That's the system I work on! Please feel free to ask any questions. All opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
Do you make the environments on demand or do you make them preemptively so that one is ready to go the moment that it is needed?
If you make them on demand, have you tested ZFS snapshots to see if it can be done even faster using zfs clone?
Furthermore, ZFS ARC should treat each read operation of the same files as reading the same thing, while a sandbox made the traditional way would treat the files as unique, since they would be full copies of each other rather than references. ZFS on the other hand should only need to keep a single copy of the files cached for all environments. This reduces memory requirements dramatically. Unfortunately, the driver has double caching on mmap()’ed reads, but the duplication will only be on the actual files accessed and the copies will be from memory rather than disk. A modified driver (e.g. OSv style) would be able to eliminate the double caching for mmap’ed reads, but that is a future enhancement.
In any case, ZFS clones should have clear advantages over the more obvious way of extracting a tarball every time you need to make a new sandbox for a Python execution environment.
That said, if you really want to use block devices, you could use zvols to get something similar to LVM2 out of ZFS, but it is not as good as using snapshots on ZFS' filesystems. The write amplification would be lower by default (8KB versus 4MB). The page cache would still duplicate data, but the buffer cache duplication should be bypassed if I recall correctly.
It's a filesystem, to put it simply.
We actually use gVisor (as stated in the article) and it has a very nifty feature called checkpoint_restore (https://gvisor.dev/docs/user_guide/checkpoint_restore/) which lets us start up sandboxes extremely efficiently. Then the filesystem is just a CoW overlay.
In any case, I share your excitement.
The "run" option for generated code was removed due to underutilization, but the sandbox is still used for things like the data analysis workflow and running extensions amongst other things. It's really just a general purpose sandbox for running untrusted code server-side.
One question I always had was what the user "grte" stands for...
Btw. here the tricks I used back then to scrape the file system:
https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/exploring-google-b...
This decoupling of system libraries from the OS itself is necessary because it otherwise becomes unmanageable to ensure "google3 binaries" remain runnable on both workstations and production servers. Workstations and servers each have their own Linux distributions, and each also needs to change over time.
You submitted this.
I am not aware of such rule's existence.
Also "should" not "must."
To be clear: I don't have a problem with you submitting this, but the title appears to be completely false.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've done that now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43509103).
I appreciate your scruples though! Because even though you would have been on the right side of HN's rules to correct a misleading (and/or linkbait) title, the fact that you work for Google would have opened you to the usual gotcha attacks about conflict of interest. This way we avoided all of that, and it's still a good submission and thread!
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Arguably this is misleading or clickbait, but safer to err on the side of using the original title.
As far as I can see, there is a mix of frustration at the slowness of launching, optimism/excitement that there are some really awesome things cooking, and indifference from a lot of people who think AI/LLMs as a product category are quite overhyped.
Profit is what matters though, not number of products. The consumer perception is that Search rakes in the largest profits, so if they lose that, it doesn't matter what else is there. Thoughts?
But the UX and general functionality of their apps and services has been in steep decline for a long time now, imo. There are thousands of examples of the most basic and obvious mistakes and completely uninspired, sloppy software and service design.
That's something you can work on to improve.
A few years back I wanted to work for FAANG big company. Now I don't after working for smaller but with 'big' management. There are rats races, dirty tricks. And engineers don't have much control on what and how they are doing. Many things decided by incompetent managers. Architect position is actually a manager's title, no brain or skills required.
Today I rather go to a small company or startup where the results are visible and appreciated.
But why? When they have so much management now and have just gotten so big that it'd probably be impossible to get anything done.
I mean I'm for sure making some presumptions and plenty of assumptions; we literally evolved to do this. Otherwise we'd shake the cold paw of every shadow in the dark.
What casts it as most capable?
Currently, Google has the most cost effective model (Flash 2) for tons of corporate work (OCR, classifiers, etc).
They just announced likely the most capable model currently in the market with Gemini 2.5.
Their small open source models (Gemma 3) are very good.
It is true that they've struggled to execute on product, but the actual technology is very good and getting substantial adoption in industry. Personally I've moved quite a few workloads to Google from OpenAI and Anthropic.
My main complaint is that they often release impressive models, but gimp them in experimental mode for too long, without fully releasing them (2.5 is currently in this category).
(I mean it will tell you it's set a timer but it doesn't talk to the native clock app so nothing ever goes off if you navigate away from the window.)
Setting timers reminders, calendar events. Nothing. If they kill the assistant, I'll go Apple, no matter how much I hate it.
It can also play music or turn on my smart lamps, change their colors etc. I can't remember doing any special configuration for it to do that either.
Pixel 9 pro
And you used to be able to say "Find my phone" and it would chime and max screen brightness until found. Tried that with Gemini once, and it went on with very detailed instructions on using Google or Apple's Find My Device website (depending on what type of phone I owned), maybe calling it from another device if it's not silenced, or perhaps accepting that my device was lost or stolen if none of the above worked. Did find it during that lengthy attempt at being helpful though.
Another fun example, weather. When Gemini's in control, "What's the weather like tonight?" gets a short ramble about how weather depends on climate, with some examples of what the weather might be like broadly in Canada, Japan, or the United States at night.
Unlike Assistant where you could learn to adapt to its unique phrasing preferences, you just flat out can never reliably predict what Gemini's going to do. In exchange for higher peak performance, the floor dropped out the bottom.