ashishb

I built something similar for myself that works on both Linux and Mac OS

https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

How do it work inside `myFunction1` which is invoked by `myFunction`? Does `myFunction1` needs to be async as well?

Context cancellation (and it's propagation) is one of the best features in Go.

Is there any equivalent in major popular languages like Python, Java, or JS of this?

Reminder to always run all npm commands inside a sandbox. I wrote amazing-sandbox[1] for myself after seeing how prolific these attack vectors have become in recent years.

1 - https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

One really common that myth this article busts is about child care.

"Child care is virtually free in Vienna and extremely expensive in Zurich, but the Austrians and the Swiss have the same fertility rate."

New Yorker has a detailed article on this phenomenon that's a great read.

It busts many common myths.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...

That's why I wrote my own sandbox. Everyone hand waives these concerns.

Further, I don't know why docker is weak security on Linux. Are you telling me that one can exploit docker?

I would configure mailman with permanent write access to the mailbox area

That's what I with my sandbox right now

Some tools do require Internet access.

Further, I don't even want to take the risk of running 'npm install markdownlint' anymore on my machine.

So you have to install npm package markdownlint on your machine and let it run it's potentially dangerous postinstall step?

It also has persistent permissions.

Think about it from a real world perspective.

I knock on your door. You invite me to sit with you in your living room. I can't easily sneak into your bed room. Further, your temporary access ends as soon as you exit my house.

The same should happen with apps.

When I run 'notepad dir1/file1.txt', the package should not sneakily be able to access dir2. Further, as soon as I exit the process, the permission to access dir1 should end as well.

> but in reality the system is thoroughly backdoored on every level from the CPU on up, and everyone knows it.

Indeed. Why lock your car door as anyone can unlock and steal it by learning lock-picking?

Tell me a better alternative that allows me to run, say, 'markdown lint', an npm package, on the current directory without giving access to the full system on Mac OS?

Try https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

I ended up writing my own sandbox so that it works on Mac OS as well and can be used for other tools (but just AI agents) as well

https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

I am running a lot of tools inside sandbox now for exactly this reason. The damage is confined to the directory I'm running that tool in.

There is no reason for a tool to implicitly access my mounted cloud drive directory and browser cookies data.

GitHub Stars are not a selection mechanism. They are filtering mechanism for most people.

Imagine someone is choosing between three FOSS projects - one has 90K stars, one has 30K and the thirdone has 1K.

In your meeting, the engineer will show you how he decided between the first and the second without even mentioning the third.

> Any company seriously looking to replace GitHub should pay some attention the social network aspect of it.

Indeed. And I would say it is not just social signals but even non-social authority signals.

E.g. how many other projects depend on this projects and how many downloads happen for its artifacts.

You can see some of these on package registries like npm and pypi where their authority signals help people choose between the right libraries.

The hacker News crowd has always these elitist takes

  - I don't look at GitHub Stars
  - I don't use Facebook
  - I am never persuaded by advertisement
  - I can build Dropbox over a weekend

Even if these are true, it is irrelevant. Hacker News is only a sliver of the tech world.

The real lock-in is stars, not reliability [1].

They can have weekly outages, and the FOSS products would still be forced to be on GitHub.

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/github-stars/

Very few people understand the depth of what you just said.

$2K or even $20K is meaningless for a parent making $100K or more.

Kids have a negative value to a professional class member.

If you engage in agriculture or some similar activity, a child as old as 10 can be a helping hand in some way or the other. No surprises that Amish farmers have a high birth rate.

https://ashishb.net/parenting/pregnancy/

Fair point. I should have said broadly.

Good for you.

I meant as a general rule of thumb.

In the short-term it can work.

Over time maintenance becomes hard

New iOS and Android features, sometimes backward-incompatible are introduced.

And now, you need your dependencies to implement them. Which might or might not happen. At best, this makes usage inferior. At worst, you can no longer publish an update in app stores.

There have been several iterations to have a unified way to build Android and iOS apps.

  - using HTML
  - using JavaScript
  - using JS+React
  - using Dart
  - using Kotlin
  - using Swift

This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

This only works for devs who over time churn out as their app fails or becomes too big [1]

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/

Interesting project.

This won't work on Mac, right?

> This looks awesome! Do you have a mental process you run through to determine what gets run in the sandbox, or is it your default mode for all tools?

Here's what I use it for right now

- yarn - npm - pnpm - mdl - Ruby-based Markdown linter - fastlane - Ruby-based mobile app release tool by Google - Claude Code - Gemini CLI

Over time, my goal is to run all CLI-based tools that only need access to the current directory (and not parent directories) via this.

6 months back I started dockerizing my setup after multiple npm vulnerabilities.

Then I wrote a small tool[1] to streamline my sandboxing.

Now, I run agents inside it for keeping my non-working-directory files safe.

For some tools like markdown linter, I run them without network access as well.

1- https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

Afaik, code running inside https://github.com/dagger/container-use can still access files outside the current directory.

> Does the lack of pip confuse Claude, that would seemingly be pretty big

It has not been an issue for me. But yeah, one can always enhance and use a custom image with whatever possible tools they want to install.