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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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Apple’s System Model is actually pretty good but is hard-limited to a 4K context length. This is OK for small Python utilities that need a model for applications that operate on small amounts of data,…
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re: > Right now unless you're paying by the token, there's no cost based reason to use the open weight models for daily coding work because the monthly coding plans from Anthropic and Ope…
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That is a nice business niche, but I would hope that companies might also care about security. There are just a few inference providers who I trust to not save data outside the scope of maintaining in…
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I was blown away by how effective their latest model drop that works with their own coding harness pool is. I tested it extensively with Haskell, Python, and TypeScript for small coding projects. The …
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+1 I enthusiastically use Chinese open weight models for a wide range of tasks (I also love Opus and Gemini) but I am so happy to see another high quality American open model (I consider gemma to be h…
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I retired several years ago and now I spend my allotted ‘tech time’ learning. Thirty five years ago I used to make up for having the ‘wrong’ degree (Physics instead of Computer Science) by writing boo…
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Well you can use Apple Containers - more convenient than Docker. Alternatively: I am not enthusiastic about Anthropic as a company but I use Claude Code with the three best open coding models (for low…
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Exactly right. I have only had one long conversation with him, but he was friendly and very interesting.
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I use LLM_based coding agents frequently with Lisp languages and my way of working is different with Lisp languages: 1) if generated code ever has a syntax error, I like to quickly fix the syntax erro…
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Those things also work for me but Siri is often so slow that it would be faster to do myself.
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I am on the developer beta for iOS/iPadOS/macOS and all I see is still just the OpenAI option. That said, Siri seems a little bit better now - my subjective opinion. It is a little bit less …
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Nice, I like the functionality and that it is a tiny native SwiftUI app. I recently wrote a blog [1] on using Apple containers for agentic coding; I just updated it to mention Davit. I so much prefer …
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re: "So, first, by no measure is GLM5.2 as good as Opus." I accept that for you and your work this is true. I have a different experience: for a month I paid big money for Opus and got a lot…
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Good point, I also like to do the work myself, with an assistant under my control. I am usually really happy with DeepSeek v4 Flash that I feel just mostly does what I tell it to do, but I do switch t…
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I like Lumo, glad to pay about $12/month for a private LLM with good conversation management.
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I disabled many built in skills and increased the context size. I also use little-coder that is based in pi.
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There are several general types of tasks that a Gemma 4 12B class model works for me, including: 1) design a large project composed of small libraries that can be coded and tested in isolation. 2) cle…
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I can come close to agreeing because queen-3.6-27b is my second favorite for local coding. I am using gemma4:26b-a4b-it-qat-48k (the "-48k" is from my modifying a model run with Ollama to al…
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Misleading title on HN but an interesting article, a reminder of why the hyper scalers are investing heavily in infrastructure. That said, I expect much of the AI bubble to pop. Google Gemini with Ant…
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That sounds correct: Pro for longer agentic tasks, Flash is fine for writing short programs, finding things for me in a large code base, etc.
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Your experience with DeepSeek v4 Flash differs from mine: while I usually use DeepSeek v4 Pro (that is also inexpensive), I find using DeepSeek v4 Flash with the Fireworks.ai API and properly configur…
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I was expecting this. Glad I just upgraded my wife and myself in December. One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my m…
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OpenCode Go looked intriguing and I spent time reading their docs and pricing but didn’t purchase services. Do you think they are running it at a loss to get market share? (Probably not.) I have been …
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I want to say that I agree with you on the value of writing your own coding harness. I wrote something simple in Emacs Lisp and it makes me happy occasionally using it. I am trying to learn Rust and I…
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I also use DeepSeek v4 flash and v4 pro, but I can’t settle between using Claude Code or OpenCode and it seems like I waste time switching back and forth (especially keeping my personal SKILLs files s…
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I spent a lot of time with RubyLLM a few months ago. Very nicely designed and implemented. I have my own LLM clients written in various Lisp languages and I thought about appropriating some of the des…
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Thanks, interesting. Two years ago I wrote a text adventure game that used a LLM model. The system was very simple, but still was interesting. A friend of mine, Ben Goertzel, has been interesting in g…
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I had a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine, ran InterLisp-D on it for about two years, then slowed it down by installing Common Lisp on it. Wonderful for Larry et.,al. to keep it going as open source.
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Out of principle. Also, I am an old man and retired - makes it easier to give up a little bit of productivity.
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Yes, I do sound like a jerk. Difficult though to not worry about local bullshit a lot more than other country’s bullshit. While I care for every person on our planet, I spend more time thinking about …