benvan (u/benvan) - Readit News

benvan commented on Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP github.com/knowsuchagency... · Posted by u/knowsuchagency

benvan · 8 days ago

Nice project! I've been working on something very similar here https://github.com/max-hq/max

It works by schematising the upstream and making data locally synchronised + a common query language, so the longer term goals are more about avoiding API limits / escaping the confines of the MCP query feature set - i.e. token savings on reading data itself (in many cases, savings can be upwards of thousands of times fewer tokens)

Looking forward to trying this out!

benvan commented on Show HN: Max – a federated data query layer for AI agents (and humans) max.cloud... · Posted by u/benvan

benvan · 11 days ago

Regarding the metrics:

- Claude (via Hubspot MCP) was paginating over contacts, at 40s per 800 contacts and ~150k tokens (triggering compaction) - full run was 120 of these loops @ 80 minutes and 18M tokens

- Claude + Max was 1 `max search hubspot --filter` command piped to sort | uniq -c - plus 1 `max search gdrive` query matching each of the results of the previous query, piped to sort | uniq -c - The rest of the tokens were spent producing an output from 20 words + 20 numbers

(Both of these calculations ignore cached tokens)

benvan commented on Command K Bars maggieappleton.com/comman... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

benvan · 2 months ago

Some fun history on how the cmd-k shortcut came to be:

https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/153937

benvan commented on How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part? cam.ac.uk/stories/third-t... · Posted by u/lostin01010101

smokel · 2 years ago

I once saw a documentary on a haptic compass, built from some rumble packs. It allowed people to improve their way-finding skills, and if I recall correctly, people accustomed to the idea of having this extra sense after about a week or so.

I can’t easily find the original research (somewhere in the 1990s), but several hackers and artists have rebuilt or rediscovered the idea.

See for example https://blinry.org/compass-belt/

benvan · 2 years ago

This was a particular passion project of mine a while back. I tried building a haptic compass that could be worn on the wrist and discovered that that the actual haptics mattered a lot. Vibration didn't work at all for me (I couldn't internalise the feeling - however much the intensity modulated it just felt like buzzing) but ended up using a kind of trick of directional "tick" lines to represent proximity to North - which felt almost instantly familiar.

I never finished the project, but love this idea!

https://youtu.be/7UaAwTuahWo?si=YFBq1trurHq0P7i-

benvan commented on Lindenmayer Systems rue-a.github.io/L-Systems... · Posted by u/susam

benvan · 2 years ago

Ooh this is one of my favourite topics :).

I had a side project a while back which has a few fun presets . You can click-and-drag to animate the pattern by changing its branching angle:

http://benvan.co.uk/lsys/#?i=30&r=L%20%3A%20S%0AS%20%3A%20F%...

benvan commented on Show HN: Metomic Contextual Consent – a privacy layer under embedded content contextual.metomic.io/... · Posted by u/benvan

ThePhysicist · 6 years ago

If you're looking for an open-source consent solution there's Klaro, which is used by thousands of websites already and is completely free (BSD-licensed):

https://klaro.kiprotect.com/

You can easily adapt it to various legislations (GDPR & ePrivacy, CCPA, ...) and customize styling and code. It's fully self-hostable and does not require any external resources, it also doesn't send any information to third parties. Interactive consent as a feature (what they call contextual consent) is coming soon as well.

I like Metomic but I wouldn't say it's "privacy-first" as they log consent in their backend. This unnecessarily sends user data to a third party. Neither the ePrivacy directive nor the GDPR requires such a thing. I can understand why they want this data as they need to monetize their service, but I think it's really pointless as you store a cookie that then allows you to retrieve consent data, which you could just as easily store directly in the cookie as well (which Klaro does). Storing consent directly in a cookie allows the website owner to check it on the server side if required, and to prove that the user was asked for his/her consent.

Otherwise it seems like a great tool with a good UI!

benvan · 6 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

Regarding privacy-first - we're striving to do a good job at this so really appreciate opening up the conversation. We don't actually store consents on our server - unless you enable "logged in mode" as a Metomic customer. When this is the case, you can generate a JWT for your customer that we then use to store a record of their consent serverside.

However for most of our customers, we operate in "anonymous mode", where consents are stored on the browser only. The only thing we do is store an incremental counter on the server that allows companies to see which policies are being accepted and which are not. Whilst we're all figuring out how to be more equitable with users as companies, it's extremely helpful to know when a change you make to a policy is something that people don't support (i.e. reject) - and our dashboard shows you this information

We actually have a community slack channel dedicated towards discussing exactly this type of thing - please do join if you'd like to chat!

https://join.slack.com/t/metomiccommunity/shared_invite/enQt...

benvan commented on Show HN: Metomic Contextual Consent – a privacy layer under embedded content contextual.metomic.io/... · Posted by u/benvan

rapnie · 6 years ago

benvan · 6 years ago

I really like this. It's a pretty elegant way to handle iframe content in particular. Will keep a keen eye on this project!

The issue we ran into in this area was with embeds that don't use iframes - generally it ends up being a third party script that needs innoculating (e.g. instagram / twitter embeds), with a bunch of associated dom content somewhere else on the page (the new facebook embeds work the same way).

The approach we've thus taken is to allow you to bundle related content together under a single "purpose" - when permission for that purpose is granted, all associated content gets unlocked.

There's also a bunch more info on this over at the docs: https://metomic.io/docs/placeholders

benvan commented on Show HN: Metomic Contextual Consent – a privacy layer under embedded content contextual.metomic.io/... · Posted by u/benvan

rapnie · 6 years ago

I really like the privacy-first products Metomic is creating, but from this perspective imho the Contextual page should have something like the Metomic footer allowing to navigate to the privacy policy (at https://metomic.io/privacy-policy )

benvan · 6 years ago

Good point! Have added a link to our privacy center at the bottom of the page