trapexit

My projects have specific build/verify steps as well, and after a certain point Claude forgets to run them. I’m going to try a “No brown M&Ms” hook to halt Claude if it tries to run the default command instead of the instructed commands from CLAUDE.md. Perhaps this will be a good signal that a compacted or fresh session is needed at that point to avoid mistakes.

You don't need your own rooftop solar. You can time your charges for when power is cheap (i.e. renewables are highly represented in the grid mix). In many locations you can get an electricity tariff that changes by time of day, either fixed times of day or nearly real-time to track the current wholesale price.

Here in Scotland, we have an EV electricity tariff that give us low rates between 00:30 - 05:30 while the wind turbines spin and demand is low, and our plug-in hybrid is programmed to charge during those hours. (We also run the dishwasher, washing machine, and tumble dryer on time delay during those hours as much as possible)

With nearly all of our car trips being local, the ~25 mile electric range the plug-in hybrid is rarely exceeded. We fill the petrol tank maybe once every 3 or 4 months, or when we're on a road trip.

Pure EVs are harder to justify in the UK currently unless you do basically all of your charging at home, because with 20% VAT added to the price of electricity from public chargers, and too-low fuel taxes, the per-mile cost is similar to—or sometimes more expensive than—driving on petrol. It's shockingly bad public policy.

LLMs are not a security barrier. LLMs cannot be a security barrier. They cannot form part of a security barrier. You must place the security barrier between the LLM and the backend systems, the same as you would place it between your web or mobile app and your backend systems. Assume that if the LLM agent can use a service, the human interacting with the agent can also call that service with arbitrary parameters.

The tools you're providing to your LLM agent must never have privileges greater than those you intend to afford to the user who is prompting / interacting with the agent.

You want to use an LLM to make a customer service bot? Sure, you can do that. But that bot MUST NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be allowed to perform any action you wouldn't let the customer do himself. If it can read your CRM, you need to scope that access to exactly the same access you'd be willing to give the customer directly. Can it cancel orders? That tool must not be able to cancel any order you wouldn't let the customer cancel himself through your app or website.

Don't treat an LLM as if it could replace a human customer service agent, or a human researcher, or a human underwriter, or a human manager. Never make the mistake of believing that the LLM, with any level of clever prompt engineering or attempts at input sanitization, will be "good enough" at not getting fooled. If you trust it with the keys to the kingdom, in the same way that you'd trust a human with those keys, it's a matter of when—not if—you're going to get pwn3d.

Of course, holding this principle, if your autonomous agent can access the web, you must assume that literally anyone on the internet can call any of that agent's tools with arbitrary parameters.

In American homes, cables are typically stapled to the wood frame construction, not run in conduit. You have to cut open the finished wall surface to change them.

I don’t take on huge IT projects anymore, or ones that have potential to require lots of changes over time.

Used to do this as an agency principal and it involved a lot of time spent managing clients and projects and subcontractors. Drove myself crazy and took a couple years off after nearly burning out.

I look for projects where the software solves a single targeted business problem and can quickly get to “done”. Then the client is happy to pay for ongoing maintenance/ops, so any additional effort I put into the software is around reducing my ongoing workload.

Clients for this work have come almost entirely by referral. See my other comments in this thread.

For ongoing things I do fixed rate or usage based pricing.

For custom one-off stuff, consultancy, and build-out of systems I charge a day rate.

I work mostly in the travel industry. First client 10+ years ago came from a friend who worked as a manager in a large company and needed some special software built to improve his unit’s results - the existing contractor was not good and internal IT did not have time/skill.

Follow on work came from other people at that first client company who knew my work and went on to work at other companies.

I run small outsourced IT systems for SMBs. Web scrapers, reporting, stuff like that. Baisically private bespoke SaaS.

About $10k/mo gross revenue and takes a few hours of work a week (unless there’s a downtime event that needs fixing). A lot of upfront work to build some of these systems though.

Got to $2k/mo in the first month of doing this. I don’t recommend working (as a solo operator) with clients who have budgets less than $5-10k/mo. Too much overhead for too little return in that case.

In what little spare time I have left after my day job and looking after two small kids, I put more automation in place to improve reliability for my clients and reduce my own ops time requirement.

I get leads for this by referral from people I’ve done good work for in the past. But it’s the kind of thing you could bootstrap by direct outbound sales, publishing authority-building content to the right business audience, going to conferences/trade shows, or building a referral network from other service provides.

