tow21

(everything I write about MCP means "remote MCP" by the way. Local MCP is completely pointless)

MCP provides you a clear abstracted structure around which you can impose arbitrary policy. "identity X is allowed access to MCP tool Y with reference to resource pool Z". It doesn't matter if the upstream MCP service provides that granularity or not, it's architecturally straightforward to do that mapping and control all your MCP transactions with policies you can reason about meaningfully.

CLI provides ... none of that. Yes, of course you can start building control frameworks around that and build whatever bespoke structures you want. But by the time you have done that you have re-invented exactly the same data and control structures that MCP gives you.

"Identity X can access tool Y with reference to resource pool Z". That literally is what MCP is structured to do - it's an API abstraction layer.

This argument always sounds like two crowds shouting past each other.

Are you a solo developer, are you fully in control of your environment, are you focused on productivity and extremely tight feedback loops, do you have a high tolerance for risk: you should probably use CLIs. MCPs will just irritate you.

Are you trying to work together with multiple people at organizational scale and alignment is a problem; are you working in a range of environments which need controls and management, do you have a more defensive risk tolerance ... then by the time you wrap CLIs into a form that are suitable you will have reinvented a version of the MCP protocol. You might as well just use MCP in the first place.

Aside - yes, MCP in its current iteration is fairly greedy in its context usage, but that's very obviously going to be fixed with various progressive-disclosure approaches as the spec develops.

For language geeks: https://kpt.datamediate.com

KPT is a language app specifically targeted at explainable verb conjugation for highly inflected/agglutinative languages. Currently works for Finnish, Ukrainian, Welsh, Turkish and Tamil.

These are really hard languages to learn for most speakers of European languages, particularly English - we're not used to complex verb conjugations, they're hard to memorise and the rules often feel quite arbitrary. Every other conjugation practice app just tells you right/wrong with no explanation, which doesn't really help you learn when there are literally hundreds of rules to get right.

The interesting part was using an LLM to create a complete machine-executable set of conjugation rules, which are optimized for human explainability, and an engine to diagnose which rule is at fault when you get it wrong. There's several hundred rules needed for each language in order to cover all exceptions.

NB as a bonus it also works fully offline because my best practice hours are when I'm travelling and have poor connectivity.

Really cool stuff, I thought about launching something similar earlier this year, there's definitely a market there. I see a lot of AI-ative startups coming up against compliance requirements way earlier than before, with much smaller teams, and most existing solutions just need too much from you as you engage.

How do you see yourself against someone like delve.co?

Yeah, I know - but an antenna embedded within a small box is going to be much less effective than a big old directional Yagi antenna like https://www.satshop.fi/en/4g/4g-5g/4g-antennas.html

Seems weird to cripple the product by not allowing me to (optionally) disable the internal antenna and instead use and tune an external antenna. And I suspect that is likely to make a difference when you are on the edge of coverage, but you know exactly where the relevant cell tower is, a few km away.

How does the Teltonika work out for you - I nearly bought it earlier this year but it doesn't have support for external antennae. I'm just on the edge of 5G coverage and I'm not sure I want to splash out on something which I can't tune for decent reception.

Seems an odd omission for a ruggedised outside modem - the Unifi also seems to not support external antennae.

(I'd also prefer a unifi version just so it fits in the with rest of the networking infra I have in the mökki.)

Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon might get through easily as companies. I don't think all G/M/M/A staff will get through easily.

On the plus side, maybe this means the endless churn of JS libraries will finally slow down and as someone who isn’t a JS developer but occasionally needs to dip their toe into the ecosystem, I can actually get stuff done without having to worry about 6-month old tutorials being wrong and getting caught in endless upgrade hell.

Only if you're only talking about income from work. If you own property in country A which you rent out while you live & work in country B, then you probably still owe tax on that rental income in country A. (but it will depend on the exact wording of the relevant DTA if one exists)

And since you are now filling in two tax returns for different countries, with different tax allowances across rental income and work income which interact in decidedly non-linear fashion, you probably need to make sure both country A and B have no confusion about where your work income was earned.

Having spent the last 8 years obsessively counting days across the UK and Finland (and every other country I have visited) exactly to account for this scenario, I am very sympathetic to attempts to solve this problem space!

Much harder to enforce against services.

Physical goods you can hold until tariffs are paid.

Services are paid for by invoices between two corporate entities whose legal domicile may have nothing to do with the real country of origin of the services.

Lots of European SaaS providers invoice US customers from their US subsidiary - impossible to distinguish the transaction in order to put a tariff on it.

