7 ms·

The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

111 points by dbreunig 1y ago

bigmattystyles 1y ago
Laughs/Cries in SAP
- _jholland 1y ago
  I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of our own critical financial data. As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky design to drive profit. Simply because they haven’t documented their systems sufficiently, it is “industry standard practice” to go straight to a £100/hr+ consultant to build what should be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin procedures. Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python. It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.
  - piva00 1y ago
    It's unfortunate it is your employer's IP, this shim on top of SAP would be extremely valuable if you sold as another product to enable internal teams in SAP-world corporations to develop without the knowledge of SAP arcana.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      Yes I would strongly recommend monetising this, even though you'd have to rebuild it from scratch. Worth filling in a Y Combinator application?
      - dbreunig 1y ago
        Yes, look up Winshuttle. A very successful company with some of the happiest customers I’ve ever seen, whose entire product was a SAP hack that allowed people to enter their data using Excel. As someone unfamiliar with SAP, absolutely blew my mind.
  - jgraettinger1 1y ago
    Hi, I’m a cofounder / CTO of estuary.dev. Our whole mission is democratizing and enabling use of data within orgs. Open to a conversation about your work here? Reach me at johnny at estuary dot dev.
robertheadley 1y ago
I am still mad that Facebook mostly abandoned the Open Graph protocol on their own sites.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mxmilkiib 1y ago
  for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :( but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > what happened to the dream of true Data Portability? It got muddled into the privacy/security debate and then we all got distracted.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Capitalism happened. You can't extract value if the usership can flow away from your site like water.
  - julik 1y ago
    Capitalism happened. My hope is on regulation - I don't see any other force being capable of prying these moat cans open.
  - rahoulb 1y ago
    As other posters have said - capitalism. But also privacy - it would be amazing to just be able to connect to any app or service you want, interact and react to stuff that's happening _over there_. However, do you want any old app or service connecting to _your_ data, siphoning it and selling it on (and, at best, burying their use of your data in a huge terms of service document that no-one reads, at worst, lying about what they do with that information)? So you have to add access controls that are either intrusive and/or complex, or, more likely, just ignored. Then the provider gets sued for leaking data and we're in a situation where no-one dares open up.
renewiltord 1y ago
It's inevitable. You can't afford to just provide a platform for free that someone else monetizes. I wonder what API plans are reasonable: * Just let your users pay for API access at a per-call rate * Charge app developer per user The problem is that ultimately the LTV of the average user is high, but this is skewed up by the most valuable users who will switch to a different app that will inevitably attempt to hijack your userbase once they control enough of your users. A classic example is that imgur became a social network of its own once it had enough Reddit users and only Reddit doing their own image/video hosting stemmed that bleeding. And then there's the fact that if you choose the payment-based approaches, one app will suction the data out and compete with you for it; inevitably some user will lose his data through some app breach and blame you; and the basic app any newbie developer will build will be "yours but ad-free" which is fine for him because you're paying the development and hosting costs of the entire infra. It's no surprise everyone converges on preventing API access. Even Metafilter does. I'm curious if anyone has an idea for API access that can nonetheless be a successful company. Everyone's always got some idea with negative margin and negative feedback loops which they bill as "but that won't make you a billionaire" (that's true, because your company will fail) but I wonder if there is some way that could work without ruining social network network-effects etc.
- immibis 1y ago
  Probably not. But there can be API access from a nonsuccessful noncompany - look at Fediverse or whatever.
seydor 1y ago
I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever. And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is your own PC / Phone. If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling again into another BigTech trap.
- visarga 1y ago
  Computer use over screen and keyboard comes to the rescue
- msgodel 1y ago
  I think the demand for this will actually kill closed ecosystems like iOS. I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it. They won't be able to get it right because every integration will have to be canned while companies giving the LLMs/users a shell will allow them to do anything. People get confused because that used to not matter, most users couldn't do anything with a shell. That's no longer the case with LLMs.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    > I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it. How long do you think it will take for this to meaningfully override Apple's share price?
    - msgodel 1y ago
      I think it's already starting. Apple can't produce anything people just have to have anymore because of the attitude that's causing this. You can see this in their sales numbers.
      - layer8 1y ago
        People “have to have” an iPhone because it’s a status symbol. Not sure how AI is going to change that.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
…news broke that rival Meta, opens new tab is taking… (emphasis mine) Been awhile since I’ve seen this kind of content error.
- io84 1y ago
  I wonder if that’s a dictation artefact
  - dbreunig 1y ago
    Not dictation…copy/paste I think. Thanks, fixed.
eadmund 1y ago
