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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 live in the USA and I use a European LLM as a daily driver: Proton’s lumo+ that does a good job packaging a Mistral model for general chat, with good searchable chat history — all with adequate priv…
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The beauty of your approach: when people are not paying for an expensive subscription, they can decide to use models less and not feel like they are leaving money on the table.
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But, it is not all about cost: models like DeepSeek v4 flash (I use the US company Fireworks.ai and also buy tokens directly from DeepSeek) is very fast, very low latency while working. Would you want…
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Nice idea but expensive. It looks like they don’t add very low cost models like DeepSeek v4 flash into their mix. After a few months of spending money on the best frontier models, now I am spending ti…
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Potentially, the raising interest rates because investors don’t trust the long term stability of the UK economic system (more spending on pro-war activities, sluggish economic growth, and higher than …
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Reading Rahul's post I got excited to build Emacs 31 from source, but reality occurred and I decided to wait for the release. I also like his articles on setting up Emacs. I don't care what …
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Why would my country blacklist DeepSeek? Perhaps crazy lunacy like: "Your product is too good and too inexpensive: consumers like US companies and individuals need to pay more for services."
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Thanks, I put that on my Haskell note to try. I am on a mobile device on vacation so all that I could do right now is read one of the notebooks.
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Interesting idea but until I get my grubby little fingers in it, to try it - difficult to have an opinion. I am hopefully expectant that we will see all sorts of optimizations in the next few years th…
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Sounds like a correct conclusion to me also. I am trying to transition to a layered system: local, then OpenCode with commercial vendor APIs for models like DeepSeek v4 flash, then DeepSeek v4 Pro. Wi…
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I would like to say I run 100% local, but I use Opus + Gemini Pro cumulatively for 3 or 4 hours a week. I also like to use DeepSeek v4 flash with OpenCode for small quick tasks. I did just publish a f…
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I have a question that perhaps you or someone else here has an answer for: I enjoy using Opus via Google Antigravity (usually agy) for perhaps 90 minutes a week. For Google’s subsidized $20/mont…
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I think Apple has a fairly good plan for supplying a common API and default on device models. What confuses me about this article is: The code examples Python, Ruby, etc.) look to me like the original…
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I am retired, so maybe I don’t get a say in this, but as a human who enjoys life in nature and hanging with family and friends, and also in periods of free time constantly exploring technology to unde…
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This might be useful when ‘coding in chat mode’: I have a few scripts that I run in a project directory that takes a prompt from me, and creates a single long one-shot prompt that I can paste into a c…
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when I started using QAT recently, I stopped trying to improve my configuration after that. I will try tuning my local environment again in a few months, but with QAT things are good enough for now.
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yes, whether for home experiments or at work, it is good practice (good hygiene) to be able to swap out both agentic harnesses and models. It is important to have a good strategy for exporting skills,…
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Nice writeup, thanks. I run something very similar except for directly using pi as the agentic harness I use little-coder that wraps pi with reasonable defaults for running local models. Even though m…
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Thanks for your comment, I especially like “If you have software engineering skills and are not an accidental vibe-coder, honestly, try it out and stop burning money.” I thought that using Opus with t…
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I am on a wait list for the ‘better Siri model’ - what iOS and macOS betas just shipped with is awful. I do think the Apple Foundation Model built in to the system is better: I was using it from Pytho…
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do you live in Phoenix? I just asked Siri a few weather questions and named the city where I live, nailed it. My favorite digital device is my Apple Watch and if Siri improves over the next hear or tw…
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Thanks apfel looks useful! I have been experimenting with Apple's foundation models for almost a year and they are useful for embedded applications. I have been taking a deeper dive into local ag…
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Sorry to be off topic, but I have a question: has anyone installed the latest beta iOS and macOS, and if so what is the current status of Gemini integration?
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We agree more than you may believe. I have worked in the field of AI since the early 80s, symbolic AI, simpler neural networks. I only believe in using any tech if it serves human needs, is privacy pr…
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I agree that many AI businesses will go bust and they deserve it, but the tech is good. I can recommend my own layered approach, using the lowest capability models that get stuff done: 1. I maximally …
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If you pay for Gemini, then it is good. I recently used Gemini Ultra for a month and the gemini models are very good (and of course, you get a lot of Claude Opus tokens to use through the same plan). …
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I have been using their on define AFM models for a year - for small models they are good. Their Secure Enclave server bases AFM model is good, but not in the same class as gemini 3.5 flash or deep see…
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I don't think so. They will be running on their servers, or running in the future on Google's servers with privacy guarantees. Do you think Google doesn't protect privacy for large payi…
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I have loved using AI technology for 45 years (symbolic AI, old fashioned NNs, … to the present). I am also skeptical about the apparently desperation-driven ‘bet the farm’ approach we are taking here…
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I had odd Gemma 4 12B results: it was ‘almost excellent’ for writing code in a variety of languages if I was using a detailed one-shot prompt describing new code to write. I had horrible luck with Gem…