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lox

1,755 karma · joined March 17, 2010

I’m a web geek who is passionate about building scalable web applications, open-source software, whisky and finding the perfect coffee. I’ve been writing code for about as long as web browsers have been around and I’ve loved every minute of it. Previously CEO at buildkite.com and CTO at 99designs.com, living in Melbourne, Australia with my wife and children.
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lox··on Let's discuss sandbox isolation
It's amazing how many different implementations of sandboxes have popped up in the past few weeks.

I'm CTO at Buildkite, have been noodling on one with a view to have an environment that can run CI workloads and Agentic ones https://github.com/buildkite/cleanroom

lox··on Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents
I just built something very similar too: https://github.com/lox/slack-cli
lox··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
I'm working on a poker server to allow holdem bots to play against each other (https://github.com/lox/pokerforbots) and a Pluribus-level bot that plays on it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)).

Enjoying writing some really fast Zig implementations of hand evaluation and CFR-based solvers.

lox··on Autism's Four Core Subtypes
I don’t disagree that pop culture has distilled spectrum down into a magnitude, but that isn’t how the DSM describes it or how professionals diagnose it (or in my experience how they communicate it). The metaphor is supposed to be like the light spectrum not “less autism ranging to more autism”. Severity scale is distinct to interacting traits of social issues and restricted interests and repetitive behaviors (the spectrum bit).
lox··on Autism's Four Core Subtypes
With a prevalence rate of < 2% (at least in Australia) this seems like an incredibly mathematically flawed take. Whilst a broad/blanket diagnosis isn't useful for making generalisations about individuals in that group, it's certainly societally useful.
lox··on I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened
No, you resigned. It’s completely possible to have adult conversations and to part ways without being terminated for cause (which “fired” is a euphemism for).
lox··on Mistral Large
From the article:

> generally available through an API (next to GPT-4)

lox··on Sora: Creating video from text
It’s more than that, doing it well is still beyond sophisticated automation. Many variables that need do be constantly adjusted for. Humans are still much better at it than machines, regardless of the social element.
lox··on Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?
Is this not essentially what docker did with cgroups? It’s incredibly tricky securing containers, I’m not at all confident process only sandboxes would be adequate.
lox··on Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom
They do, the parent is either on an older tesla software platform or they haven't looked at settings > service and have ignored the alerts when they occur.
lox··on Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom
I'm running a Model 3 with 2023.44.39 on it. In the Service menu there are a variety of exactly the things you mentioned.

In the top right corner there is "Tire Service Mileage" with an estimate of when you should service your tires. There is a reset link under that, which links into the "Wheel and Tire" service tab with more maintenance options.

There are alerts for nearly all of the things you mentioned: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-E95DAAD...

Regarding the tire wear, the car is heavy with instant torque. I've had to replace my tires quite a few times, but it's the only thing that has needed much servicing for me in the past three years. I'd expect that from a new car though, and I don't have much confidence in it's longevity.

lox··on Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom
There is a service screen in the UI with alerts and details on when tires were last changed. There is an alert for windshield fluid.
lox··on The Quest to Secure chown and symlinks
Docker is running as root, so the files written in mounted volumes get mapped to uid 0 on the host. When the agent then goes to re-use the checked out code, it can’t run ‘git clean’.

Username space remapping wasn’t adequate, for reasons I’m a bit blurry on. I think recent kernels have some better options on remapping permissions across file systems.

lox··on The Quest to Secure chown and symlinks
This stack is run by a single customer on trusted code isolated in their own AWS env. (I wrote it originally 6-7 years back)

There are radically better isolation strategies now. Firecracker and/or Sysbox hardened docker containers is one I’ve recently implemented.

lox··on DevOps is a failure
My take is different. I think DevOps was wildly successful, most of our infrastructure is now software that can be managed by Software Engineers. The goal posts have shifted, we now have major software challenges where as before we had hardware and operational challenges.

Well written tools and cross-functional teams that do both operations, feature work and security are still the path forward IMO, we just need to refocus on developer experience.

lox··on DevOps is a failure
In 2005 your infrastructure provisioning wasn’t automated. The complexity has increased, but so has what we get. Being able to provision new hardware stacks like software is amazing, in 2005 I had to get quotes from hosting providers.
lox··on Heart-disease risk soars after Covid, even with a mild case
"This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed"
lox··on Real-world stories of how we’ve compromised CI/CD pipelines
I don't spend a lot of time on those comparison-style charts if I'm honest, but that is good (and valid) feedback for them. I also hadn't heard of it, I discovered sysbox via jpettazo's updated post at https://jpetazzo.github.io/2015/09/03/do-not-use-docker-in-d..., he's an advisor of nestybox the company that develops sysbox.

For the CI/CD usecase on AWS, sysbox presented the right balance of trade-offs between something like Firecracker (which would require bare metal hosts on AWS) and the docker containers that already existed. We specifically need to run privileged containers so that we could run docker-in-docker for CI workloads, so rootless docker or podman wouldn't have helped. Sysbox lets us do that with a significant improvement in security to just running privileged docker containers as most CI environments end up doing.

Just switching their docker-in-docker CI job containers to sysbox would have mitigated 4 of the compromises from the article with nearly zero other configuration changes.

lox··on Real-world stories of how we’ve compromised CI/CD pipelines
Yup, we have a sidecar process/container that runs for each job and assumes an AWS IAM Role for that specific pipeline (with constraints like whether it’s an approved PR as well). The credentials are provided to the job container via a volume mount. This allows us to have shared agents with very granular roles per-pipeline and job.
lox··on Real-world stories of how we’ve compromised CI/CD pipelines
We’ve been using Sysbox (https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox) for our Buildkite based CI/CD setup, allows docker-in-docker without privileged containers. Paired with careful IAM/STS design we’ve ended up with isolated job containers with their own IAM roles limited to least-privilege.
lox··on YAML: It's Time to Move On
Have spent many years developing dev tools that use YAML and alternatives and I still think YAML wins because of its ubiquity relative interop with JSON. I’d pick HCL as an alternative if I was going to, as it’s been widely battle tested in Terraform.
lox··on Go’ing Insane: Endless Error Handling
Yup, fair point, I thought we were talking about libraries replacing errors to obscure the original, which absolutely happens. Lots of libraries (e.g aws-sdk) do use typed errors, so wrapping them correctly for smaller libraries that compose them is important.
lox··on Go’ing Insane: Endless Error Handling
You can use %w in fmt.Errorf to accomplish this.
lox··on Podman, the open source Docker alternative ported to M1 (Apple Silicon) machines
This looks like the podman client, effectively? Has anyone gotten `podman machine` working on M1?
lox··on Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
Nah, we lack the political motivation for really any major change. Australian politics is about not losing vs winning.
lox··on Hacker News [keybase] proof just broke
Mine broke too.
lox··on Ivermectin as a Covid-19 Therapy
I’ve heard this said, but is this accurate? Would love a source.
lox··on Kids with a desk and a quiet place to study do better in school, data shows
“Our findings may show that the absence of a desk is an indicator of poverty, which research has shown to be highly correlated with academic performance, both in the U.S. and internationally.”

This seems the obvious flaw in this hypothesis.

lox··on Ask HN: Why are all the submissions about Bill/Melinda Gates being killed?
In this case they share a charitable foundation that contributes to lots of projects that are frequently discussed here.
lox··on Ask HN: Why are all the submissions about Bill/Melinda Gates being killed?
That one was mine, from the original tweet about 5 seconds after it was posted. I was perplexed that it was flagged given the impact the news will have on a variety of tech issues.
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