Snowing in Sedona Arizona

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Mark Watson's artificial intelligence and Lisp hacking blog

I am a consultant and the author of 20+ books on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the semantic web. 55 US patents. My favorite languages are Common Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, and Python. I live in Flagstaff Arizona.
My personal web site: hire me for part time work!

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Snowing in Sedona Arizona

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February 04, 2008

My wife and I took a drive this morning after it stopped snowing. Some nice pictures taken near our home in Sedona:

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

September 19, 2024

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...

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

August 28, 2023

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.

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

March 12, 2023

As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...

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Clojure vs. Scala smackdown

October 21, 2012

Just kidding with the title of this post :-) I believe in using the best tools for any given task, but this is not always possible when working with teams where most developers already know one programming language and/or framework. Also, as a consultant I usually favor using which ever tools are already used in the customer's organization. All that said, I find that alternative JVM languages like Clojure, Scala, and JRuby are so much more effective for the projects that I work on that I have a strong preference to not use Java. I find the decision when to use JRuby to generally be easy, using it on projects requiring fast development, web services, and as glue code for existing Java software. Increasingly though, I am viewing Scala and Clojure to be almost as agile as JRuby, with much better runtime performance. For me, the tough decision is between Scala and Clojure. Taking Martin Odersky's Functional Programming with Scala class definitely affects my decision because I ...

Nice: OpenCyc version 4.0 has been released

July 08, 2012

The last release 2.0 was made available almost three years ago, so I was very happy to see that version 4 is available . OpenCyc is a knowledge base and ontology containing about 270K terms and 2 million triples. There are now many more links to outside (or OpenCyc) knowledge resources like DBPedia, UMBEL, Wordnet, etc. Check out the new features. I downloaded the Linux version (requires Java 6, 3 GB memory, and is only for 64 bit OSs and Java). I had no problems at all running it on 64bit Ubuntu and OS X Mountain Lion (developer preview 4) - it only took a few minutes to install and run. Just follow the instructions in the README.txt file and try the web interface at http://localhost:3602/cgi-bin/cg?cb-start Nice to see this the free version of Cyc getting support and development efforts. I would be very interested in hearing from people who have done projects with either OpenCyc or the OpenCyc OWL/RDF data. 9-9-2012 update: Alyona Medelyan provided a link for downloading ...

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

November 21, 2011

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon...

Small example app using Ember.js and Node.js

March 14, 2013

I have been playing with Ember.js, and generally trying to get a little at better programming in Javascript, a language I have used for years, but for which I am still a novice. I wrote the other day about Small example app using Ember.js and Clojure + Compojure + Noir and I thought I would try replacing the simple Clojure REST backend with an equally simple Node.js backend. The results of this simple exercise are in the github repo emberjs-nodejs . I leave it to you to take a look if you are interested. I will say that development with Javascript, Ember.js, and Node.js seems very light weight and agile, even though I use IntelliJ for editing and project management. Starting an app takes maybe a second. Compared to, for example, Java + GWT, or even Clojure + Compojure, I find Javascript, Ember.js, and Node.js to be really a light and fun combination. It would be even more fun if I were a better Javascript programmer :-)

Writing a simple SQL data source for the free LGPL version of SmartGWT

November 07, 2011

While travelling back from a vacation I cleaned up some old experimental code for writing a fairly generic SmartGWT data source with the required server side support code. The commercial versions of SmartGWT have support for connecting client side grid and other components to server side databases. For the free version of SmartGWT you have to roll your own and in this post I'll show you a simple way to do this that should get you started. Copy the sample web app that is included in the free LGPL version of SmartGWT and make the modifications listed below. I also set up a Github project that contains everything ready to run in IntelliJ. The goal is to support defining client side grids connected to a database using a simple SQL statement to fetch the required data using a custom class SqlDS . I had to strangely format the following code snippets to get them to fit the content width for my blog: ListGrid listGrid = new ListGrid(); listGrid.setDataSource( new SqlDS ...

