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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 get some push back from a few tech friends because I avoid using apps (except for things like Chess game apps). I can’t say for sure that preferring web versions of services helps with censorship, b…
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Isn’t your mode toggle just turning StageManager in or off?
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While my main driver is a maxed out MacMini hooked to an Apple Studio monitor, at least once a week I pack up and store my MacMini and plug an iPadPro into my large monitor for a few days. So, I feel …
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Is it my imagination, but don’t the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI spread around a lot of bullshit whenever they want to raise more money or even worse try to get our government to set up regulatory bar…
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EDIT: I just tried it, nice!
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I may not use this but I just had a pleasant five minutes reading through some of the source code. Off topic, but: I currently think Swift is the most interesting non-Lisp language. I tried Rust and d…
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Sadly (at least for me, I am a US citizen) we are seeing the slow burn collapse of western ‘democracies’ and the slow steady rise of the global south. Western leaders are in panic mode. I am not very …
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Good question. I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent.…
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I enjoy doing the same thing: if I am reading and something in the text triggers a memory (could be a historic person, a philosophy, some technology, place, etc.) then I like to have a back and forth …
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Without a doubt, in my opinion, OpenAI is a risky bet, but perhaps Softbank can make some money on OpenAI and then get out.
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As a westerner (USA), I would add a good interpretive book on the Bhagavad Gita. Just a few years of study might be life changing.
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I exclusively use their API, with tool use.
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I bought $5 worth of Moonshot API calls a long while ago, still have a lot of credits left.
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+1 > It's really just a performance tradeoff, and where your acceptable performance level is. I am old enough to remember developers respecting the economics of running the software they creat…
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I agree with you (I have a 32G M2Pro) and I like to mix using local models running with Ollama and LM Studio with using gemini-cli (used to also occasionally use codex but I just cancelled my $20/…
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Very cool! Love to see old but still useful GPL licensed FSF projects. I had Maxima on my old Lisp Machine, and 24 years ago when I first interviewed at Google, one of the developers of Maxima was als…
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I like your method of adding TODOs in your code, then using a model - I am going to try that. I only have a 32G M2 Mac so I have to use Ollama Cloud to run some of the larger models but that said I am…
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UV lets me love using Python. There are other languages, mostly Lisp languages, that I have always liked better but my workflow with UV is so pleasant that I find myself not minding Python the languag…
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I totally agree. Clearly, an all-local implementation is safer, and using less powerful local models is the reasonable tradeoff. Also make it open source for trust. All that said, I don’t need to have…
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Thank you!
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I am mostly retired but I am thinking of restarting a solo products mini-company next year. I have been looking at much less expensive options like Alibaba Cloud, GLM, Kimi K2, etc. There is a recent …
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Written by VPs of sales from Anthropic and OpenAI? Where this article fails the worse: in my experience smaller local models are not often used in agentic tasks that involve code execution so much of …
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Interesting idea! Haven’t heard that before.
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I had problems running Emacs in no window mode (emacs -nw). I should try again, or maybe just use vim.
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Thank you. I just tried it on my iPad, very cool.
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ha! I took at least one PGM class myself. I had a difficult time with the material.
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This seems like important work and at first I wondered what this does for Google's bottom line. However reading about the simulator for software dev and the hardware kits, Google is aiming to win…
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Chandrasekhar was a good friend of my father and from my childhood I remember Chandrasekhar and his wife being super-nice people. Thanks for sharing the story about his two students.
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Martin Casado from a16z stated an opinion that 80% of US startups are likely using less expensive open models, usually from China. Chamath P. on the All In Podcast said that his company is using Chine…
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I was explaining the problem of lagging benefits for the huge expenditures for AI research and infrastructure this morning to my wife (my RC airplane flying club is an hour round trip drive so we real…