• Long chats: Avoid dragging out conversations when the previous context isn't needed. Use /clear and start fresh. Claude processes the entire conversation from scratch on every response, so long chats = more tokens every time. Yes, every single time.

• Don't let the agent read entire files: This is probably the biggest waste. Share only the relevant section, or tell it exactly which function to look at, or specify a line range (e.g., "read from line 40 to 80"). Letting Claude read a 2000-line file to fix one function is like calling a plumber to fix a leaky tap and making them inspect the entire building first.

• Be specific with what you want: Instead of "Emoji not showing on all phones, fix that", say "Emoji screen showing black lines instead of emojis when the user selects a custom font." The more specific, the better. Vague prompts = Claude guessing = you correcting = more tokens wasted.

• Start a new chat for a new task if it doesn't need context from the previous one.

• Don't always default to the highest model: Save the powerful models for tasks that actually need deeper thinking. Not every bug fix needs the smartest brain in the room.

• Edit your last message instead of sending a follow-up correction when Claude misunderstands. Sending "no not like that, I mean..." just burns extra tokens. Just edit the message, it's right there.

• Use /context to see what's actually eating up your context window. Eye-opening honestly.

• Put persistent rules and instructions in CLAUDE.md so you're not repeating yourself every session. If you're typing the same instruction more than twice, it belongs in CLAUDE.md.

• Start in plan mode to scope out features or implementation details before diving in. It saves you from Claude going full speed in the wrong direction.

• Avoid thinking/ultrathink mode unless the task actually requires it. Great feature, expensive feature.

• Only enable the MCP servers you actually need. Disable the ones you're not using. No reason to bring the whole toolbox when you just need a screwdriver.

• Use images instead of describing UI issues: Claude Code accepts drag and drop images in the CLI and it really helps for UI bugs. Just don't re-upload the same image multiple times, each upload is treated as a separate file.

• Prevent Claude Code from generating unnecessary docs and summaries. If that's not part of your workflow, add it to CLAUDE.md.

• Set Claude Code to respond concisely and directly. Shorter responses = fewer tokens. Nobody needs a five-paragraph essay about why it changed one line.

• For bigger tasks, check what Claude is actually thinking during its thinking state. If it seems like it's overcomplicating things or missing the point, edit your previous message to steer it before it goes too far down the wrong path.

• When you manually edit the code, let Claude know. Otherwise it won't be aware of your changes and may revert them or make mistakes based on outdated context. This leads to a painful back-and-forth just to get it back on track.

• Provide the library version you're using: Claude will look up the exact docs for that version instead of guessing or defaulting to whatever version it feels like. Small thing, big difference.

• Share the relevant library docs or function reference directly: If it's easy to grab, paste it in. Saves Claude from hunting it down itself and makes sure it's working with the right information.

Currently Experimenting

• When a task requires full context and understanding of something, ask Claude to first read and understand the full flow, then write a summary of it to an .md or .txt file. For future tasks that need that same context, just tell Claude to refer to that file instead of re-reading everything from scratch. Still testing this but it's looking promising.

എന്താണ് ഡീപ്ഫെയ്ക്? ഈ സാങ്കേതിക വിദ്യയുടെ ചരിത്രവും സാധ്യതകളും അപകടങ്ങളും പരിചയപ്പെടുത്തുന്ന കുറിപ്പ്.

നിര്‍മിത ബുദ്ധിയുടെ (Artificial Intelligence - AI) വരവോടു കൂടി സാങ്കേതിക മേഖലയില്‍ വലിയ മാറ്റങ്ങളാണ് നിത്യേനയെന്നോണം വന്നുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്നത്. പല ജോലികളുടെയും ഭാരം കുറഞ്ഞു. ചിലതെല്ലാം ഇല്ലാതായി. സമാനമായി പുതിയ തൊഴിലവസരങ്ങള്‍ രൂപപ്പെടുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു. എ ഐ ഉപയോഗിച്ച് നല്ല കാര്യങ്ങള്‍ എന്ന പോലെ ചീത്ത കാര്യങ്ങളും ചെയ്യാനാകും. അതിന്‍റെ ഏറ്റവും പുതിയ ഉദാഹരണമാണ് കഴിഞ്ഞ ദിവസം സാമൂഹ്യമാധ്യമങ്ങളിലൂടെ നമ്മള്‍ അറിഞ്ഞ ഡീപ്ഫെയ്ക്ക് ഉപയോഗിച്ചുള്ള പണം തട്ടല്‍. സാങ്കേതിക വിദ്യ മാറുന്നതിന് അനുസരിച്ചു തട്ടിപ്പുകളുടെ രീതിയും വ്യാപ്തിയും മാറുന്നതാണ് നമ്മള്‍ കാണുന്നത്.

