Aliases and pre-hooks are nowhere near the guarantees you want, that’s what I am arguing - not everything is invoked from a blessed shell. Safely-bump-does.sh is also impossibly hard to write because you are replicating _all of the work NPM does in transitive dependency resolution_. Unless you are re-generating the lock file from scratch - it isn’t safe. Just updating package.json isn’t sufficient for eg.
safely-bump-deps.sh does not need to do impossibly hard things. It can just call npm: outdated, install --save-exact and/or install --package-lock-only. There's plenty of solutions here.
Pushing this into a hook makes it invisible, implicit, hard to debug, and an entry point for all sorts of undefined behaviours.
Lots of Unix stuff uses hooks. cron, init, bash has multiple different hook-shaped files (eg .bashrc). The Unix philosophy isn't a sacred cow, purity over pragmatism was the Multics philosophy.
The problem with MCP isn't MCP. It's the way it's invoked by your agent.
IMO, by default MCP tools should run in forked context. Only a compacted version of the tool response should be returned to the main context. This costs tokens yes, but doesn't blow out your entire context.
If other information is required post-hoc, the full response can be explored on disk.
I think part of the problem is how these mcp service are designed. A lot of them just returns Mbs of text blob without filtering at all, and thus explodes the context.
And it's also affected by how model is trained. Gemini specifically like to read large amount of text data directly and explodes the context. But claude try to use tool for partial search or write a script to sample from a very large file. Gemini always fills the context way faster then claude when doing the same job.
But I guess in case of a bad designed mcp, there is no much model can do because the results are injected into context directly though (unless the runtime decided to redirect it to somewhere else)
This is quite literally the opposite opinion I and many others had when first exploring MCP. It's so _obviously_ simple, which is why it gained traction in the first place.
disclosing information is not a medically neutral act. Knowing you have a medical condition can create a great deal of anxiety and anguish and prompt lots of tests. If the result of all those tests and anxiety is "no action indicated," you've basically given your patient a condition that reduces their quality of life for no upside.
I once had a misdiagnosis of an incurable illness that I didn't actually have, and the stress of dealing with that caused me to develop another, very real medical condition that took a year to get under control.
Hypothetically (totally made up numbers), if a positive result on the test means there is 1/10000 chance you have cancer, and negative result means a 1/20000 chance, with the test also having a 1/1000 chance of giving the patient an adverse reaction, i think the questions most patients would ask is why was the test run in the first place?
We're not talking about hiding information, we're talking about not looking for it in the first place. Information that is costly to acquire but not actionable once acquired.
in some cases the knowledge itself is a curse. These commenters mostly have no clue what they’re talking about and it shows.
My spouse found out they had a benign brain tumor, an accidental discovery while doing a brain scan for some other reason. She now has to get annual scans done to make sure the size doesn’t change. Guess what? It hasn’t changed in 5 years.
You might say “better safe than sorry!” To that i say - bullshit. It’s caused her lots of unnecessary stress and anxiety. EVERY year she goes back to the testing center and stresses out about if it’s changed in the last year. She sleeps poorly sometimes because of the anxiety, etc. Knowing every microscopic issue within your body is not always a net benefit! Quality of life matters too, not just longevity.
I think it really depends on the type of cancer. Actionable information is the most useful information.
So my wife has gone through all this extra stress to MAYBE catch a cancerous tumor (28%). That’s assuming it grows large enough to impact her before she dies naturally. And I see that the survival rate of some brain tumors, even if found very early, is very poor (5-10% for some tumors, like glioblastoma).
Lots of “what if’s” here. And for what? All i’m arguing is, knowledge is not always actionable, and what’s not actionable can keep you up at night.
The point i’m making is, we should not be trying to pursue a life of 0 risk and perfect decisions. Life is filled with risk (and good and bad luck). That’s just life.
It depends on your personality or worldview. Some people would be much more comfortable lowering their chances of “what ifs” than leaving it all to fate.
i agree with you. If a patient expresses that sentiment to their doctor, they should act accordingly and order the extra screening. At the end of the day it should be a conversation with your provider.
There should definitely be an honest discussion about pros and cons. And not just the physical, but the mental aspect as well.
Just like the opinion would be different if the size didn't change but she embarked in a risky treatment that left her permenantly disabled or dead.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty. If you take the wrong course of action of course you are going to be upset. But that goes for both possible choices. Its not like the choice is ignore vs take some safe but possibly unnessary action. Both choices could kill you.
On the other hand, the placebo effect works even when the placebo is clearly labelled "placebo". So I guess there's potential to tell people needlessly disconcerting facts and then take the edge off with reassuring bluster and functionless comforts.
This is a "why don't you just" answer. The reason the establishment does this is that we know the outcome of telling people is worse than not telling them. This is an expensive lesson learned over over a century of medical treatment.