At the end of the day, servers and software engineers cost money. One way to pay for things is ads, but ads are hostile to integrations (because there is no good way to guarantee ads will be shown) — I believe this is why Twitter and Reddit killed their third-party clients. But there are alternate ways to pay for things, e.g. subscriptions. The good news here is that the sorts of things one pays for are IMHO more likely to be the sorts of things worth MCPing together. Using MCP to post to Reddit or Twitter? Low value, to oneself and to society. Using MCP to work with one’s AWS account? Higher value. Incidentally, why do the article’s links all use strikethrough rather than underlines? Is this a deliberate style choice, or some Chrome/Firefox/Safari incompatibility? It’s pretty ugly.
bsenftner 1y ago
The moment MCP was announced, my first thoughts were "oh, those summer children". MPC is idyllic and not for this world.
- spacecadet 1y ago
  Hacky scrapper go brrrr
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Yup, same here. But it's also super painful to watch it being neutered by people who tried to force-fit MCP to their usual smelly business models, and then started to make a fuss about "security issues" that are actually core features of MCP and LLMs in general. In most cases, it's not MCP that was a problem, it's someone's -as-a-Service business model they cling to.
Permit 1y ago
> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users (they’ve since cut off all 3rd party clients). One thing I haven't seen written about much is how these APIs turned into massive liabilities for privacy. If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them. If a Facebook API allows (user-approved apps) to view the names of my friends and the pages they like, this data can be used to create targeted political ads for those users[1]. So a company considering creating a public-facing API must deal with the fact that: 1. This API could be helping my competitor 2. This API makes internal changes more difficult (typically there is a strong effort to maintain backwards compatibility). 3. If company XXX uses the API to extract data (that users have given them explicit access to), the ensuring scandal will not be called the "XXXX Data Scandal", but rather the "MYCOMPANY-XXX Data Scandal"[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  It does like seem there are so many inherent disadvantages that the original proponents must have been confused or intentionally ignoring realistic factors… It’s like they never even tallied up all plausible advantages and disadvantages in the first place. So how did anyone determine it was an overall net positive?
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    Are you proposing that interoperability is not an overall net positive? If it's getting a bad rap right now it's just because it's not always simultaneously a competitive advantage. But that line of thinking is a race to the bottom. I mean, why not just kill your competitors? Then your product, however bad, would be the only one. Clearly a net negative, but a competitive advantage. What has changed is that we've recently lowered the bar for how much of a net positive we plan on shooting for. Top dog on the trash heap is, I guess, now an enviable position.
exabrial 1y ago
OAuth/APIs were a beautiful thing until the marketing departments figured out they could use it to spam even more people.
tempodox 1y ago
> But it didn’t last. Of course not. All this gatekeeping is how every Tom, Dick and Harriette make their money and wrestle for dominance. Believing that any specific tech would fundamentally change that is hopelessly naive. The honeymoon phases that make it look like it could be different this time around are merely there to lock in lots of users. It's in the nature of capitalism and that's not a technological issue.
walterbell 1y ago
> don’t expect the platforms to let you compete easily. Regulatory support of interoperability and competition: 1. EU mandated interoperability on mobile and messages. 2. US won antitrust legal case against Google. Remedy TBD. 3. Epic lawsuit enabled non-Apple payments and lower fees for content sale. 4. US has mandated that banks open up payment history data to 3rd parties. 5. US halted Facebook/Meta Libra/Diem digital currency. 6. China halted Ant Group digital currency.
armchairhacker 1y ago
Today, an external camera can record your computer screen and audio, AI can extract the data and metadata, and a 2D contraption can physically move your mouse to interact. In the future, these will probably become more effective and cheaper (eventually the AI becoming possible to run locally, though even today it’s possible with a good GPU on simple UIs). Lots of other comments argue for regulation mandating open APIs. I disagree, instead we should remove and prevent regulations that block scraping. We should also create alternative monetization paths for companies who charge for access or use ads, since they’ll lose those paths, and they’re already suffering from piracy and illegal scraping.
- pixl97 1y ago
  The biggest problem here is preventing said scraping from shutting down the sites with cost. Over the years most of the problems I had with sites getting overloaded were from valid 'scrapers' like Google. Quite often providers were adding more memory/cpu just to ensure Google could index the site. While hosting costs are cheaper than ever, being on the internet can still get very expensive very fast.
  - armchairhacker 1y ago
    In theory it could be solved by websites charging a very small fee (maybe crypto) for incoming requests, to pay operating costs. The fees from human browsing (even excessive like 1 site / second) would be negligible. APIs that use scraping would forward the fee to their users. Training or search (index) data would cost a lot to generate, but probably still insignificant compared to training the ML model or operating the search. It already costs a small amount of electricity for clients to send requests, so maybe paying for the server to handle them wouldn’t be a big difference, but I don’t know much about networking. Although in practice, similar things have been tried and those haven’t worked out, e.g. Coil. It would require adoption by most browsers or ISPs, otherwise participating sites would be mostly ignored (most clients don’t pay the fee so they don’t get access, they don’t cares because it’s probably a small site and/or there are alternatives).
teleforce 1y ago
Please check out Braid project initiative that is working towards fully interconnected eco-system for the web [1],[2]. [1] Stop using REST for state synchronization (2024) - comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000810 [2] A Synchronous Web of State: https://braid.org/meeting-107 https://braid.org/meeting-107
yapyap 1y ago
AI infighting, hilarious

