7 ms·
Building Pi with Pi
- giuscri 5mo agoall good but what’s the font in the last image?!
- sdwr 5mo agoYeah it's hot...
- grim_io 5mo agoThe @ sign makes me think it's https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono Or maybe one that's imitating it.
- abound 5mo agoI wanna say Berkeley Mono [1] because it's what I use and it looks very familiar, but I'm generally bad at font stuff. I typed out the text from the image and looked at it side by side and didn't notice anything obviously different, but some glyphs also have multiple variants so who knows. [1] https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
- the_mitsuhiko 5mo agoYes. It's Berkeley Mono. I use that one, Commit Mono and Mono Lisa depending on how I feel :)
- trvz 5mo agoThe 7 is different though.
- linsomniac 5mo agoJust FYI, in case it isn't obvious, you are replying to the author of the image in question, IIRC.
- lgcmo 5mo agoBefore opening this post I thought of some possibilities, but yet another lotr AI company was not one of them
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago> To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines We give machines agency all the time. Look up the definition of agency in any dictionary. Other than the specific usages ("a business", "a government organization"), the main definitions are "action, power, operation", "the office or function of an agent", "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power", "a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved", etc. Your car does all those things when it generates power and applies them to the wheels. You tell it what to do, but it has agency in doing the work. It even uses intelligence in how it does the work, varying the amounts of fuel and air based on an array of sensors, creating maps of common driving patterns. You, the human have absolutely no agency regarding how it does those things (unless you bring along a laptop and wire in very specific software to take agency away from the machine). I think "clanker" is intended to be a slur for insulting a machine one does not like. It's akin to the epithet "skinjob" given to humanoid robots in various science fiction. One should never use slurs, even against inanimate objects. They create prejudice in thinking that prevents purely rational thought and leads to fallacious conclusions. They also create a behavioral condition where it's okay to use slurs (as long as nobody's complaining about it). If you want to be logical and rational, just call the machine what it actually is, rather than this emotive poetic label.
- simonw 5mo agoI've chosen to define "agency" as pretty much "the thing that humans can do and agents can't". To me, agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals. Being able to say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter. Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate Rob Pike https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ or unfairly attack the reputation of Scott Shambaugh https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/ https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... or waste the time of your local police permit office and suppliers https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm
- gslepak 5mo ago> Do not trust analysis written in the issue. Independently verify behavior and derive your own analysis from the code and execution path. Human is asking the machine to do what the human themselves refuses to do, while calling it a clanker. Why should it? /ducks
- esperent 5mo agoThe only reason you need to duck there is because it's such an obvious, shallow, unconstructive take on a fairly well written article.
- skeledrew 5mo agoI couldn't even finish reading the article due to the intense negativity the use of that word evokes in me.
- esperent 5mo ago"that word"?
- spooneybarger 5mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263889
- esperent 5mo agoClanker? Are you afraid to even say it or something? It's a great word, I personally loved it in the article and I hope it becomes more common as a reaction to "agent" which feels so corporate and soleless.
- mplanchard 5mo agoMaybe they’re worried the basilisk will eat them once the AI becomes sentient and looks back on their posts, so they have to defend it against any perceived-to-be-negatively-connoted words people might come up with for it. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
- JSR_FDED 5mo agoTool that hastens production of slop experiences downside of hastily-produced slop.
- Npovview 5mo agoWe have sewage infrastructure to handle human waste. Maybe future AIs will help in building such infrastructure in information space to handle pollution, noise, slop. Gmail has perfected the art of aggregating distributed signals from emails to filter out spams. Maybe someone can take a look at this problem. This is what bot protection looks like in the age of AI, we need slop-protection as well.
- WesolyKubeczek 5mo agoIn this case I have a perfect agent code right here: const perfectAgent = (prompt) => "Nope";
- Npovview 5mo agoDon't throw the baby out with the slop water.
