30 mentions · 17 chunks · 15 episodes
For dangerous APIs, it used to be possible to reduce the harm by increasing the friction. The harder the user had to work to do the dangerous thing, the more likely the...
...tential for dynamic webapps existed before the word "Ajax." The actual enabling APIs had existed for years. But once it was a word, it exploded into usage. The word allowed coordination to happen, and expectations to change. The possi...
Google threatening to kick a user off their Gmail for personal use of the APIs to access your own data would be a nuclear option. This is assuming the reason for the ban wasn't that the user did something most people would find ...
...abs would rather be able to do price discrimination by having vertical-specific APIs. Mythos is a first step in this direction. It can't be generally released for safety reasons… which also conveniently means that it can only be relea...
Google released a CLI for their APIs, gws. It's better than what was available before, but other than that, it's almost embarrassingly clunky. It's just a thin coat of paint on top of th...
Users are stickier to UX than agents are to APIs. That's because it's harder for users to switch their mental models than for agents to rewrite the API they code to. Humans are lazy and would rather...
...down is that power delivery infrastructure has a natural monopoly in a way that APIs don't. Atoms can be rivalrous, but bits don't have to be.
...tem if the proprietary system can't cut someone else off on top. Open access to APIs, no control on distribution. But an aggregator is entirely in control of the ecosystem. It cannot be an open system if an aggregator controls the fin...
...would push forward and scoop up the market share. The only way we'd lose public APIs is if they all moved in unison. This dynamic is roughly stable because the quality of the models is in the same general ballpark. Each provider would...
...Part of this cost is "how expensive is it to write code to enmesh well with the APIs of external systems." But now we can compile english to code. So in a post-app world that is LLM-native, you might expect to see a larger number of s...
...now which parts won't change very often? The safest parts are existing internal APIs that have stayed constant over multiple years, despite new use cases being added in the overall system and underlying changes. The hardest ones are n...
...he presence of a cross-functional meeting indicates a failure to make the right APIs". When you make an API, the nuance / responsibility might drop out if you aren't careful. It's important to make sure the API captures the nuance and...
All APIs are a form of a plugin model, it's a matter of how modular, how much sandboxing there is, how integrated into the host system it is. In a full plugin...
...gated by origin and sandboxed. Although apps have a richer set of high-fidelity APIs. Traditional desktop applications, on the other hand, can read and write to the shared filesystem. This allows them to coordinate with other applicat...
Protocols depend on tacit knowledge. Protocols here could be APIs, or other formal agreements, like laws and contracts. If you have only the explicit protocol but not the necessary tacit knowledge, you might not be ...
...e with many other designers. My heart goes out to the poor folks working on the APIs to deprecate third party cookies.
...dashboard)? The API is the escape hatch; everything must be possible in it. But APIs are fiddly and require specialized knowledge; there are many more people who would feel comfortable with the UX than the API. UXes are more forgiving...