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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 toggle back and forth between deepseek v 4 flash/pro on FireWorks.ai using OpenCode. Easy to toggle, I default to flash.
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I prepaid for a ton of DeepSeek v4 flash tokens. When I use them I would like to try purchasing Luna tokens for a while. I like cheap and fast models and since I am retired, if I waste time having to …
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> I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. Right on! For 15 years I worked for two companies that had their offices on the cliffs overlooking the ocean in La Jol…
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Very good, pairs well with the linked article. I am an old man (mid-70s) and retired now except for personal research and writing, but fifty years in the business taught me to simply pay attention to …
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This looks really good, but for me the timing of seeing agent-manager is bad: I read about the similar Herdr on HN several days ago and I have completely changed my dev setup for the better. I have al…
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+1 upvote I don’t agree with you but your comment is very well thought out and doesn’t deserve downvotes.
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I used to do this to build command line utilities in SBCL, with millisecond initialization times. Good technique, and compress the image so executables are fairly small.
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Clog is very cool. As an alternative, I have recently been building Common Lisp UIs with webview (I have two example webview apps as recent additions to my Common Lisp book). re: heap based delivery: …
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To me, the most weasel words are “”All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing.”” I bet via regulatory capture that evaluating Chinese models will be a…
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Welcome to our political system. There are ways to fix this, in theory, but our government has passed the point of no return with corruption. There is one solution: no one register as a democrat or re…
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I agree, then need to bring back Nelson Minar’s old search API, or something like it. Google does supply search grounding with Gemini API calls, and that is handy, but not general enough.
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I more or less agree. When Apple starts using Chinese and expanded South Korean production memory chips, their hardware pricing problem will go away. I am running new betas for macOS/iOS/iPa…
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Great show of principles and character, +1000 to the author. What can we "regular people" do? My approach, which is very inconvenient, is to try as much as possible to not feed my consumer s…
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That sounds reasonable, Intel Macs aren't much used anymore.
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My problem with AI use of em-dashes is that it covers up sloppy writing. I simply collected about six examples of horrible use of em-dashes and how I would have written the text. This became part of m…
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I am repeating myself: at least a partial solution is enforcing anti-dumping laws, that is, make money losing subscriptions illegal. If businesses and individuals pay actual token costs, then they wil…
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This seems like a smart move, given their ability to host efficiently. I approve of efforts to make the cost of inference for smaller useful models slowly approach 'close to zero' and there …
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This is a real problem, a long time in the making. Over fifty years ago advertising started to affect the way people thought: I argue that they trained people to not be content with a classic simple l…
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Why? The current administration is doing such a fine job protecting the investments of a few hundred wealthy people, and not caring about the economy of the country. The combination of a wide range of…
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+1 I have read most of Rand's works. She grew up in the Soviet Union and hated collectivism and carried it very much too far. Still I find value in her work, and if she were here today I would be…
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Great 'scratch my own itch' story and I like the framing of Emacs and Elisp as Malleable Software.
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I share the cynicism here about this article. I think the saddest part of betting our economy on AI is that Google is actually the US-based corporation that is best positioned because so much of their…
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For me, poolside.ai “came out of nowhere” a week or so ago when I discovered their local coding harness ‘pool’ and their smaller 33G MOE model that runs fast and is effective on my old 32G mac mini. R…
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I like that v4 flash is so fast! I run it on both FireWorks.ai in the US and bought some tokens directly from DeepSeek as an experiment. I only work on Open Source projects, so I don’t have to worry a…
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There is a ton of headroom (or room for improvement) in smaller locally runnable models. Some of the Gemma 4 models were re-released this week with better tool support and the improvement in using it …
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I found qwen3.6:26b slightly better on my 32G mac mini than the same sized gemma until gemma was updated with better tool support 4 or 5 days ago. It is like a ping-pong game: the advantage flips back…
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You may be correct but the combination of local models when they are fast enough and work, combined with paying close to zero for deepseek v4 flash from US providers is pretty good. When you need it, …
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I worry about that but here are two positive things: 1. it would put us (USA) at a competitive disadvantage, and cooler heads will prevail in this fight 2. there are good US open models. I have the la…
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Very true. The code is interesting and educational since the overall design is simple. Also true that the PDF to vector database code reminded me of something I would have done a couple of years ago. …
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Interesting looking project, but I just looked at the repo. UIUC is such a great school. I managed an AI team in the UIUC Research Park for two years and interactions with professors and hiring a lot …