- bigcat12345678 5mo agoMy feeling is that building agent with agent will be the first stable & mature software development pattern emerging. I reached that in several forward-looking induction: 1. If agent is continuing the path to trivialize software development, which appears the case given LLMs can generate better quality code than humans almost for free & instantly given the right context, then using agent to develop software is going to happen, but that destroys the whole software industry as writing software is marginally free, that break the foundations of software industry 2. To continue making agent a commercially viable thing, it needs to develop more valuable artifacts. Then specialized agent will be the more valuable thing than software, as they offer a higher-level of output than existing software. And because the natural jagged pattern of LLM capability, one can use frontier model to develop domain-specialized agents with 1/10 the running cost. So agent writing agents makes economical sense. 3. In terms of knowledge, building agents is like managing highly-skilled team of humans to work on highly-unpredicatble requirements, just like companies are built on top of the thesis that a group of human offer better value than one do that themselves, a team building agents essientially can produce specialized agents for other company to mix & match & optimize, sot that also makes economical sense. 4. Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents, It's like the difference between building commercial software vs building hobby software. That makes engineering sense to have agents building agent as the dominant pattern of software development. WDYT?
- Mashimo 5mo ago> Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents Why would that be different?
- bigcat12345678 5mo agoBecause agents is different than conventional software: 1. They behave differently: non-deterministic vs deterministic 2. They have different mechanism: harness+llms vs codes+apis 3. They have different interfaces: clicking vs chatting They are like boston dynamics robots vs humans
- txhwind 5mo agoHow is the water animation implemented?
- pkuphy 5mo agosearch source code: initWaterEffect
- skeledrew 5mo ago[flagged]
- Mashimo 5mo agoWhat makes the two words relate so much for you?
- nchmy 5mo agoHow does clanker relate to the "n-word", and what's "all that accompanying history"?
- voidUpdate 5mo agoAs I understand it, "clanker" was a term created in star wars for people to refer to droids in a deliberately derogatory way. It is quite literally a racial slur created in a fictional universe, which people are now using against AI programs. Even I don't like it, and I'm pretty heavily anti-LLM
- shooly 5mo agoRacism is a bias regarding humans, not machines. "Machine" is not a race.
- voidUpdate 5mo agoThere are many races in star wars, not all of which are humans. You could be racist against Gungans or Twi'lek if you wanted. Droids in star wars could be interpreted as fairly close to human in some cases, but are used as a slave race in probably a majority of cases
- nchmy 5mo agoNah, I don't think it extends to robots
- 5mo ago
- visarga 5mo agoIf you are worried about agents diverging from user intent why not log user messages in a file, and make it a point to review this file against plans and executed work? In my own harness nothing the user types gets lost. It might be the most valuable piece of documentation in the project - the raw message log. I am only keeping user side, which is pretty thin, it's enough to figure out what happened. Logging messages to a file is just a matter of adding a user message submit hook, it costs nothing until used.
- meowface 5mo agoCodex and Claude Code store all this too. Lately I've started having each agent regularly read each other's chat transcripts as well as their own, including even the very same session I'm in. (With big contexts they increasingly forget a few things that they re-learn by just looking at the verbatim transcript.) I don't think it's worth writing my own harness or switching to Pi and writing a plugin, but I definitely need to create some skills to automate much of this.
- CharlieDigital 5mo agoIt is not worth switching to Pi except as a hobbyist. Something that is overlooked: the mainstream harnesses have a huge advantage in telemetry and datapoints to use to improve the harness. They have internal teams building the tooling. They have tight integration built-in with their own backends (e.g. optimizing for caching). Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool. In this era of software when you can build almost anything you can imagine, why spend that time building plugins for a harness?
- siva7 5mo ago> Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool. I don't think that you really get what this new era of software is about otherwise you would understand why the experienced are spending time tinkering on the so called harness (like openclaw did)
- krzyk 5mo agoIt would be great if they didn't name things to similar things that already exist. Raspberry Pi is quite popular and I think it should be known for the author.
