madrox (u/madrox) - Readit News

madrox commented on MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System worksonmymachine.ai/p/mcp... · Posted by u/azhenley

jes5199 · 14 days ago

ads really aren’t all that lucrative, though, they’re just simple. I worked for a company that was trying to figure out an alternative to ad revenue (we failed) and our people did some research and the average internet user ends up being shown (if I remember correctly) like $60/month of ads, total.

madrox · 14 days ago

Maybe lucrative isn’t the right word but it’s more profitable than the alternative. Call it simple but there’s only so many ways to monetize people that feel entitled to digital works and refuse to open their wallet.

madrox commented on MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System worksonmymachine.ai/p/mcp... · Posted by u/azhenley

CobrastanJorji · 14 days ago

This is Web 2.0. You're in the process of rediscovering mashups. Before it was SOAP and REST/HTTP and now it's...well, it's still kind of REST/HTTP because MCP is JSON-RPC. There was this brief, beautiful period where every "learn to code" book ended with a couple of chapters of how to make your app do google searches and throw the results into a word graph or something before all the big tech companies locked that sort of access down.

Weirdly, I'm a little optimistic that it might work this time. AI is hot, which means that suddenly we don't care about IP anymore, and if AIs are the ones that are mostly using this protocol, providers will perhaps be in less of a rush to block everybody from doing cool things.

madrox · 14 days ago

You’re totally right, and that’s why I think this era will fail.

Web 2.0 failed because eventually people realized to make money they needed to serve ads, and to do that they needed to own the UI. Making it easy to exfiltrate data meant switching cost was low, too. Can’t have that when you’re trying to squeeze value out of users. Look at the evolution of the twitter API over the 2.0 era. That was entirely motivated by Twitter’s desperate need to make money through ads.

Only way we avoid that future is if we figure out new business models, but I doubt that will happen. Ads are too lucrative and people too resistant to pay for things.

madrox commented on Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives blog.cloudflare.com/perpl... · Posted by u/rrampage

madrox · 20 days ago

Every time there's an industry disruption there's good money to be made in providing services to incumbents that slow the transition down. You saw it in streaming, and even the internet at large. Cloudflare just happens to be the business filling that role this time.

I don't really mind because history shows this is a temporary thing, but I hope web site maintainers have a plan B to hoping Cloudflare will protect them from AI forever. Whoever has an onramp for people who run websites today to make money from AI will make a lot of money.

madrox commented on Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives blog.cloudflare.com/perpl... · Posted by u/rrampage

rstat1 · 21 days ago

So server owners are just supposed to bend over and take all the abuse they get from shitty bots and DDOS attacks and do nothing?

That seems pretty unreasonable.

madrox · 20 days ago

There is a difference between blocking abusive behavior and blocking all bots. No one really cared about bot scraping to this degree before AI scraping for training purposes became a concern. This is fearmongering by Cloudflare for website maintainers who haven't figured out how to adapt to the AI era so they'll buy more Cloudflare.

madrox commented on Claude Code introduces specialized sub-agents docs.anthropic.com/en/doc... · Posted by u/tekkertje

_--__--__ · a month ago

People speculate somewhat seriously that Claude (especially given its French name) picked up at some point that you aren't supposed to work as hard in July and August.

madrox · a month ago

How long before we hire psychiatrists instead of engineers to debug AI

madrox commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove

handoflixue · a month ago

They are literally publishing a book called "If you build this, everybody dies" and trying to stop humanity from doing that. I feel like that's an important detail: they're not the ones trying to create the god, they're the ones worried about someone else doing it.

madrox · a month ago

I don't think what you said negates anything I said

madrox commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove

evantbyrne · a month ago

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's own poorly constructed beliefs. Perhaps such a comparison is apt for some people in the inevitable AGI camp, but their worst arguments are not where we should be focusing.

madrox · a month ago

I've read LessWrong very differently from you. The entire thrust of that society is that humanity is going to create the AI god.

madrox commented on A manager is not your best friend staysaasy.com/management/... · Posted by u/thisismytest

madrox · 3 months ago

Managing is a hard job, which is why so many managers are bad and yet, in spite of the efforts of C-levels for decades, the role hasn't been eliminated. There's some wisdom in here, but I would not give this article to a new manager to read. I think it's easy to read too much into this and appear inhuman to your directs.

Is there a line? Sure. Don't shit on your company, but don't do it for your directs...do it for you, because that's just not a healthy way to manage frustration. However, learn to lead in a way that's authentic. Authenticity requires candor.

madrox commented on LLM function calls don't scale; code orchestration is simpler, more effective jngiam.bearblog.dev/mcp-l... · Posted by u/jngiam1

fooker · 3 months ago

Can you point to evidence of widespread use of the word 'agent' in this context from two years ago?

madrox · 3 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37626877

madrox commented on LLM function calls don't scale; code orchestration is simpler, more effective jngiam.bearblog.dev/mcp-l... · Posted by u/jngiam1

madrox · 3 months ago

I've been saying for two years that "any sufficiently advanced agent is indistinguishable from a DSL."

Rather than asking an agent to internalize its algorithm, you should teach it an API and then ask it to design an algorithm which you can run that in user space. There are very few situations where I think it makes sense (for cost or accuracy) for an LLM to internalize its algorithm. It's like asking asking an engineer to step through a function in their head instead of just running it.