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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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Nice: I just installed and played with this for 5 minutes. Assuming no significant bugs or problems, this is a welcome tool for when I have to use Windows. (I can't even imagine using Windows without …
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That was a good article. Generally I use Scala very little, but in the last few days I have written both Scala and Clojure wrappers for some of my Java code (I wanted idiomatic wrappers that feel Scal…
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I am surprised Kenneth Rogoff equates chess AI with "real AI." "Real AI" is a long way off; my definition: ability for systems to learn from their environment (physical or Internet), change their inte…
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Not a good article. I have been around the Tarahumara. The women are friendly but very shy, the men are not to be seen when outsiders are around. My guide told me that they have a 50% infant mortality…
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A useful article by Grant Ingersoll, of Mahoot fame. I am using PostGIS for two current customer projects, but when I have time I'll work through Grant's example from this article.
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The fact that the employees in China would lose their jobs was the first thought/concern I had when this story broke. But, the world is not a fair place.
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Looking at this from a computer nerd perspective, China has been a successful NODEMOCRACY because they have been able to deliver on an increasing standard of living for its citizens. I suspect that a …
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I turn down about 1/2 of consulting offers (two today, which is a record), spending the time on research, general learning, and the non-tech aspects of living. For me the trick is: I got an agreement …
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That was a great story :-) I am just a 'pure techie' and could never pull off something like this, but I enjoyed the experience vicariously. (All I can do is code ;-) Off topic: SGI made such great bo…
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I don't like the part of not paying the offshore team. Sure, fire them if you want to, but pay up on billable hours. On the other hand, since there is no legal recourse in some other countries, keepin…
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I think that most of the 45K instances are small experiments that only get a few HTTP requests per day. I would guess that in this case an instance that does not get a request for a while that it gets…
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I just installed Clozure on a new Windows laptop (yes, I know, but it has 4 cores, and was inexpensive). On OS X and Linux I was used to running SBCL (or Franz).
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I really like 'behind the scenes' stories like this from big sites like Reddit, Facebook, Heroku etc. I work on a smaller scale of a few EC2 at a time, but I really enjoy the scaling info.
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Well said! Let people who create decide how to distribute their creations. Also, that was a really good analysis of the history of balkanization of BSD derived OSes.
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Very cool, both tech-wise and for Arizona (where I live, and more local jobs == a good thing). I want to put solar panels on our roof (different tech, same motivations) and my wife is just about talke…
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""Watch, too, for Amazon, to develop an application platform."" What is AWS? AWS provides high level infrastructure like very robust message queues and file volumes that are automatically replicated. …
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That is interesting, thanks. I did not realize how few projects use the AGPL. One problem with the AGPL is that it seems to work for projects that are totally owned by one individual or company becaus…
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I don't agree with the trash talk on the AGPL in these comments to the original article. I would like to see fewer open source licenses: in my opinion the Apache 2, LGPL 3, and AGPL 3 would suffice si…
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Great article - I especially liked the idea of using several for a very low power "server farm." I bookmarked the page where the shiva plug dev it can be purchased - probably won't buy one, but I migh…
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I expect that 6. is spot-on. For me, 1. is almost here: all of my important data is in a git repository on a managed server in Texas, and backups are in Amazon zone east 1-b. His predictions on AI als…
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I'm in my 50s. I do some similar exercises: putting shoes on in reverse order, play a Wii sports game left handed instead of right handed, etc. Also, about 1/2 of my friends very much disagree with me…
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I hope you are correct. I still boot my MacBook to OS X sometimes, but universal use of Linux in the cloud, private servers, and on the desktop will lead to lowering computing costs and produce more s…
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I have an idea similar to yours: in the far future, software will be ancient, largely bug free, and not be changed much over the centuries. Information management software will evolve to a high degree…
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Wow, please don't take this badly, but: if you don't have a few prototypes, how can you really know what works and what doesn't for your general ideas? Definitely, build a few experimental systems and…
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ACTA is just more evidence of the excessive control that corporations/new world order want to exert over individual communication. I've written 16 published books and I have never lost a moments sleep…
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A subset of the SW, Linked Data, seems to be gathering some momentum. I still think that we are going to hit an inflection point where there is enough linked data to enable great apps, which will driv…
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I just blogged on my predictions for the hot tech for 2010: wireless, analytics, modeling, data/text mining, micro business development with small very focused charge for use web apps, Linked Data, et…
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Cool, I just upgraded. A long while ago, I used to use Rich Hickey's very nice LispWorks to Java bridge. I have tried getting into Clojure a few times in the past, but I kept going back to Common Lisp…
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Nice writeup, and useful. I just did a git clone and looked through the project. I used to do web app development in Lisp and I found having a skeleton project to start with with all ASDF installs loc…
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Zed made some good points. I also like simplicity in designs (and make things more complicated by refactoring if the need ever arises). That is one thing I like about Ruby: it is so simple and conci…