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zimbatm

5,660 karma · joined February 5, 2011

Nix and DevOps consultant <https://numtide.com/>

meet.hn/city/ch-Geneva

Socials: - github.com/zimbatm - x.com/zimbatm - cal.com/zimbatm

Interests: Open Source, Programming, DevOps, Freelancing, Entrepreneurship, Outdoor Activities

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zimbatm··on MCP is dead?
Another aspect is access control.

CLIs live in the same namespace as the agent, so any secrets the CLI needs access to, the agent can also exfiltrate. And access control is lightly gated by the agent's tool call policy.

For an enterprise-level deployment, it becomes quickly desirable to have a centralized MCP backbone, on which each MCP is attached to. A place you can attach policies to, log activity, and reason about access control.

zimbatm··on Dirtyfrag: Universal Linux LPE
Maybe. This phenomenon of security holes being found closely to each other was also common before LLMs. People attention gets directed to a place and typically more issues are getting found.
zimbatm··on I am worried about Bun
Is there actual evidence coming from the Bun project itself?

Otherwise it's just FUD.

zimbatm··on Show HN: Kontext CLI – Credential broker for AI coding agents in Go
This is how keychains should be designed. Never return the secret, but mint a new token, or sign a request.

We need this also for normal usage like development environments. Or when invoking a command on a remote server.

Are you going to add support for services that don't support OIDC or this going to be a known limitation?

zimbatm··on Show HN: Moltis – AI assistant with memory, tools, and self-extending skills
Isn't the point of OpenClaw that the agent can modify itself?
zimbatm··on Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI
Thanks! Playing with packaging automation is actually quite fun.
zimbatm··on Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI
Just added it to our inventory. For those of you using Nix:

    nix run github:numtide/llm-agents.nix#mistral-vibe
The repo is updated daily.
zimbatm··on Replace PostgreSQL with Git for your next project
Gerrit is doing this with NoteDB. Backups are just one git clone away.

See https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/note-db...

zimbatm··on AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
This should have been CONTRIBUTING.md all along.

The content of the AGENTS.md is the same as what humans are looking for when contributing to a project.

zimbatm··on Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
I haven't used it extensively, but it works. I don't think it necessarily needs any updates since the underlying tech is stable.
zimbatm··on Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli
zimbatm··on Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
Quality animated SVGs is even better:

https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli

zimbatm··on bootc-image-builder: Build your entire OS from a Containerfile
Yes, you can target VMDK, AMIs, Azure, ...

`nixos-rebuild build-image --image-variant vmware`

See https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-image-nixos-rebui...

zimbatm··on Show HN: Voiden – a free, offline, Git-native API Client
That I wasn't very good at Rust :-D

My assumption was that a tool like this will make it easier to keep the README.md in sync while the project evolves. Think of a `--help` section. That assumption holds true to me.

You can see it in action for example here: https://github.com/numtide/treefmt-nix?tab=readme-ov-file#su...

The best part is that it makes it easy to keep the README.md in sync when the project evolves. Just add it to the CI

zimbatm··on Show HN: Voiden – a free, offline, Git-native API Client
One thing I miss the most when writing Markdown is this formula experience you get in Excel. Jot something down, get the result. Then link it to another block.

There are tools like Jupyter notebooks that have all the functionalities, but their file format isn't very readable or diffable using standard terminal tools.

A while back I wrote https://github.com/zimbatm/mdsh to explore the space. Voiden.md looks like a fancier version of that.

zimbatm··on Gemini 2.5
Why would the book be worth buying tough. If AI can generate a fresh new one just for you?
zimbatm··on The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome
Since Chrome's engine is used by Edge, Opera, Brave, etc.. Probably the best move is to become a non-profit and have all those organizations chip in.

The main reason even Microsoft gave up and rebased their browser on top of Chrome is because of the breakneck speed at which Google introduces new standards and features to the ecosystem. Having them be forced to slow down might be a good thing for browser diversity and the future of the Internet.

zimbatm··on Google Pixel 4a's old firmware is gone, trapping users on buggy battery update
This needs more coverage. Perfectly good phones are getting thrown out because of a software update.
zimbatm··on Discussion: Reduce error handling boilerplate in Golang using '?'
This change would mark a turn in the language's evolution, as it would be the first implicit variable to be added to the language.

I'm not going to invoke the slippery slope argument, but what distinguishes Go from the pack is how explicit it is. It can make it more tedious to write, but also much easier to follow as a reader.

zimbatm··on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers
This is true for any type of assistance. We have had the same arguments about calculators a long time ago.
zimbatm··on Make your QEMU faster (2022)
NixOS has switched to virtiofs 4 days ago: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/362081

Not all use-cases are faster with virtiofs.

zimbatm··on Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers
Wise also recently switched their US bank provider from Evolve to Community Federal Savings Bank. Maybe they had similar issues?
zimbatm··on Git-crypt – transparent file encryption in Git
Another major flaw:

Transparent decryption sounds nice. Until you commit decrypted secrets by mistake.

Because the encryption/decryption is transparent, you won't notice if the .gitattributes pattern-matching is wrong until it's too late.

I did this myself and saw it happen in the wild as well.

zimbatm··on Show HN: We built a FOSS documentation CMS with a pretty GUI
It looks closer to https://www.getoutline.com/
zimbatm··on Serverless-registry: A Docker registry backed by Workers and R2
Does the worker need to process the body?

Sometimes, the worker can return a signed URL and have the client directly upload to R2.

zimbatm··on Garage: Open-Source Distributed Object Storage
That's very cool; I didn't expect Garage to scale that well while being so young.

Are there other details you are willing/allowed to share, like the number of objects in the store and the number of servers you are balancing them on?

zimbatm··on OneFileLinux: A 20MB Alpine metadistro that fits into the ESP
Except most ESP partitions I have seen are in the 200MB range.

So now you're asking your users not only to bless the EFI loader, but also to resize their ESP, and most likely system partition.

zimbatm··on Pornhub prepares to block five more states rather than check IDs
Why not turn this around?

1. Introduce a X-PEGI HTTP header that sites can use to change the content. This would also be useful for other contexts such as cybercafes and whatnot.

2. Mandate that porn website abide by these headers.

3. Have responsible parents, lock their children's computers and add the appropriate header.

The adults then have access to the adult internet with no extra restrictions.

zimbatm··on Fuzzing Ladybird with tools from Google Project Zero
Who said the goal was to create a production browser?

This seems like a pure passion project: to return to the pleasure of building something just for the sake of it. Design and explore. Hack.

Not every endeavour has to become a product. As soon as you get users, you get obligations, and this tends to destroy these feelings.

zimbatm··on Twenty years is nothing
Git as a data structure is ok, but I wish we could eliminate PRs. There is too much overhead in managing those, code reviews, branch rebases.

A better way would allow you to push your changes as stacks of commits. No branches. Just push, and have a CI that automatically builds, tests, merges and deploys your commits. And everything that didn't pass gets handed back to you. Instead of change reviews, do pairing and code reading sessions.

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