111 points by dbreunig 1y ago

bigmattystyles 1y ago

Laughs/Cries in SAP

_jholland 1y ago
I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of our own critical financial data. As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky design to drive profit. Simply because they haven’t documented their systems sufficiently, it is “industry standard practice” to go straight to a £100/hr+ consultant to build what should be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin procedures. Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python. It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.
- piva00 1y ago
  It's unfortunate it is your employer's IP, this shim on top of SAP would be extremely valuable if you sold as another product to enable internal teams in SAP-world corporations to develop without the knowledge of SAP arcana.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    Yes I would strongly recommend monetising this, even though you'd have to rebuild it from scratch. Worth filling in a Y Combinator application?
    - dbreunig 1y ago
      Yes, look up Winshuttle. A very successful company with some of the happiest customers I’ve ever seen, whose entire product was a SAP hack that allowed people to enter their data using Excel. As someone unfamiliar with SAP, absolutely blew my mind.
- jgraettinger1 1y ago
  Hi, I’m a cofounder / CTO of estuary.dev. Our whole mission is democratizing and enabling use of data within orgs. Open to a conversation about your work here? Reach me at johnny at estuary dot dev.

robertheadley 1y ago

I am still mad that Facebook mostly abandoned the Open Graph protocol on their own sites.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mxmilkiib 1y ago
for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :( but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > what happened to the dream of true Data Portability? It got muddled into the privacy/security debate and then we all got distracted.
- immibis 1y ago
  Capitalism happened. You can't extract value if the usership can flow away from your site like water.
- julik 1y ago
  Capitalism happened. My hope is on regulation - I don't see any other force being capable of prying these moat cans open.
- rahoulb 1y ago
  As other posters have said - capitalism. But also privacy - it would be amazing to just be able to connect to any app or service you want, interact and react to stuff that's happening _over there_. However, do you want any old app or service connecting to _your_ data, siphoning it and selling it on (and, at best, burying their use of your data in a huge terms of service document that no-one reads, at worst, lying about what they do with that information)? So you have to add access controls that are either intrusive and/or complex, or, more likely, just ignored. Then the provider gets sued for leaking data and we're in a situation where no-one dares open up.

