alt Hacker NewsThe technology works fine if you use it in a disciplined way. The problem is that people don't! You're necessarily going to break programs if you put them in restricted environments. That's not the same as the restriction technology not working properly.
> Sandboxing almost always involves having a dedicated, privileged service, due to how operating systems have designed things.
Or just invoking bwrap. Or sandbox-execute. There's no performance overhead. Complexity is minimal. Just read current Codex source code. It's not so bad. People have been making these sandbox tools for AI agents for years. Just need to apply sandboxing to all domains.
You want some kind of silver bullet that makes code "safe" without anyone having to change anything? To prompt for nothing? To use no IPC portal? That's not happening.
The people saying we need a new language or something are half right. We don't need a new language. A pure library solution is fine! But people do need to do work to make an ecosystem based on capabilities and least privilege to work. And we need to tell people who refuse to do this work to go to hell.
A new language is neither necessary nor sufficient. What we need is new set of balls.
> The technology works fine if you use it in a disciplined way.
Then obviously we have to discuss the implementation!
> Or just invoking bwrap. Or sandbox-execute. There's no performance overhead. Complexity is minimal. Just read current Codex source code. It's not so bad. People have been making these sandbox tools for AI agents for years. Just need to apply sandboxing to all domains.
Tools like bwrap literally could not have existed until very recently without also requiring suid/ privileges, and even today unprivileged user namespaces are not universally enabled. This is why the implementation matters. No, unprivileged sandboxing has not been around for years, especially not x-plat. bwrap is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, great reference - it either requires root or it requires unprivileged user namespaces and it's not x-plat. Great.
> You want some kind of silver bullet that makes code "safe" without anyone having to change anything? To prompt for nothing? To use no IPC portal? That's not happening.
I have no idea why you think I've said this, I'm pointing out that the implementation and technology matters deeply.
> The people saying we need a new language or something are half right. We don't need a new language. A pure library solution is fine! But people do need to do work to make an ecosystem based on capabilities and least privilege to work. And we need to tell people who refuse to do this work to go to hell.
Again, you can't say "this technology has existed for years! You can do it in a library!" and then say "but they don't!". You misunderstand the complexity and assert that it's merely a matter of will. It is both.