Using the Datomic free edition in a lein based project

July 25, 2012

Hopefully I can save a few people some time: I flailed a bit trying to use the first released version yesterday but after updating a new version (datomic-free-0.8.3343) life is good. Download a recent release, and do a local maven install: mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=com.datomic -DartifactId=datomic-free -Dfile=datomic-free-0.8.3343.jar -DpomFile=pom.xml Setting a lein project.clj file for this version: (defproject datomic-test "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT" :description "Datomic test" :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.4.0"] [com.datomic/datomic-free "0.8.3343"]]) Do a lein deps and then in the datomic-free-0.8.3343 directory start up a transactor using the H2db embedded database: cp config/samples/free-transactor-template.properties mw.propreties bin/transactor mw.propreties When you run the transactor it prints out the pattern for a connection URI and I used this in a modified version of the Datomic developer's Clojure...

Comparing Clojure + Clojurescript with Scala + Scala.js

July 25, 2015

Even though I mostly use Java, Ruby, and Haskell, I have also been getting my head back into using Scala in my spare time. I took Martin Odersky's Functional Programming Principles in Scala class three years ago, and although I really enjoyed the class (he is a great lecturer!), I didn't much care for the tooling for Scala at that time. I ended up mostly using Clojure (with a little Haskell) for my day to day most used programming language. I experimented with Scala.js a while back and thought that it compared well with Clojurescript. Sweet to write client code in either Clojurescript or Scala.js but I think that sometimes it is faster to not have the extra complexity and the need to transpile and just use plain old Javascript. I took a class in Typescript this year and really liked it but with ES6 quickly becoming a standard some of the benefits of Typescript go away. This morning I was looking for an interesting template project using Scala for the backend and Scala.js ...

Happy New Year

January 03, 2015

I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I am not going to make new year technology predictions, but I do have a few comments on what technology I am using and what I expect to be using this year: First, I am surprised at how much Microsoft technology I am using. This started last spring when for political reasons I wanted to stop using Dropbox (I did not like their appointment of Condoleezza Rice to their board of directors). At the time, I could not find a good Dropbox replacement but after getting a Microsoft BizSpark business development grant last fall, and very much liking the Azure services, I recently decided to take another look at Office 365. It turns out that for the same $100/year I paid Dropbox for a terabyte of storage, with Microsoft I now get for the same cost one terabyte of cloud storage per family member and everyone in my household also gets Office applications and use of the online Office tools (that run really well in Chrome with Chrome apps). The versi...

And the best JVM replacement language for Java is: Java?

April 21, 2011

Although I use Ruby (mostly Rails) and Common Lisp on many customer projects, I am heavily invested in the Java platform and I don't see that changing in the next ten years or so. Java is more than a little heavy on ceremony however, and I would like a really agile language for the JVM. I have used Clojure a lot in the last year for work on one customer's project but at least for now the lack of concise and useful runtime error backtraces kills some of the joy of using Clojure. Really nice language and community however, and I expect in a few years Clojure may be my primary JVM language. I love coding in Ruby and the JRuby developers do a great job moving the sub-platform forward. However, except for large Rails applications, I don't see myself writing very large applications in Ruby: for me Ruby is a scripting language for getting stuff done quickly and easily. I do like Scala but the learning curve is steep and that means that it is difficult to find pre-trained highly ...

History in the making: first Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo match game

March 09, 2016

I was up to 1am this morning watching the game live. I became interested in AI in the 1970s and the game of Go was considered to be a benchmark for AI systems. I wrote a commercial Go playing program for the Apple II that did not play a very good game by human standards but did play legally and understood some common patterns. At about the same time I was fortunate enough to get to play both the woman's world Go champion and the national champion of South Korea in exhibition games. I am a Go enthusiast! The game played last night was a real fight in three areas of the board and in Go local fights affect the global position. AlphaGo played really well and world champion Lee Sedol resigned near the end of the game.

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