Pxtl

Yeah, since pi is my first agent harness I barely understand what MCP is beyond an API standard. When the essay started talking about codemode without any introduction I was having trouble following it.

It sounds like the main value-add of codemode is security, since its a sandboxed language that can call your MCPs with elevated privs.

But pi doesn't have security. Pi is full yolo, it's on the user to run it in an environment that minimizes the blast radius if the LLM goes haywire.

So I'm not sure what the plan is here. Will pi support running certain tools like bash as a different OS user than owner of the pi process?

That sounds like you just NIH'd mr Zechner's Pi Coding Agent. Those were basically its founding design: yolo-mode security, simple design, minimalist system prompts, plug-in based for anything fancy (even sub-agents and web).

Not just that, they're also kinda similar value proposition, in that it's "holy crap look how fast you can develop code if you just ignore all of the longer-term risks you're creating".

Both AI and Mongo can be used for good and quality code but that's not how they get sales.

MongoDB is the textbook success of "Zero friction and slick marketing beats good engineering discipline" that is the AI froth right now.

From a technical standpoint? Very different. From a marketing standpoint when selling to software-development clients? Same space.

Probably just because it reminded everybody that MongoDB exists as a corporate entity and everybody is re-evaluating investment in "Open Core" products where the paid value-add is consultancy because learning to us the product is so difficult, since LLMs for all their faults are good at "how do I use this hard-to-learn tool?"

"Hey the MongoDB guy left, is MongoDB okay?.... wait, no, of course it isn't. It's in that space that is completely screwed."

I'm giving you the details because I'm going to give you options for solutions and I need priority information about those solutions, and you need to be informed about the trade-offs and costs of each option because you have better knowledge of our overarching objectives than I do.

If our overarching objectives don't impact our on-the-ground decisions, what are you even for?

Actionable items go onto the backlog. The backlog grows from the top.

As a stopgap, a manual pre-flight check is added. The number of manual pre-flight checks becomes a ridiculous overhead but it gives a clear person to blame when something goes wrong.

Dario has always wanted the AI development to slow down and be more careful. Safer AI development was a core reason that Anthropic split off from OpenAI.

What's different today is that now all the big LLM firms want to slow down AI development. When men like Musk and Altman (both known for habitually shooting their mouths off and saying whatever they need to whoever needs to hear it regardless of truth) suddenly agree with Amodei, that's when things start to smell off.

That's surprising because WVO just updated the readme to actually be a decent pitch for the language (although it's LLM-text heavy) just before it was posted to here.

Why? It's idiomatic to math. There's a lot to hate about math notation (use more than one letter in your variable names!) but "let" for declaring variables seems harmless.

If I'm going to pick a bone about modern programming language conventions it's the prevalence of = for assignment and == for equality that grinds my gears.

Yeah, it seems like the sweet-spot for this is real-time and embedded because it should be extremely conservative and consistently fast about memory allocation and de-allocation.

Sad that it's got plug-in stuff as a "non-goal", because I'd love to see this as a scripting engine for gaming (since that's Wouter van Oortmerssen's background). But I imagine a "compiles to C" language would at the very least be functionally impossible to sandbox.

Edit: Question for anybody who's playing with this: When he talks about no generics he says that ADTs still work... is that like his example of writing a function "double" that returns "a + a" and works for any type that supports the plus operator?

It sounds like compile-time duck-typing but I'm having trouble working out the boundaries of that in my head. It sounds like it would only work with fully-open-source libraries for one thing since everything would have to compile from source. Anybody have experience with that sort of thing?

I'm a big fan of Aardappel, I used to co-run the Cube/Sauerbraten mapping website. I've never played with his language projects since they generally seemed too C-fixated to me... but despite that being the case here, I can at least see the value proposition clearly-enough that it seems really cool.

I think the README has been updated to be much more informative since it was first posted. tl;dr:

Stack-obsessed compiles-to-C programming language that promises to be faster than idiomatic C++ or Rust by using creative ideas about allocating dynamically-sized objects to the stack.

I feel this in my bones. I've literally had to fix outages in products where the failure was a "document store" or a "notification system" haphazardly slapped on by a student under direct supervision of a PM with no experienced technical leadership.

One time it was user profile avatars that took a site down. I work in line of business software, nobody needs avatars.

My experience is always "we have a standard SQL server datamart. We just need to put a good reporting tool on that. You're a business analyst and product manager, go analyze some products."

"But can't you just make something exactly like we imagine? We're already paying you and buying stuff is paperwork".

Also it would be nice to have a good standard vector format that isn't the complete kitchen-sink that is SVG, but we don't have that. We needed "jpeg but for vector graphics" and instead we got "html but for vector graphics".

So anybody saying "we should use more vectors" has to remember what the state of open vector graphics standards is.

The form of JPEG-XL that can lossless convert to/from traditional JPEG is exciting tech that should be adopted universally. The non-backwards-compatible version of it seems redundant with AVIF.

"Lisa, get in here... in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

Why not?

It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.

The ladies at Tran Girlismo called this soon after the blockade started.

"There's nothing to explain. You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen."

Could this also be coming from the problem that Qwen3.8-27B's default mode being "extra-high reasoning level"?

Holy crap really? Yay! I know a couple of trans folks that will be ecstatic.

Aside: I'm honestly bewildered that Google doesn't have the ability to handle that in gmail accounts. If somebody gets married or otherwise needs to change their name, their answer is "just make a new google account" when all your stuff is still tied to the old account.

I'm working on same for my family since I want to properly degoogle a bit. One thing I think long term - if I give my kids first-name @ last name , that means that I forever hold power over their email. Which isn't great. But what's the alternative? Register one full domain name per kid? Even ignoring the cost, the ergonomics are awful.

Imho email is missing a feature for nameless email addresses for when somebody just buys their full name as a domain name. If I get "firstname-lastname.name", having the email be "firstname@firstname-lastname.name' kinda ruins it.

Agree that the .name 3rd level domains are silly, disagree on .co.uk being a problem.

If .gov and .mil and .com make sense, then .gov.cc and .mil.cc and .com.cc make sense.

Of course, I think having more than one non-cc TLD was a mistake, but that's just me. If it makes sense to have topical TLDs for international and US institutions, it make sense to have national ones.

The prose equivalent of Artgerm (a comic cover artist whose style looks to have heavily inspired a lot of AI art).

That's literally the meaning of the statement "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

Irrational means stupid.

Stupid can win for a very long time, and in the end the "loss" is born mostly by bag-holders.

I don't think of Zitron as a journalist, I think of him as an entertainer, no different from all the columnists paid to tell people that what they already think is right.

The fact that you're holding him to a higher standard than fabulously compensated professional c-suite officers whose products are used in matters of life and death is... kinda weird?

Bitcoin changed everything. It used to be if you hacked somebody's PC you got.... a hacked PC. Big whoop.

Bitcoin provided both a financial use for stolen compute and a bankless online international payment system for ransoms.

That's what turned the script kiddies into professionals. Malice and lulz were replaced with dollars and cents.