Funny how Anthropic's press team has been working overtime to ensure the public they're the AI on the right side of history, yet that's anything further than the truth...
When you choose to serve the American military, knowing both its history and the fact that it's been facilitating at least one genocide over the past few years, you can't just claim "we didn't want anything bad to happen".
Slack is in no way a great program (source: use it daily for work), but it seems to me that it works as intended, and developers can already extend it with bots/AI agents. Plus, Claude as an agent is already installable to Slack.
For compliance, my company already has a tool that scrapes all slack messages, and archives them for a required amount of years. I'm at a small company, so I assume large corporations have already refined this process.
Slack's API rate limits and design make it difficult to replicate the data within Slack to a data store that can then be used to provide context to AI agents.
You are forced to use their MCP and their realtime search APIs, which don't work very well/not performant and may require additional licensing.
You can only access public channel data, you can't even access that at scale, and Claude needs to be more natively integrated in ways that Slack will never allow.
If people wanted to do this theyd be self hosting xmpp servers already. No one wants to write and maintain the code and infra for things like this, you are grossly underestimating the effort involved here.
No no it makes sense. Hypothetical scenario: I, a high-level employee at a company just convinced my boss (or did we convince each other?) to spend $30k/year on Claude/Codex enterprise licenses. So far, the productivity gains have not been there and we're starting to sweat. So, I propose to my boss to build an internal version of $SaaS and call it a win. Galaxy brain.
Now some IC somewhere in the company who is at the end of his rope and sees the company as a dead end, sees an opportunity. Why not advocate for this project, get real experience building something greenfield in a brand new domain, strengthen their own resume, and finally have a way out of their strut? It's not like they're gonna stick around maintaining what they built.
Most people using Slack, Teams etc. and especially those making purchase decisions have no idea what XMPP is and what it's capable of. Heck, even Facebook used to federate XMPP until they decided to go proprietary. Not in the interest of their users, but because it makes the most money for its shareholders.
I don't pay for slack any more, I just picked the price of their enterprise plan. Large users probably get big discounts but it doesn't matter, the cutoff where this makes sense financially is probably around 4000 employees even at $10/seat
The article mentions some sort of legal audit reasons that the author is of the opinion that any reasonably sized company needs. These features are apparently only on the expensive plan.
I'm an American. I know people my age want rail (18-24). I know lawmakers fund big infrastructure packages. So where's the disconnect on this side of the pond?
New technology in the airport is incredibly scary. I recently flew between the United States and Canada and it is mind boggling how trivial passports are already becoming. I began by looking into a camera on a kiosk, where as soon as my face was recognized, I walked up to the CBP officer and he verified my identify with a quick look at my passport and ticket. I don't see the passport lasting much longer, at last in the US, Canada, and Europe.
Singapore is even further ahead, with no human in the (regular) loop at all. I walked up to the first barrier, it scanned my face and opened. My name appeared on the screen inside, before I inserted my passport. Then the system "thought" about it for a few seconds, and then the second barrier opened.
I appreciated the complete lack of a passport line (going and coming), but got squicked out about the heuristics the system (might) run through before it let me through.
>but got squicked out about the heuristics the system (might) run through before it let me through.
I think you're overestimating how sophisticated the system is. Most online check-in processes require you to input your passport details. In-person check-in probably results in the gate agent doing something similar. If the arrival airport has this information, it's pretty easy to look up the corresponding face on file (that you provided when you applied for a passport), and use that to generate a list of faces you need to match against. From there, it's only a matter of matching a given face to a face in that set. Moreover, given that arrivals are staggered, that set is going to be relatively small. A wide-body aircraft holds around 300 passengers. If 3 of them arrive at the same time, to the same passport control point, that's only around 1000 faces to match against. That's far easier to do than trying to match against all faces in the entire country, for instance.
It's not inconceivable, however, that the system connects to whatever other dossier(s) have been built against my identity. Even before we consider ML facial recognition by public cameras (probably not yet possible at scale?), the Singaporean SIM card I bought was connected to my passport, which gives them my location: both absolute and relative to anyone I might have spent time around.
I mean, I was a normal tourist, and not doing anything shady whilst I was there, but... False positives exist, and I wouldn't have wanted to have been pulled out of the queue for questioning about something I couldn't possibly have explained.
Singaporeans seem to have a different point of view about surveillance, however. Even the (fairly low-key) human rights activist I chatted with thought it was all great, and said something along the lines of "the cameras keep us safe". "Privacy" as we tend to think about it on this board may be a mainly Anglo-Saxon concern, for what that's worth.
>It's not inconceivable, however, that the system connects to whatever other dossier(s) have been built against my identity. Even before we consider ML facial recognition by public cameras (probably not yet possible at scale?), the Singaporean SIM card I bought was connected to my passport, which gives them my location: both absolute and relative to anyone I might have spent time around.
Why do they need a dossier on you when the passenger manifest has your exact identity? Or are you talking about them tracking you in the country after you left customs? Given that passport control is already plastered with cameras, and you need to present an identity document containing your face to enter the country, I'm not sure why people feel extra creeped out by an automated passport control gate. If they wanted to track you they already have all they need.
ATL has this in parts for domestic flights if you're eligible for 'Digital ID'. Passport control in the US is still for the most part way behind other countries.
When flying into Toronto last year, I filled in my rudimentary customs declaration on the machine and then was waved through right out. Not only did I not interact with a border officer, I did not pass any kind of e-gate either.
As much as some gTLDs are known for spam, it's dangerous to generalize certain domains as spam. I used to run a website with a somewhat niche gTLD and it was a headache getting blocked by spam filters who just blocked *.mygTLD
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