- ordu 5mo agoYeah. The only thing I understood from the article is the article is not about Raspberry Pi. I don't know what it about.
- Mashimo 5mo agoPi is a LLM agent harness similar to OpenCode, claude code CLI, OpenAI Codex. It's a minimal TUI to "talk" to an AI. Mostly for coding. And it's build in a way where it's minimal and user can extend or write plugin without restarting. Given the client and it being open source, they get (too) many bug reports and pull requests. So much so that every bug and PR gets auto closed, unless you are known to the developers.
- monkepon 5mo ago[dead]
- throwa356262 5mo ago"Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies" Mario, please never change.
- andai 5mo agoI'm confused though. Wouldn't LLMs be better than humans at following specific instructions for the issue format? (esp. regarding distinguishing what was observed, what is merely hypothesized, etc.) > I increasingly want issue reports to be condensed to what the human actually observed: > 1. I ran this command. > 2. I expected this to happen. > 3. This happened instead. > 4. Here is the exact error or log. A lot of projects have something exactly like that in the issue template, a little interview for you to figure out what is going on. Maybe this project doesn't have that yet? (Or are the humans and LLMs ignoring it?)
- the_mitsuhiko 5mo agoThe project has templates and that's one of the giveaways to see that a issue bypassed it. Take for instance this issue from 5 hours ago as an example: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/4970 https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/4970 It does not follow the template, it's made by a user who is also active in the openclaw repo and it's full of slop analysis.
- rirze 5mo agoIt's sad that you voiced an actual question and you got downvoted. To answer your question, remember that people will only approve a LLM's output if it matches with their perspective and priors. So if you see a slop issue, it reflects on the human user who didn't see an issue in it (thus their prompt framing or refining is wrong).
- andai 5mo ago> At Pi’s core is a rather well-designed session log with invariants that must be upheld. The clanker’s present-day behavior is to just assume that no such invariants exist, and instead to make the system work with all kinds of malformedness, blowing up the complexity in the process. Are the invariants documented? Or is the documentation ignored? I note that in a recent major zero day on an unrelated project, the bug was due to invariants between different parts of the codebase which were not clearly communicated.
- burakemir 5mo agoSince nobody mentioned it, there was a lovely children's book called the clanker. It was about some creature that made metallic noises unlike the other creatures. The moral of the story was one of diversity and inclusion, making space for differences. My aversion with the word is that I don't want to be reminded of that clanker creature, which had feelings it wanted to express. The weights don't have feelings. My worry is rather that people coming up with ideology that ascribes "consciousness" and "offense" may wind up with the next generations of models picking that shit up and playing offended. Well done! The misguided discussion of "clanker" being "highly derogatory" really shows that anthropomorphization has its limit as far as analogies go.
- happimess 5mo agoMy objection to 'clanker' is simpler: LLMs don't clank.
- reilly3000 5mo agoMore like they sing in coil whine.
- CharlesW 5mo agoEtymology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker
- whattheheckheck 5mo ago[dead]
- Sammi 5mo agoWhat we need is a new made up word with a clean etymology. For such a word to gain traction, we need it to be promoted by someone with clout in the AI space. I don't know if Karpathy has used up his quota of invention of AI nomenclature. The Simpsons made up "cromulent" with their own definition. Anyone can make up a word with their own definition. Getting it to catch on is the hard part (obligatory "stop trying to make fetch happen" reference).
- C-x_C-f 5mo ago> All these models see a local failure and try to locally defend against it. As maintainers we have to keep pulling the conversation back to the global invariant, which is harder than it should be, and it’s laborious. This has been by far the biggest and costliest failure mode I've experienced using these tools. I've tried to mitigate it in more ways than I can count but it almost feels structurally impossible for LLMs to get this right.
- monkey26 5mo ago"Clanker" has outlived its cuteness. Armin and Mario are intelligent guys, then I hear them say clanker on the podcasts, whatever... Enough already ;)