Anthropic’s Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign

[madwebness]

On Thursday, 9 April 2026 at 04:09:49 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 09, 2026 at 02:57:17AM +0000, madwebness via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
This is old news.  Linux already has built-in ability to restrict 
programs by capabilities.

Not aware of anything on linux, but if it's anything like 
Capsicum on FreeBSD, it's laughable in that it requires programs 
to be capsicum aware and if they're not, then nothing actually 
works.

> Also old news. Things like Snap run individual applications 
> inside their own encapsulated sandbox, and they literally 
> cannot break out because it's enforced at the OS level.

Snap/flatpak are containers. This isn't what I'm talking about. 
Capabilities are not containers. If an OS had first-class 
capabilities design, it wouldn't be as cumbersome as you imagine. 
There are capability OSs out there, but as far as I'm aware, 
they're very academic and pretty difficult to use. I did spend 
some considerable time thinking about proper design of such an OS 
and I'm fairly certain it's possible to have it both get out of 
your way as a user and be secure/sandboxed. I think people 
haven't thought about it hard enough precisely because they don't 
want to (I get it, many other problems to solve, OS design ain't 
one of them!). But I think it's mistake to believe we can't do 
better.

> I used to be young and foolish, and opinionated to think that 
> had I been the one to write the OS, things would be different.

Yeah, I get the sentiment. I'm not very young myself either. I'm 
just trying to stay excited about things (isn't it why we use 
D?), but I'm fully aware of how much other people actually don't 
care.