I will always check Bandcamp before buying digital music anywhere else, under the assumption that more goes to the artists. I'm glad to hear that that's not just wishful thinking!
Incredible you could run it in 2005 since it was released in late 2006. I ran windows vista beta that summer on my new 2GB computer, it was a great OS in my view.
Just an anecdote from yesterday. I got an old Pentium 4 1,5Ghz from a friend, put a Terratec EWX 24/96 soundcard in, installed WinXP, turned automatic updates off and installed a software synth, Native Instruments FM7, connected a midi keyboard via the gameport. Literally 2ms latency and no midi jitter! With an 25 years old setup! And it just works, without any distractions. Really, I almost cried as I saw that. I feel somehow violated by today's Windows11/10/8.
I had a similar experience when helping a friend's parent with an absolutely ancient laptop from like 2007, which which had a crappy Celeron, 256 MB of RAM, and Widnoes Vista.
The damn thing was shockingly performant. We have been played for absolute fools.
Apparently Vista introduced a new audio stack with higher processing overhead and thus latency.
I used to boot up XP in a VM occasionally. It‘s amazing how streamlined everything felt, inviting you to be productive. This was before the Electron apocalypse. Almost all UI looked the same, behaved the same and was easy on the eyes (remember when widgets had depth?).
Really nice!
Reminds me of my "Voyetra Sequencer Plus Gold" which I still have running on a 286, because it has great midi timing!
"Miditui" would need a descent recording feature besides easy keyboard roll editing, quantization and so. Any plans to implement this? So you actually could compose music with your real midi devices.
> To address the security concerns below: MCP is just the wire protocol like TCP or HTTP. We don't expect TCP to natively handle RBAC or prevent data exfil. That is the job of the application/server implementation.
That is simply incorrect. It is not a wire protocol. Please do not mix terminology. MCPs communicate via JSON-RPC which is the wire protocol. And TCP you describing as wire protocol isn't a wire protocol at all! TCP is a transport protocol. IT isn't only philosophy, you need some technical knowledge too.
Fair point on the strict terminology, I was using 'wire protocol' broadly to mean the communication standard vs. the implementation.
A more precise analogy is likely LSP (Language Server Protocol). MCP is to AI agents what LSP is to IDEs. LSP defines how an editor talks to a language server (go to definition, hover, etc.), but it doesn't handle file permissions or user auth, that’s the job of the OS or the editor.
Would you say MCP is a protocol (or standard) similar to how REST is a protocol in that they both define how two parties communicate with each other? Or, in other words, REST is a protocol for web APIs and MCP is a protocol for AI capabilities?
also REST is less about communicating, more about the high level user interface and the underlying implementations to arrive at that (although one could argue that’s a form of communicating).
the style does detail a series of constraints. but it’s not really a formal standard, which can get pretty low level.
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standards often include things like MUST, SHOULD, CAN points to indicate what is optional; or they can be listed as a table of entries as in ASCII
> standard (noun): An acknowledged measure of comparison for quantitative or qualitative value; a criterion
note that a synonym is ideal — fully implementing a standard is not necessary. the OAuth standard isn’t usually fully covered by most OAuth providers, as an example.
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> The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard and open-source framework
MCP, the technology/framework, is like Django REST framework. it’s an implementation of what the authors think is a good way to get to RESTful webpages.
MCP, the standard, is closer to REST, but it’s more like someone sat down with a pen and paper and wrote a standards document for REST.
They aren’t the same, but the have some similarities in their goals albeit focussed on separate domains, i.e. designing an interface for interoperability and navigation/usage… which is probably what you were really asking (but using the word protocol waaaaaaay too many times).
Thanks, and call me wrong, I think "Protocol" in MCP is somehow misused. Sure it is somehow a protocol, because it commits on something, but not in the technical sense. MCI (Model Context Interface) would probably the better name?
I agree that interface would be a better name than protocol, but Model Context Integration/Integrator would be even better as that is it's core intent: To integrate context into the model. Alternatively, Universal Model Context Interface (or integrator) would be an even better name imo, as that actually explains what it intends to do/be used for, whereas MCP is rather ambiguous/nebulous/inaccurate on the face of it as previously established further up-thread.
That said, I think as the above user points out, part of the friction with the name is that MCP is two parts, a framework and a standard. So with that in mind, I'd assert that it should be redefined as Model Context Interface Standard, and Model Context Interface Framework (or Integration or whatever other word the community best feels suits it in place of Protocol).
Ultimately though, I think that ship has sailed thanks to momentum and mindshare, unless such a "rebranding" would coincide with a 2.0 update to MCP (or whatever we're calling it) or some such functional change in that vein to coincide with it. Rebranding it for "clarity's sake" when the industry is already quite familiar with what it is likely wouldn't gain much traction.
Wow, this is great. Calling it UMCI would have saved me a lot of confusion in the first place. But yeah I think the ship has sailed and it shows that a lot of things there were cobbled together in a hurry maybe.
Coding on a phone really isn't something new. With tmux a lot of people created crazy things directly on their phone. In some countries this even is the only possibility to code at all, because there are no laptops.
The example use case images are very funny though! :-)
>> There aren't that many places in 2025 where getting a phone with internet is significantly cheaper than getting some scrappy laptop or desktop.
No, but it's not a choice between a phone and a laptop. You NEED a phone. So you use what you've got. I've done work helping developers in less developed countries and you frequently find they're sending screenshots of code they've written on phones.
I assume he means people are too poor to have multiple devices, and if you only have one it's probably a phone. That said I'm dubious anyone who only has a phone is doing meaningful coding
Huh, makes you wonder if it's actually doing it on his phone or if he has a keyboard and maybe dock and monitor he attaches it to. I suppose my original comment was too broad, there was a point not too long ago when everyone wanted to replace their laptop with their phone. Samsung even let you dual boot linux from your phone with DeX
There's always an edge case. Speaking of which, here's someone who would really benefit from a hard column width limit and limited nesting that modern programmers (particularly ones using various IDEs) so carelessly violate these days.
Following that story as it happened, it was all on the phone with the phone keyboard and he somehow made multiple good Neovim plugins including that very popular one (which I use in multiple configs).
neovim is probably the only sane way you could code like this on a small screen. everything works pretty much the same way it does on a desktop terminal, the only thing you have to get used to is having so many lines wrapped, and not having quick access to some characters like $ or ^, but they can just be added to the toolbar in termux
There are countries where the market for PCs and laptops is really tiny and the stores sell them at markups compared to US/European prices. Many of these countries are low wage countries, too, so these markups have a big impact on affordability.
Having the means doesn't mean the would-be programmer is in charge of the purse. I got my start coding at the local library because my parents wouldn't get me my own computer until I was in high school.
I tested Firefox, Safari and Brave on macOS. Results are totally different for each. "for loop, positive" seems to be the only safe bet. Safari was very slow on everything, Brave and Firefox were slow on `for … of`.
I'm surprised by the huge variance. Can these results be trusted?
The way the array is constructed at least leads to holey arrays in V8. Perhaps similar in other implementations. The performance characteristics between different array types may vary significantly as well. Still, the traditional for loop, counting upwards seems to be fastest for me across Chrome and Firefox on Linux. For-of is slowest by a wide margin.
There is always going to be a big gap between a browser that had a particular optimization, and one where it is absent.
But, browsers are an odd case where optimizations often prove not to be worth it on real world websites. The cost to optimize can easily exceed the savings.
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