Pentive VS SES-shim

> I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were otherwise.

Shameless plug - I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive which is basically GitHub/Reddit for flashcards. Very much pre-product and a WIP, though the offline client proof of concept is done.

I also enjoyed the Treesitter talk from 5 years ago by Max Brunsfeld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jes3bD6P0To

I'm currently building a query language whose grammar is very much inspired by Github's search syntax. I'm using Lezer, which is a GLR like Treesitter, so this talk learned me some parser generators (I've no formal CS education). Here's my grammar, a playground, and an example search query if anyone wants to play with it

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/blob/main/app/src/quer...

https://littletools.app/lezer

    -(a) spider-man -a b -c -"(quote\\"d) str" OR "l o l" OR  a b c ((a "c") b) tag:what -deck:"x y"

Not really. There are options for sharing cards on Anki https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/14j2jfy/deck_sharing_... but their collaboration features are limited.

I myself am building an Anki clone https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive with collaboration built in as a first class citizen, though its far from primetime. Currently stewing on how to get the SR algorithm, FSRS, to compile to wasm.

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive

A free, open source, local-first, spaced repetition system that works offline, has p2p syncing, plugins, and first class support for collaboration. It's GitHub/Reddit for flashcards.

I basically took Anki and turned it into a webapp >_>

I find Solid's model pretty damn close to "compiling down to nothing". I chose Solid for my project because I wanted to support plugins that used other UI frameworks. I recently got a Svelte plugin working with the SolidJS router. I could probably make it prettier... but it's literally a call to Solid's `createComponent` with the Router and an anchoring div to which the Svelte component is mounted. Ezpz.

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/blob/main/example-plug...

I'm also building an Anki clone (sigh) that I'm calling "Github for flashcards".

>A free, open source, local-first, spaced repetition system that works offline, has p2p syncing, plugins, and first class support for collaboration.

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive

Very much a WIP, completely unusable, but I recently made a video demoing the technical proof of concept.

Anki, imo, already has an open algorithm (that the user can change via plugins), universal interfaces, and is "self-hosted". My eyes perked up at REST api, but it doesn't look like there's a centralized server that hosts shared cards, which is where my mind went.

I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/ which is basically Anki + Reddit - people can optionally upload their cards for others to download, and the most popular cards rise to the top. It's FLOSS, offline-first, supports plugins and p2p syncing, and is very much a WIP. My proof of concept is almost done though, which demos the critical technologies in a secure way.

I'm using cr-sqlite right now in my Anki clone: https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive

It's basically an offline-first flashcard webapp. CR-Sqlite allows for incremental syncing.

With Anki (the app from which I'm taking my inspiration), syncing is _not_ incremental - basically it just copies SQLite files around. So for example, the app could be on an iPhone with cards a card `A` reviewed, but the app on an iPad could make changes to the template on which card `A` is based, and that's enough to cause a conflict - you must take changes from only the iPad or only the iPhone. (To be clear - Anki does have some incremental syncing capabilities - I'm picking an intentionally pathological example.) CR-SQLite will mean that everything is incremental, however.

Basically makes 3 way merges a breeze (or n-way merges, really).

A FLOSS, offline-first, spaced repetition system that has first class support for collaboration, curation, and plugins. It's Reddit for flashcards.

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive

I've been thinking about this for a stupid amount of time... thinking that someday someone's going to improve on Anki. Finally got tired of it and said that person's me.

I used E in the 90s: http://erights.org/

I haven't kept up with newer systems but I've heard of https://github.com/endojs/endo and just came across http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/home/anon/isr2017... (which says "in the style of the E programming language" -- that's as far as I've read) while looking that up.

WebAssembly was designed to follow the same capability security principles. CHERI too as someone else just brought up.

There are other potential solutions I haven’t explored close enough (like Endo and SES), or completely omitted as they’re based on an imperfect blacklist-based approach to security (like sandboxed WebWorkers). However, the mentioned 4 solutions are the top contenders, at least in my mind.

I don't know why you are being silently downvoted, as I think it is worth talking about the potential of using static analysis to improve things.

One promising approach is Endo[0] which "uses LavaMoat to automatically generate reviewable policies that determine what capabilities will be distributed to third party dependencies."

[0] https://github.com/endojs/endo

Agoric moved forward and Realms gave way to SES

https://github.com/endojs/endo/tree/master/packages/ses

And Endo is a set of tools (being) built around it to make it more practical for particular usecases

Yea you could restrict the app by whitelisting only the network services and folders that it will use and that's pretty valuable though at least on Linux could already easily be achieved otherwise. It's good that Deno makes it easy but let's be honest, most people will just pass -A.

I'd love to see a permissions system on a library basis. It would ask the first time a dependency is added and when a new permission is requested after an update. Javascript doesn't make that easy though by being so dynamic. SES could maybe help: https://github.com/endojs/endo/blob/master/packages/ses/READ...

I was poking around on the internet a bit earlier and I found this project. It looks pretty cool, and I figured perhaps a few of y'all might find it cool too!

I have no idea if it actually sandboxes networking by default. This other project, endo[0], seems to add some of that functionality.

Regardless of the maturity though, it makes me excited to see this type of work getting done now!

(What made me want to research it was this[1] thread from the other day.)

0: https://github.com/endojs/endo

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30215212

Fortunately the problem could become more tractable if something like SES / Endo takes off:

"Endo protects program integrity both in-process and in distributed systems. SES protects local integrity, defending an application against supply chain attacks: hacks that enter through upgrades to third-party dependencies. Endo does this by encouraging the Principle of Least Authority. ... Endo uses LavaMoat to automatically generate reviewable policies that determine what capabilities will be distributed to third party dependencies."

https://github.com/endojs/endo

Yeah. JavaScript is probably the closest to being there (with things like SES[0], LavaMoat[1], etc.) but we're not quite there yet. It's just shocking that this sort of thing is as seemingly obscure as it is; it's like the whole industry has collectively thrown up their hands and said code execution is unavoidably radioactively dangerous. (While simultaneously using package managers that... well.) But it doesn't have to be!

[0] https://github.com/Agoric/ses-shim

[1] https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat