It is a bit of a different thing than pipelines because in every organisation I've worked at you're expected to have a peer review via pull request for anything going to production - and that is before the change is merged/pipeline triggered. The idea is that anything super-nefarious should be caught by the peer during the PR review and questioned/denied before it can happen.
I doubt we'll want each prompt we make that could leverage an MCP to be peer reviewed beforehand in the same way.
That said - thinking this through some more I wonder if we could give an AI agent elaborate rules on what is and/or isn't acceptable through an MCP and let it do that "peer review"...
100% - it's really about context aware policies for each type of agent, server, interaction, etc.
That's why fine-grained policies are such a big part of the answer here
At first glance this feels very much like GKE Autopilot and/or AKS Automatic. So now all three cloud providers have a more-fully-managed managed Kubernetes.
Part of the reason why they are including the managed add-ons is that they likely are going to be blocking your ability to escape your container with privileged DaemonSets to run things like those yourself in this model. GKE did something similar but eventually had to build a program for their security and observability partners to have their agent DaemonSets allow-listed through their block so that their tools could run on Autopilot - https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/resources/au.... We'll see if AWS ends up doing a similar thing there too.
I have been in a platform team who tends towards analysis-paralysis and wanting to not use any of the managed EKS stuff as well as a security/compliance team getting more active/aggressive around our K8s. So it might be nice actually to just have fewer choices "e.g. sorry - we have to use the AWS CNI / Load Balancer Controller because EKS Auto" as well as throw more of the compliance stuff over the fence at AWS (assuming they get all the usual compliance certs on it).
But I am sure there'll be some sort of limitation(s) that keeps us from using it for the foreseeable future - so I am not getting my hopes up in the short term...
I work for an Enterprise SaaS company who has a "Contact Us" pricing and fully agree with the sentiment. This is how it was explained to me:
* Since we sell mainly to Enterprise they all have procurement people who get measured on how much money they save - with some getting crazy bonuses if they can "save" 50%. So we needed to keep the price inflated by 50% until it gets to them so they can "twist our arm" down to the real price to show their value.
* And if a procurement person can get that 50% off our competitor such that the deal with them makes them look better they'll pick them instead.
* And when we used to put that 2X the real price price on our website some people wouldn't know to twist our arm for the discount and instead just thought we were too expensive. It was also abused by our competitors who were all "Contact Us" to make out they were cheaper than us without giving us the chance to compete.
So instead we do this stupid dance that I hate where we can't even tell the real price to the people in the early meetings (keeping that for procurement at the end of the process) - and we have to do all this fishing to find out who else they are looking at and what their price is that we have to beat before giving them our price. The entire purpose of our Sales Execs is to do this dance to decide whether to give a price and which price they tell to various people at the various stages as far as I can tell - though they actually are pretty good at it...
I came from Amazon where the price was public as were the mechanisms to lower it through various types of commitment so I found the whole thing ridiculous. I have since learned that everybody does it this way and this seems to be the reason. I argued "maybe if we are the one who doesn't in our space then we'll get more business for being the easiest one to deal with?" but I was assured that was not the case and it would just mean procurement people would want 50% off our best price instead...
This feels like when a mining company has to remediate/recreclamate their mine(s) at the end of their useful life rather than leave them there to cause people problems in the future.
IE11 has long since needed to die and I am glad that MS is doing the right thing for the world and cleaning up the mess on its way out!
One thing I was surprised by recently as an American ex-pat (living in Australia for years) too was tipping housekeeping in hotels. I was told by an American colleague on a recent trip there that I was meant to leave $5 in the room every day for housekeeping. This was because it might be somebody different every day - and I was expected to directly recognise each one.
I have gotten used to not having to carry/worry about cash and the idea I need all these $5 notes whenever I stayed in a hotel in the States stressed me out a bit.
I think it used to be. It was common travel advice. But only for longer stays. After covid hotels rarely do regular cleaning ime or they want to conserve water. I used to do it, but totally forgot about it until you mentioned. I've pretty much stopped. I also don't carry cash anymore except for emergencies and tipping isn't an emergency
I moved to Australia from the US in 2006. I swear that when I left the tip was more like ~15% (as the sales tax where I was was 7.5% and the rule was that you doubled the tax to work it out). Every couple years I'd go back and it would seem to creep up. All of the sudden it was 20% and, then when I was back last year, somebody told me 20% was minimum and 25% was really more expected if the service was good.