Brilliant! Literally my first thought when I saw the original submission was “I wish there was a banjo version”!

Definitely will be using your app.

Otherwise pointless pedantry, but in line with the "nobody cares about quality" ...

"the hoi polloi" grates every time I read it. "hoi polloi" literally means "the many", so this is an awkward pleonasm, "the the many", amounting to a lack of quality in a piece of writing.

Coincidentally I was reading this story yesterday:

https://www.londonrecruits.org.uk/index.php/items-received-s...

about the “London Recruits” in the 70s and 80s who smuggled books, leaflets, etc into apartheid SA on behalf of the ANC, doing so in such secrecy they didn’t know each others identity until 29 years after the apartheid regime fell.

Joy Leman, one of the recruits, was my late father-in-law’s colleague.

Actually, London used to have one area code, "01".

Then at some point it was split into inner & outer, and there was endless one-up-manship about whether you had an inner or outer London code. (obviously, inner London was posher)

They still do make rubber products!

https://www.nokianfootwear.com/ https://www.nokiantyres.com/

Chiming in here from Finland as another 9-5 owner, 2001 model. Also a station wagon (or "farmari" as the Finns like to call it).

Definitely a much-loved model, I get appreciative comments regularly from middle-aged men whose formative years were clearly spent in Saabs. When I went to the Mercedes car dealership last weekend (thinking about upgrading to an electric vehicle), the salesman was in such raptures over my Saab he nearly forgot to try and sell me a new car.

I think this is honestly a worry over nothing: this is very directly a sales tool to encourage spending on MS products.

What you are seeing is basically meaningless stats dressed up in pretty charts. There are enough pretty charts there to ensure that your organization is doing "better than a peer benchmark" on at least a few metrics.

Then the CIO is able to select the best-looking charts into his board presentation and say, "look guys, we are a really great IT organization that is using tools effectively, please give me more budget to go and spend"

And then some of that budget will get back to Microsoft.

I don't think any of the participants in this dance really believe these numbers actually mean anything, and if you suggested tracking individuals at this level I think you would get push back from the managers because it would be a waste of their time.

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I love it. At least, the idea, without having tried it yet. The moment you support Office365 calendars, you can have all my money.

So I actually live (and am typing this) about 5 minutes walk from the CSC head office in Keilaranta, which I can see out of my window. I wonder if the machine is physically located there.

(I'm pretty sure my first linux kernel download was 1997, one of the 2.0-pre series, and it probably came from funet.fi)

Something like this:

https://www.wanhala.net/post/156592370293/all-roads-lead-to-...

?

... but Palantir? That rather deflated the vision of regret.

Honestly, maybe I’m way out of the normal HN demographic, but my first reaction was, this sounds like, “how I had a lucky escape and didn’t spend most of my early career actively making the world a much worse place.”

I’m no great fan of MS, but given the choice between a job there; or the possibility to work on bringing about a dystopic surveillance future, I just don’t see the hard decision.

My favourite illogical system is archaic Finnish, where it goes (roughly translated)

One, two, three, ... Second-one (11), second-two (12), second-three (13), ... Third-one (21), third-two (22), third-three (23), ...

ie you have an off-by-one error in the tens digit as you are counting.

Modern Finnish retains this for 11-19, but mercifully sanity returns for numbers above that.

Weird. I think it’s rubbish as a public library.

I mean, it’s an interesting building, and a nice place for a cup of coffee, but it’s absolutely useless if you want to go and browse some shelves and borrow some books; it’s like it’s been actively designed to make that hard to do.

I think ncmncm means “people”. The cutting edge of computational systems organization is finding ways to effectively work with the complex multiagent systems running on wetware.

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On the other hand, if you're not in a position to go and talk to decision makers about your product, it's worth asking whether you're the right person to be building that product.

Probably worth noting that the Daily Express is decidedly opinionated on the question of EU membership; not exactly an unbiased opinion.

Not that I'm disputing the quote (I have no idea) - but Monnet was not the only person driving the formation of the ECSC, and I'm not sure any of the others involved had the same views.

An unfortunate datapoint: for one of our products I'm still seeing >25% users on IE8.

This is a (primarily UK) product most of whose users are on internal bank networks. It's come down from about 40% 2 years ago, so it's heading in the right direction - but I'm not sure I see it going away any time soon.

There's huge organizational inertia inside these banks around IT systems - if we want to serve them, we need to support IE8 for the foreseeable future.