Infrequently updated posts by Arthur

Today’s fun is setting up the new Zapier MCP integration. This creates a MCP server that allows Claude Desktop or Cursor or anything else that supports MCP to call any Zaps Setting Up Zapier MCP Step 1: Install mcp-remote First, install the mcp-remote package using npm: npm install mcp-remote Step 2: Configure MCP Endpoint in Claude Desktop In Claude Desktop, you’ll need to add the Zapier MCP endpoint to your settings. Add the following configuration to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json ...

Trying something new, with a weekly-ish list of links 1) OAPs are radicalised too When Grandpa Turns Extremist: Digital Immigrants, Radicalisation and the German Reich Citizens Movement the radicalisation of middle-aged and elderly people remains largely overlooked despite their active involvement in nearly all extremist movements. This Insight advocates for a more nuanced understanding of extremism and ageing, emphasising the need for radicalisation prevention strategies geared towards those born as Digital Immigrants, such as Baby Boomers and Generation X. These generations did not grow up in a digitised world, and their education largely did not include critical media studies. Among others, this factor makes them prone to misinformation consumption online. [This article looks..] at the example of the German Reich Citizens Movement, which has a very specific age structure and is characterised by the relatively late radicalisation of its adherents. The movement, which predates the digital age, now primarily relies on the internet for communication, spreading its ideology, and mobilising action against the state and governmental authorities ...

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardized approach for structuring context information when working with Large Language Models (LLMs). It was introduced by Anthropic but is standardised and an open protocol. Yeah, great. But what does that even mean? The problem that MCP is trying to solve is one of getting access to local/specialist information. When using Claude or ChatGPT etc, the model has access to its built in knowledge from training, but this only contains public information and will have a cut off date when the model was trained. To get around this, some tools have integrated web search that can add extra knowledge and/or the ability to import documents. But what if you want to talk to a database? Or files on disk? Or a knowledge base? Or … ...

Now Deep Research is available to ChatGPT users on the £20/mth tier, I’ve had a chance to experiment. The tl;dr is that it’s really very good, and the level of progress in just 6 months is mind-blowing. I picked something I know about - financial pressures facing UK Universities. First, I asked ChatGPT to generate the prompt for Deep Research, using this template I found via a mailing list (and I can’t remember which one). ...