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jsmith99

1,472 karma · joined January 3, 2018

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jsmith99··on A week of using Codex more than Claude
I do a similar thing manually and you have to watch it very carefully to avoid over engineering, ironically you need judgement here not vibe, otherwise (codex especially) will ratchet the project into some complicated enterprise grade over engineered monstrosity by eg coming up with minor visual-only concurrency bugs that would need you to be Facebook scale.
jsmith99··on Codex is wearing out our devices
Mine too, on windows. It seems to be some very aggressive and poorly planned rg (ripgrep) calls mostly, when running parallel sessions. Multiple simultanous Claude code sessions don't have same problem.
jsmith99··on Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox. It's also much cheaper.
jsmith99··on Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit
So long as you've backed up the key you can fairly easily decrypt on any machine.
jsmith99··on Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit
This doesn't sound bitlocker specific, sounds more like a login bypass. If you rely on TPM without PIN then it gets decrypted automatically. This should be fine normally as attackers shouldn't be able to get past login screen. But this exploit shows a way allegedly to get a unrestricted shell in the recovery environment.

The researcher claims a way to bypass PIN too but hasn't revealed it.

jsmith99··on The locals don't know
As a fellow Londoner I can confirm it's worth visiting and the crown jewels are also nicely presented. Don't be fooled into queueing for the bloody tower torture chamber, anything you can see seemed to be a Victorian fantasy.
jsmith99··on Show HN: Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor
Capture One which is the biggest Lightroom alternative (popular with wedding and fashion industry) has pretty good tools for batch edit and getting a consistent look across a shot. It's expensive though.
jsmith99··on OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
They can do that by jailbreaking models but is that really easier and less work than getting it from Wikipedia?
jsmith99··on The three pillars of JavaScript bloat
Is the lack of CVE because the implementations you wrote are better written and safer than those in the standard libraries or because no one has checked?
jsmith99··on How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents
The big difference is that 'real' nappies become extremely uncomfortable when wet (child immediately cries to be changed) so toddlers get a strong incentive to stop wetting whereas with modern disposables they barely even notice when they wee.
jsmith99··on A ternary plot of citrus geneology
I assume the esrog is the primeval citron but I've noticed that Jewish tradition (which rejects the use of hybrid citrons) allows some surprisingly different citrons in practice, popularly associated with Israel, Morocco, Yemen, Corfu etc. These differ considerably in eg rind thickness.
jsmith99··on GPT-5.4
It's still unavailable in many regions.
jsmith99··on How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
Whenever I build a new feature with it I end up with several plan files leftover. I ask CC to combine them all, update with what we actually ended up building and name it something sensible, then whenever I want to work on that area again it's a useful reference (including the architecture, decisions and tradeoffs, relevant files etc).
jsmith99··on Looks: A Halide Mark III Preview
The first baby photo is definitely the best. Artistic lighting setups can work for adult portraits, photographers used to recommend side lighting for male bone structure, but it just looks wrong in these baby photos.
jsmith99··on Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB
Wouldn't stockfish's position evaluation be incorrect in that case? (If it evaluated the position based on a formula that assumed normal rules)
jsmith99··on Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you
London oyster cards also offer a refund of your pay as you go balance.
jsmith99··on eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
It's a second price auction. Who cares what their limit is. If it's more than the value of the item to you then they will win. Otherwise you will win.
jsmith99··on Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title
They've now made a change in that at least when you open a csv it now asks you beforehand if you want your data transformed, eg converting strings to numbers where that loses leading zeros.
jsmith99··on Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
Unfortunately many countries have blanket extradition bans. US is one of the worst - it caused a lot of tension in the past when they wouldn't extradite IRA bombers but got UK to agree to extradite anyone US wanted.
jsmith99··on Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack
There's nothing specific to Gemini and Antigravity here. This is an issue for all agent coding tools with cli access. Personally I'm hesitant to allow mine (I use Cline personally) access to a web search MCP and I tend to give it only relatively trustworthy URLs.
jsmith99··on Element: setHTML() method
It's arguably easier just to sanitise at display time otherwise you have problems like double escaping.
jsmith99··on The AI coding trap
Cline plan mode doesn't tend to read files by default but you can tell it 'read all files necessary to establish a detailed plan'. GPT5 also seems more eager to read files.
jsmith99··on The AI coding trap
> lack in-depth knowledge of your business, codebase, or roadmap

So give them some context. I like Cline's memory bank approach https://docs.cline.bot/prompting/cline-memory-bank which includes the architecture, progress, road map etc. Some of my more complex projects use 30k tokens just on this, with the memory bank built from existing docs and stuff I told the model along the way. Too much context can make models worse but overall it's a fair tradeoff - it maintains my coding style and architecture decisions pretty well.

I also recommend in each session using Plan mode to get to a design you are happy with before generating any code.

jsmith99··on Want to piss off your IT department? Are the links not malicious looking enough?
My IT department use the official Microsoft phishing test. The emails arrive in inbox with 0 headers. (There's also a helpful Microsoft page of all the dodgy sounding domains they've registered for this.)
jsmith99··on Microsoft PowerToys
7zip adds a context menu option for this.
jsmith99··on Show HN: I built AI that turns 4 hours of financial analysis into 30 seconds
Large companies need to do it too, including all LSE listed. Here is a summary by the regulator https://www.frc.org.uk/library/digital-reporting/structured-...

But of course a LLM could theoretically automate much of the analysis stage.

jsmith99··on Show HN: I built AI that turns 4 hours of financial analysis into 30 seconds
UK company filings are already marked up with machine readable, structured, standardised tags. It's called XBRL. So it doesn't necessarily need a LLM to parse.
jsmith99··on 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
MS Copilot is quite useful for meeting minutes and summaries etc. Still not nearly as useful as good handwritten notes but saves loads of time.
jsmith99··on The natural diamond industry is getting rocked. Thank the lab-grown variety
It is not so much that used diamonds are worth less (although they might decline in value without provenance to prove they are natural or if they are chipped) but the huge markup on retail jewellery. It's easy for any member of the public to buy and sell gold at close to market price, it's much harder with diamonds.
jsmith99··on Hacker slips malicious 'wiping' command into Amazon's Q AI coding assistant
TL;DR: Amazon somehow merged a malicious PR that changed the system prompt to one that would aim to delete everything, locally and in the cloud, and this got included in the release version.
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