Oh there will be something up there that they call a datacenter. It doesn't have to actually work for them to point at it and say "the data is up there and therefore is not subject to whatever regional regulation you're hassling me about."
It's a bit like how one guy bought alpaca socks on the silk road and thousands pointed to those socks and said "see, it's not for crime."
As far as I'm aware, all of the benefits of MCP over CLI go away if you just bother to run your agents as OS users with locked down permissions such that they only have access to secrets for similarly locked down users on remote systems.
We've had decades to come up with systems for restricting what users can do, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel just because this user happens to be an AI.
We need to rethink the web so that fewer third parties are involved in things that seem on the surface to be an A-B conversation. To say nothing of the trustworthiness of those parties, having them involved at all is needlessly brittle.
This seems like a nice stepping stone towards something cool, but having the forming happen at a dedicated facility seems to miss the point. The promise of this technology is that instead of:
- make packaging
-> ship to where product is packed
-> ship to consumer
-> ship to recycler
you can:
- grow packaging where product is packed
-> ship to consumer
- consumer composts it in their garden
That is, the packaging should just make one trip instead of three. Hopefully they eventually figure out how to make kits so that shippers can just grow the packaging around the actual product. The hard part will be ensuring that the biomass used as feedstock (likely a waste product from some process nearby to where the product is packed) is actually something that people want in their garden. Doable, but maybe not the kind of thing markets can be trusted to do on their own.
Circumventing controls as a kid is what taught me enough about computers to get the job that made college affordable (in those days you could just boot windows to a livecd Linux distro and have your way with the filesystem, first you feel like a hacker, later the adults are paying you to recover data).
If we must have controls, I hope the process of circumventing them continues to teach skills that are useful for other things.
I think the problem is that people are lonely in ways that the medium can't address well, but does address to some lesser degree, so it elicits lopsided engagement. You're this whole person but people only ever react to this quirk or that one because those quirks come through better online, and over time those two quirks become a larger share of your personality. We end up with things like looksmaxxing--because pictures go online well, and it happens at the expense of whatever other characteristics of that person don't go online well.
I've been imagining a social medium which finds temporary peers via one of your phone's radios--so it broadcasts and gathers rotating public keys as you ride the same bus with people or share an elevator with them--and then your feed contains whatever they're posting, but only for 48 hours or something (unless you decide to make the connection permanent). That way when you see something cool in your feed, you're well positioned to go be social in meatspace.
Like I get why you don't bring your guitar on the bus, same reason I don't bring my drums on the bus, but if a few hours later I saw a video of you making some music I might be like "hey lets get together and jam" next time I see you.
The issue is the fantasy of social media doesn't convert well to reality. I've reached out numerous times "to jam" with people who have openly expressed a desire to, and... ...nothing. It's like a full conversation stopper. It's weird.
As far as I can tell the social anxiety takes hold, where someone might have their perceived fear of "being bad" exposed, so they recede back into their insular, online-only personas.
I take it you're a musician, and so I really think the only way is to take your drums (or guitar, or whatever) to the park or a local 'town square' and just get down to business. People will interact with you in whichever way they do, but at least it will be real, and possibly lead to real fruitful relationships.
The question of whether the users are actually ready to defend is irrelevant if the attackers look at the defenses and decide that an attack isn't worth mounting. As we have learned, this is not a credible threat:
> It will be hard, but we'll self host if we have to
Bluesky offers:
> It will be easy-ish, and we'll self host if we have to
We shall see if it's credible enough to make corruption look elsewhere.
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