I believe in an MCP-less future of agent-service interactions and have recently submitted this general alternative (which also supports Slack) based on curl: https://github.com/imbue-ai/latchkey
With that said, a specialized tool like this will almost certainly work better if Slack is the only service you want your agents to interact with. I like that the auth is transparent.
I think that a curl wrapper could serve as a universal integration with arbitrary services (as long as they have a public API), saving you a lot of setup complexity and context space. Authentication is the hard part; ideally, you shouldn't even need an OAuth intermediary. Which I think is doable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876636. It's still a bit of an experiment, though.
I don't think this is a real concern, for two reasons: first, how should such a "transfer of genes" to another species proceed? This is not how it works.
Secondly, these genes are pretty much self-regulating; they disappear from the population in one generation. They almost certainly won't be in the ecosystem long enough in order to play a role in any improbable scenario.
> first, how should such a "transfer of genes" to another species proceed? This is not how it works.
Couldn't a viral infection do this? Some virus that existed inside the mosquito could be modified by (or modify itself in response to) this generic engineering and then transfered to an unintended host.
> They almost certainly won't be in the ecosystem long enough
Your use of absolutes here (with respect to the unknown) makes me want to turn on the news and wait for the big announcement that this new breed of mosquitos has unknowingly caused an undead plague in Africa ;)
NOTE: I am not saying this should have never been tested. I am just surprised how little is known before a public trial was executed.
I still don't see how exactly. E.g., even if it "modified itself in response to this genetic engineering" then it wouldn't really transfer the lethal gene into another species, would it?
> Your use of absolutes here (...)
Which absolutes exactly are you talking about? :) Nothing absolute in the "almost certainly" statement, in my opinion.
> I am just surprised how little is known before a public trial was executed.
> Which absolutes exactly are you talking about? :) Nothing absolute in the "almost certainly" statement, in my opinion.
heh, very true. I was just having some fun and wanted to work zombie-apocalypse into my reply somewhere :)
> What do you mean by "is known"?
NPR covered this on science friday I think 2 or 3 weeks ago with folks close to the project (not from the project, but familiar with it) and all these same questions about how this will spread in the wild, what could go wrong and if it had been tested in any large-scale deployments all seemed to be questions that were up-in-the-air.
There wasn't any concrete comments like: "The team did a test deployment in a quarantined marsh and published the results".
I had the impression from that show (and this story) that the path from conception to design to deployment was really fast.
I am not a geneticist though. It is very possible that this type of work is not something to lose sleep over and I have too many Hollywood premises running through my head.
Monsanto said the same thing about their genetically enhanced crop. Now those genes that rendered those crops resistant to roundup, have been transfered to other plants such as amaranto.
The author is presenting different viewpoints on the role of higher education, not saying he holds them all (because, obviously, they are, at least in part, contradictory, which is also something the author mentioned).
What science often does is that it responds to a "why" question by an analysis of the phenomenon and presenting its causes in some lower-level terms. But, from a certain viewpoint, that is not a satisfactory answer.
Take physics, for example. It can tell you why some objects behave the way they do by telling you there are certain particles, interacting forces, etc.. In this way you can explain, say, the photoelectric effect.
But it isn't really an answer to the "why" question, is it? It just pushes the question one level lower. Why are there such and such particles and forces? Why the constants? The very nature of these answers is descriptive. It is a description of how the world works, not why it works that way.
Maybe asking "why" in this ultimate manner is an ill-posed question - but that's not the deal here. It just doesn't seem that science in its current form, unlike religion or philosophy, could ever even attempt to answer it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly atheistic myself, but there are some inherent limitations of scientific exploration and clarification with respect to the answers it can provide.
My impression was that the OP didn't say superlinear algorithms are somehow useless; merely that there are reasons why the linear (or better) ones can be used in much more general settings, which is what makes them "big impact".
I don't know much about the other ones, but Havel most assuredly is not an economist. He has a cultural background and is an author of a number of theater pieces. His successor at the post of Czech president (Klaus) is an economist, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from.
Just as a matter of interest - the current Czech prime minister, who, at least in theory, has more power than the president, has graduated in physics, and has actually worked in research for some time. Angela Merkel (coming from Eastern Germany) has also a scientific background (in physics and chemistry).
But otherwise, it seems you are right about the fact that there is no such rule about post-totalitarian leaders being educated in engineering or sciences in general.
I stand corrected - just read that Havel has studied economcs for only two years before dropping out and that's probably the reason I have remembered him (wrongly) as an economist - I must have read it somewhere and it has probably stuck in my mind.
Btw, the rest of the Eastern European countries can learn a lot of things from the Czechs.
"Our failure to work together prevents us from enjoying better, more widespread Internet access."
I almost didn't manage to read further. The same can be said about so many things (if everyone just took or borrowed what he needed in a responsible manner, we wouldn't need money at all... to name the most utopian example), yet this kind of reasoning simply doesn't work, as has been shown both practically and theoretically (from game theory to "selfish gene").
It makes me always kind of sad to see smart and enthusiastic people not to grasp this simple fact.
With that said, a specialized tool like this will almost certainly work better if Slack is the only service you want your agents to interact with. I like that the auth is transparent.
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