The moment MCP was announced, my first thoughts were "oh, those summer children". MPC is idyllic and not for this world.
The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
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Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#22I am still mad that Facebook mostly abandoned the Open Graph protocol on their own sites.
for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :( but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
As other posters have said - capitalism.
But also privacy - it would be amazing to just be able to connect to any app or service you want, interact and react to stuff that's happening _over there_.
However, do you want any old app or service connecting to _your_ data, siphoning it and selling it on (and, at best, burying their use of your data in a huge terms of service document that no-one reads, at worst, lying about what they do with that information)? So you have to add access controls that are either intrusive and/or complex, or, more likely, just ignored. Then the provider gets sued for leaking data and we're in a situation where no-one dares open up.
Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#23The moment MCP was announced, my first thoughts were "oh, those summer children". MPC is idyllic and not for this world.
Hacky scrapper go brrrr
Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#24Laughs/Cries in SAP
I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of our own critical financial data . As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky design to drive profit. Simply because they haven’t documented their systems sufficiently, it is “industry standard practice” to go straight to a £100/hr+ consultant to build what should be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin procedures. Throug…
Hi, I’m a cofounder / CTO of estuary.dev. Our whole mission is democratizing and enabling use of data within orgs.
Open to a conversation about your work here? Reach me at johnny at estuary dot dev.
Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#25…news broke that rival Meta, opens new tab is taking… (emphasis mine) Been awhile since I’ve seen this kind of content error.
I wonder if that’s a dictation artefact
Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#26Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it. How long do you think it will take for this to meaningfully override Apple's share price?
I think it's already starting. Apple can't produce anything people just have to have anymore because of the attitude that's causing this. You can see this in their sales numbers.
People “have to have” an iPhone because it’s a status symbol. Not sure how AI is going to change that.
Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#28> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users (they’ve since cut off all 3rd party clients).
One thing I haven't seen written about much is how these APIs turned into massive liabilities for privacy. If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them. If a Facebook API allows (user-approved apps) to view the names of my friends and the pages they like, this data can be used to create targeted political ads for those users[1].
So a company considering creating a public-facing API must deal with the fact that:
1. This API could be helping my competitor
2. This API makes internal changes more difficult (typically there is a strong effort to maintain backwards compatibility).
3. If company XXX uses the API to extract data (that users have given them explicit access to), the ensuring scandal will not be called the "XXXX Data Scandal", but rather the "MYCOMPANY-XXX Data Scandal"[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#29I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever. And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is your own PC / Phone. If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling again into ano…
MCPs are, in part, a response to the difficulties LLM companies had when trying out LLMs interact online by visually navigation the screen.
They need APIs for it to be efficient. For whatever reason they didn't choose to use accessibility tooling to automate agents, and we haven't written REST APIs for 20+ years - they're left hoping a newly designed protocol will fix it.
Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it. How long do you think it will take for this to meaningfully override Apple's share price?
I think it's already starting. Apple can't produce anything people just have to have anymore because of the attitude that's causing this. You can see this in their sales numbers.
I am completely uninterested to going back to the privacy-stealing, ad-infested nightmare that is Android. Besides, what would I even gain? iOS 25 just got live translation in calls and item extraction from screen (not just photos). So what am I missing?