My father, Thomas Armand Moulia, pulled the Ellis Island passenger manifests from 1913 documenting when his grandfather, Armand Moulia, came to the states. Armand was ten years old at the time and travelling in the care of his fourteen year old sister, Julie. My father was trying to trace Armand and Julie’s origins, however the records of origin and destination are phonetically misspelled, likely because they were young and only spoke Basque. To figure out where old Armand Senior came from, we’ve been trying to decipher them.

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A few months ago I daydreamed bridging Emacs LLMs with a burgeoning ecosystem of MCP tools: being able to use websearch, run Python code within a local virtualenv, or anything off the awesome list. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a protocol for integrating tools with LLM’s. Designed by Anthropic for Claude and picked up by OpenAI, it’s shaping up to be the standard for wiring up tools.

lizqwerscott/mcp.el implements an MCP client from within Emacs alongside an interface for managing connected MCP servers. Mix in a few glue functions to wire the MCP servers to karthink/gptel as gpt-tools and your Emacs LLM now has [potentially dangerous] superpowers.

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Stymied by not being able to run Llama 4 on my desktop’s 24GB of VRAM, I signed up for OpenRouter. OpenRouter serves as a marketplace where providers can sell LLM generated tokens to folk like us. Every popular model, closed or open, is available and the prices are low. Instead of having an account with each provider, you can get away with just the one.

Gptel supports OpenRouter out of the box. I set it up with the API key pulled from 1Password:

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The first sentence of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento, a book I’d started knowing little about, reads: Todavía recuerdo el día que mi padre me llevó por primera vez al cementerio de los libros olvidados. Familiar and resonant ¹, this Gothic remix of Cien anos de soledad’s opener² sends the reader down an intertextual rabbit-hole. Just a few pages further in, and we find ourselves in an impossible library filled with forgotten books and mirrored galleries. The references and Borgesian symbols aren’t subtle: Zafón is taking the postmodern approach by making La sombra del viento that which it describes: a library of other works, a nesting doll of stories.

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I read Invisible Cities while traveling to Toronto. I’d seen Toronto once before, in the summer, and was struck both times by the amount of construction, the sheer number of cranes hoisting the skyline. This was my first time seeing the ivy-bricked university white with snow. It felt like Calvino as deconstructing my perspective of the city.

Apparently, there is a tradition of illustrating the invisible cities. Some links:

• Pooja Sanghani-Patel Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• Ethan Mollick Illustrating Cities, Writing Cities
• Karina Puente on ArchDaily (paywalled)
• Dave McKean Folio edition (physical book)

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