Significantly more than $200, but we had motorized external screens & shutters put on the bedroom windows. I flashed Tasmota onto some cheap Sonoff modules to control the motors and integrated via MQTT into Homebridge so we can easily set schedules or ask Siri to put the shades up or down.

We're sleeping so much better with the room mostly blacked out (we also have rear neighbors with bright lights, and cats that roam the neighborhood and set off everyone's motion sensors all night).

Having an exterior covering on the southwest-facing windows has also massively reduced the need for cooling in the summer — our original reason for having the install done.

Our bedroom has ~99% light reduction with the external screens, and our toddler's room upstairs has completely opaque roller shutters and gets DARK, which has made for very easy nap times and great overnight sleep. When we ask Siri to wake the kid up, a scene is executed that rolls up the shutters, turns on the overhead light, and plays a happy song on the HomePod. Always puts him a great mood.

Seems to be a lot of stuff flapping right now. I was able to load a client site that was behind Cloudflare, and now not.

cloudflare.com was returning Connection Refused, then error 522 cloudflarestatus.com was returning Connection Refused, now can't even resolve the IP

My guess would be that a router misconfiguration is being progressively deployed throughout their infrastructure.

EDIT: Continues to look like a cascading failure across their network. 1.1.1.1 is now unreachable for me.

Did you file a CA tax return? If not, it sounds like they "estimated" one for you based on your past earnings and when you didn't pay it, they seized the funds.

You should be able to sort this out by filing nonresident returns for the years you were absent. If the state wants to contest the return, then you see them in court. Otherwise they have to refund you.

On the advice of my tax advisors, I've made a point of filing nonresident returns for multiple years after moving out of a state (and out of the USA), even if the earned amount is $0 and the owed amount is $0.

This starts the statute of limitations (where applicable) and it puts you into the bucket of "people who have filed tax returns, which we may or may not audit" versus "people who have not filed tax returns, who we may or may not think should have filed a return".

At the point where you stop filing nonresident returns, you ought to make sure you have essentially zero ties to the state. The nonresident returns you filed should have had a mailing address in a different state. Your drivers license should be from a different state (or expired). You should not be registered to vote in the state. You should not have any bank, brokerage, or other financial accounts with an address in the state. If you own a business, it should not be registered as doing business in the state. No one should be 1099'ing you at an address in that state. Anything that the state's tax board can access in their databases should point to you living elsewhere.

[Obligatory disclaimer that I am not a tax attorney and this is not legal advice. Consult your accountant or a competent attorney as your case may dictate.]

Does anyone know how to tell the FB "pixel" to stop sending the query string to Facebook?

Facebook now alerts you if you're sending what looks like PII to them in the query string, e.g. parameters named "first_name", but after extensive Googling I couldn't find any way to tell the FB code to strip off the query string before sending conversion events back to the mothership.

It's not exactly easy, but with Google Analytics it's at least possible to redact the URL before it gets attached to the transmitted event.

The only thing I could think of was to do for Facebook was to use a redirect (or the History API) to strip the query off the URL before loading the FB pixel, but this will break any other embeds that are relying on query params for e.g. form-filling.

Your co-founder's code is mostly worthless at this point without the continuing involvement of the co-founder. Developers have their own idiosyncratic coding styles, and without a multi-member dev team providing continuity of design, I expect that a new developer would rewrite it as the product evolves.

At the same time ... if you've been at this for 6 months already and you don't have any meaningful traction, you should strongly re-evaluate whether this is going to be a viable market for you.

I once negotiated my rent up. In the tight rental market pre-COVID, I needed a place for my family while we waited six months for the purchase of our house to close.

Our current living situation was intolerable due to unending construction noise next door, and the minimum time you could rent an apartment for was 6 months, so it was a matter of moving right now or being stuck until we took possession of the house.

Found the perfect place, at a reasonable price, and of course there was tons of interest in it. I insisted on getting the first viewing appointment, put in an application immediately, and offered the landlords an extra $50/month on top of the rent they were asking.

So, of course my application was the one they accepted. In this situation, $300 very well spent.

An overboost would have been catastrophic for the mission.

JWST has thrusters on only one side, and to correct for an excess of velocity it would have had to rotate such that its instruments faced the sun, ruining them instantly.

As such, the mission design called for a deliberate underboost, to be made up for by JWST's own precise thrusters. But a more precise launch vehicle means that the error bars are smaller, and they can use a much smaller underboost than would be required from a less precise launch vehicle.