I wonder how much data Apple is transferring today.
I used to download from a BBS Apple II software overnight on a 2400 baud modem. What a trip.
Any conversation
But maybe we'd all be a little saner if we remembered what we're actually doing: building tools to make our lives and the lives of others easier.
This resonated a lot. Iโm glad I read it now, before going totally insane lol. But I disagree that itโs just a glorified spreadsheet. The UI/UX matters, how you present the data, how they can change and so on, all of those things play a role. The good thing with AI is iteration is cheaper than ever, so you can experiment and process the results quickly. But yeah sometimes I just do things here because I just have to be doing something, I canโt leave it alone.
Agreed. The "just" makes the statement sound dismissive, but I do agree with the underlying sentiment that most software boils down to CRUD apps that help people organize information and complete tasks more efficiently. I think the path to developer enlightenment is realizing this truth without despairing over it.
I've been enjoying toast to help click through a project. I still mostly use Zed to handwrite code, but it's nice to open a pane and fire up toast from the terminal. paradise-runner.github.io/toast/
For , the tension between & to eat healthy is an interesting problem.
If you don't have time, it is difficult:
If you don't have money, it's difficult:
- to learn to cook,
- to source real food,
- and cook real food
- to afford real food
- or solve one of the time problems above
Yea, aside from the money, sourcing is a big problem, one thing I noticed when trying to at some point was that there are zero vegan snacks in ordinary neighbourhood stores, so that didnโt last very long.
Choice is definitely a problem. We notice it when we go to our cabin, about a 2 1/2 hour drive away.
The grocery store there targets for its local community. It is beef-centric and often boxed foods -- which is not our diet.
Access -- or lack thereof -- is the worst kind of problem. illustrate the historical and complex nature.
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd banish us - you know!
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!
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).
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing
130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later.