Tiny computers everywhere

Sprites is an inter­esting new plat­form offering little vir­tual Linux servers, com­plete with con­sole access, which you can spin up in a second. They join Cloudflare’s new Sandbox offering, which doesn’t cos­play as a full computer, but does offer code exe­cu­tion and a “normal” filesystem: it is roughly computer-shaped.

Both of these are intended pri­marily as play­grounds for AI coding agents, but more broadly they make me think of—well, you know when there’s a beam of hard sun­light coming in through a window, or maybe you’re run­ning a pro­jector in a dark room, and it lights up all the motes of dust in the air? And you realize, oh right, those are there all the time: I am sur­rounded by this stuff. The world is dense with hit.

That, but computers.