Awful headline and I doubt it's what the author would have chosen, given that her comments are much more to do with supply:
> “In San Francisco, demand is reflected in increased prices,” she says. “In Charlotte, demand is reflected in increased quantities.”
> “A big takeaway is that cities are in control of a big portion of their supply sensitivity,” Gorback says. “It’s cities that control zoning. It’s cities that control permitting. The real keeper of the keys are the municipalities.”
Yes, Package Identity was the bane of my existence for a while. It's wild how MS gated important APIs behind it and then made it so difficult+impractical to work with (I honestly think this is a large part of why WinRT was mostly ignored by developers).
I've moved on, but this looks like it will at least fix some of the paper cuts.
The search bugs in Mail are absolutely real. They might not affect every user but I've had major issues on both macOS and iOS mail, and eventually gave up and switched to Gmail.
I can see where Mario is coming from, but IMO MCP still has a place because it 1) solves authentication+discoverability, 2) doesn't require code execution.
MCP shines when you want to add external functionality to an agent quickly, and in situations where it's not practical to let an agent go wild with code execution and network access.
Feels like we're in the "backlash to the early hype" part of the hype cycle. MCP is one way to give agents access to tools; it's OK that it doesn't work for every possible use case.
I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people.
Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...
Similar approach as MCPCat (telling agents to specify context about why a tool was called in special tool arguments): https://mcpcat.io/
I don't love it (potential privacy issues, and it makes the user's agent spend more tokens), but I don't think there's a better approach right now. Would be great if someone took the time to add an observability mechanism to the MCP spec itself.
That's more or less how Tokyo works. Almost no on-street parking, people have to prove that they have a parking spot when buying a car, liberal zoning so there are lots of very small pay parking lots around the city. It works really well IMO but it would be politically very difficult in North America.
Sharpening a knife to r/sharpening standards is hard. But just honing frequently and occasionally using a cheap sharpener will get you further than 95% of home chefs.
The Sysinternals suite is incredible; acquiring Sysinternals and maintaining the tools is one of the best things the Windows team has ever done.
I don't love everything about Windows these days, and I've mostly switched away from it. But Process Explorer and Process Monitor are a lovely reminder that it's still a powerful OS, and tools don't have to be text-first to cater to power users.
PowerToys is able to grow, experiment and evolve much more quickly as a standalone application because shipping something inside Windows is hard. The OS has a very long support and compatibility guarantee that makes it extremely difficult to iterate and ship features quickly. The .NET team is pretty open about how being coupled to Windows for a long time held .NET back.
Also, my understanding is that PowerToys is sort of an incubator; successful experiments may eventually make it into Windows itself.
It's gone on for almost a year now. Some initial response was warranted but IMO continuing to bring this up is reflecting poorly on Casey at this point.
My sympathies to you and the rest of the WT team. I think you’re doing a bang-up job under difficult platform constraints (that most people don’t appreciate), and the amount of vitriol spilled over this one interaction has been really disappointing.
Just remember that there’s a huge number of people who appreciate the work you’re doing to modernize terminal experiences on Windows (nearly 78k GitHub stars!)
> “In San Francisco, demand is reflected in increased prices,” she says. “In Charlotte, demand is reflected in increased quantities.”
> “A big takeaway is that cities are in control of a big portion of their supply sensitivity,” Gorback says. “It’s cities that control zoning. It’s cities that control permitting. The real keeper of the keys are the municipalities.”