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Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

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Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#71
post #32

Maybe a dumb question, but couldn't you use seccomp to limit/deny the amount of syscalls the Python interpreter has access to? For example, if you don't want it messing with your host filesystem, you could just deny it from using any filesystem related system calls? What is the benefit of using a completely separate interpreter?

Yours is a valid approach. But you always gotta wonder if there’s some way around it. Starting with runtime that has ways of accessing every aspect of your system - there are a lot of ways an attacker might try to defeat the blocks you put in place. The point of starting with something super minimal is that the attack surface is tiny. Really hard to see how anything could break out.

[deleted]

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#72
post #66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Staying true to your username at least. While I hear you in principle, I don’t think shaming people into not building things is going to work out. Even if you could convince some people, you’ll never reach them all. Someone will build it. IMO energy is better spent figuring out how to best structure our society to handle the seemingly inevitable end state where superhuman AI is commonplace.

Sorry if I'm shaming. I suppose you're right, someone will probably build them. But in order to prevent bad outcomes for the average joe/worker we are can't just hand optimizations over to corporations for free in the form of open source. We know all too well how open source is exploited.

I don't know how to prevent people from stopping this without shaming them. I think more shaming might be required, as uncomfortable as that may be. It's a societal wide prisoner's dilemma (well if I don't build it, someone else will), except we this isn't a prisoners dilemma and we can coordinate, sort of.

It would be one thing if GPUs and Tokens were cheap and everyone could take these implementations and out compete the corporations, but that's not the game theoretical terms we're on here. They have the resources, and I promise they are not going to let the average joe be able afford to out compete them. They are the ones that are going to be able to get the most advantage from these tools.. Why give them the extra leverage. It will be used to displace you. The ruling class or those with the resources, have zero intention of letting the tide rise all boats. And if there are any in the ruling class that do have good intentions, they will be rooted out.

We see this evidence all across literature, history, and in their own actions. This year in Telluride Colorado the Ski Patrol Union went on strike over wages. The billionaire owner who lives in California, Chuck Horning, did not want to concede to the Ski Patrolers over a $66k spread out over 3 years, like 22k a year over the contract length. He shutdown the ski resort during the Christmas holidays, and brought the town to its knees. This is just one example, but there are many. It is ideological to these people, its about maintaining their control over the working class. We are at the beginning of a class struggle that Earth has never witnessed before, with way more lives at stake.

I do not think LLMs are going to lead to super intelligence btw, I do believe it will get decent enough to uproot many lives when its used as a weapon against the value of labor and to accelerate concentration of resources into the few(er). We are up against people like Chuck Horner, who'd rather destroy an entire town of workers over 22k a year than concede any power. They have zero interest in building a equitable society, or we wouldn't see this type of behavior. This will 100% get used to replace you, then what will they do with us? They aren't going to just let everyone chill, I promise you that.

I believe the devaluation (and surveillance )of labor because of LLMs, robotics (machine learning in general) is the most pressing issue of our time.

I get the draw to building cool tools with these things, but please don't do it in the open. Let someone else do it, and then we can call them out too. The slower these developments can happen the better.

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#73
post #60
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please report any panics, we'll fix them!

[flagged]

How do you feel about software engineers who build open source libraries?

Open source has been responsible for enormous productivity boosts in our industry, because we don't all have to build duplicates of exactly the same thing time and time again.

But think of all of the jobs that were lost by people who would otherwise been employed building the 500th version of a CSS design system, or a template engine, or code to handle website logins!

What makes AI tools different? (And I actually do agree that they feel different, but I'm interested in hearing arguments stronger than "it feels different".)

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#74
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Every AI advancement liberates real humans from drudgery and allows them to create what they want more easily. The invention of the digital calculator turned human calculators into accountants, and that's great! We're contributing to the same process now

It liberates those who have massive resources to run gigantic models at whatever scale they want.

Corporations and billionaires will get Ti-Nspires we get Ti-83s.

