Wuzzy

I agree that there are downsides to this approach. NVIDIA OpenShell does the same thing: https://docs.nvidia.com/openshell/latest/sandboxes/manage-pr.... I had wondered how they deal with the fact that client programs sometimes come with their own CA bundles. Turns out OpenShell sets various common environment variables (like REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE used by Python's requests) to try to convince as many clients as possible that the proxy's certificate is to be trusted :) I would assume exe.dev does something similar.

(I was interested in this because I was actually working on something similar recently: https://github.com/imbue-ai/latchkey. To avoid the certificates issue, this library uses a gateway approach instead of a proxy, i.e. clients call endpoints like "http(s)://gateway.url:port/gateway/https://api.github.com/..." which can be effectively hidden behind the "latchkey curl" invocation.)

I think that a curl wrapper could serve as a universal integration with arbitrary services (as long as they have a public API), saving you a lot of setup complexity and context space. Authentication is the hard part; ideally, you shouldn't even need an OAuth intermediary. Which I think is doable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876636. It's still a bit of an experiment, though.

I believe in an MCP-less future of agent-service interactions and have recently submitted this general alternative (which also supports Slack) based on curl: https://github.com/imbue-ai/latchkey

With that said, a specialized tool like this will almost certainly work better if Slack is the only service you want your agents to interact with. I like that the auth is transparent.

> Couldn't a viral infection do this?

I still don't see how exactly. E.g., even if it "modified itself in response to this genetic engineering" then it wouldn't really transfer the lethal gene into another species, would it?

> Your use of absolutes here (...)

Which absolutes exactly are you talking about? :) Nothing absolute in the "almost certainly" statement, in my opinion.

> I am just surprised how little is known before a public trial was executed.

What do you mean by "is known"?

I don't think this is a real concern, for two reasons: first, how should such a "transfer of genes" to another species proceed? This is not how it works.

Secondly, these genes are pretty much self-regulating; they disappear from the population in one generation. They almost certainly won't be in the ecosystem long enough in order to play a role in any improbable scenario.

Most organisms play multiple roles, too.

The author is presenting different viewpoints on the role of higher education, not saying he holds them all (because, obviously, they are, at least in part, contradictory, which is also something the author mentioned).

What science often does is that it responds to a "why" question by an analysis of the phenomenon and presenting its causes in some lower-level terms. But, from a certain viewpoint, that is not a satisfactory answer.

Take physics, for example. It can tell you why some objects behave the way they do by telling you there are certain particles, interacting forces, etc.. In this way you can explain, say, the photoelectric effect.

But it isn't really an answer to the "why" question, is it? It just pushes the question one level lower. Why are there such and such particles and forces? Why the constants? The very nature of these answers is descriptive. It is a description of how the world works, not why it works that way.

Maybe asking "why" in this ultimate manner is an ill-posed question - but that's not the deal here. It just doesn't seem that science in its current form, unlike religion or philosophy, could ever even attempt to answer it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly atheistic myself, but there are some inherent limitations of scientific exploration and clarification with respect to the answers it can provide.

My impression was that the OP didn't say superlinear algorithms are somehow useless; merely that there are reasons why the linear (or better) ones can be used in much more general settings, which is what makes them "big impact".

I don't know much about the other ones, but Havel most assuredly is not an economist. He has a cultural background and is an author of a number of theater pieces. His successor at the post of Czech president (Klaus) is an economist, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from.

Just as a matter of interest - the current Czech prime minister, who, at least in theory, has more power than the president, has graduated in physics, and has actually worked in research for some time. Angela Merkel (coming from Eastern Germany) has also a scientific background (in physics and chemistry).

But otherwise, it seems you are right about the fact that there is no such rule about post-totalitarian leaders being educated in engineering or sciences in general.

"Our failure to work together prevents us from enjoying better, more widespread Internet access."

I almost didn't manage to read further. The same can be said about so many things (if everyone just took or borrowed what he needed in a responsible manner, we wouldn't need money at all... to name the most utopian example), yet this kind of reasoning simply doesn't work, as has been shown both practically and theoretically (from game theory to "selfish gene").

It makes me always kind of sad to see smart and enthusiastic people not to grasp this simple fact.