AI-infused

Now, let’s look at some little things we can do with MCP that would be a pain in the neck without it.

* A user — a senior German academic — has a hunk of XML that represents a pile of attributes and their values. He wants to parse this into a Tinderbox note, creating user attributes as required. The standard approaches might include (a) request a new Tinderbox operator that converts the XML object to a Tinderbox dictionary; (b) use regular expressions in Tinderbox actions to break up the XML and extract the juicy bits; (c) convert the XML to an intermediate format that’s easier for Tinderbox’s stream operators to parse; or (d) convert the XML to the corresponding JSON, because Tinderbox does have a JSON operator.

This is easy enough for the technically proficient, but plenty of smart people don’t really know enough to do this comfortably.

Instead, we could ask Claude to reformat the XML to a simple textual list.  This is boring work, but it’s the sort of work LLMs can do.  And if the LLM tries to shirk the job or botches it, you’re likely to notice immediately.

* I’m writing a book. I’ve got a resource I want to add to my reference database.  Bookends imports RIS/Endnotes, which most digital libraries support. But *this* library only provides BibTeX.  Best Answer: add BibTeX to Tinderbox: an easy three-day job for me, challenging for me, but challenging for most people.  OK Answer: Ask Claude to convert this BibTeX to RIS, and import the RIS.  If it’s right, we’re done.  If Claude botches it or invents some other hunk of RIS, it won’t import or the imported reference will refer to the Audubon with the errata on page 23, not the Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents paper you were expecting.

* Ben Shneiderman and his AI list are quite engaged by a recent paper by Floridi on the relationship between Scope and Confidence in computational results.  Floridi uses a construct known as Kolmogorov Complexity, of which I have never heard.  “Does everyone else know this?” I ask myself. “Is it sound, or cranky?”  Old answer: call a few mathematicians and ask them.  But lots of people don’t have a lot of math professors on speed dial.  Ask Claude, and in minutes you can have a pile of references from a range of fields, and an explanation of why you haven’t heard it before. Yes: it might all be fabulation, but I’ll find out as soon as I read those references.

Can we please stop with the emotional appeals for and against AI — we’ve been doing that since Asimov and Phillip K. Dick — and think about what we can do with the tools?

MadaboutDana wrote:
But at the same time, there is a huge amount of security expertise out
>there nowadays (one of my family members works as a high-level software
>in banking security – a real laugh a minute!), and it does appear
>that whoever put MCP together didn’t take the time to consult the
>really experienced experts in anything like enough detail.

Posted by Paul Korm
Sep 29, 2025 at 03:11 PM

It’s possible @eastgate is misreading the gist of this thread.  If AI is the culmination of technology in our times, then healthy questioning and skepticism is a very good thing.  That’s all that’s going on here.  I have no doubt Tinderbox is built with the best of care for its users.  However, it’s obviously a very small corner of the universe compared to whatever it is that the enormously capitalized tech bros are up to with “AI”.  (FWIW, “AI” has become undefinable, mainly because the press does a poor job understanding the multiple technologies they lump together under “AI”.) 

I suspect that everyone in this forum has spent considerable time in recent years “think[ing] about what we can do with the tools”.  Lack of thought and effort is not the issue.  Lack of trust in what’s behind the curtain is.

eastgate wrote:
>Can we please stop with the emotional appeals for and against AI —
>we’ve been doing that since Asimov and Phillip K. Dick — and
>think about what we can do with the tools?

Posted by eastgate
Sep 29, 2025 at 04:54 PM

Paul:

There’s a place for skepticism.  This is not that. 

If you are worried about that which is behind the curtain, LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN.  Don’t cite irrelevant credulous clickbait like the Perrone article — and that’s probably the best of the lot.  Certainly don’t waive it in the air as if it’s some sort of profound gotcha.  (Perrone is the fellow behind a newsletter concerned with building audiences, boasting of 30M impressions. A clickbait expert. He’s also a mathematician, and ought to know better than this.).

For those not technically inclined, the dangers Perrone identifies in MCP are the dangers of installing and using software.

Are you worried about Claude?  OK: identify the problem, demonstrate it, document it.  If you are deeply worried, for example, that racial bias in its training set will interfere with Claude’s ability to translate BibTeX to RIS, well, be my guest: show me.  If you are concerned that allowing Claude to persist notes about today’s discussion of Assyrian schools will establish an attack vector through your Tinderbox document, then READ ITS NOTES, which are just a section in YOUR notes.

Before we shun hard-won attainments of arduous research, let’s actually do it for reason, not rumor.  And then, could we find out if it’s a problem with this LLM?  Or inherent to all LLMs?  Or to all computation?

At least, can we talk about actual software and actual research, not half-understood phantoms from overheard ghost stories?

Posted by Paul Korm
Sep 29, 2025 at 08:20 PM

Cool down, chap.  I don’t understand your anger at the members here.

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