Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Month: January 2021

  • That productivity wagon

    Overall the last week of productivity has been pretty darn good. I’m on that productivity wagon and hopefully nobody falls off any time soon. This post as you can tell already is generally devoted to productivity. Productivity is occurring in two different ways. First, I’m writing in a larger volume than previously this year. Second, planning is occurring for future writing with commitments to complete the writing work. Those two things together typically result in a higher level of productivity or least they should keep going. All that assumes the productivity wagon keeps functioning properly.

  • Some Saturday thoughts

    Ok — I’m ready to admit that the thought of buying GameStop ($GME) stock occurred to me this week. Rationality kicked in and prevented me from buying, but the fear of missing out on such a wild ride was very real. It seemed like people were doing wild things and it was difficult not to keep checking to see what was happening. The swings were spectacular, but not tied to anything related to the actual operations of the business. That is what kept me out of the whole adventure. Something macro related is definitely going on beyond just a few stocks being impacted. It will be interesting (if not scary) to see what happens in the next few months.

    My productivity this week has been on an upward swing. I planned out the next 12 weeks of Substack posts. That meant putting together a list of topics that would receive weekly coverage. The target on each one of those is a Friday publication date generally before bedtime.[1] Yesterday, I set up and published my first submission to the Substack platform. It was somewhat exciting at the time. I timed the content to release both here on the weblog and on the Substack platform at the exact same time. This content here is archived and will presumably continue to exist for years. I have no idea what will happen to Substack in 5 years. I have a proven history of outlasting platforms over the last 20 years. That seems to be a fact of digital life. Some things that seemed like they would be around forever 20 years ago are long since gone. Some of them were really great and failed… some of them were just eaten by other things along the way. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://nelslindahl.substack.com/

  • Working on my first Substack post

    Posting on Substack seems to require three elements to be completed before submitting the post: 1) enter title, 2) enter subtitle, and 3) some type of content. They have not offered any type of content length guidance. I guess you can write as much or as little as you want. Right now I’m working on my first Substack post and have drafted the three required elements for that post. I’m going to try to keep these posts at a conversational level with a bit of depth, but that is going to require some editing. My focus is on reworking the content for the new forum. I’m going to publish the content here on the weblog and on Substack. The inside look of how the content was created and any changes or modifications will live here. It feels like Substack is a very fleeting medium that has maximum engagement at the moment of publication. We will see what happens throughout the next 12 weeks of content creation. That will either be true or some type of momentum will build up along the way.

    Here are the details of my first Substack publication build out…

    Enter title… Machine Learning Return On Investment (MLROI)
    Enter subtitle… A brief look at how understanding ROI helps unlock ML use case success

    Content: 292 words starting and ~750 words as a finished product

    Be strategic with your ML (machine learning) efforts. Seriously, those 6 words should guide your next steps along the ML journey. Take a moment and let that direction (strong guidance) sink in and reflect on what it really means for your organization. You have to take a moment and work backward from building strategic value for your organization to the actual ML effort. Inside that effort you will quickly discover that operationalizing ML efforts to generate strategic value will end up relying on a solid return on investment plan. Taking actions within an organization of any kind at the scale ML is capable of engaging without understanding the potential return on investment or potential loss is highly questionable. That is why you have to be strategic with your ML efforts from start to finish.

    That means you have to set up and run a machine learning strategy from the top down. Executive leaders have to understand and be invested in guiding things toward the right path (a strategic path) from the start. Make an effort to just start out with a solid strategy in the machine learning space. It might sound a lot harder than it is in practice. You don’t need a complicated center of excellence or massive investment to develop a strategy. Your strategy just needs to be linked to the budget and hopefully to a budget KPI. Every budget results in the process of spending precious funds and keeping a solid KPI around machine learning return on investment levels will help ensure your strategy ends on a strong financially based footing for years to come. All spending should translate to some key performance indicator of some type. That is how your result will let you confirm that the funding is being spent well and that solid decision making is occurring. You have to really focus and ensure that all spending is tied to that framework when you operationalize the organization’s strategic vision to be aligned financially to the budget.

    That means that the machine learning strategy you are investing in has to be driven to achieve a certain return on investment tied directly to solid budget level key performance indicators. You might feel like that line has been repeated. If you noticed that repetition, then you are paying attention and well on your way to future success. That key performance indicator related tieback is only going to happen with a solid machine learning strategy in place. It has to be based on prioritizing and planning for return on investment. Your machine learning pipelines and frameworks have to be aligned toward that goal. That is ultimately the cornerstone of a solid strategic plan when it comes to implementing machine learning as part of a long term strategy.

