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mark_l_watson
21,400karma·8,624submissions·August 19, 2009
about
I am an author of 20 books and a practitioner specializing in artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing, and the semantic web. I have 55 US patents. I code in Common Lisp, Clojure, Swift, Python, Haskell, Java, and Scheme. My web site is https://markwatson.com
My recent books can be read for free online on my web site or optionally you can pay for them at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson
Twitter: mark_l_watson and Mastodon: @mark_watson@mastodon.social
recent activity (8,624 total)
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There are a near infinite number of Qi Gong and Tai Chi videos on YouTube. I prefer to following new videos, and where my wife and I live they have Tai Chi and Yoga classes. A great use of time, and t…
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In the mid 1980s I wrote a commercial neural network product SAIC Ansim and I usually got things working in Common Lisp first, then manually translated to C++. Now we can write in CL and use coding a…
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I didn't try Hax but I hope someone who has can answer a question: does it support suspending current operation if user hits ESC key? EDIT: I just looked at interrupt.c in the github repo: handle…
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I am only 75, but in a few years I have thought of downsizing to one device (and a VPS for a little coding). A future version of this phone that is triple fold would work for me.
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Thanks for the kind words. I just built the Chess example in my Clojure book and the executable was a tiny 18M.
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Great work. It just simply worked for me.
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I love the wave of new small model releases. Pleasantly surprising that an NVIDIA model runs so well on Apple Silicon using MLX! I was using nemotron-3.5-lightning:30b-mlx with OpenCode on my old (che…
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I used to love using Squeak but moved to Pharo to get better high resolution display support. I should try the Squeak 6.1 release.
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From the Ollama docs for this new model: Ollama's MLX engine provides state-of-the-art performance on Apple Silicon, with support for DFlash and image input: ollama run muse-glimmer:30b-mlx
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To be honest, I never give benchmarks a look. I just use the models for whatever I need to work on, so I can't really make comparisons that are useful for other people.
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Meta is rocking AI. As of last week I have been using their excellent muse coding harness with their model Muse Spark 1.2. Starting this morning I am running their new local 30B model muse-glimmer on …
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He did the right thing. The very idea of Claude copying an existing project to answer one of my prompts or a whole project in Claude Code is a nightmare scenario. I have all but given up using the mul…
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I am retired, so this may not be of general interest: I am working on my fourth AI coding agent, this one written in Racket Scheme: https://github.com/mark-watson/racket-coding-ag…
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Are you one of the authors? Great job! It took me just a few minutes to install Jolt and build a native executable for the Chess program in my Clojure book. Jolt rocks!!!
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Clojure hosted on Chez Scheme (same as Racket). So cool. I tried building a standalone executable for the Chess game in my Clojure book using "jolt build -m chess-game.cli -o chess_jolt" and…
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I just saw this - works great to build small self contained apps. (I just tested on macOS, also supports Linux).
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I find pi-sandbox works well for me. Did you evaluate pi-sandbox? If not, give it a try.
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Same experience, sometimes using Little Coder helps make things faster because it is built on pi and strips out some functionality. Probably best to stick with pi however, adding pi-sandbox for some s…
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I am starting to share the opinion in the article. I used to use Claude Code with strong open models, and sometimes pay for Opus. Now one of my main drivers is out of the box pi’s 4 built in tools, an…
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No, but a good idea. I want something simple, practical, understandable. I think I will write a short book on this general topic.
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Great article! I am currently writing my second harness (first was in Emacs Lisp, using Emacs as UI; second is a command line coding agent written in Common Lisp). If anyone wants to argue that it is …
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While I agree with the article, I would carry the idea further: the huge value in AI is improving ourselves. By all means use AI to help design, write tests, and implement code and while I understand …
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Thanks, you make me feel better for spending the (fun!) time writing my first harness in Emacs Lisp with a ‘Emacs UI’ and later writing a command line harness in Common Lisp. Am I more productive with…
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Odd results for me. Last month I tested five AI chat sites, with web search turned off, and four of them had a shadow of information about me as a person (what kind of books I write, what tech I use, …
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Such great advice. I have been meditating for over 50 years, and while this meditation practice is key to my being happy and content in my personal life, hobbies, and work the techniques in this excel…
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You can buy really good Ramen ingredients online and make your own. If you are not a vegetarian and don’t mind eating pork, you can buy sealed packets containing about 2 or 3 fluid ounces of thick por…
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Are you using the $20/month subscription? I don't use it much, perhaps two 20-minute sessions a day so I don't get close to using my quota. When it works, it is a great system, but now …
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This is my experience also: DeepSeek v4 flash is good enough for most of my work and I like the fast response times. I buy tokens mostly from FireWorks.ai in the US, but I also prepaid for a large chu…