Yes, because I have met many doctors whose judgement I profoundly mistrust, and prefer my own. Sometimes their whole paradigm is flawed, but sometimes they're just not informed about my own values. And I would rather die by my own misjudgment than theirs.
I'm an old guy, it's happened several times. The last time, a surgeon removed a tumor, found that it was malignant ... and then told me that it was no big deal, it was a kind of cancer that would not have caused serious problems. She said if she had to get cancer she'd pick this kind. I wish she had told me that before the surgery. I may have had it anyway, but maybe not. Wouldn't you value being fully informed more after that? Surgeons have as much of a conflict of interest when selling their own services as anyone else.
I'm not sure what your point is. This discussion is about medical researchers making decisions on thousands or millions of patients in aggregate... what you're describing is a common thing (don't know how bad a tumor is until it's removed).
The doctor didn't know that before removing the tumor (almost certainly; the alternative is medical fraud).
Doctors going into uber salesman mode selling dangerous surgery is super common. So very common among heart surgeons it’s comical. Point is, blindly trusting doctors and their judgements will in all likelihood just turn you into a sickly perma patient.
Also, if the outcome is worse by informing, doesn't that imply a violation of "first, do no harm"? Which, to be fair, the OP says they wouldn't prioritize...
Depends on how you interpret: "First do no harm". Is that an obligation to minimize the harm to an individual patient? Or is the goal to maximize the health of many patients? Like I've said elsewhere, medical reasoning is subtle.
> We already have an extreme shortage of available healthcare workers. We don't need to stress them further because 20% of the population suddenly decides they need 80 elective surgeries to remove things that would've gone away or stayed benign on their own.
Strawman. No one is suggesting adding extra stress to healthcare workers. It's also not you or your doctors call to make: let's gatekeep this patients cancer because our hospital can't deal with the workload. What a truly wicked idea.
To help alleviate the extreme shortage of available healthcare workers we should instead allow those wanting to pay for these elective surgeries, to pay for them! Drive money into healthcare, scale up treatments, drive money into research. Let the system work.
It's significantly more wicked to pretend that tests, treatments, and more aren't done by healthcare workers (yes, even private ones), and to inundate them with unimportant medical procedures while truly sick people are dying.
Yes, this is true even if the person opting for the elective surgery has millions, potentially even billions of dollars to pay with. Having money doesn't make your illness more important.
Don't get all holier-than-thou on topics like this; it's already a difficult-enough topic.
I often wonder if people who make these kinds of statements simply don't know how market forces work, or if they know how market forces work but just choose to pretend they don't exist in certain contexts where that reality feels particularly unfair...
Demand suppression doesn't work. "Having money doesn't make your illness more important" sounds like a noble sentiment, but by applying it in the real world you'd actually be reducing the total size of the pool of resources available to treat everyone. Talk about holier than thou...
Of course I know how market forces work. They are not the only forces we can manage. They are not the only levers we can pull. Economics are cool, but not almighty. There is no scenario in which a hospital gets extra profit, and turns around and simply reduces the cost for those in need. No - no additional resources are being removed. That's not how hospitals work.
You claim to know, yet you still make statements that are obviously foolish given said knowledge? Imagine applying this logic to other industries:
> The existence of folding phones inundates phone manufactures with orders for devices with unimportant luxury features when there are people who are struggling to afford even a basic entry level phone. Having money doesn't make your needs more important. We should ban folding phones to make entry-level phones more accessible to poor people.
Do you agree the paragraph above is unreasonable and that trying to implement it in the real world would make things worse for everyone? If so, why did you just propose the same thing for medical care a couple comments back?
That's what I'm so curious about; I see this all the time where when the subject matter is emotionally or politically charged people revert to this "there's a fixed-sized pie and I want to make sure I get a big piece" economic model, even while appearing in other contexts to understand that that's not how things work.
> It's significantly more wicked to pretend that tests, treatments, and more aren't done by healthcare workers (yes, even private ones), and to inundate them with unimportant medical procedures while truly sick people are dying.
Strawman+ad hominem. No one is suggesting to pretend _anything_. Charge premiums for these tests based on how "unimportant" they are. Use market forces to move money from those willing to pay, to those who cannot.
Actually neither - you were suggesting that money makes the problem valid. It doesn't. You can charge all you want - it either becomes useless (why are we trying to find ways to get more profit to hospitals???) or it reduces the staff who are better suited to go somewhere else.
This is an unbelievably inefficient way to try and move money to those who need it. The market correction should be elsewhere.
You don't need your package manager to invoke your hook. You need _your_ tooling to invoke your hook.
./safely-bump-deps.sh && npm install
Want it global? Use a bash alias.