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For my workflow I need both, a permanent-ish VM and emphemeral sandboxes. Both have their place and pros and cons. VMs are better for personal assistant work,

by mgw 12d ago

For my workflow I need both, a permanent-ish VM and emphemeral sandboxes. Both have their place and pros and cons. VMs are better for personal assistant work, GUI clicktesting, investigating bugs in your personal dogfooding dev instance and anything you haven‘t yet made repeatable and fast to set up. Sandboxes are better when you need resource isolation or security and have a graph of tasks to work through. My agents often starve each other on one VM, so if they don‘t need any of the above it‘s just easier to isolate them. Everyone is working in this area, including me [0], but either option really isn‘t that convenient to use yet. It‘s a bit of a „isn‘t Dropbox just FTP on a VM“ moment right now. [0] https://github.com/madeinorbit/podium https://github.com/madeinorbit/podium

TeMPOraL 12d ago
> It‘s a bit of a „isn‘t Dropbox just FTP on a VM“ moment right now. Since this is not the first mention of Dropbox I've seen in HN threads in the last 48 hours: Let's not forget that Dropbox was at its best when it was "just" a streamlined ftpd over sshfs or whatever - when it was just "a folder that syncs". That didn't last long, the downfall started with them killing their most useful accidental feature[0], which started them on a path of enshittification[1], which they followed swiftly and diligently into complete irrelevancy they enjoy today. So if the agentic tooling is now enjoying its "Dropbox moment", I implore people working on these tools, don't overdo it. -- [0] - The "Public" folder initially supported direct linking, meaning you could publish static web sites by simply putting them in Dropbox/Public/, you could update the files there and changes were immediately "live". Notably, this was the heyday of phpBB and similar discussion boards, back between the rise and subsequent fall of free image hosting - so the ability to put images in your Dropbox/Public/ and hotlink them in a discussion was extremely useful and popular way to use the service. [1] - They didn't just kill direct links, they replaced them with what I consider to be OG enshittification pattern - captive page that asks you to press a button to download. Yes, same one every "synced drive" service offers now, to enable various functionality that's 99% harmful to the user with the link.
- pmontra 12d ago
  Maybe I knew how they explained the change back then but I forgot about it. If I must take a guess now, maybe their legal office had a word with marketing about the risk of becoming a publisher, with responsibility for what their users shared publicly on the internet.
  - TeMPOraL 12d ago
    Perhaps. This was also before CDNs were a thing, so they may have decided they can't afford to be one, as more and more people discovered just how versatile the Public/ folder is. Either way, this was the peak of Dropbox; after shutting down direct Public/ links, it was still useful for its main job as seamless cross-machine, cross-platform "folder that syncs", but gradually lost market share as OneDrive and Google Drive became more broadly useful (and had the advantage of being first-party on their respective platforms), and then Dropbox the company itself lost focus and tried a bunch of failed pivots in the direction towards cloudification, away from "just syncing files". End result for end users? We now have zero options for bullshit-free, file-first, seamless "folder that syncs" experience for non-tech users (techies that like fiddling with things have Syncthing). Only cloud-first options remain, and they're full of footguns and enshittified to the core (which becomes apparent the moment you want to share a file outside of the vendor's cloud ecosystem).

by mgw 12d ago

TeMPOraL 12d ago

> It‘s a bit of a „isn‘t Dropbox just FTP on a VM“ moment right now. Since this is not the first mention of Dropbox I've seen in HN threads in the last 48 hours: Let's not forget that Dropbox was at its best when it was "just" a streamlined ftpd over sshfs or whatever - when it was just "a folder that syncs". That didn't last long, the downfall started with them killing their most useful accidental feature[0], which started them on a path of enshittification[1], which they followed swiftly and diligently into complete irrelevancy they enjoy today. So if the agentic tooling is now enjoying its "Dropbox moment", I implore people working on these tools, don't overdo it. -- [0] - The "Public" folder initially supported direct linking, meaning you could publish static web sites by simply putting them in Dropbox/Public/, you could update the files there and changes were immediately "live". Notably, this was the heyday of phpBB and similar discussion boards, back between the rise and subsequent fall of free image hosting - so the ability to put images in your Dropbox/Public/ and hotlink them in a discussion was extremely useful and popular way to use the service. [1] - They didn't just kill direct links, they replaced them with what I consider to be OG enshittification pattern - captive page that asks you to press a button to download. Yes, same one every "synced drive" service offers now, to enable various functionality that's 99% harmful to the user with the link.

pmontra 12d ago
Maybe I knew how they explained the change back then but I forgot about it. If I must take a guess now, maybe their legal office had a word with marketing about the risk of becoming a publisher, with responsibility for what their users shared publicly on the internet.
- TeMPOraL 12d ago
  Perhaps. This was also before CDNs were a thing, so they may have decided they can't afford to be one, as more and more people discovered just how versatile the Public/ folder is. Either way, this was the peak of Dropbox; after shutting down direct Public/ links, it was still useful for its main job as seamless cross-machine, cross-platform "folder that syncs", but gradually lost market share as OneDrive and Google Drive became more broadly useful (and had the advantage of being first-party on their respective platforms), and then Dropbox the company itself lost focus and tried a bunch of failed pivots in the direction towards cloudification, away from "just syncing files". End result for end users? We now have zero options for bullshit-free, file-first, seamless "folder that syncs" experience for non-tech users (techies that like fiddling with things have Syncthing). Only cloud-first options remain, and they're full of footguns and enshittified to the core (which becomes apparent the moment you want to share a file outside of the vendor's cloud ecosystem).