Yeah the social media giants cribbed Lifestreams sort of with the timeline but without the search capabilities that were a cornerstone of the paper. You can see glimpses of this metaphor elsewhere with email, rss and news readers but it would be interesting to make that the centralized metaphor of an entire system for all the system's data.
The basic idea of Lifestreams is good for its metaphor but a lot of important implementation problems are ignored: ballooning storage from "clone" operations for every edit, ever increasing "view" query time, lack of a provenance back pointer. I think a lot of this can be solved with an SQL store, git style content hashes but there are still leaks to plug. One big one is how to resolve hashes given the content stores can move or disappear? Here I am assuming the system does not attempt to intern and reinvent git, github, dropbox, Maildir, etc? Then there is the huge footprint of how to collect inputs. Plugins for browser, email, git, perhaps even file system. It's all rather daunting to contemplate yet also feels like such a workable system is just within reach.
What interactions with internal tools? If you can answer that question then the clankers can help you write a deterministic program for that same interaction and you only spend the tokens once.
Retrieving messages from Slack over MCP allows a shared read-only bot account accessible from the web browser and CLI. Setup is automated so users can just ask Claude to read them and do something.
Sharing Slack with Claude:
- Using the "normal" way, it shares too much, including privates messages.
- Using your own token, it doesn't work with Claude.AI or Cowork and requires you to go to slack.com to generate an application, tokens and more.
- Using a shared token, now you need context to tell Claude to retrieve it. It still doesn't work for non-Claude Code workflows. Rotation may break currently running workflows.
Yeah. Like I had Claude code write an upload Slab script, and a few linear integration scripts, now it just runs these to interact with those systems. I had it write a redshift proxy that doesn’t take login creds and is just a logging read only account but it can just write sql to research to its hearts content (some columns hashed on replies) and I don’t need much trust but I get a lot of good analysis and verification done.
> If you can answer that question then the clankers can help you write a deterministic program for that same interaction and you only spend the tokens once.
The MCP is the deterministic program.
You need to take a step back and look at the problem you're discussing. What's exactly this MCP thing? It's a protocol to allow agents and coding assistants to access tools, services, and data sources, through a standardized interface.
It's the interface for your deterministic program. That's it.
It's easier if you started a while back shunning all human labor (including your own) in favor of fully deterministic systems. Reality is deterministic so your company or project logically can be run off a single compiled binary with formal verification of correctness for every possible scenario.
I've been doing this myself but it's been extremely hard to get buy-in from the rest of the org. They keep churning MCPs for deterministic interactions while I have tons of little tools written by clankers, not only for clanker-use but also for my own use when needed.
I don't know if it's even OK for a cop to just randomly watch a random street corner without a specific reason to do so. If a cop was following a given person around all day every day without probable cause would this not be considered harassment? If we view the Flock Camera network as a single system is this not harassment?
Just to add context and not to comment on rightness, that was one of the early core purposes of policing--to ensure that a people in a particular public space (where either the people or the space are particularly vulnerable) are free from unwanted disturbance. Here is that exact concept shown in a painting from 172 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_(Jules_Breton).
This is what I've been mulling over for months. Surely there's a better, more rigorous specification format than Markdown prose that already exists in the industry and is useful to the agents. Formal Use Cases perhaps? Probably not Gherkin but maybe some other spec DSL.
I agree with this but what I've been trying to answer the last few months is if there was an optimal language for the spec. As with you, I don't think it's English Markdown, but I don't think it's Java either. I also don't think it's Gherkin, Lisp perhaps? I'm still searching.
Well.. I think this is a big open problem in philosophy.
On one hand, you have things like Lean (calculus of inductive constructions), these are relatively simple formal logics (just in more practical notation) that let you define any conceivable type, which is akin to specification.
On the other hand, there is a rich set of modal and fuzzy logics that can help with aspects of reasoning in natural language. I think these can be defined in the former, but nobody has really made a good agreement as to how.
So the main difficulty is for any such language to gain traction, people who speak it.
Instead, we trained LLMs and they came up with something (evolved to reason). I think the future philosophical research will need to answer what exactly do LLMs bring to the table in terms of formalization of natural language.
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