We have a lot of tools (starting with the internal wiki) which are normally only exposed to engineers through web interfaces; MCPs make them available to terminal agents to use autonomously. This can get really interesting with e.g. giving Claude access to query logs and metrics to debug a production issue.
It is obnoxious that MCP results always go directly into the context window. I'd prefer to dump a large payload into Claude's filesystem and let him figure it out from there. But some of the places MCPs can be used don't even have filesystems.
Because "him" is objectively wrong, under almost any interpretation of any words involved. You can cause Claude, or any text-based LLM, to emit language that matches almost any personality / gender / character in the training set. At best you might be able to say "the default outputs have a masculine tone / vibe", but this still doesn't justify, by modern discourse, the "him".
The use of "him" by GP is extremely unusual IMO, and I suspect is odd for anyone with English as their native language. The current convention among normal people seems to me to be to avoid pronouns other than "it" with these tools, and generally just use the name. The name is not really relevant: like, sure, in some contexts we think of ships as "she/her", and may prefer feminine names for them, but if you used e.g. "she" rather than "it" to refer to the Titanic or any other ship with a female name, this is going to cause some double-takes / disfluent comprehension in the vast majority of native speakers in most cases.
Only if you imagine e.g. some stereotypical pirate with an eyepatch slapping the hull and saying something like "Aye, but she weathered the storm, as she always does" might this feel normal. Or, maybe if you are a Redditor and trying to make it your AI boyfriend / girlfriend, you can use he/him or some other neo-pronoun, but this is currently abnormal and not the general context.
And the fact that you can make the model act as any gender again shows why choosing "him" as some default here is strange. Absent any specific context, the choice of "him" here is poorly justified.
The GPTs are "it" because they were deliberately named in a way to discourage anthropomorphizing them. Anthropic does want you to anthropomorphize Claude, and they gave their model a male name. It's not that deep!
Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.
And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.
> doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.
LA average vehicle speed during rush hour is 27.6km/h (17 mph) according to Tom Tom [1]. So a 10 mph bus would turn that 27 minute journey into 46 minutes which I'll admit is more than desirable, hardly catastrophic though.
But remember that each bus can carry about fifty people which would remove close to fifty cars from the road resulting in less congestion and faster buses. Fifty cars need 400 m of road, one bus needs only 20 m.
And on your way home you can doze in your seat without causing an accident.
The corporate security theater that kills me is insisting that everyone tap their badge on the reader next to an already-open door. Even in the presence of a guard, this merely ensures that everyone passing through the open door has some object, plausibly badge-shaped, to hold near the reader. Essentially any NFC card will make it beep. Only a valid credential will actuate the lock, but the door is already open, and the click is too subtle for its absence to alarm anyone.
There is a device you can deploy if you're serious about ensuring that every single individual in a moving crowd has a valid credential... a turnstile! Assuming you've calculated the appropriate number of them for the expected traffic flow.
I like to think of Claude as enjoying himself more when working with good tools rather than bad ones. But metaphysics aside, tools that have the functions you would expect, by the names you would expect, with the behavior you would expect, do seem to be just as important when the users are LLMs.
If the concern is time-wasting, even having upvotes or likes and sorting on them is plenty engaging. I spent thousands of hours as a teenager on Reddit, HN, and the old blue Facebook chronological feed.
Do you believe the research shows that screens in and of themselves are so powerfully damaging that being exposed for, what, a few hours a week at a friend’s house will cause them to require psychiatric medication?
So many questions. Are you campaigning against billboards in your city? Do you avoid taking your kids to any business that has digital signage? I assume you completely abstain from all types of movies and TV? What about radio or books?
it sounds like you already knew all of your assumptions were absurd yet you asked them anyways which ironically makes your comment the truly fascinating one
You stated that parenting goes out the window if a child encounters a screen at a friend’s house.
I dunno man, going over to friends’ houses to watch movies, play console games, later to show each other funny YouTube videos, and in high school to do computer-based writing projects, group presentations, and digital video projects are parts of my childhood I wouldn’t trade for anything. I hope my kids get those experiences with their peers.
When I was growing up, we loved to lend the sheltered kids from the more conservative families media they weren’t supposed to have, like the Harry Potter books.
A physical realm that is safe for children to explore in their own is clearly preferable to one where it’s transgressive to let a child go outside without an escort.
It is plausible that the same applies to the digital realm.
If you’re going to hold datacenter operators to blame for the waste associated with non-optimized computation, then it would seem to follow that they get some credit for optimizing.
It is obnoxious that MCP results always go directly into the context window. I'd prefer to dump a large payload into Claude's filesystem and let him figure it out from there. But some of the places MCPs can be used don't even have filesystems.
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