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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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Duck.ai seems good, as is Proton’s Lumo.
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I stopped paying OpenAI a long time ago. I get that actually deleting your OpenAI account hurts their ‘numbers’ and thus possibly their valuation. I choose another path: I use their tokens for free, h…
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I enjoyed his sci-fi so much. Rest in peace brother.
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very cool!
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+1 I came to make the same point. Basically unclassified. Pretty weak press release!
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Could it be tooling like Claude Code? I just used Claude Code with qwen3.5:35b running locally to track down two obscure bugs in new Common Lisp code I wrote yesterday.
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Nice idea, caching what you are already browsing.
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Hendrix seemed like a really nice guy. His vibe was that he loved everyone in the audience. I was close to the stage and took some nice pictures using Anschrome 500 that I developed myself pushing it …
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I agree 100%. Often when I use increasingly powerful local models (qwen3.5:32b I love you) I mix in web search using search APIs from Brave, Perplexity, and DuckDuckGo summaries. Of course this requir…
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Hopefully this is on-topic: I would hope that some people would opt for private chat services. I evaluated both Proton’s Lumo+ and DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai services. I like both services but only wanted t…
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The amazing thing is that Hendrix during live performances has the same wonderful effects as he got in the studio. I only saw Hendrix play live one time, that was in San Diego a few weeks before he di…
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>> signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agency said such laws would "disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and …
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Github user atgreen has a large number of really interesting Common Lisp projects: https://github.com/atgreen I am a fan.…
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This seems like a really solid idea: using an environment variable in command line tools and small apps to control output for AI vs. human digestion. Even given efficient attention mechanisms, slop to…
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Some degree of national pride and independence simply makes a lot of sense: slightly modified Linux distros set up for local information resources and banking, tuned open LLMs, local web site indexing…
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I’ll do the Minority Report here: I loved the article, the point being that rich people hyping AI for their own enrichment have somewhat shutdown rational arguments of benefits vs. costs, the costs be…
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great point - I am a heavy user of API calls (using an API key) for gemini-3-flash-preview and I find it difficult to spend my free API credits.
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Excuse me giving you advice, unasked for: as part of your ‘digital life spring cleaning’ spend some time converting auth with Google/Apple/GitHub for services to logging in with your email (…
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Use of Chinese models: If I had not got a discount for signing up for a full year of Gemini AI Pro for something like $14/month, I might have started just using a Chinese chat model for things wh…
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I agree. As others have mentioned here, the authenticate with AntiGravity web popup clearly says that this authentication is only to be used with Google products. How can Claws users miss this? What G…
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Maybe have to pay for search? I am experimenting with paying Proton another $10/month for a paid lumo+ account. lumo+ is a private chat like ChatGPT that uses a strong Mistral model and also priv…
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Except, I only use services I pay for and set tight privacy settings. EDIT: sorry for the initial short reply, your comment deserved a more reasoned response: I build my digital life on two primary se…
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Beautifully written, I saved your post to send the next friend or relative who asks me why I am so hard-over on privacy. I enjoyed working at Google hears ago as a contractor, and they are my ‘favorit…
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Good work. Like the author, I usually prefer experimenting with different system prompts, ordering of data in a prompt, etc. using small local open models. I get the impression from talking to people …
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I experimented with many models on my 16G and 32G Macs. For less memory, qwen3:4b is good, for the 32B Mac, gpt-oss:20b is good. I like the smaller Mistral models like mistral:v0.3 and rnj-1:latest is…
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Fine, I guess. The only commercial API I use to any great extent is gemini-3-flash-preview: cheap, fast, great for tool use and with agentic libraries. The 3.1-pro-preview is great, I suppose, for peo…
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I had the privilege of getting a working gig in Singapore for a small AI startup: such a well run country! There is a sense of community for helping by employing people who need jobs, the police were …
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Two mildly contrary points: AI is a fantastic learning tool. Getting smarter usually leads to more success. AI is great when you don’t have skilled co-workers to bounce ideas off of: as an indy mostly…
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I have been using vector based RAG for about two years now, I am not knocking the tech, but last year I started experimenting with going way back in time and also in parallel trying BM25 search (or hy…
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I agree with you, but then I am retired so my opinion is not that relevant. I have a sweet spot for using just Emacs, no other IDEs except very occasional use of AntiGravity. For a particular fun proj…