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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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This is an interesting conversation: some of you correctly pointing out that so much AI driven development is not having a positive effect on business profitability, and others correctly pointing out …
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The flash version is smaller, I think around 200B parameters and is cheap to run.
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I used the flash version on a tricky Common Lisp coding problem this morning. The first cut of the new library had a runtime error. I was running in a simple REPL using: ollama run deepseek-v4-flash:c…
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I have been running the slightly larger 31B model for local coding: ollama launch claude --model qwen3.6:35b-a3b-nvfp4 This has been optimized for Apple Silicon and runs well on a 32G ram system. Loca…
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I have an old Mac Mini with 32G of integrated RAM, and the following works for me for small local code changes: ollama launch claude --model qwen3.6:35b-a3b-nvfp4 In addition to not having an integrat…
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I am on Google's $20/month plan, and I usually get about three half-hour coding sessions a week with AntiGravity using the Claude models. The limit using Gemini Pro models is much higher. I …
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I hope this is not off topic, too much: with the current geopolitical situation I expect reduced capacity to manufacture both memory chips and all types of CPUs/GPUs. I base this on news I read f…
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I ran OpenClaw in a container, on a VPS without connection to messaging systems, so perhaps that is why I didn't get value. Similarly, I have been using Hermes Agent also inside a container, and …
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The new movie Mercy is a good take in this, as fiction. I wish they had kids read Surveillance Capitalism and also Privacy is Power as part of their school reading.
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Well, I started a long time ago: I had written several books and readers occasionally contacted me for doing gig work.
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I enjoyed both of your long comments, thanks! I would add one thing to the programming languages conversation: which languages make developers happy to use them? Personally, I have no emotional involv…
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I used tools that I was paid to use. After being deep in neural networks in the 1980s, ten years ago I dropped back into deep learning, thus mostly used Python.
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I agree and I am amazed at how much money some individuals and also a friend's company burn on token costs. I get huge benefits from this tech just using gemini-cli and Antigravity a few times a …
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Clojure is a great language and ecosystem. I donated a little money to Rich's efforts in the early days (I loved his older Common Lisp - Java bridge so his Clojure project was immediately interes…
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While I liked to see a native (written in Swift?) app, the web interface for Gemini is very usable.
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I find OpenClaw and (more so) Hermes Agent useful for software development, research, and writing - but I refuse to run them anywhere that is not deeply-sandboxed and has no access to most of my digit…
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At the time his friends and family in interviews talked about how happy he was: after whistle blowing and leaving to start his own company. The scary thing is that there were so many huge investors wh…
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I agree. At first I was really turned off by the Gemma 4 line of models because they didn’t function with coding agents as well as the qwen3.5 line of models. However, I found that for other use cases…
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That sounds interesting. I just checked out the examples in the Haskell Janus implementation: https://github.com/mbudde/jana …
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looks nice!
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That would be my question also. I like it when companies have easy to sign up for, pay as you go models. Being able to buy $5 worth of tokens and get an API key - in less than a few minutes - is ideal…
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What you are suggesting might sound difficult to some people, it is possible: in the last week I co-wrote (with Antigravity with Claude as the backend) an Emacs package for agentic coding that also ju…
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Pi does seem special, at least to me. The only close to happy experience I have had coding with a small local model has been with Pi. Here is how I ran Pi and I was impressed how well it worked with a…
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I can’t wait to try it. I set up a new system this morning with OpenClaw and GLM-5, and I like GLM-5 as the backend for Claude Code. Excellent results.
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I was thinking the same thing: better to run models using a local service not in the wen browser. I use Ollama and LM Studio, switching between which service I have running depending on what I am work…
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I am lazy: when an LLM messes up parenthesis when working with any Lisp language I just quickly fix the mismatch myself rather than try to fix the tooling.
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I agree with you, but a Python REPL in Emacs (using the ancient Python Emacs support) is very nice: initially load code from a buffer, then just reload functions as you edit them. I find it to be a ni…
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Same experience. I like Haskell a lot but I am not great at Haskell programming. LLM based coding agents are useful for helping with runtime errors, library versions, etc. (and as other people here ha…
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Thanks for the Scheme setup examples. I have created very simple skills markdown files for Common Lisp and Hylang/hy (Clojure-like lisp on top of Python). I need to spend more effort on my skills…