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"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:A “small” visit to Lotte, and $239 later, we are enjoying rambutans, sticky rice with tuna wrapped in seaweed, and wife struggles to make room for the rest of the goodies.
I've been on a kick lately of trying to visualize the oscillating clock, and ultimately the effectively arbitrarily complex activity of a computer processor, as modern refinements of the line shaft factory of the 19th century. Of compute as being not much more than profoundly refined "work" delivered by the electrical grid into marvelously complex machines.
Does that, as a metaphor at least, feel as important to you as it has to me of late? We spend so much time in a world abstracted.
In an attempt to put myself out there, I have started a blog to write about my experience as a software engineer. Feel free to check out my first article :)
Been a bit quiet here the last week or so. Recovering from ill health, at risk of redundancy, and working on side projects. It's been a bit full on.
Does anyone make pay check/cheque money from side projects? Can I use my redundancy runway to turn some websites from side hustle to salary money?
Recovering from ill healthHope you’re feeling better now!Does anyone make pay check/cheque money from side projects?That’s the dream, I’ve only made a few hundreds so far. I’ve had a machine gun approach. Shoot as many rounds as possible in the hopes I might hit something. has helped immensely in this direction. I’ve done a dozen projects past year and while became I’m still not there yet. I’m hopeful though! 😊
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.
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).