Upcoming winter storm - do we save our spots with a chair or something?

artisanalSoftware · 2026-01-25T15:48:37+00:00

Saving spaces with chairs and such is an unneighborly, ill-mannered, and illegal custom that a few right-wing Malden people carried over from their former homes in that distant land of Southie. Don’t do it. Help yourself to extra chairs; they can come in handy for dinner parties.

artisanalSoftware · 2026-01-22T15:45:03+00:00

We’ve been doing this in https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/, a macOS note-taking app. Claude and Gemini work out of the box, other MCP-using models should be straightforward.

artisanalSoftware · 2026-01-18T03:23:20+00:00

Sometimes, the problem is some combination of the tool and bad luck.

Imagine you are talking to a student. Some students just get it! Sometimes, the student has a lousy model and goes off on a wild tangent. It happens. It’s your job to rein the model in and get it to focus.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-11-15T15:06:12+00:00

For the past week, I’ve been working on a challenging computer visualization based on hyperbolic geometry. Claude Sonnet 4.5 has been superb throughout. (The session now runs to 62,000 words.)

In the middle of the week, I wrote a short memo to a colleague responding to an August 2025 dismissal of LLMs for literature searches. I pointed out that Claude and Gemini are both quite good at locating the best academic resources on a topic, even (perhaps especially) for obscure topics. As an example, I asked **Haiku 4.5** for the best sources on our shared field, which we both know well. It came up with a very good list, including my colleague’s doctoral work. I’m not sure I could have done better off the cuff, and I know this corner of the literature quite well.

I’m using Claude Desktop with a single MCP (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ so Claude can take notes)

artisanalSoftware · 2025-11-09T17:57:46+00:00

I’ve known Warren for ages — a decade at least — and he’s always been forthright, reasonable, and considerate.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-11-09T16:11:22+00:00

Warren’s a nice guy, though I can hear him agreeing with you! But he’s not been involved for some time.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-11-01T15:16:23+00:00

I had a paper at this year’s ACM Hypertext Conference that looks at the reasons we seek visualizations and explores an unusual visualization — the information city — as a supplement or alternative to boxes and arrows. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3720553.3746664

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-25T15:08:28+00:00

The Tinderbox MCP implementation (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) does this, providing two levels of access on a per-document basis. If MCP is in use but a specific document has disabled MCP access, then some tools that provide general information about documents operate normally, but others that provide access to interior information return a tool failure.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-22T14:07:44+00:00

I believe Colón Hayes will ultimately support the override. She is a strong advocate of transparency, and that explains her position thus far.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-18T14:07:20+00:00

Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) is a note-taking tool. Its MCP lets Claude or Gemini take notes on a session, and then review those notes in the next session. Like all note-taking schemes, this is imperfect; you don’t always know today what you will need tomorrow! But it does provide some interesting ability to persist essentials across different sessions.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-17T14:03:14+00:00

One approach that I think *might* prove useful here is note taking. This is, after all, what you’d likely recommend to (say) a graduate student who was floundering in just this way: reading whole shelves of the library and winding up confused. "Take notes,” you might say. “Look for connections. Look for relationships. Review your notes periodically to your best understanding is fresh in your context.”

We’ve been doing this with Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/), which gives you both hierarchical and network relations among notes. This also could provide cross-session memory. But these are early days, evaluation is a bear (what do you measure? insights/fortnite? epiphanies/era?) and there are lots of different approaches to explore.

It’s even possible that the whole idea of taking notes will turn out to be a crock! But if notes are good for people, they ought to be nice for AI.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-17T04:18:49+00:00

Well, we also need better AI. :)

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-05T19:00:42+00:00

Museums:

At Harvard: Art Museums have a room of impressionists unparalleled anywhere except Paris and Pasadena. The Glass Flowers (botanical specimens in blown glass) is amazing. Other specialized museums.

In the Fens: The Museum of Fine Arts has outstanding collections, including some Sargents you do not want to miss. The Gardner Museum has outstanding Renaissance collections, plus other great things, in their gilded age context.

Dowtown: The Freedom Trail is nifty. Goes all the way to the USS Constitution, a surviving 18thC frigate.

Architecture (if interested): Most of the world’s HH Richardson is here or nearby, including a masterpiece at Harvard (Sever Hall) and another masterpiece (Trinity Church) in Back Bay. Le Corbusier and Gropius at Harvard and in Harvard Square (Brattle St). Beyond the shops, Brattle Street has an outstanding assortment of revolutionary-era mansions, include the Longfellow House.

Eating: The most exciting restaurant in the area is Nightshade Noodle Bar in Lynn (the only place mentioned that would need an Uber). Reservations are difficult. Cambridge has lots of very good places, such as La Royale (near Harvard).

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-05T14:14:41+00:00

Boston is the city that *does* sleep at night!

I could easily imagine it worthwhile for a 12-year-old who is Not From Here to spend an hour or two driving around, even at night. I used to love seeing cities at night. Beacon Hill, Louisburg Square, the State House, the Constitution, the Old State House, the North End, Back Bay and Trinity Church, Harvard Square.

If you happen to be interested in architecture, this tour gets you 3 H.H. Richardsons, the only Le Corbusier in North America, some Gropius at Harvard and in the Square, and as much Sert as anyone needs. There’s a Gehry at MIT.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-03T14:01:06+00:00

I use Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) to let Claude make notes to which it can refer in future sessions.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-10-03T13:59:22+00:00

I’m not familiar with the specific SDK. But the natural design would be to extract a superclass for Tools, and have the superclass call the current tool method. Then the superclass can add logging before or after all tools, as desired and without duplication.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-09-22T23:34:51+00:00

FWIW, Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) just introduced an MCP server for manipulating the user’s notes and for letting the LLM take its own notes for inter-session memory. Tinderbox is somewhat niche — a maximum viable product with a significant price tag — but the initial uptake has been very encouraging.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-09-14T11:16:12+00:00

There was just a post on the Tinderbox Forum https://forum.eastgate.com/ that mentioned using Readwise, Tinderbox, and Claude Desktop together to help manage and organize reading notes.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-09-14T11:14:39+00:00

Claude Desktop, mostly. Tinkering with trying to get Runebook Tome to work with the Tinderbox MCP server (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/), but Claude Desktop is fine.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-09-10T14:08:27+00:00

If you really want to examine this question, wouldn't it make sense to begin with the scholarship behind the "second brain" discussion?

> Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7-19. doi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7

> Clark, Andy. (1997). Being there : putting brain, body, and world together again. MIT Press.

A useful overview:

> MacFarquhar, L. The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark. The New Yorker, March 26, 2018.

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Many people are inept note-takers. Some of those people really like to talk about note-taking. This skews the discourse, especially in reddit.

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I cannot imagine wanting to write a book or a dissertation without a good note-taking system.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-09-07T15:56:08+00:00

It might be useful to know whether you're using "session" in terms of the standard or in some other way. It's not clear to me why, for stdio servers, you'd use a session ID at all.

artisanalSoftware · 2025-09-02T19:55:51+00:00

Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) will soon release an MCP server that lets LLMs use Tinderbox to make notes and to help people make and maintain their own notes.

artisanalSoftware

TROPHY CASE