> The (only?) year of MCP
I like to believe, but MCP is quickly turning into an enterprise thing so I think it will stick around for good.
16,544 karma · joined April 2, 2010
I like to believe, but MCP is quickly turning into an enterprise thing so I think it will stick around for good.
That in retrospective was what made rye temporarily attractive and popular.
You are not wrong. That's what I thought for two years. But I don't think that framing has worked very well. The problem is that even though it is a machine, we interact with it very differently from any other machine we've built. By reducing it to something it isn't, we lose a lot of nuance. And by not confronting the fact that this is not a machine in the way we're used to, we leave many people to figure this out on their own.
> An LLM can't suffer. So no need to get one's knickers in a twist with mental gymnastics.
On suffering specifically, I offer you the following experiment. Run an LLM in a tool loop that measures some value and call it a "suffering value." You then feed that value back into the model with every message, explicitly telling it how much it is "suffering." The behavior you'll get is pain avoidance. So yes, the LLM probably doesn't feel anything, but its responses will still differ depending on the level of pain encoded in the context.
And I'll reiterate: normal computer systems don't behave this way. If we keep pretending that LLMs don't exhibit behavior that mimics or approximates human behavior, we won't make much progress and we lose people. This is especially problematic for people who haven't spent much time working with these systems. They won't share the view that this is "just a machine."
You can already see this in how many people interact with ChatGPT: they treat it like a therapist, a virtual friend to share secrets with. You don't do that with a machine.
So yes, I think it would be better to find terms that clearly define this as something that has human-like tendencies and something that sets it apart from a stereo or a coffee maker.
It's not that simple. Proportionally I spend more time with humans, but if the machine behaves like a human and has the ability to recall, it becomes a human like interaction. From my experience what makes the system "scary" is the ability to recall. I have an agent that recalls conversations that you had with it before, and as a result it changes how you interact with it, and I can see that triggering behaviors in humans that are unhealthy.
But our inability to name these things properly don't help. I think pretending it to be a machine, on the same level as a coffee maker does help setting the right boundaries.
I can only speak for myself. I worked for a company that is somewhere in the observability space (Sentry) and Charity was a person I looked up to my entire time working on Sentry. Both for how she ran the company, for the design they picked and for the approaches they took. There might be others that have worked on wide events (afterall, Honeycomb is famously inspired by Facebook's scuba), she is for sure the voice that made it popular.
Fighting complexity is deeply unpopular.
I concur. In fact, I strongly recommend anyone who has been working with observability tools or in the industry to read her blog, and the back story that lead to honeycomb. They were the first to recognize the value of this type of observability and have been a huge inspiration for many that came after.
If we want it or not, a lot of modern software looks like that. I am also not a particular fan of building software this way, but it's a reality we're facing. In part it's because quite a few services that people used to build in-house are now outsourced to PaaS solutions. Even basic things such as authentication are more and more moving to third parties.
Right now VSCode can do things that Cursor cannot, but mostly because of the market place. If Cursor invests money into the actual IDE part of the product I can see them eclipsing Microsoft at the game. They definitely have the momentum. But at least some of the folks I follow on Twitter that were die-hard Cursor users have moved back to VSCode for a variety of reasons over the last few months, so not sure.
Microsoft itself though is currently kinda mismanaging the entire product range between GitHub, VS Code and copilot, so I would not be surprised if Cursor manages to capitalize on this.
I have absolutely no horse in this race, but I turned from a 100% Cursor user at the beginning of the year, to one that basically uses agents for 90% of my work, and VS Code for the rest of it. The value proposition that Cursor gave me was not able to compete with what the basic Max subscription on anthropic gave me, and VS Code is still a superior experience to Claude in the IDE space.
I think though that Cursor has all the potential to beat Microsoft at the IDE game if they focus on it. But I would say it's by no way a given that this is the default outcome.
That requires trust that the company will do this. The FSL is irrevocable and comes with a future promise.
> Also how does this work with contributor contributions?
The same way as any other thing with a CLA works. If you don't have a CLA, then you have a bit of a mess.
That Sentry is a pain to deploy is not really intentional, it just happened over the years. However because it's a pain to deploy it also opens up a market for people that create managed deployments so I would say, that if anything, it made it worse. For self deployed Sentry you do not need to pay cent, the license explicitly allows it.
Our way of dealing with this was delayed open source publication. That led to the FSL [1], and later to bootstrapping the Fair Source initiative [2] to establish an umbrella term that does not conflict with Open Source. What I have found interesting in the years since is that many companies are wrestling with the same problem, but feel that the two year head start the FSL gives is too aggressive.
I actually still find that surprising. I would like to know whether this is a legitimate concern that two years is not enough, or mostly a perceived one. To me, moving to an Apache 2 or MIT license after a relatively short period is a much stronger statement than a license that risks the project effectively ending if the commercial entity is unwilling to relicense it more openly at the end of its life such as the O'saasy license.
[2]: https://fair.io/
> An alternative construction method for the air induction elbow, shown in the Cozy Mk IV plans, is a lamination of four layers of bi-directional glassfibre cloth with epoxy resin. The epoxy resin specified for the laminate has a glass transition temperature of 84°C, after the finished part has been post-cured. The aircraft owner stated that as the glass transition temperature listed for the CF-ABS material was higher than the epoxy resin, he was satisfied the component was fit for use in this application when it was installed
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69297a4e345e3...
People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now it is kind of fascinating how liberally people throw everything at hosted AI models.
For some reason I remember that the original xbox 360 had "drive letters" which were entire strings. Unfortunately I no longer have access to the developer docs and now I wonder if my mind completely made this up. I think it was something like "Game:\foo" and "Hdd0:\foo".