201–210 of 366 posts
I know this is nit-picky and not really relevant to the actual meat of the story, but a toaster (outside of a gag gift or gimmick) cannot run on USB-C since your typical toaster draws ~1kW and USB-C power spec tops out at 240W.
> But it worked, and now Rex's toast has HDMI output.
> Toaster control protocols? Rex says absolutely.
I agree with the article, and I love how the author is (mis-)using MCP. I just want to rephrase what the accident actually is. The accident isn't that somehow we got a protocol to do things we couldn't do before. As other comments point out MCP (the specificaiton), isn't anything new or interesting. No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned. I don't know h…
For those that don't remember/don't know, everything network related in Windows used to use their own, proprietary setup.
Then one day, a bunch of vendors got together and decided to have a shared standard to the benefit of basically everyone.
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> The main difference between MCP and REST is `list-tools`. > REST APIs have 5 or 6 ways of doing that You think nobody's ever going to publish a slight different standard to Anthropic's MCP that is also primarily intended for LLMs?
Why would they? I'm sure the "Enterprise" folks are putting together some working group to develop ANSI-xyzzy standard for Enterprise operability which will never see the light of day.
The next step would be Microsoft attempting to make their registry the de facto choice for developers and extending with Windows-specific verbs.
Then, by controlling what's considered "secure", they can marginalize competitors.
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Remember Web 2.0? Remember the semantic web? Remember folksonomies? Mash-ups? The end of information silos? The democratizing power of HTTP APIs?Anyone? Anyone?
Nobody remembers the semantic web anymore
In all seriousness though, I think HN has a larger-than-average amount of readers who've worked or studied around semantic web stuff.
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so... is this OpenAPI then?
OpenAPI doesn't have a baked in discoverability mechanism. It isn't compatible with LLMs out of the box. It is a lower level abstraction. I don't want to write a blob of code that talks to an Open API service every time I want to do something with an LLM.
Well, Swagger was there from the start, and there's nothing stopping an LLM from connecting to an openapi.json/swagger.yaml endpoint, perhaps meditated by a small xslt-like filter that would make it more concise.
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But you're describing it in a way that is useless to anything but an LLM. It would have been much better if the description language had been more formalized.
The description includes an input and output json schema.
https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/ser...
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If this then that - a zapier type glue provider.
Minor chronological point but Zapier is an IFTTT-type glue provider. IFTTT was announced Dec. 14, 2010 and launched on Sept. 7. 2011. Zapier was first pitched Sept. 30, 2011 and their public beta launched May 2012.
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My understanding is MCP = original APIs + 1 more API The additional API is /list-tools And all the clients consume the /list-tools first and then rest of the APIs depending on which tool they want to call.
Yes. But in order to do that you run the MCP server for that API locally. Is it really worth doing that just to have the additional /list-tools, when it is otherwise basically just a bridge/proxy?
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So the whole point of the article is that an API is an API and anything can call an API?
There is a long tail of applications that are not currently scriptable or have a public API. The kind that every so often make you think "if only I could automate this instead of clicking through this exact same dialog 25 times" Before, "add a public API to this comic reader/music player/home accounting software/CD archive manager/etc." would be a niche feature to benefit 1% of users. Now more people will expect to h…