The last time I was there I was out with 6 people and the bill was $500 and I watched them tip $150 (and then expect us all to evenly split it). The service was not exceptional - if anything I remember waiting ages to get the second drink and the bill. I am sure that person was working at least 5 tables (likely more) and you'd think at least a couple sittings so they'd be making some quite good money for a night at those kinds of numbers.
I made a bit of a comment about how it felt generous and they said "if you can't afford to tip like this you can't afford to go out to eat in America" - and I remember feeling things had gone way too far. It is a bit of a strange flex?
I am an American who has been living in Sydney for years and who stopped tipping here after getting used to it not being expected - but it has gotten a little weird/muddied of late. First it was Uber and the food delivery apps - and I did tip there because the app asked and I knew that in the gig economy the workers were not paid well (unlike others in Australia).
Then I have been to a few restaurants lately that the card machine (often a US-based one like Square) asks for a tip as a mandatory thing (i.e. you have to say no or type 0 to get past it). And the waiter/waitress will stand behind you watching/waiting with the machine they bring to your table. This never happened before - and I do admit that I have started leaving $10-$20 or something if I was happy with the service when this has been forced on me (depending on the size of the bill and the mood I've been in).
I did this with a work drinks with a customer the other day and my Aussie boss called me out on it "what is this tip on here - we don't do this in Australia". And I was like "I was in front of a customer the machine asked me - did you want me to say zero and possibly look cheap/unkind?".
So it is somewhat creeping into things here. Curious the views of other Aussies on how they are dealing with it? Am I just slipping back into this because I am an American and was used to it being a thing?
You're correct, it's creeping in mostly due to cookie cutter POS machines setup for US market (I assume), and Doordash/Uber/etc apps and websites baking it in. I'd guess the payment machines can be setup to hide it, but management figures we have a "choice" (under light duress) to not tip so that's good enough. There are also a lot of international people working in hospitality so I guess they wouldn't be as against it as a lot of locals and just assume it's normal.
There are pretty much weekly hate threads on r/australia and similar places on Reddit about this as you'd expect.
One other thing I did notice - when travelling the US and reading reviews, a lot of people talk about the service. It's rarely mentioned in reviews over here in comparison unless it's an outlier. I personally found the fawning attention quite cloying in the US, but it's a different culture I guess. Wondering if that'll change if tips gain a foothold.
If there's a presumptive pre-filled tip amount that I have to zero out that would annoy me a lot.
In most cases there is a tip button that I just don't press or I answer 'No' to the question on it. Sometimes the staff do it when handing it over. That doesn't annoy me as much and I don't usually feel much pressure since I've got a whole life behind me not tipping I guess. I do feel a bit awkward sometimes so I'd rather they not put me in the situation but I get over it.
This is yet another amazing cherry-on-top of an amazing product. I switched Internet providers a couple months ago and was horrified to find that I was now behind a CGNAT. I went looking for a solution to reach my home lab on the go and found Tailscale. Tailscale solved that issue - and I actually had the epiphany that if I couldn't reach my home network without it then nobody else could either. So, maybe the CGNAT is actually a big security benefit in that way - but I digress.
I originally was thinking of it like a network-level VPN but realised if I installed it on everything individually it would give me DNS and HTTPS certs for all the machines in my home lab - that work from anywhere as long as my laptop was connected to Tailscale. That is something I always wanted to do with let's encrypt but never got around to. And now this!
It has really inspired my imagination. I've been running labs teaching 5-15 people k8s and k8s security out of AWS but this means I might be able to just run a bunch of VMs in my home lab all with Tailscale loaded and point people easily at them all. Maybe with code-server (VS code in a browser) on them to give them a browser-based terminal. And that is just one possible usecase...
Thank you Tailscale people - it is such a great product that has exceeded all my expectations!
The difference is that AWS support can recover them and will help you. In that way it is a service not a tool. They are also the support team for the services that are being provisioned/managed so it is "one throat to choke".
On the contrary, I have seen many many destructive terraform applies that really messed everything up - without a helpful support team to call (unless you are paying Hashicorp) that can just get you out of the jam.
Yes it is a bit slower and often you need to wait for it to rollback when something goes wrong - but 9 times out of 10 that rollback succeeds. I'll take that trade-off...
I doubt we'll want each prompt we make that could leverage an MCP to be peer reviewed beforehand in the same way.