This article was 160 pages long when printed in the New Yorker. Modern nuclear warheads are around 30x more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. For comparison sake the equivalent resulting story would be 4800 pages long.
Amiga had a similar issue. One of the chips (fat Agnes IIRC?) didn't quite fit in the socket correctly, and a common fix was to pull out the drive mechanisms and drop the chassis something like a foot onto a carpeted floor.
Somewhat related, one morning I was in the office early and an accounting person came in and asked me for help, her computer wouldn't turn on and I was the only other one in the office. I went over, poked the power button and nothing happened. This was on a PC clone. She has a picture of her daughter on top of the computer, so I picked it up, gave the computer a good solid whack on the side, sat the picture down and poked the power button and it came to life.
One confusing thing to me was the word "server". An "MCP server" is a server to the LLM "client". But the MCP server itself is a client to the thing it's connecting the LLM to. So it's more like an adapter or proxy. Also I was confused because often this server runs on your local system (although it doesn't have to). In my mind I thought if they're calling it a server it must be run in the cloud somewhere but that's often not the case.
MCP is supposed to support both concepts of a local and a remote server, but in practice most have opted to build local servers and the tooling basically only supports that which is a shame and, in my opinion, a nonsensical choice that basically only has downsides (you need to maintain the local server, your customers need to install it, you have to remain retro-compatible with your local server, etc.).
This just continues to reinforce my feeling that everything around vibe coding and GenAI-first work is extremely shortsighted and poor quality.
Not more than what local servers do. You don't seem to understand what MCP is. Regardless of whether the MCP "server" is local or remote, it is JUST a wrapper around APIs. It's basically a translation layer to make your APIs adhere to the MCP spec, that's it.
Whether that wrapper's code runs on your laptop or a remote server changes nothing in terms of data exfiltration capabilities. If anything, it would make it more secure to have a remote server since at least you'd have full control over the code that's calling your API.
Right but at least in the case of a local instance, the risk profile is shifted to the use of the computer. A less than ideal situation for sure, but on the other hand a user should be able to do just about anything they want to with hardware they own.
I'm talking about MCP servers that call 3rd party APIs, like your local MCP server calling the Jira instance of your company, the Google Maps API, etc.
Obviously local MCP servers make sense to interact with applications that you have installed locally, but that's by far not their only use.
// Beware the SI's broken definition
// of Hz. You should treat the radian as being correct, as a fundamental
// dimensionless property of the universe that falls out of pure math like
// the Taylor series for sin[x], and you should treat the Hz as being a
// fundamental property of incompetence by committee.
> In other words, if you use the Hz in the way it's currently defined by the
SI, as equivalent to 1 radian/s, you can point to the SI definitions and
prove that you follow their definitions precisely. And your physics
teacher will still fail you and your clients will think you're completely
incompetent because 1 Hz = 2 pi radians/s. And it has for centuries.
You are both simultaneously both right and both wrong.
You cannot win.
You are perfectly right. You are perfectly wrong. You look dumb and
unreasonable. The person arguing the opposite looks dumb and unreasonable.
Huh? Seems this quote confuses correspondence and equivalence. A frequency f = 1 Hz = 1 s^-1 (aka cycle/s != rad/s) corresponds to an angular frequency ω = 2π rad/s (ω = 2π f) but they're distinct concepts and quantities. The Hz was introduced in SI with all those considered. Basically both statements "1 Hz = 1 rad/s" and "1 Hz = 2π rad/s" are wrong. The only dumb is this quote tbh.
The point being made in that file is really that, if you take the SI definitions literally, 'cycles' and 'radians' end up both being dimensionless and equal to 1, which is stupid.
I’m dating myself but it reminds me of when e-mail hit the mainstream and Microsoft jammed it into every product with no thought for how it would really be used. Like in Excel … every email address in your spreadsheet would open the email client when you clicked the cell. Gee what if I want to edit the value in this cell instead of email the person? We’ll make that possible if you hold shift (or something). It was terrible and this feels exactly the same. The purpose is not to give the user a helpful AI assistant it’s just to be able to say “we have AI”. That’s it.
My parents have saved letters from their parents which are written in cursive but in two perpendicular layers. Meaning the writing goes horizontally in rows and then when they got to the end of the page it was turned 90 degrees and continued right on top of what was already there for the whole page. This was apparently to save paper and postage. It looks like an unintelligible jumble but my mother can actually decipher it. Maybe that’s what the LLMs are having trouble with?
Are they having trouble? You can sign up right now and get tasks from the archive that seem trivial for 4o (by which I mean: feed a screenshot to 4o, get a transcription, and spot check it).
