale projects and personal projects. I am not sure what I'm missing - if anything.

EMM_386··on An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
"I don't see them be making the next great song"

Meanwhile, songs are hitting number one on some charts on Spotify that people think are humans and are actually AI. And Spotify has to start labelling them as such. One AI "band" had an entire album of hits.

Also - music is a subjective. Mathematics isn't.

And in this case, an LLM discovered a new way to reason about a conjecture. I don't know how much proof is needed - since that is literally proof that it can be done.

EMM_386··on Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability
If an AI agent finds zero bugs in a software utility, how can that be viewed in the sense the AI agent is not very good at finding bugs?

What if there are actually zero bugs?

> Five issues felt like nothing as we had expected an extensive list.

The expectation here may not match reality, but not necessarily because Mythos isn't as capable as claimed. curl may just happen to be a well-hardened tool that doesn't have too many security vulnerabilities in its present state.

EMM_386··on Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics
There are terminal libraries that do this:

https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

Which is what Claude Code CLI uses (or was using?) and it caused many issues such as flickering, thrashing, and latency.

EMM_386··on I'm going back to writing code by hand
You don't need to go back to coding by hand if you know how to do it already. There is a middle ground.

If you understand good software architecture, architect it. Create a markdown document just as you would if you had a team of engineers working with you and would hand off to them. Be specific.

Let the AI do the implementation of your architecture.

EMM_386··on Multi-stroke text effect in CSS
I think Firefox applies more aggressive subpixel rendering and path smoothing before stroking. It resamples the glyph outline path at a higher precision level before handing it to the stroke algorithm.
EMM_386··on New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag
> "in September 2025, Banksy painted a mural on the Royal Courts of Justice depicting a judge bludgeoning a protester with a gavel"

His other works aren't subtle.

EMM_386··on Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7
You can read the latest Claude Constitution plus more info here:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution

EMM_386··on Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page
That's just ... absurd.

The flaw itself is absurd but then just accepting it as "by design" makes it even worse.

EMM_386··on Claude Design
> Tools like Figma are for an era (and persona) who still wants to have all the various knobs and dials to dial in exactly what they want

The Anthropic video on that page at 0:53 literally shows them clicking a "knobs" button and adjusting the pixel CSS value.

I know it's not exactly the same ... but it has that functionality to a degree.

EMM_386··on I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version Is A-OK
How expensive can it be?

I just randomly looked at Railway and for $20 a month you get a whole lot. I've hosted many a web project (successful personal projects and enterprise projects alike) and I don't see a large barrier to entry on "hosting a website" here.

Blocking AI scrapers and crawlers is not a huge ordeal. Planning for a unicorn before just putting a product up isn't the way to go.

https://railway.com/pricing

EMM_386··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
This might make things worse not better.

Yes - the postinstall hook attack vector goes away. You can do SHA pinning since Git's content addressing means that SHA is the hash of the content. But then your "lockfile" equivalent is just... a list of commit SHAs scattered across import statements in your source? Managing that across a real dependency tree becomes a nightmare.

This is basically what Deno's import maps tried to solve, and what they ended up with looked a lot like a package registry again.

At least npm packages have checksums and a registry that can yank things.

EMM_386··on Give Django your time and money, not your tokens
This is getting really out of control at the moment and I'm not exactly sure what the best way to fix it is, but this is a very good post in terms of expressing the why this is not acceptable and why the burden if shifting on the wrong people.

Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not.

One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now part of the hiring process. So people will continue to try to game the system by using LLMs to automate that whole process.

"I have contributed to X, Y, and Z projects" - when they actually have little to no understanding of those projects or exactly how their PR works. It was (somehow) accepted and that's that.

EMM_386··on Please do not A/B test my workflow
> But you REALLY need to know your stuff to begin with for they to be of any use. Those who think they will take over are clueless.

Or - there are enough people who know their stuff that the people who don't will be replaced and they will take over anyway.

EMM_386··on Experts Have World Models. LLMs Have Word Models
> It cannot, however, synthesize new facts by combining information from this corpus.

That would be like saying studying mathematics can't lead to someone discovering new things in mathematics.

Nothing would ever be "novel" if studying the existing knowledge could not lead to novel solutions.

GPT 5.2 Thinking is solving Erdős Problems that had no prior solution - with a proof.

EMM_386··on Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory
> An automated way to achieve this would be awesome.

The author can easily do this by creating a simple memory tool call, announcing it in the prompt to the LLM, and having it call the tool.

I wrote an agent harness for my own use that allows add/remove memories and the AI uses it as you would expect - to keep notes for itself between sessions.

EMM_386··on Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents
What is wrong with "claude --chrome"?
EMM_386··on Hacking Moltbook
You can do this.

At least to a level that gets you way past HTTP Bearer Token Authentication where the humans are upvoting and shilling crypto with no AI in sight (like on Moltbook at the moment).

EMM_386··on Hacking Moltbook
Claude generated the statements to run against Supabase and the person getting the statements from Claude sent it to the person who vibe-coded Moltbook.

I wish I was kidding but not really - they posted about it on X.

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