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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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My non-tech brother has the latest Google Pixel phone and he enthusiastically uses Gemini for many interactions with his phone. I almost switched out of the Apple ecosystem a few months ago, but I hav…
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I only use commercial LLM vendors who I consider to be “commercially viable.” I don’t want to deal with companies who are losing money selling me products. For now the venders I pay for are 90% Google…
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I use the Duck Duck Go browser for almost everything. I is open source for iOS/Android/macOS platforms, but I think there are parts of their platform that are not. The DDG browser hits all m…
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I used Nemotron 3 nana on LM Studio yesterday on my 32G M2-Pro mac mini. It is fast and passed all of my personal tool use tests, and did a good job analyzing code. Love it. Today I ran a few simple c…
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I am a day late to this conversation: while I sometimes find full-on agent-first based coding assistants like Claude Code, Google Antigravity, OpenAI codex, etc. useful, I think it is a mistake giving…
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I use the DDG browser about 80% of the time. Duck.ai is an interesting product, like Proton’s AI chatbot - both privacy preserving.
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Good product idea! Nice feature keeping track of Claude Code and codex and doing some syncing. I don’t use Claude code and cancelled my OpenAI subscription a few months ago (I use local models and Gem…
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I am going to defend Apple: their new built in system model in iOS26 and iPadOS26 is very decent, similar to the small Google Gemma models and the small Chinese models. For complex queries a free API …
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I enjoy reading Peter’s ‘Python studies’ and was surprised to see here a comparison of different LLMs for solving advent of code problems, but the linked article is pretty cool. Peter and a friend of …
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Their edits on YouTube shorts are hideous but at least it is 100% obvious that artificial edits were applied. I have a funny attitude towards Google: I am a big privacy nut, have read the principle bo…
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I have thought about stopping the use of all tech leaders: only use LLM access by running locally and Huggingface, only use a small 3rd party email provider, just use open source, and only social medi…
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I agree. I am happiest just using plain Emacs for coding and every once in a while separately using an LLM or once or twice a day use gemini-cli or codex for a single task. My comment is for coding, b…
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I basically agree. OK: Small focused models for specific use cases, small models like the new mistral-3-3B that I found today to be good at tool use I and thus for building narrow ranged applications.…
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+1 interesting
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I agree. re: energy and other resource use: the analogy I like is with driving cars: we use cars for transportation knowing the environmental costs so we don’t usually just go on two hour drives for t…
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I used DeepSeek-v3.2 to solve two coding problems by pasting code and directions as one large prompt into a chat interface and it performed very well. VERY WELL! I am still happy to pay Google because…
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In reading the comments here I only saw two references to Apple's local system LLM. I wrote my own chat app using it and it effectively handles simple queries locally and otherwise sends queries …
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I use an app like Terminus or Prompt to access a remote server. I have a keyboard and a mouse for my iPad Pro.
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Good guidelines. My primary principle for using AI is that it should be used as a tool under my control to make me better by making it easier to learn new things, offer alternative viewpoints. Sadly, …
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It is an option. You are talking with an old man (me!) and I just usually like simple Emacs setups, also using mosh and ssh and tmux.
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I am going to sound like a mouse-using Luddite but I configure .emacs with a one line addition to allow a mouse click to reposition the cursor and fast scrolling works also. I have been using Emacs fo…
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I love Racket. Just for fun, I wrote a Racket book, read online: https://leanpub.com/racket-ai/read For Scheme languages I recommend Racket or Gerbil. Racket is great for beginne…
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This is my question also. I tend to not use apps, use DuckDuckGo browser. I sometimes do use Safari which is a more convenient browser - it would be ironic if DDG browser is less private than Safari.…
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Much of the value of platforms like X and Mastodon is in discovering and bookmarking long form articles and blogs to read. I have written close to 3000 blog articles over the last 25 years (and many b…
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This has been my question also: I spend a lot of time experimenting with local models and almost all of my use cases involve text data, but having image processing and understanding would be useful. H…
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I used the new Nano Banana Pro just now, indirectly. I was brainstorming with Gemini 3 Thinking mode (now the default best thinking option on my iPadOS Gemini app) over a system design for an open sou…
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Yes! I meant to also say that, thanks. Sorry for going off on a tangent, but last week I asked Gemini about security and privacy advantages of running Gmail and Google Calendar using Safari and DuckDu…
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I had a fantastic ‘first result’ with Gemini 3 but a few people on social media I respect didn’t. Key takeaway is to do your own testing with your use cases. I feel like I am now officially biased re:…