HN user

nimish

2,809 karma
Posts17
Comments979
View on HN

We already have had that ossified layer thing multiple times in mathematics. Formalisms change. For example, prior to vector calculus writing out multidimensional PDEs was tedious. Vector calculus has serious issues in its own right, so you get people pushing geometric algebra. In more rarefied domains you have things like categories and sheafs replacing the previous "ossified" layer.

It'll keep going on and on.

That consumption figure is per acre of almonds. But your point is still valid. In total almonds or other crops like alfalfa consume millions of acre-feet of water a year in a dry state like California while a single data center only consumes ~500-1000.

Interoperability is, and always was, the hardest part of programming systems together. It's telling that the ai tooling needed sustained non ai effort to expose the interfaces via MCP (or ws-* or rest or an enterprise service bus or xml or CORBA or EJB or...)

This paragraph alone is fundamentally better than the page or so of text in the blog post.

I'm not sure what it is about the style of technical writing I've seen lately but just directly getting to the point versus trying to obfuscate the thesis on a potentially controversial topic is increasingly rare

Rent seeking is the name of the game for much of b2b SaaS.

MCP is an attempt to make that easy, but the issue here is that a lot of the companies offering integration could be disintermediated entirely by LLMs. Hard to say what that means.

There's an issue this highlights and it's not that the original authors were stupid so much as there's clearly a lot of knowledge held in silos.

That's not a good thing if your goal is to advance everyone's knowledge. Whatever is going on in academia is failing relatively closely related fields which is not good.

Yep. Trusting a guy who made a rookie excel error is not something I think we should continue to do.

Especially when the consequences downstream of that error were so stark in terms of policy.

Hey garry, my daughter woke up with the flu so I won't make it in today

This is a strictly better email than anything involving the AI tooling, which is not a great argument for having the AI tooling!

Reminds me a lot about editor config systems. You can tweak the hell out of it but ultimately the core idea is the same.