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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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The 1.8 and 1.9 dichotomy is a pain, no doubt about it. I totally switched to 1.9, wiped 1.8.* from my development systems. In a few cases I had problems (like manual edits to acts_as_list) but life i…
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"Our customer count and revenue have similar growth curves." That is good news, since they provide a good service. While it would be easy to migrate any app to EC2 (or RackSpace, RimuHosting, etc.) I …
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Actually, our carriers have not been very safe since Russia started selling the SSN-22 Sunburn several years ago. The defense industry lobbyists do a really good job of marketing weapon systems that a…
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"Ownership" of this data is not clear to me. If FB does not allow large scale spidering/collecting of this meta data, then FB has the best use of it. On the other hand, if many other web sites use the…
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Two comments: I think that the OmniGraffle and TexShop applications justify keeping an old Mac around. Excellent. Also, Macbooks run Ubuntu very well, especially models that are not brand new. I stron…
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That was a good (if old) presentation. I worked for a few years in the entertainment industry (Nintendo U64 and PC games, virtual reality projects for Disney and SAIC) and it is an experience that I c…
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Instead of reading this article that summarizes the REWORK book, I suggest actually reading the book. (I read it twice, it is quite good.)
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A nice dream, and parts of it may be possible. I especially like the comments about no cars, working and living locally. I can't fully agree with home schooling - we need to improve our education syst…
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I just took a better look at Open Graph. Certainly marking up pages with RDFa tags using standard Ontology's for properties and classes could be a useful thing. The problem as I see it is that the Fac…
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You are absolutely correct that RDFa is a SW technology. I must admit some prejudice here: I went from thinking that RDFa was very useful to being skeptical when HTML5 won the standards war against XH…
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Great article. I agree with the other comment: Ola has an interesting way of thinking about programming. Very creative.
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I expected them to do this - good for them. As much as I tend to distrust large corporations, Google has some coolness, and I can't think of another large corporation that I distrust less than Google.
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I have a problem with tossing around the term Semantic Web when their take is so much different than mine. The SW is about standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL, HTTP, using URIs to represent things and c…
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Very nice pitch for RDF (which I agree with).
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RDF.rb and RDFS.rb look like nice libraries and basing them on the high quality Redland libraries was a good decision. That said, using Sesame for the underlying parsers, data storage, and real RDFS i…
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The one feature that I wish would be added to both Java and Python versions of the SDK is a very easy way to migrate app data stores between AppEngine and a local development environment. For Java, I …
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I think that this price point is too high. Compare with the minimal Netflix subscription at the same cost that gets instant view movies and 1 blu-ray at a time. That said, two $10/month subscriptions …
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Although I am a bit sceptical of Chomsky's approach to linguistics (he seems to leave out the messy human side of language, reducing it to something easier to study), I think that his other life role …
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Perhaps Lisp will now be a standard/supported programming language in the Googleplex :-) I think that most of what ITA does is written in Common Lisp.
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Sounds like they are going for even 'greener' servers. Difficult to predict the future but I wonder: if application platforms like AppEngine will get much more popular, then we will see the positive e…
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Agreed, Facebook is odd, no other way to say it. For developers, Facebook Connect is sort-of interesting but using Facebook is boring and I have never clicked on any FB advertisements (compare to, for…
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Which ORM (or pure object database) did you use?
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Good point, but I am not sure. The key thing is to respect the wishes of the authors of a package so I would just contact the Neo4j developers and ask them.
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I now only use Smalltalk a few hours a month but I have switched over completely to using Pharo instead of Squeak or VW (non commercial version). Pharo really is cleanly laid out and nice to use if yo…
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That is a cool trick that I will try. I usually just install the command line tools on each server, write a tiny Ruby script to attach EBS volumes and bind Elastic IP addresses, and put this script in…
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I don't think so. If the REST server is part of a larger system then I believe that the AGPL requires that the other networked software components need to be AGPLed. They do have a commercial license …
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A cool addition to a very useful project. That said, I prefer using JRuby and Neo4j in embedded mode: the Ruby bindings are very good.
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I blogged about this last year and wrote to all three of my Congress-critters. This is legislation written by big-agro and spoon fed to "the best Congress that money can buy." Shameful legislation tha…
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Amazing how many great looking projects are coming out of the Clojure community. I used to think that Scala was the heir apparent to Java but it seems like Clojure now has more momentum. Clojure has a…
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As a practical matter, it will be a while before I jump to 3.0. I am almost entirely on Rails 2.3.5 and Ruby 1.9.1 and that is working for me. Really it is a tradeoff between working at 100% speed rig…