Inference

Vol. 23 No. 2 – March/April 2025

Inference

Sandboxing: Foolproof Boundaries vs. Unbounded Foolishness

Sandboxing mitigates the risks of software so large and complex that it's likely to harbor security vulnerabilities. To safely harness useful yet ominously opaque libraries, a simple mechanism provides ironclad confinement—or does it?

by Terence Kelly, Edison Fuh

Peer Mentoring

Stop waiting for a senior mentor to appear. Your peers are some of the most valuable mentors you'll ever find. Start leveraging those relationships, sharing insights, and bringing value to every conversation. Your career will thank you for it.

by Kate Matsudaira

Can't We Have Nice Things?

We build apparatus in order to show some effect we're trying to discover or measure. A good example is Faraday's motor experiment, which showed the interaction between electricity and magnetism. The apparatus has several components, but the main feature is that it makes visible an invisible force: electromagnetism. Faraday clearly had a hypothesis about the interaction between electricity and magnetism, and all science starts from a hypothesis. The next step was to show, through experiment, an effect that proved or disproved the hypothesis. This is how empiricists operate. They have a hunch, build an apparatus, run an experiment, refine the hunch, and then wash, rinse, and repeat.

by George Neville-Neil