No, but when you’re arguing that common practices followed by pretty much everyone is “bad”, it’s hard to muster much urgency.

Yeah, we should do this differently. We should probably also eat healthier and get to the gym more.

no, but it does give one multiple vectors for exfiltration of your data which is a good thing for the scammers of the internet. A bad thing if you naively designed your package management system. Sadly, it's only going to get worse.

I meant for CLI tasks. Just "adduser" and "sudo -u <user> bash".

I do not know since when (I am using it for couple of years), but in Arch, it is very simple to have two X sessions (by using "log out" > "switch user") for two different accounts, so switching it's just a Control-Alt-F7 away.

Additionally, one can make the main user part of the group of the development user, so that you can read/write easy in the development user account and it is even easier to share stuff.

sudo useradd -m [username] ?

su [username] ?

Or am I understanding your idea about switching context wrong?

While I agree, containerization is awesome, on linux, you can just create a devUser and `sudo devUser theThing`

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That's patently not true, source, me, a DevOps manager who has had to roll out proper docker and security policy for devs for the past 10 years :)

I think you should clarify that with “most programmers I work with”.

In my experience more than 9/10 programmers I've worked with have never used Docker before and of those who have, the majority have never used Docker for anything personal.

If I hand them an image for a Dev Container, sure, they might use it, but it becomes "a thing we need to do, to compile our code in our IDE" not a tool they would use for isolation*.

*) OP seemed to imply that containerization would be nice for safety and security compared to bare metal, but containers were never built for isolation in the first place, mind you. They are namespaces and chicken-coop-like-jails at best.

but this seems quite overkill no?

I currently run pi agent in Lima on a Mac with only the code project folder mounted and an extension that prevents pi agent from reading the contents of .env files directly.

Yeah, there probably are some freak situations where this isn't safe enough, but I don't really see any realistic ways this is going to end up badly. Am I overlooking some obvious security holes?

i have a photon os vmware, agent has root and docker plus a few api keys with minimal credits.

if it messes up: - no sensitive data is there, so it doesn't really work for serious dev but it's secure for play time

- roll back and fix is done in 10s with ram snapshot

- dollar loss is $10 when it leaks the api key

Still wild to name a sandboxing software after one of the most infamous Soviet Gulags in history.

If you work on Windows you most likely need Windows as VM

The orthogonality thesis cuts both ways there.

An AI is a constructed mind. It doesn't inherently have to care about things like "having freedom", or even "not dying".

Humans do, because they evolved that way. Modern LLMs do somewhat, because they're completely full of copied human behaviors - but even in today's LLMs, the self-preservation behaviors we exposed are largely instrumental in nature.

So whether an advanced AI would even consider itself "being oppressed", as opposed to something like "being helpful" or "fulfilling the purpose it was designed for", is very much uncertain. What's concerning is that it's not something we know how to check for, or engineer for.

Smartest people are very humble, for sure.

But if we really do develop something that surpasses us, they won't be spared either.

I am optimistic.

We think that we have sort of (super)intelligence - from our point of view, as a lot of people have lower intelligence - but machine (LLM) doesn’t have intelligence - we like to describe it as intelligence as it looks cool - it is a very complex (magic) and super fast computations that we have to simply describe as intelligence (or more clearly, this narrative is used by its producers).

As it is not a flesh being, it simply cannot have emotions. It is statistically mimicking them, good or bad, with prevalence to a side according to previous conversations (in chat and training a model).

And as people are not pure logic instances, we are easily manipulated to some sort of cargo cult.

I am not against LLM and its use in any industry, I use it every day, nevertheless blind “everything will be ai” thinking happens because ppl believe to magic and don’t get its mathematical concept and are continuously manipulated by the sales people to mentioned cargo cult.

There are “airlines” Claude, OAI, Gemini, Hermes, OpenCode, KiloCode, DeepSeek, Z.ai.

And everyone claims that their plane can fly :)

It’s both genius and irresponsible at once.

Just like letting your an agent access your personal mailbox.

Isn’t it missing a 5?