    Be ready to do things in a definable and repeatable way. Part of executing a strategy with quality is doing things in a definable and repeatable way. That is the essence of where quality comes from. You have to know what plan is being executed and focus in and support the plan in ways that make it successful at your desired run rate. In terms of deploying machine learning efforts within an enterprise you have to figure out how the technology is going to be set up and invested in and how that investment is going to translate to use cases with the right return on investment.

    Know the use case instead of letting solutions chase problems. Building up technology for machine learning and then chasing use cases is a terrible way to accidentally stumble on a return on investment model that works. The better way forward is to know the use cases and have a solid strategy to apply your technology. That means finding the right ML frameworks and pipelines to support your use cases in powerful ways across the entire organization.

    This is a time to be planful. Technology for machine learning is becoming more and more available and plentiful. Teams from all over the organization are probably wanting to try proof of concepts and vendors are bringing in a variety of options. Both internal and external options are really plentiful. It is an amazing time for applied machine learning. You can get into the game in a variety of ways rapidly and without a ton of effort. Getting your implementation right and having the data, pipeline, and frameworks aligned to your maximum possible results involves planning and solid execution.

    Your ML strategy cannot be a back of the desk project. You have to be strategic. It has to be part of a broader strategy. You cannot let all of the proof of concepts and vendor plays drive the adoption of machine learning technology in your organization. That will mean that the overall strategic vision is not defined. It happened generally because it might have a solid return on investment and the right use case might have been selected by chance from the bottom up in the organization. That is not a planful strategy.

    Know the workflow you want to augment with ML and drive beyond the buzzwords to see technology in action. You really have to know where in the workflow and what pipelines are going to enable your use cases to provide that solid return on investment.

    At some point along the machine learning journey you are going to need to make some decisions…

    Q: Where are you going to serve the machine learning model from?
    Q: Is this your first model build and deployment?
    Q: What actual deployments of model serving are being managed?
    Q: Are you working on-premise for training or calling an API and model serving in your workflow?
    Q: Have you elected to use a pretrained model via an external API call?
    Q: Did you buy a model from a marketplace or are you buying access to a commercial API?
    Q: How long before the model efficiency drops off and adjustment is required?
    Q: Have you calculated where the point of no return is for model efficiency where ROI falls below break even?

    What’s next for The Lindahl Letter?

    Week 2: Machine Learning Frameworks & Pipelines
    Week 3: Machine learning Teams
    Week 4: Have an ML strategy… revisited
    Week 5: Let your ROI drive a fact-based decision-making process
    Week 6: Understand the ongoing cost and success criteria as part of your ML strategy
    Week 7: Plan to grow based on successful ROI
    Week 8: Is the ML we need everywhere now?
    Week 9: What is ML scale? The where and the when of ML usage
    Week 10: Valuing ML use cases based on scale
    Week 11: Model extensibility for few shot GPT-2
    Week 12: Confounding within multiple ML model deployments

    I’ll try to keep the what’s next list forward looking with at least five weeks of posts in planning or review. 

  • Really digging into that content roadmap

    Never forget that the gift of happiness begets more happiness. Tonight I’m spending my time working on really digging into that content roadmap that was mentioned yesterday. At the end of last year, I was working on version 12 of a talk titled, “Applied ML ROI – Understanding ML ROI from different approaches at scale.” Instead of working on the 13th version of that talk my focus has turned to working on something else titled, “The scale problem: where and when to use ML.” Outside of working on writing the bulk of that main talk for 2021 I’m focused on a few featured topics that will receive a bulk of my attention in the next few months.

    1. Is the ML we need everywhere now? 
    2. What is ML scale? The where and the when of ML usage
    3. Valuing ML use cases based on scale
    4. Model extensibility for few shot GPT-2
    5. Confounding within multiple ML model deployments

    That batch of fresh topics enumerated above will receive some attention this year. Over the next 7 weeks or so I’m going to work on some Substack posts based on that mythic version 12 talk mentioned above.

    1. Machine Learning Return On Investment ( ML/ROI)
    2. Machine Learning Frameworks & Pipelines
    3. Machine learning Teams
    4. Have an ML strategy…
    5. Let your ROI drive a fact-based decision-making process
    6. Understand the ongoing cost and success criteria as part of your ML strategy
    7. Plan to grow based on successful ROI

  • Working on a content roadmap

    My mind is racing with thoughts about writing my first post for the Substack platform. At the moment, my whiteboard includes all the right elements to make something happen this week. I have a stack of concepts ready to build toward an ongoing weekly Substack narrative in the machine learning and artificial intelligence space. A ton of that pending writing content remains centered around a new talk I have been preparing to give throughout 2021. You could say I have been thinking about building a new content roadmap for publications in 2021. That is probably the right way to think about the actions being taken right now. All that potential future effort is basically powered by the cup of coffee sitting next to me right now at this very moment. 

