Waiting for free software releases

Some of the best software that I use is FREE, so please don't think for a minute that I am complaining. Still, there are two (hopefully!) soon to be released free packages that I can't wait for:
  • Open Croquet - this may change the way we think of online collaboration and generally large scale network applications
  • Apple Computer's early development release of JDK 15. (also known as JDK 5)
Everything else, I can be wait for :-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Getting closer to AGI? Google's NoteBookLM and Replit's AI Coding Agent

Putting "closer to AGI?" in a blog title might border on being clickbait, but I will argue that it is not! I have mostly earned my living in the field of AI since 1982 and I argue that the existence of better AI driven products and the accelerating rate of progress in research, that we are raising the bar on what we consider AGI to be. I have had my mind blown twice in the last week: Today I took the PDF for my book "Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming With Clojure ( you can read it free online here ) and used it to create a notebook in Google's  NotebookLM  and asked for a generated 8 minute podcast. This experimental app created a podcast with two people discussing my book accurately and showing wonderful knowledge of technology. If you want to listen to the audio track that Google's NotebookLM created,  here is a link to the WAV audio file Last week I signed up for a one year plan on  Replit.com  after trying the web based IDE for Haskell and Python...
Read more