I do not agree that inference will get more affordable in time to prevent harm. It will cause way more problems with the devaluation of labor before it starts to solve those problems, and in that period they will solidify their control over society.

We already see it in how ML is being used on a vast scale to build advanced surveillance infrastructure. Lets not build the advanced calculators for them for free in open source please, they'd like nothing better. I wrote a lot more in the comments above also.

If anyone has time, this is required reading imho: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#75

Maybe a dumb question, but couldn't you use seccomp to limit/deny the amount of syscalls the Python interpreter has access to? For example, if you don't want it messing with your host filesystem, you could just deny it from using any filesystem related system calls? What is the benefit of using a completely separate interpreter?

https://github.com/butter-dot-dev/bvisor is pushing in that direction

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#76
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You're really stretching things here to classify me pointing out that LLMs can handle syntax errors caused by partial implementations of Python as "being a vapid propagandist". (This kind of extremely weak criticism often seems to come from newly created Hacker News accounts, which makes me wonder if it's mostly the same person using sockpuppets.)

Sorry for this, Simon. But just know that this non-newly-created hacker news account does not think you are a “vapid propagandist” and appreciates your content.

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#77
post #8

This feels like the time I was a Mercurial user before I moved to Git. Everyone was using git for reasons to me that seemed bandwagon-y, when Mercurial just had such a better UX and mental model to me. Now, everyone is writing agent `exec`s in Python, when I think TypeScript/JS is far better suited for the job (it was always fast + secure, not to mention more reliable and information dense b/c of typing). But I think…

Python has uv, ruff, ty

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#78
post #8

This feels like the time I was a Mercurial user before I moved to Git. Everyone was using git for reasons to me that seemed bandwagon-y, when Mercurial just had such a better UX and mental model to me. Now, everyone is writing agent `exec`s in Python, when I think TypeScript/JS is far better suited for the job (it was always fast + secure, not to mention more reliable and information dense b/c of typing). But I think…

Python has the advantage that everybody sort of knows it is bad and slow, which is an important trait for a glue language. This increases the incentive to do the right thing: call a library written in C or Fortran or something.

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#79
post #73
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How do you feel about software engineers who build open source libraries? Open source has been responsible for enormous productivity boosts in our industry, because we don't all have to build duplicates of exactly the same thing time and time again. But think of all of the jobs that were lost by people who would otherwise been employed building the 500th version of a CSS design system, or a template engine, or code t…

Because beforehand engineers could be reasonably confident that their work would simply accelerate a the growth of a growing pie; today, most expect that further development will be used, first and foremost, to replace labor. Most sectors do not grow indefinitely, so there's no reason to assume software has to.

To put it gently, yes it feels different: for people who haven't already saved a lifetime of SWE wages, this is the first credible threat to the sector in which they're employed since the dot com bubble. People need to work to eat.

Re: Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

#80
post #40
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there’s no way around VMs for secure, untrusted workloads. everything else, like Monty has too many tradeoffs that makes it non-viable for any real workloads disclaimer: i work at E2B, opinions my own

As discussed on twitter, v8 shows that's not true. But to be clear, we're not even targeting the same "computer use" use case I think e2b, daytona, cloudflare, modal, fly.io, deno, google, aws are going after - we're aiming to support programmatic tool calling with minimal latency and complexity - it's a fundamentally different offering. Chill, e2b has its use case, at least for now.

There's been a constant stream of v8 VM sandbox escape discoveries since its dawn of course. Considering those have mostly existed for a long time before publication it's very porous most of the time.

And Python VM had/has its sandboxing features too, previously rexec and still https://github.com/zopefoundation/RestrictedPython - in the same category I'd argue.

Then there's of course hypervisor based virtualization and the vulnerabilities and VM escapes there.

Browsers use belt-and-suspenders approaches of employing both language runtime VMs and hardware memory protection as layers to some effect, but still are the star act at pwn2own etc.

It's all layers of porous defenses. There'd definitely be room in the world for performant dynamic language implementations with provably secure foundations.

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