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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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True, and their integration is pretty good - I laid down money for their Lumo paid plan - happy with it.
11mo ago·view thread
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I was advised by a doctor to take Omega 3 for the same reason.
11mo ago·view thread
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Medley Interlisp
11mo ago·view thread
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Pretty cool to get hosted access to Interlisp-10 on a Dec-10. A bit of boring personal history: I think that it was in the late 1970s that I very randomly got access to Lisp on my company's Dec-1…
11mo ago·view thread
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I have worked on NLP systems for decades, the usual pattern is converting a request into structured data, and sanity checking the structured extracted data. If you ordered a pizza with rocks on it, th…
11mo ago·view thread
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I agree, that would be just under 6% of all taco bells. The should have done a few in each region.
11mo ago·view thread
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#1, likely not now: Most of my close friends are non-technical and expect me to be a cheerleader fir USA AI efforts. They were surprised when I started mentioning the recent Stanford study that 80% of…
11mo ago·view thread
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wow, I found 8 of my books!
11mo ago·view thread
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Lessig’s proposal is excellent. A long time ago I wrote 10 books for publishers like McGraw-Hill, J Wiley, Springer-Verlag, etc. For many reasons I switched to writing using a Creative Commons license…
11mo ago·view thread
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True enough, but training on synthetic data now seems to be pushing SOTA.
11mo ago·view thread
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It is such a common pattern for LLMs to surround generated JSON with ```json … ``` that I check for this at the application level and fix it. Ten years ago I would do the same sort of sanity checks on…
11mo ago·view thread
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I pay to use ProtonMail’s privacy preserving Lumo LLM Chat with good web_search tooling. Lumo is powered by Mistral models. I use Lumo a lot and usually results are good enough. To be clear though, I …
11mo ago·view thread
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This might be of at least some value to augment training LLMs? I spent a lot of time in the 1980s and early 1990s using symbolic AI techniques: conceptual dependency, NLP, expert systems, etc. While t…
11mo ago·view thread
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In some small sense the British Empire lives on through the US hegemony. The British were experts at replacing local governments with people they could control, and since the Second World War we have …
11mo ago·view thread
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I just bought ePubs for your Raja Yoga Revisted (I usually study SRF material, but alternatives are good!) and Scheme 9 for Empty Space. Your web site is very nice, I loved the ‘Who am I?’ page. I hav…
11mo ago·view thread
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Just my personal opinion: Racket and Gerbil Scheme are the most useful Schemes because of their fairly rich standard libraries. There are other Schemes I like to play with but I don’t do much with. So…
11mo ago·view thread
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The advantage to me was having persistent data in memory and stored in the image. I used a function ‘ll’ to reload all source code. I stopped using this technique when computers got faster so loading …
11mo ago·view thread
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Nice, a new update. I remember playing with both small-js and Amber a longtime ago. Very cool projects but I am not a JavaScript developer so I always had friction using both projects so I settled on …
11mo ago·view thread
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I call out to curl sometimes, usually when I want something easy from Lisp languages. What is the overhead of starting a new process between friends?
11mo ago·view thread
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This is nice. I have also enjoyed experimenting with the smolagents library - good stuff, as is the agno agents library.
11mo ago·view thread
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I was just reading the code: it looks like minor tweaks to utils.c and this should run nicely with local models using Ollama or LM Studio. That should be safe enough. Off topic, sorry, but to me the r…
11mo ago·view thread
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I also use Perplexity APIs, specifically their combined web search tool + decent models. Useful combination and easier that what I used to do: using a search API like Brave and rolling my own code to …
11mo ago·view thread
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Key comment author made at the end: result evals were done blind: nice. I have always juggled a multitude of API keys and this article has almost convinced me to try Open Router. It is easy enough to …
11mo ago·view thread
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Thanks!
11mo ago·view thread
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I would like to make the switch but I inherited a 7K Apple Studio monitor when my Dad died two years ago and I fear that I will never get full use of the monitor moving away from macOS. BTW, my favori…
11mo ago·view thread
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I would like to make a broader comment: perhaps as users we should ask what AI features even make sense to use? Starting last year I experimented heavily with Google Gemini interacting with Google Wor…
1y ago·view thread
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The commented longer program listing was fun to read.
1y ago·view thread
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We will miss the US Navy keeping most shipping routes open and safe.
1y ago·view thread
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OK, point taken. I will post a link in the future.
1y ago·view thread