I 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 another BigTech trap.
visarga · 13m ago
Computer use over screen and keyboard comes to the rescue
ChrisMarshallNY · 28m ago
…news broke that rival Meta, opens new tab is taking…
(emphasis mine)
Been awhile since I’ve seen this kind of content error.
eadmund · 22m ago
At the end of the day, servers and software engineers cost money. One way to pay for things is ads, but ads are hostile to integrations (because there is no good way to guarantee ads will be shown) — I believe this is why Twitter and Reddit killed their third-party clients. But there are alternate ways to pay for things, e.g. subscriptions. The good news here is that the sorts of things one pays for are IMHO more likely to be the sorts of things worth MCPing together. Using MCP to post to Reddit or Twitter? Low value, to oneself and to society. Using MCP to work with one’s AWS account? Higher value.
Incidentally, why do the article’s links all use strikethrough rather than underlines? Is this a deliberate style choice, or some Chrome/Firefox/Safari incompatibility? It’s pretty ugly.
robertheadley · 2h ago
I am still mad that Facebook mostly abandoned the Open Graph protocol on their own sites.
mxmilkiib · 1h ago
for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :(
but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
It got muddled into the privacy/security debate and then we all got distracted.
immibis · 9m ago
Capitalism happened. You can't extract value if the usership can flow away from your site like water.
bigmattystyles · 4h ago
Laughs/Cries in SAP
_jholland · 1h ago
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.
Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python.
It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.
piva00 · 58m ago
It's unfortunate it is your employer's IP, this shim on top of SAP would be extremely valuable if you sold as another product to enable internal teams in SAP-world corporations to develop without the knowledge of SAP arcana.
renewiltord · 2h ago
It's inevitable. You can't afford to just provide a platform for free that someone else monetizes. I wonder what API plans are reasonable:
* Just let your users pay for API access at a per-call rate
* Charge app developer per user
The problem is that ultimately the LTV of the average user is high, but this is skewed up by the most valuable users who will switch to a different app that will inevitably attempt to hijack your userbase once they control enough of your users.
A classic example is that imgur became a social network of its own once it had enough Reddit users and only Reddit doing their own image/video hosting stemmed that bleeding.
And then there's the fact that if you choose the payment-based approaches, one app will suction the data out and compete with you for it; inevitably some user will lose his data through some app breach and blame you; and the basic app any newbie developer will build will be "yours but ad-free" which is fine for him because you're paying the development and hosting costs of the entire infra.
It's no surprise everyone converges on preventing API access. Even Metafilter does.
I'm curious if anyone has an idea for API access that can nonetheless be a successful company. Everyone's always got some idea with negative margin and negative feedback loops which they bill as "but that won't make you a billionaire" (that's true, because your company will fail) but I wonder if there is some way that could work without ruining social network network-effects etc.
immibis · 8m ago
Probably not. But there can be API access from a nonsuccessful noncompany - look at Fediverse or whatever.
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 another BigTech trap.
(emphasis mine)
Been awhile since I’ve seen this kind of content error.
Incidentally, why do the article’s links all use strikethrough rather than underlines? Is this a deliberate style choice, or some Chrome/Firefox/Safari incompatibility? It’s pretty ugly.
but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
It got muddled into the privacy/security debate and then we all got distracted.
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.
Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python.
It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.
* Just let your users pay for API access at a per-call rate
* Charge app developer per user
The problem is that ultimately the LTV of the average user is high, but this is skewed up by the most valuable users who will switch to a different app that will inevitably attempt to hijack your userbase once they control enough of your users.
A classic example is that imgur became a social network of its own once it had enough Reddit users and only Reddit doing their own image/video hosting stemmed that bleeding.
And then there's the fact that if you choose the payment-based approaches, one app will suction the data out and compete with you for it; inevitably some user will lose his data through some app breach and blame you; and the basic app any newbie developer will build will be "yours but ad-free" which is fine for him because you're paying the development and hosting costs of the entire infra.
It's no surprise everyone converges on preventing API access. Even Metafilter does.
I'm curious if anyone has an idea for API access that can nonetheless be a successful company. Everyone's always got some idea with negative margin and negative feedback loops which they bill as "but that won't make you a billionaire" (that's true, because your company will fail) but I wonder if there is some way that could work without ruining social network network-effects etc.