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The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

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31–36 of 36 posts

Re: The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

#31

I wrote this because I kept seeing developers (myself included) confuse language-level isolation like Python venv with OS-level isolation like Docker. I wanted to trace the actual technical boundaries between them. The article maps out the differences between common execution environments—from physical bare metal and VMs to containers, process sandboxes, and virtual environments—to create a mental model of where the…

Did you really write it though? Within the first paragraph it's fairly obvious this is heavily LLM-generated.

I don't know what it is about LLM-generated text, but when I read it I cannot understand the meaning it is trying to convey. The words are all there, but it is fatiguing to repeatedly parse phrasing like "it's not X but Y" and "you aren't just X, you are Y". The entire article is organized as a sequence of these statements, and this is not hyperbole.

Re: The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

#32

Ah, I think I found the reason as to why WebAssembly (in a browser or some other sandboxed environment) is not a suitable substrate for near native performance. It is a very ironic reason: you can't implement a JIT compiler that targets WebAssembly in a sandbox running in WebAssembly. Sounds like an incredibly contrived thing to do but once speed is the goal then a copy-and-patch compiler is a valid strategy for impl…

This is true. A multi-tier JIT-compiler requires writable execute memory and the ability to flush icache. Loading segments dynamically is nice and covers a lot of the ground, but it won't be a magic solution to dynamic languages like JavaScript. Modern WASM emulators already implement a full compiler, linker and JIT-compiler in one, almost starting to look like v8. I'm not sure if adding in-guest JIT support is going in the right direction.

Re: The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

#33
post #20
post #6

> This website collects anonymous usage analytics data via GoatCounter and Umami. My uBlock origin shows that googlefonts.com and fonts.googleapis.com are being blocked. It irks me a bit that your message explicitly mentions two trackers but it fails to mention the Google tracking. Google is also not mentioned in your privacy policy. Is there a reason for this?

Google Fonts is not a tracker. https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq/privacy > For clarity, Google does not use any information collected by Google Fonts to create profiles of end users or for targeted advertising.

By default, loading Google Fonts from Google’s servers exposes user data to Google (e.g., IP Address, User agent, Referrer, Timestamps, Cache identifiers).

It's passive tracking, but it's tracking.

Re: The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you really write it though? Within the first paragraph it's fairly obvious this is heavily LLM-generated.

I don't know what it is about LLM-generated text, but when I read it I cannot understand the meaning it is trying to convey. The words are all there, but it is fatiguing to repeatedly parse phrasing like "it's not X but Y" and "you aren't just X, you are Y". The entire article is organized as a sequence of these statements, and this is not hyperbole.

Because it is statistical. It has no understanding of the purpose of writing which is to convey information. It can only show you the statistically most likely text, although very good sometimes, it also has its limitations.

Re: The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1. Physical Machine (Bare Metal) This is the foundation. Nobody should ever forget this. But I would say this next part is about the opposite for bare metal though: >Use Case: High-performance computing (HPC), large databases, or legacy systems that require direct hardware access. To get the utmost reliability out of adequate hardware then bare metal is more suitable for almost everything except for special situatio…

Thanks for the feedback. These are typical use cases where the convenience of higher level abstractions may be less important than the benefits of direct access to the hardware.

[deleted]

Re: The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

#36
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your message sent me down a weird rabbit hole of trying to find privacy friendly alternative to google fonts. I found this: https://github.com/coollabsio/fonts They claim to be a privacy friendly drop-in replacement. Their main website: https://fonts.coollabs.io/

The easiest solution is to simply self host your fonts.

That definitely deserves better tooling!
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