renewiltord 1y ago

It's inevitable. You can't afford to just provide a platform for free that someone else monetizes. I wonder what API plans are reasonable: * Just let your users pay for API access at a per-call rate * Charge app developer per user The problem is that ultimately the LTV of the average user is high, but this is skewed up by the most valuable users who will switch to a different app that will inevitably attempt to hijack your userbase once they control enough of your users. A classic example is that imgur became a social network of its own once it had enough Reddit users and only Reddit doing their own image/video hosting stemmed that bleeding. And then there's the fact that if you choose the payment-based approaches, one app will suction the data out and compete with you for it; inevitably some user will lose his data through some app breach and blame you; and the basic app any newbie developer will build will be "yours but ad-free" which is fine for him because you're paying the development and hosting costs of the entire infra. It's no surprise everyone converges on preventing API access. Even Metafilter does. I'm curious if anyone has an idea for API access that can nonetheless be a successful company. Everyone's always got some idea with negative margin and negative feedback loops which they bill as "but that won't make you a billionaire" (that's true, because your company will fail) but I wonder if there is some way that could work without ruining social network network-effects etc.

immibis 1y ago
Probably not. But there can be API access from a nonsuccessful noncompany - look at Fediverse or whatever.

seydor 1y ago

I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever. And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is your own PC / Phone. If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling again into another BigTech trap.

visarga 1y ago
Computer use over screen and keyboard comes to the rescue
msgodel 1y ago
I think the demand for this will actually kill closed ecosystems like iOS. I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it. They won't be able to get it right because every integration will have to be canned while companies giving the LLMs/users a shell will allow them to do anything. People get confused because that used to not matter, most users couldn't do anything with a shell. That's no longer the case with LLMs.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  > I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it. How long do you think it will take for this to meaningfully override Apple's share price?
  - msgodel 1y ago
    I think it's already starting. Apple can't produce anything people just have to have anymore because of the attitude that's causing this. You can see this in their sales numbers.
    - layer8 1y ago
      People “have to have” an iPhone because it’s a status symbol. Not sure how AI is going to change that.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

…news broke that rival Meta, opens new tab is taking… (emphasis mine) Been awhile since I’ve seen this kind of content error.

io84 1y ago
I wonder if that’s a dictation artefact
- dbreunig 1y ago
  Not dictation…copy/paste I think. Thanks, fixed.

eadmund 1y ago

At the end of the day, servers and software engineers cost money. One way to pay for things is ads, but ads are hostile to integrations (because there is no good way to guarantee ads will be shown) — I believe this is why Twitter and Reddit killed their third-party clients. But there are alternate ways to pay for things, e.g. subscriptions. The good news here is that the sorts of things one pays for are IMHO more likely to be the sorts of things worth MCPing together. Using MCP to post to Reddit or Twitter? Low value, to oneself and to society. Using MCP to work with one’s AWS account? Higher value. Incidentally, why do the article’s links all use strikethrough rather than underlines? Is this a deliberate style choice, or some Chrome/Firefox/Safari incompatibility? It’s pretty ugly.

bsenftner 1y ago

The moment MCP was announced, my first thoughts were "oh, those summer children". MPC is idyllic and not for this world.

spacecadet 1y ago
Hacky scrapper go brrrr
TeMPOraL 1y ago
Yup, same here. But it's also super painful to watch it being neutered by people who tried to force-fit MCP to their usual smelly business models, and then started to make a fuss about "security issues" that are actually core features of MCP and LLMs in general. In most cases, it's not MCP that was a problem, it's someone's -as-a-Service business model they cling to.

