You talk to a master agent (Sidekick) describing the app you want, and it creates it for you, batteries included (a lot of tools, which are vetted MCP servers and skills, a database, cron-jobs, and a hosting environment where your apps live). The tools connect to many things such as email, slack, weather, sports, news, web, and your agents can do all sorts of things.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050214

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008929

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Being a library is a pretty interesting feature! Correct, Durable Functions allows you to write task-parallel orchestrations of task-parallel 'activities' (which are stateless functions), and these orchestrations are fully persistent and resilient, like DBOS executions. It also has the concept of 'Entities', which are named objects (of a type you define) that "live forever", and serialize all method invocations, which are the only way to change their private state. These are also persistent. The Netherite paper [1], section 2, describes this model well.

So, there seems to be a pretty close correspondence between DBOS steps and DF activities, and between workflows and orchestrations. I don't know what the correspondence is to DF entities is in the DBOS model.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

In the default mode, the app will interpose on the communication between, say, Claude, and a local MCP server. It will send the contents of the message (which may include the very sensitive information it is trying to protect) to a remote LLM, which you have to trust. The "scans" will be stored on a log on the server. Not to mention the potential extra delay for every MCP exchange?

This may be more secure, but is it really?

They wouldn't be able to see you are using X in particular. There may be very specific timing patterns that the X app or the X web app use when fetching related images, new posts, etc, but this also depends on how you scroll the site, and this seems infeasible to prove beyond any reasonable doubt, and also that any ISP would have logs with that granularity. As the parent said, you should make sure no DNS queries go outside of the VPN, for example.

Now, if you post to X, then it would be clear that you used it, which would be a problem according to the resolution, as long as you were in the country.

After the course ended, one student going home did manage to use his assignment to get Internet access from the airport, as we had forgotten to turn off the DNS server nodes.

Over the years we had a lot of fun with creative final projects in the course besides IP-over-DNS, including web-based phone tethering, DNS spoofing, openflow-based SDN routing, LT (Erasure) Coding, a BitTorrent client, and a DNS-redirection-based CDN with leaderboard.

[1] https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs168/s11/handouts/dtun.pdf

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.07366

Her PhD work went on to really understand the performance of complex distributed programs, like large Spark jobs, and a lot of at least earlier performance instrumentation in Spark is due to her.[2]

[1] https://brooker.co.za/blog/2012/01/17/two-random.html [2] http://kayousterhout.org/