Read Original

തൊഴിലിടങ്ങളില്‍ എ ഐ നിര്‍മിത ബുദ്ധി ഉപയോഗിച്ചുള്ള ക്ഷമത പരീക്ഷിച്ചുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുകയാണ്. അത്തരം സാധ്യതകളെ കൂടി മുന്നില്‍ കണ്ട് നിര്‍മിത ബുദ്ധി അടിസ്ഥാനമാക്കിയുള്ള കുറേയധികം ടൂളുകള്‍ നിലവിലുണ്ട്. അവ പരിചയപ്പെടാം.

എ ഐ മേഖലയില്‍ വലിയ മാറ്റങ്ങളാണ് വന്നുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്നത്. ധാരാളം നല്ല ടൂളുകള്‍ സൗജന്യമായും ചെറിയ പണം മുടക്കിയും എല്ലാവര്‍ക്കും കിട്ടിത്തുടങ്ങിയിട്ടുണ്ട്. ഒരുപാട് അധ്വാനം വേണ്ടി വന്നിരുന്ന പല തൊഴിലുകളും വളരെ വേഗത്തില്‍ ചെയ്തു തരുന്ന ടൂളുകള്‍ ഇന്റര്‍നെറ്റില്‍ ലഭ്യമാണ്. ഇങ്ങനെ കിട്ടിയിട്ടും ഉപയോഗപ്പെടുത്താതിരിക്കുന്നത് ചിലപ്പോള്‍ വലിയ നഷ്ടമാകും.
Read Original

• Incident Title: Smart Home Devices Not Responding to Pings

• Start Date: July 17, 2025, 18:49 UTC

• Status: Ongoing (will update as progress continues)

• Incident Level: Major

My Smart Home Network

My house is powered by an Omada network that connects a handful of smart devices. These help automate routine chores, keep tabs on which power source is active (KSEB, inverter, or UPS), and keep the place secure with wireless cameras.

The Issue

Despite every device showing as “online” in the Omada dashboard, several went completely silent and refused to respond to even simple pings. This caused:

• Automations started to fail

• Difficulty in controlling and monitoring the device

• Receiving a device down notification in Telegram from Uptime Kuma (If it is a main device, it sends several messages)

• Dashboard status indicators provide misleading comfort

Troubleshooting Steps So Far

1. Basic Checks

• Device Restarts: Tried the classic solution, turning them off and on again. Fixes the issue temporarily.

• Firmware Updates: Updated all devices to the latest firmware

2. Network Investigations

• Firewall & Rules: No Need to check this, the issue seems to start after some time, not always

• VLANs and Subnets: Rechecked device segregation to ensure nothing was isolated by mistake.

• Other Protocols: Verified that, while pings failed, devices also did not respond in their apps.

What’s Next

This incident is still in progress. Here’s what I plan to do as ongoing steps:

• I’m currently at my workplace, and I need to get home and try to fix it from there. When trying to fix remotely, there are so many limitations, especially if something breaks, I had to travel back home to fix that, mostly.

• Monitor the Fixes: Watch for device responsiveness as network policy changes take effect.

• Document All Changes: Maintain a log of tweaks for easier rollback or review.

• Collect Device Logs: Gather diagnostics from each device for follow-up analysis.

• Regular Status Updates: I’ll continue amending this report as the situation evolves, detailing new symptoms or victories along the way.

