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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 was going to agree with this sentiment until I realized that I listen to a few podcasts put out by individuals who spend a lot of time producing content. For me, it is pod quality vs. how many ads.
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I can also agree with the ‘other side’ viewpoint as well. There are things to do to mitigate war though besides interlocking infrastructure: young people studying abroad, travel, friendships with peop…
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I read years ago that Hetzner placed data centers near inexpensive power, but I understand that the EU’s energy situation has deteriorated. So you are correct, they have the larger energy problem to c…
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If they wait a year or so, the new AI chips being used now in China will probably be available for LLM inference in Europe. It seems unfortunate for small and medium size countries, and also for the E…
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Proton drive is fine, their docs service is usable but could use improvement. Their secure and private file and docs sharing with other Proton users could be a great feature, if you need it. EDIT: I j…
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I have used Hetzner off and on for years, nice products and services. I don’t care what provider you use, if your business or app use case needs any sort of reliability have a plan for reinstalling co…
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That was a good article, I don’t usually read The Register. Even as a US citizen, I say: good for Europe! The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant…
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I agree. I took Martin's fantastic online Scala class way back when and I was a fan. Now Clojure is a great JVM alternative, and as you say Java has kicked it up a notch.
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I think this is relevant, Cory Doctorow's recent speech to Canadian government and texh leaders: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ott..…
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Also, I had several experiments where I was interested in just 5 to 10 websites with application specific information so it works nicely for fast dev to spider, keep a local index, then get very low s…
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The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
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I have been enjoying reading this thread, but with some irony: sure the email spams pushing their Lumo LLM private chatbot were a mistake, and I bet they stop doing that fast. The irony is that Lumo i…
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Absolutely you give up a lot of convenience of searching email content. After using it twice, I stopped using their Bridge and instead on my laptop set search to download and index locally. On mobile …
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To be fair, they are working to stay in business. None of my business, but did they treat you unfairly? I am developing a severe anti huge corporation bias, and I try to do business with smaller compa…
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Right on. You might like the Better Offline podcast by Ed Zitron, although the two of you seem to be so closely aligned that you might not learn anything new.
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I subscribed to Lumo for two months. Mistral models were good and I like the idea of a private version of GPT. However, if you only use it a few times a week, it’s not worth the money.
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Is this even worth writing an article? In almost a decade of paying for Proton I have ran across two annoying bugs that eventually got fixed. Report bugs and be patient.
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Despite having written a few books on LLM applications I use them sparingly for coding: to design and get started, and occasionally for debugging. I have no interest criticizing other people’s practic…
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Not directly covered by this blog, but for low cost and good performance the combination of gemini-3-flash with search grounding is hard to beat, at least for the many small experiments I use it for. …
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I agree with you. I do have some local model LLM support configured in Emacs, as well as integration with gemini 3 flash. However, all LLM support is turned off in my setup unless I specifically enabl…
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Old news now I think, but good news. Except for my Apple Watch I have given up using Siri, but I use Gemini and think it is good in general, and awesome on my brother's Pixel phone. Because Apple…
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I think you are correct, with one large caveat: With very good tooling (e.g., Google Antigravity, Claude Coding, Open AI’s codex, and several open platforms) and not caring about your monthly API and …
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I agree so strongly with Antirez. For me (just a personal take!) the main benefit of AI is helping me improve myself via: better understanding technology that I am currently studying; a springboard fo…
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Well prepared article, and the window resizing pisses me off also! For practical reasons I am stuck inside Apple’s macOS garden, but I wanted to share a few things that at least make me feel content u…
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I hope things work out for Tailwind. I think it is very decent of Google to do this. Obviously Google takes some heat for their business model but when I was invited to work at Google in 2013 I though…
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Manufacturers add ‘apps’ and other spyware. My understanding is Microsoft direct sales don’t have the extra apps, etc. That said, I have not been a Windows user for over 15 years.
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Most smart TVs have advertisements and spyware that yields additional profits. Same with some electronic devices: Apple devices and Windows laptops sold directly by Microsoft have less advertising and…
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Open-Source Multimodal AI Agent Stack: Connecting Cutting-Edge AI Models and Agent Infra.