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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 agree about Kimi 2.5. Also, MiniMax M2.7 that just dropped is amazing, and it is just a 200G MOE model and inference is very fast. I tried using MiniMax M2.7 twice today as the backend for Claude Co…
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I am very unhappy about this. Astral tools like uv are key to my work/experimenting process. I think OpenAI sucks as a company. That said, I hope the excellent Astral team got a good payday.
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I agree, but would like to go further: I won’t run OpenClaw type systems because of security and privacy reasons. Although I dislike making tech giants even more powerful, it seems safer to choose you…
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I am rooting for Mistral with their different approach: not really competing on the largest and advanced models, instead doing custom engineering for customers and generally serving the needs of EU cu…
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Well, rude behavior stemmed from lack of empathy for other people who have to listen to them. I am sorry you had that bad experience. Off topic, but since I retired a few years ago, I go to movies all…
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Python because so much of my paid work in the last decade has been in deep learning.
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I am excited by the proposal and early work. SBCL Common Lisp is my second most used programming language - glad to see useful extensions. Most of my recent experiments with SBCL involve tooling to be…
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The phrase "when US data becomes unreliable" is misleading in one sense: for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up. Calculation of unemployment and real de…
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I agree, agentshell is a nice way to chat with LLMs. Well worth setting up. Emacs eye candy.
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Nice writeup! The list of Emacs packages to use LLMs is the roadmap for getting started with AI Emacs integrations and I also liked his list of AI dangers at the end. I have used Emacs for over 40 yea…
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I have spent a HUGE amount of time the last two years experimenting with local models. A few lessons learned: 1. small models like the new qwen3.5:9b can be fantastic for local tool use, information e…
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If I have time I want to try this today because it matches my LLM-based work style, especially when I am using local models: I have command line tools that help me generated large one-shot prompts tha…
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Lisp languages are niche, but frequently used as seen in the great projects mentioned in this thread. Since 1982, I have been employed about 20% of my time using mostly Common Lisp and for a few years…
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I have had an Oculus 2 for many years and while I love it, I rarely spend more than an hour or two a month using it because time in VR competes with activities like walking outside getting fresh air a…
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Indeed! Your comment is probably the most important in this thread. The Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes a lot about losing humanity because of tech advances. I am retired so this …
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I mostly run Emacs in a terminal, except I configure for two finger scroll on Mac trackpad and tap to move cursor. I also reduced the size of my .emacs by 60% in the last year.
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That is kind of beautiful. Reading the code in main.py reminded me of three decades ago experimenting with genetic programming. Very cool.
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I understand the author’s sentiment but I would like to give a counter example: I like to read philosophy and after I read a passage and think about it, I find it useful to copy the passage into a dec…
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Vicky’s writeup is interesting, but to me the most interesting thing is Jeff Dean’s advice that sometimes doing a linear scan is the fastest approach (over any kind of indexing). This is basic advice,…
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I think that I understand you. I started programming in the mid-1960s as a kid and now in my mid-70s I have been retired for two years (except for occasional small gigs for old friends). Nothing speci…
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While the article makes good points, I simply find it amazing that a programming user interface (with small changes) has been around for so long: I think kit was in 1983 that Xerox Special Information…
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wow, the prices have come down. I inherited the old Pro XDR display when my father passed away a couple of years ago: I think he paid $6K for the display and another $1K for the stand. Off topic, but …
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I think the EU in general is shortsighted if they don’t spend resources to complete what they already have for basic technology of their own: phone, telcom infra, AI models, cloud providers, etc. I wo…
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Good projects. I have only used Clojure professionally for about 2 years out of the last 15 years but I lived in Cider. When I bought my new laptop a few months ago I consciously and purposefully refu…
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I upvoted you, and mostly agree with you, but: as much as I love using strong small local models sometimes a commercial 'frontier' model is very useful (for me). I deleted my free OpenAI acc…
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Cool, that was easy to do. A week ago, I was anti-Anthropic because I questioned their business model. Now they are my preferred provider - what a difference a week makes. I still prefer running olen …
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I will, right now. EDIT: opencode was a bit slow with qwen3.5:35b using Ollama. Faster/nicer to use with Liquid lfm2:latest
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The new 35b model is great. That said, it has slight incompatibility's with Claude Code. It is very good for tool use.
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>> Drawing on the work of Robert Reich, William I. Robinson, Yanis Varoufakis, and others, alongside historian Heather Cox Richardson Good references to use! I used to enjoy the All In Podcast a…