bjackman

12 ms·

181.
by bjackman 8mo ago
Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor. Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossib
182.
by bjackman 8mo ago
I have a PiKVM attached to my PC at home, so at some point I'm thinking of setting up a crazy demand-scaling scheme where when my underpowered homelab nodes can power up the PC when they need to run a heavy workload.
183.
by bjackman 8mo ago
I have lately taken to this approach when I raise bugs: 1. Fully human-written explanation of the issue with all the info I can add 2. As an attachment to the bug (not a PR), explicitly noted as such, an AI slop fix and a note that it makes
184.
by bjackman 8mo ago
I think the spirit of the policy also allows you to write your own words in your own language and have an AI translate it. (But also, for a majority of people old fashioned Google Translate works great). (Edit: it's actually a explicit
185.
by bjackman 9mo ago
There's more to it than just coding Vs building though. For a long time in my career now I've been in a situation where I'd be able to build more if I was willing to abstract myself and become a slide-merchant/coalition-
186.
by bjackman 9mo ago
My experience is that basic generic agents are useless but an agent with extensive prompting about your usecase is extremely valuable. In my case using these prompts: https://github.com/masoncl/review-prompts Took thin
187.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Yeah I also regularly bring a razorblade (for my old fashioned safety razor). I have got caught once but it's worth the risk of wasting a few minutes. If this was really about security, it would be set up so that just deliberately brea
188.
by bjackman 9mo ago
> It is a luxury we cannot afford Privacy is a luxury we cannot afford? When it was a luxury we couldn't afford because of "terrorism" I was doubtful. Now that it's a luxury we cannot afford because of the "publi
189.
by bjackman 9mo ago
I don't think it's possible? You could imagine some sort of certificate scheme where the govt issues a thing that says to a 3rd party "we certify this person is 18 but in a way that doesn't reveal who they are". You
190.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Ah yeah I've seen that too. Definitely seems related. I suspect this is also something like the "inverse" of a prompt hijacking situation. Basically it's losing track of where its output is flowing to (whereas prompt inj
191.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Yeah that's a separate issue though, it predates the time when the looping issues got really common, for me at least.
192.
by bjackman 9mo ago
I would have assumed valve use some third party CDN but yeah this would make sense I guess
193.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Wait, but you get 63MB/s down from steam? My internet is pretty good, I can easily saturate my (rather dated) WiFi at about 30MB/s. But Steam downloads are extremely slow for me (can't remember the numbers but much less). I a
194.
by bjackman 9mo ago
"Car culture" and "public roads" are not the same thing. I'm a militant cyclist and I'm extremely unhappy with the state of urban planning in the world. But... Roads are a really good thing and I'm glad my
195.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Also... Fewer houses using fossil-fueled power on Earth. If you live on Earth that's pretty good. The answer to this isn't "less subsidies" it's "find a way to make everyone benefit from the subsidies.
196.
by bjackman 9mo ago
There are some other failure modes that all feel kinda vaguely related that probably help with building a hypothesis about what's going wrong: Sometimes Gemini tools will just randomly stop and pass the buck back to you. The last thing
197.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Lately with Gemini CLI / Jules it doesn't seem like time spent is a good proxy for difficulty. It has a big problem with getting into loops of "I am preparing the response for the user. I am done. I will output the answer. I
198.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Aha yeah I did not consider the danger to _passengers_ specifically. So yeah if you follow the rules you are REALLY safe with rail. Not to mention the stats about HSR specifically that a few others brought up.
199.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Train crashes like this are _so_ rare. It's not as safe as flying but AFAICT in rich countries it's the same rough order of magnitude in terms of danger level. I don't have data but I would imagine crashes on these high speed
200.
by bjackman 9mo ago
I believe that lets the compiler reorder the accesses. So this would be fine for my second example but it would be broken for my first example. ({READ,WRITE}_ONCE() only lets the compiler reorder the accesses if they happen in the same C st
201.
by bjackman 9mo ago
LWN includes archives of a bunch of mailing lists so that might be a factor. There are a LOT of web on that domain.
202.
by bjackman 9mo ago
In my experience, in practice, it usually isn't that hard to figure out what people meant by a READ/WRITE_ONCE(). Most common cases I see are: 1. I'm sharing data between concurrent contexts but they are all on the same CPU (
203.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Those things both exist in the kernel and they refer to CPU atomics similar to std::atomic in C++.
204.
by bjackman 9mo ago
I guess whether container isolation is good enough just comes down to the threat you're protecting against: - confused/misaligned agent: probably good enough (as of Q1 2026...). - hijacked agent: definitely not good enough. But al
205.
by bjackman 9mo ago
I use https://jules.google . The UI is obviously vibe-coded garbage but the underlying system works. And most of the time you don't have to open the UI after you've set it running you just comment on the Github PR. This
206.
by bjackman 9mo ago
It's turtles all the way down but there is a VERY big gap between VM Isolation Turtle and <a half-arse seccomp policy> turtle. It's a qualitative difference between those two sandboxes. (If the VM is remote, even more so).
207.
by bjackman 9mo ago
How does a simple sandbox fix this at all? If Claude has been prompt-hijacked you need a VM to be anywhere near safe.
208.
by bjackman 9mo ago
Yeah local is totally fine too just whatever is easiest to set up.
209.
by bjackman 9mo ago
I really don't understand why people have all these "lightweight" ways of sandboxing agents. In my view there are two models: - totally unsandboxed but I supervise it in a tight loop (the window just stays open on a second mo
210.
by bjackman 9mo ago
But they don't need to be taken back anywhere. They are reusable. So this just ends up back at what I said about "taxing waste".

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