mark_l_watson

4 ms·

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by mark_l_watson 6d ago
Since I am retired, my uses of agentic coding harnesses include: 1. update my old open source projects by searching for and fixing defects, adding tests and documentation 2. working on my own agentic coding harnesses, using the coding harne
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by mark_l_watson 6d ago
Wow, this is a pessimistic (but accurate!) view. I was the second featured Creative Commoner decades ago and I have published all my books using Creative Commons share and share alike, no commercial reuse for the last few decades. I haven’t
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by mark_l_watson 13d ago
This is why only synthetic and highly tailored training data should be used. As someone else here said: the Deepseek team makes training runs in tightly controlled sandboxes, and any hacking behavior is scored as a failure. The problem we h
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by mark_l_watson 13d ago
This paper is the most reasonable one I have read on AI safety. We need to fundamentally change the training pipelines by figuring out better ways to ‘reward’ behavior. Yoshua didn’t explicitly mention training data, but we probably need to
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by mark_l_watson 14d ago
I like the API, and since this is open source I will copy the design with attribution: I have been organically hacking little bits of LLM client code for most providers in Common Lisp for about 3 1/2 years and it is time to clean up al
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by mark_l_watson 17d ago
I am 75, and have a ton of computer gear. I can imagine myself as an old man later in life, not wanting to do any programming, and just wanting a single digital device like a future version of this product. Let’s see what Apple has availabl
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by mark_l_watson 17d ago
I am shocked. After playing with Muse by Meta for an hour in just chat mode, I was impressed enough to: I never use Apple Reminders so I gave Muse read access to Reminders. I asked Muse to schedule repeating tasks that only involve web sear
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by mark_l_watson 18d ago
Your three examples in the README.md file help. If you have the time, please add more examples and more example use cases. Sorry to sound lazy, I started reading the code in yayster.el, then stopped, wanting more docs. I wrote an Emacs base
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by mark_l_watson 19d ago
I am starting to wonder if I am doing something wrong: I ignore evals and instead I just try new models or new harnesses (or tweak my own harnesses) by solving problems I want to solve in any case; I just use new tools and form my own subje
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by mark_l_watson 19d ago
I need to manage skill files across 2 Macs and 1 VPS, and also across fast inferencing APIs vs. very slow local models. The first dimension is easy: I simply keep copies of debugged skill files in iCloud and copy them where I need them. The
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by mark_l_watson 19d ago
I watched a 90 second clip from this film earlier today: Holmes unblinking asking ‘Why would I deceive you…’ Really strange stuff. I have to admit that I watched the clip a second time.
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by mark_l_watson 20d ago
My older books have real photographs on them (e.g., https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp ) and newer ones have AI generated covers and some have AI generated figures. Look for books with photos I have taken of nature - those are t
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by mark_l_watson 20d ago
And NC doesn’t always work. I use no commercial reuse (NC) yet years ago a polite young man from China emailed me letting me know that he was translating my stuff to resell under his name for money. To be honest, I didn’t mind and it made a
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by mark_l_watson 20d ago
I have been releasing books under Creative Commons for 20+ years. Share alike, no modifications, no commercial reuse. I sell my books via Leanpub (my books https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson ) and they can all be read fre
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by mark_l_watson 20d ago
I like the AGPL but don’t often use it. (I did recently license two coding harnesses I wrote as AGPL.) A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do. In the USA the collusion between gov
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by mark_l_watson 21d ago
I should have said first commercial Go program because I actively marketed it. There were several previous Go programs.
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by mark_l_watson 21d ago
I have used Lockdown mode also. Not that inconvenient but I didn’t mind the slight no JIT slowdown. I did find not seeing some images annoying.
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by mark_l_watson 22d ago
thanks!
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by mark_l_watson 22d ago
I love this. I watched every game years ago between Lee Sedol, even though it was late at night. I love AI and I love Go. Off topic, but I wrote the first commercial Go program for the Apple II in the late 1970s.
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by mark_l_watson 22d ago
Please, I have a question: in September 2026, what is the price differential between buying GPT inference tokens vs. a $20/month subscription? I have moved to just using Google Gemini occasionally paying for tokens, no subscription, an
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
Meta is getting most of my casual vibe coding business as long as they keep giving about 90% discount in the ‘we train on your prompt interactions data.’ I have had sos-so results with their local muse 30b model, but the hosted API is very
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
When deepseek-v4-flash-0731 was released I used it constantly for everything, and I loved the very low cost and speed. I think Google has the same game plan with their flash models.
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
I am not surprised. Google is a real company that wants to make money on selling services. Anthropic and OpenAI are in a different game of spending investor money to buy market share.
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
It is trivial to set up a spending cap on Google Cloud and also on Google AI Studio. That said, it is probably easier to use APIs from FireWorks.ai, Ollama Cloud, Open Router, etc.
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
I agree, I use my own harness (link to the most stable version, from my Racket book: https://github.com/mark-watson/Racket-AI-book/tree/main/sour... ) and except for handling user interrupts correctly, wr
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
I agree. I might be wrong about this, but obviously Google would like to provide inferencing at the lowest cost to themselves, so perhaps their slow ‘pro’ releases and rapid ‘flash’ releases is an attempt to guide people to use more profita
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
I usually use OpenCode for all open weight models but for Gemini I use Google’s agy coding harness (or my own). Venders coupling coding harnesses with their own models is usually a good thing. Poolside.ai has a combined harness with their o
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
That is my understanding, which is a nice thing. I use Exa and Brave search APIs separately but the Google bundling is convenient. Ollama Cloud offers the same thing: they supply a web search tool bundled with cloud API inference services.
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
The Gemini APIs have options for using Google Search grounding, or in simpler terms: to process a prompt by first using search to augment the context.
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by mark_l_watson 23d ago
good summary, thanks. I used to use Google Cloud for consulting and projects (I worked at Google for a while, and there is some nostalgia) so I have Gemini API via Google Cloud, but I am retired now. Your post reminded me that I need to shu

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