miniblog.

One interesting consequence of the rise of LLMs: there's more demand for tools that handle untrusted input. Arbitrary HTML+JS can be safely run in a browser. Lean can check an arbitrary proof. These work really well with an LLM that can be wrong, but sometimes gives exactly what you want. Are there other tools in this family?

TIL Tcl has a notion of 'safe interpreters', a mode where you can run untrusted code in a sandbox: https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/safe.htm Not many programming languages have this, but it's way safer to include in the implementation than try to build as a userland library.

I'm writing some docs in markdown, and I'm really glad I can use arbitrary HTML when I need to. It's so handy when you hit the limits of markdown (e.g. tables, named anchors, custom styling). It's dangerous when you have untrusted input, but I'm beginning to appreciate it.