Lessons (So Far)

• Smart home devices make some tasks easier, but not always.

Stay tuned for updates as I continue my quest to turn the “silent” devices back into smart home collaborators. If you’re navigating a similar saga, remember: sometimes the journey is half the fun (or at least good for a laugh later).

The Emoji world is expanding day by day from SMS, Social Media, to even Git commit messages, How do these simple icons work well on all platforms? Let's find out

A brief history

According to Wikipedia

The emoji was predated by the emoticon, a basic text-based version of the now established Unicode emoji language, and likely took inspiration from pictograms. the term "emoji" in the strict sense refers to such pictures which can be represented as encoded characters, but it is sometimes applied to messaging stickers by extension. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character"); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon are purely coincidental. The ISO 15924 script code for emoji is Zsye.

Emojis is originated in Japan, In the early stages of emojis, Emoji are represented by symbols like :-) for smiley faces, these emojis implemented in Japanese mobile phones in 1997, emoji become increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after being added to several mobile operating systems. Emojis are an essential part of every digital communication this time, in 2015 Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji (😂)the Word of the Year (UK).

A highly influential early set of 176 cellular emoji was created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, and deployed on NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, a Mobile web platform. These emojis become popular day by day, Due to the influence of these companies Kurita's designs were once frequently claimed to be the first cellular emoji, but Kurita denied this in interviews and he said he took inspiration from Japanese manga where characters are often drawn with symbolic representations called manpu

The modern set of emojis is standardized by Unicode. Unicode started standardizing the emojis set to solve the issue of supporting emojis in different platforms, in 2009 the Unicode Technical Committee produced a proposed Unicode Emoji Standard, Unicode 6.0 was the first version with a uniform set of emojis

Behind the scenes of emoji?

Emojis are just sequences of Unicode code points like letters in languages, For example, the popular Face with Tears of Joy emoji (😂) is the code point U+1F602, Emoji code point varies from a single code point to multiple code points, basic emojis are single Unicode code points

Emoji communication problems

Emoji are often misunderstood, This misunderstood comes from different cases

• Misunderstanding is related to how the actual emoji design is understood by the viewer, For example, the emoji Drop of Blood 🩸 has so many meanings it is released to represent menstruation but it is also used to represent donating blood and other blood-related activities

• Rendering issue of emojis, if you send an emojis to your friend but her not support that emojis, on his phone instead of rendering emojis, The device shows s a small square box called tofu ☐

• Another common issue is rendering emojis in different emojis in different operating systems, What? Why did that happen? You say Unicode standardized the emojis in 2009? yes, that is correct, The Unicode standardized the emoji code point sequences, not the look of an emoji, Each operating system vendor (also some of the other vendors like Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, etc) created their own emoji set design and puts their systems. For example,

In April 2020, British actress and presenter Jameela Jamil posted a tweet from her iPhone using the Face with Hand Over Mouth emoji 🤭 as part of a comment on people shopping for food during the COVID-19 pandemic. On Apple's iOS, the emoji expression is neutral and pensive, but the emoji shows as a giggling face on other platforms. Many fans were initially upset thinking that she was mocking poor people as a well-off celebrity, but this was not her intended meaning.

THAT LOOKS STRANGE :)

Different types of emojis

we can classify emojis based on their code points

• Skin tone variations 🏻🏼🏽🏾🏿

Unicode added the support of skin tone variations in Unicode 8.0 in 2015. This is implemented by the Fitzpatrick scale for measuring human skin color. These modifiers are themselves also Unicode code points, starting at U+1F3FB and ending at U+1F3FF (These modifiers are called EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2, -3, -4, -5, and -6). Totally there are 6 skin tones but the golden variant skin tone is applied by default so it has no code point, also not that U+1F3FA is not golden variant skin tone it is Amphora emoji 🏺

Source: Wikipedia

• Variation Selector 16 🗺︎🗺️

There is a special code point that is commonly used in emojis code points, called Variation Selector 16, with the code point U+FE0F.

What is the use of this? Some emojis have a plain text presentation and emoji presentation,