Off to handstand class. I have been known to recommend to everyone within earshot doing challenging and/or silly physical things in a community. Not bucking the trend here.
Any conversation
I needed to process 20,000 json files & 20,000 JXL files. I'm pulling together a website from them all. Anyway, started with emacs elisp to handle it all, just because I've not done that before. Went kinda ok, and I'm gonna use org-mode to export it all to a website (done that bit loads of times before).
In the end, I ended up breaking out my C programming skills (late 80s->nowish). It was a delight. Nothing more refreshing than writing raw code, that doesn't rely on 3rd party code/libs.
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NIH syndrome? I am guilty of it too. I love implementing things from scratch, you learn a lot by doing so and you get to own the codebase end-to-end, so no surprises and fighting around others’ choices. It can get exhausting too though, in the end I succumb to using off-the-shelf components because my primary goals move at a higher level.
I don't see much point in trying to build software at a "higher level", like whole products and services. I'm going to go down low and train myself on the fundamentals. Hopefully in time I'll be able to contribute to the foundational bits.
You're right, it does get exhausting. At some point you just want to rebuild everything, which is not possible.
A thing I've been doing lately is trying to come to the same conclusions others have without looking their the direct techniques and code. Last night I tried to figure out why people do vector based retrieval for RAG and ended up running these experiments: n0tls.com/…/2026-09-03-i-think-…rag-with-grep.html
I'm still going to do an explore agent.
@fastidiousprofilefollow
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:Just three more commits left, but
/usage ran out. Resets at 01:50, so I guess I am going to sleep.@fastidiousprofilefollow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerscontinued:
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerscontinued:Woke up during the night for a short trip to the loo, got 'resume’ going. All done in the morning. Ahh, coffee tastes better now!
replied to@fastidiousprofilefollow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyers:
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyers:Best pee ever!
I remain ambiguous. This morning I used pi+gpt5.6 to create a color scheme based on evergarden.moe. It works, and I haven’t checked how well it stay true to the style used in vim-bundled schemas. Before I wouldn’t have done this, and now I can. But I don’t know if it is good. github.com/…/evergarden.vim
Really glad to be using Haskell for work - especially in today's climate with agentic coding.
Our team uses containers to keep our development environment consistent across team members, though, and most agent sandbox approaches want to either offload your work fully to the cloud or they want to sandbox the agent harness process itself.
We're not ready for full cloud based development (yet?) and sandboxing just the agent doesn't work for us when the agent needs to run docker.
... because letting the agent run docker gives them a too-easy escape hatch from their sandbox.
So we're currently stuck with using VMs. This turns out to be tricky but seems do-able.
My current approach is to provision a VM image and use Incus for the execution. My main goal is to keep my current workflow of local/non-agent dev working seamlessly and share the source with the VM/agent.
This means sharing my working dirs with the agent VM but overlaying artifact dirs from VM-owned block devices so we don't take too big of an IO perf hit.
I also don't want the agent to be able to
git push so that means we need some quirky git config to rewrite origin paths and thread through some agent specific PATs ("thanks" GitHub) for read-only repo access. These ALSO need to be threaded through to the development containers - they need to clone private repos.... in the end, this seems to work but I haven't lived with it for long.
There are still some quality of life issues to work out, but I think it'll work out.
At this point, I've removed all coding agents from my host - and that's nice.
Curious, why does using Haskell make a difference here?
It's tangential to the sandboxing topic, really. I started the first post with a broader intent in mind and then elaborated on the sandboxing setup I'm working on.
For AI-assisted coding, though, it's nice because Haskell provides a lot of feedback earlier in the development process compared to lots of other languages. It tends to work once it compiles (obviously not all the time).
At moms house for the holiday weekend so the kids can see Nana. She has a "premium Plex" account on her tv serving a truly massive amount of content. Allegedly the brother of a long time friend is offering the "service". She says that the service will go down when the host is having outages, so the infra is likely local.
I brought my year this weekend. We are going to dig in to this guys operation. Intuition dictates that there is some hand rolled accounting going on. I'd like to see it.