Comment by simonw

Counterpoint to the sibling comment: posting your own site is fine. Your contributions are substantial, and your site is a well-organized repository of your work. Not everything fits (or belongs) in a comment.

I'd chalk up the -4 to generic LLM hate, but I find examples of where LLMs do well to be useful, so I appreciated your post. It displays curiosity, and is especially defensible given your site has no ads, loads blazingly fast, and is filled with HN-relevant content, and doesn't even attempt to sell anything.

And again you're linking to your site. Maybe try pasting the few relevant sentences instead of constantly pushing your content in almost every comment. That's what people find annoying. Maybe link to other people's stuff more, or just write what you think here on HN.

If someone wants to read your blog, they will, they know it exists, and some people even submit your new articles here. There's no need to do what you're doing. Every day you're irritating more people with this behavior, and eventually the substance won't matter to them anymore, so you're acting against your own interests.

Unless you want people to develop the same kind of ad blindness mechanism, where they automatically skip anything that looks like self promotion. Some people will just see a comment by simonw and do the same.

A lot of people have told you this in many threads, but it seems you still don’t get it.

> can it run in WebAssembly?

You can safely assume so. Bellard is the creator of jslinux. The news here would be if it _didn't_.

> What's the difference to regular JavaScript?

It's in the project's README!

> Is it safe to use as a sandbox against attacks like the regex thing?

This is not a sandbox design. It's a resource-constrained design like cesanta/mjs.

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If you vibe coded a microcontroller emulation demo, perhaps there would be less pushback.

It's interesting but I don't think it belongs as a comment under this post. I can use LLMs to create something tangential for each project posted on HN, and so can everyone else. If we all started doing this then the comment section will quickly become useless and not on point.

Usually I watch your stuff very closely (and positively) because you're pushing the edges of how LLMs can be useful for code (and are a lot more honest/forthwright than most enthusiasts about it Going Horribly Wrong and how much work you need to do to keep on top of it.) This one... looks like a crossbar of random things that don't seem like things anyone would actually want to do? Mentioning the sandboxing bit in the first post would have helped a lot, or anything that said why that particular modes are interesting.

Simon although I find it interesting. And I respect you in this field. I still feel like the reason people call out AI usage or downvote in this case is that in my honest opinion, it would be also more interesting to see people actually write the code and more so (maintain) it as well and create a whole community/github project around microquickjs wasm itself

I read this post of yours https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/ and although there is a point that can be made that what you are doing isn't a job and I myself create prototypes of code using AI, long term (in my opinion) what really matters are the maintainance and claim (like your article says in a way, that I can pin point a person whose responsible for code to work)

If I find any bug right now, I wouldn't blame it on you but AI and I have varying amount of trust on it

My opinion on the matter is that for prototyping AI can be considered good use but long term it definitely isn't and I am sure that you share a similar viewpoint.

I think that AI is so contrasting that there stops existing any nuance. Read my recent comment (although warning, its long) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359684)

Perhaps you can build a blog post about the nuance of AI? I imagine that a lot of people might share a similar aspect of AI policy where its okay to tinker with it. I am part of the new generation and trust be told I don't think that there becomes much incentives long term unless someone realizes things of not using AI because using AI just feels so lucrative for especially the youngsters.

I am 17 years old and I am going to go into a decent college with (might I add immense competition to begin with) when I have passion about such topics but only to get dissuaded because the benchmark of solving assignments etc. are done by AI and the signal ratio of universities themselves are reducing but they haven't reduced to the point that they are irrelevant but rather that you need to have a university to try to get a job but companies have either freezed hiring which some point out with LLM's

If you ask me, Long term to me it feels like more people might associate themselves with hobbyist computing and even using AI (to be honest sort of like pewdiepie) without being in the industry.

I am not sure what the future holds for me (or for any of us as a matter of fact) but I guess the point I am trying to state is that there is nuance to the discussion from both sides

Have a nice day!

No I mean post it as an HN post and if anybody cares to see it, they'll upvote that and comment in there. That, instead of pigging backing on other posts to get visibility.

I love it, I find the note interesting, educational, and adds to the discussion in context. Guess you're bound to get a few haters when you share your work in public, but I for one appreciate all your posts, comments, articles, open-source projects.

Running v8 itself as a sandbox is non-trivial, at least embedded in a Python or Node.js or similar application.

The web is littered with libraries that half do that and then have a note in the README that says "do not rely on this as a secure sandbox".