Permit 1y ago

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users (they’ve since cut off all 3rd party clients). One thing I haven't seen written about much is how these APIs turned into massive liabilities for privacy. If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them. If a Facebook API allows (user-approved apps) to view the names of my friends and the pages they like, this data can be used to create targeted political ads for those users[1]. So a company considering creating a public-facing API must deal with the fact that: 1. This API could be helping my competitor 2. This API makes internal changes more difficult (typically there is a strong effort to maintain backwards compatibility). 3. If company XXX uses the API to extract data (that users have given them explicit access to), the ensuring scandal will not be called the "XXXX Data Scandal", but rather the "MYCOMPANY-XXX Data Scandal"[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

MichaelZuo 1y ago
It does like seem there are so many inherent disadvantages that the original proponents must have been confused or intentionally ignoring realistic factors… It’s like they never even tallied up all plausible advantages and disadvantages in the first place. So how did anyone determine it was an overall net positive?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Are you proposing that interoperability is not an overall net positive? If it's getting a bad rap right now it's just because it's not always simultaneously a competitive advantage. But that line of thinking is a race to the bottom. I mean, why not just kill your competitors? Then your product, however bad, would be the only one. Clearly a net negative, but a competitive advantage. What has changed is that we've recently lowered the bar for how much of a net positive we plan on shooting for. Top dog on the trash heap is, I guess, now an enviable position.

exabrial 1y ago

OAuth/APIs were a beautiful thing until the marketing departments figured out they could use it to spam even more people.

tempodox 1y ago

> But it didn’t last. Of course not. All this gatekeeping is how every Tom, Dick and Harriette make their money and wrestle for dominance. Believing that any specific tech would fundamentally change that is hopelessly naive. The honeymoon phases that make it look like it could be different this time around are merely there to lock in lots of users. It's in the nature of capitalism and that's not a technological issue.

walterbell 1y ago

> don’t expect the platforms to let you compete easily. Regulatory support of interoperability and competition: 1. EU mandated interoperability on mobile and messages. 2. US won antitrust legal case against Google. Remedy TBD. 3. Epic lawsuit enabled non-Apple payments and lower fees for content sale. 4. US has mandated that banks open up payment history data to 3rd parties. 5. US halted Facebook/Meta Libra/Diem digital currency. 6. China halted Ant Group digital currency.

armchairhacker 1y ago

Today, an external camera can record your computer screen and audio, AI can extract the data and metadata, and a 2D contraption can physically move your mouse to interact. In the future, these will probably become more effective and cheaper (eventually the AI becoming possible to run locally, though even today it’s possible with a good GPU on simple UIs). Lots of other comments argue for regulation mandating open APIs. I disagree, instead we should remove and prevent regulations that block scraping. We should also create alternative monetization paths for companies who charge for access or use ads, since they’ll lose those paths, and they’re already suffering from piracy and illegal scraping.

pixl97 1y ago
The biggest problem here is preventing said scraping from shutting down the sites with cost. Over the years most of the problems I had with sites getting overloaded were from valid 'scrapers' like Google. Quite often providers were adding more memory/cpu just to ensure Google could index the site. While hosting costs are cheaper than ever, being on the internet can still get very expensive very fast.
- armchairhacker 1y ago
  In theory it could be solved by websites charging a very small fee (maybe crypto) for incoming requests, to pay operating costs. The fees from human browsing (even excessive like 1 site / second) would be negligible. APIs that use scraping would forward the fee to their users. Training or search (index) data would cost a lot to generate, but probably still insignificant compared to training the ML model or operating the search. It already costs a small amount of electricity for clients to send requests, so maybe paying for the server to handle them wouldn’t be a big difference, but I don’t know much about networking. Although in practice, similar things have been tried and those haven’t worked out, e.g. Coil. It would require adoption by most browsers or ISPs, otherwise participating sites would be mostly ignored (most clients don’t pay the fee so they don’t get access, they don’t cares because it’s probably a small site and/or there are alternatives).

teleforce 1y ago

Please check out Braid project initiative that is working towards fully interconnected eco-system for the web [1],[2]. [1] Stop using REST for state synchronization (2024) - comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000810 [2] A Synchronous Web of State: https://braid.org/meeting-107 https://braid.org/meeting-107

yapyap 1y ago

AI infighting, hilarious