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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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I think the best point made in this conversation is that AI is often enough used to do things quickly that have little value, or just waste people’s time. I am glad to see articles like this that eval…
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excellent. Also cool that Allen wrote TCL Lisp.
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I agree that John Allen’s book was incredibly useful 40 years ago to explain some of the nitty-gritty of implementing Lisp languages, but I can’t really recommend it today. The Genius of Lisp is fun a…
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I always buy every Lisp related book I see. I bought this book on Kobo as an eBook. So far, I have spent less than an hour looking through a few sections; fun stuff! I like the wide variety of code sn…
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chapter 13 covers Clojure
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Yes, I can! After reading Jacques's response to my question, my list got smaller. Personally, I still like Proton, but I get that they have made some people unhappy. I also agree that Hetzner is …
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Jacques, do you mind sharing your list of trusted companies? Thanks in advance.
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I have not run OpenClaw and similar frameworks because of security concerns, but I enjoy the author's success, good for him. There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus…
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Try it for free. I pay $10 a month for unlimited use.
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Great writeup. Glenn mentions that he stopped using Gemini. While I still use Gemini for technical research and occasional coding/design work via Antigravity, for all day to day queries and promp…
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Off topic comment (sorry): when people bash "models that are not their favorite model" I often wonder if they have done the engineering work to properly use the other models. Different model…
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I feel like a luddite: unless I am running small local models, I use gemini-3-flash for almost everything: great for tool use, embedded use in applications, and Python agentic libraries, broad knowled…
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It was front page with good up-votes, then BAM, it just disappeared. Please join and boycott what you can: Many of us complain about what the current Trump administration in the USA is doing and this …
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I have heard ProfG talking about his plan for a few weeks. I think it is a good idea, better described on his podcast than on the linked site. I have participated where I can, but I haven't parti…
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Really good read (and thanks for the mention of the book "The Dispossessed" that I just now bought on libro.fm). The article covers a general theme that those who cause harm should be respon…
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So much money is on the line for US super scalers that they probably pay for ‘pushes’ on social media. Maybe Chinese companies are doing the same.
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US Secretary of State Bressent just publicly said that the US needs to get along and cooperate with China. His tone was so different than previously in the last year that I listened to the video clip …
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I agree. I removed TikTok apps from all my devices just before the handover happened. Too bad, a US startup I used work for had good luck with ads on the ‘old TikTok.’ I wonder how much damage this ha…
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“Emperor wore no clothes” moment. Given time AI will lead to incredible productivity. In the meantime, use as appropriate.
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Interesting perspective of someone curating an exhibit for their famous mother. I am a fan of her writing, but strangely I most often go back to Le Guin’s audio book reading of ‘Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching’…
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I have also found similarities with things in the Bhagavad Gita. Paramahansa Yogananda also writes on this topic.
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I was disagreeing with just your last statement, but then I did a little research: about 80% of revenue is from chatbots and 20% from APIs. So +1 on your comment. Bear with me here, I actually do have…
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A 3B resident parameter MOE allows absolutely huge savings on inference costs. I use a cloud provider for models to large to run locally, can’t wit for them to support qwen3-coder-next hopefully in a …
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Yes, I had to set the Ollama context size to 32K
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I configured Claude Code to use a local model (ollama run glm-4.7-flash) that runs really well on a 32G M2Pro macmini. Maybe my standards are too low, but I was using that combination to clean up the …
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I want one of those t-shirts. I was incredibly lucky to have been funded to write StarLisp code for the original CM-1 machine. CM-1 was a SIMD architecture, the later models were MIMD. Think of the ph…
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A friendly counterpoint: my test of new models and agentic frameworks is to copy one of my half a zillion old open source git repos for some usually very old project or experiment - I then see how eff…
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I like the idea of a smaller version of OpenClaw. Minor nitpick, it looks like about 2500 lines of typescript (I am on a mobile device, so my LOC estimate may be off). Also, Apple container looks real…
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I surprise myself: at the international AI conference AAAI in 1982 some of the swag was a bumper sticker “AI It Is For Real” that I put on my car and left it there for years. With that tedious history…