  • Thinking about Substack

    Tonight I took the plunge into another publishing platform and signed up for a Substack account. Getting setup is apparently free to do and was pretty easy based on linking my Twitter account. I’m considering writing something (about 1,000 to 1,500 words) every Friday evening for Substack. That was the primary reason for getting signed up and starting to think about using that platform. All of that effort is really just to get back on a regular publishing schedule. Honestly, I was starting to think about writing machine learning course syllabuses and literature reviews all evening. During the course of that intellectual adventure I listened to the Sway podcast recap and started to think about actually using Substack. That is how it happened anyway. We will see what happens on Friday if the actual process of writing unfolds and a publication actually occurs.

    You can find the new page here: https://nelslindahl.substack.com/p/coming-soon

  • Moments of extreme questioning

    We all face those moments of extreme questioning. Those moments happen from time to time in the day to day grind of life and sometimes they can be really useful. When I look back on the last 10 days or so of my writing output it is categorically bad (unredeemable dribble). Unfortunately, that makes it not very useful prose. To that end you will notice a gap in my publishing of thoughts. This year I have been rethinking the grand effort of blogging. My thoughts have centered on the potential creation of more personal content. It might be easier to really dig in and write some tighter observational based prose, but that feels disjointed to my natural stream of consciousness style of writing. For better or worse, I tend to sit down and write about the things that catch my attention in the moment. Inherently that means at the moment a spark of creativity hits I need to sit down and put words to paper or the window of creation will be missed. 

    That last paragraph was droning on and on and a new one had to be started. That is where we are right now at the start of the second paragraph of writing for the day that is wholesale about the stoppage of the first passage of writing. That first passage centered on questioning and this passage focuses on something more definitive in nature. It centers on the moment of focus. It is the moment between continuation and idea generation. It is not a moment of working along the way from the start to the finish. It is so much more in terms of awareness of the moment and the nature of things at this specific part of the journey. To that end I’m aware and ready to do something, but that something has not been really brought into focus yet as a decision has not exactly been made to do that next thing. Within that context perhaps it is easier to just sustain the status quo and procrastinate. Obviously writing during the moment of intellectual procrastination seems like a dicey proposition. To both be creating and moving along the path to advance the journey and engaging in the irreverent act of procrastination based prose creation seems inherently questionable. That is probably the case. It is probably the exact question that needs to be answered. It is the question that helps move along the path or generally questions the path. 

    Right now I’m sitting at my keyboard writing in front of my Corsair Air 740 cube shaped computer case. It’s sitting on top of an aluminum briefcase. That seems like a good second career for a briefcase that is no longer needed for any traveling or caring related purpose. My writing skills are now awake and I’m sitting in the middle of a stream of consciousness that is being translated from internal monologue to keyboard driven input. Each stroke of the keyboard is just a part of the process of thinking, wondering, and questioning. Really this post could at this moment of time go in a wide variety of directions. That open promise is perhaps the most redeeming part of the process. It really makes directing the energy of the moment toward something positive a key part of being in the moment.      

  • Just moving along slowly

    This block of time right now this morning is purely my time for the next 20 minutes. I could spend that time doing anything. Instead of selecting to do something useful I’m surfing YouTube and starting to think about the day. Really the only outcome of that 20 minutes is that I have decided to clean off my whiteboard. All right hold on just a second — the whiteboard is now completely clean. I’m going to need to order a new bottle of Expo whiteboard cleaning at some point. My previous bottle was either empty and thrown away or lost forever. This might also be the year that my collection of whiteboard markers are refreshed. They last a long time at my rate of usage.

  • Catching up on my writing

    Apparently, I’m now mostly a weekend blogger and writer for that matter. Eek — those are painful words to even write down this morning. Last night I was thinking about AI/ML in decision systems for a couple of hours. That is where my thoughts were focused. Sometimes the ideation phase needs to happen instead of writing, but in the past I would have sat down and captured my brainstorming, ideation, or just thinking out loud phases in writing or drawing. For some reason that is not really happening anymore and it cannot be blamed on 2020 as it is clearly 2021. Instead of spending the time right now writing and focusing I found myself watching the news and cleaning my monitor. It is much easier to just focus on those things than to try to collect my thoughts and engage in meaningful writing. Writing used to be a vital part of my daily routine. It was the core focus of my daily activities. Gradually that vital part of my daily efforts washed into the background. It is much easier not to spend time deeply thinking about things. Throughout 2021, I’m going to focus more on reading and rereading the books in my collection. Reading will be my main focus instead of consuming the endless stream of disjointed video based content that exists.

    Topic: My 500 words on 1/6/2021

    Wednesday, January 6, 2021 was one of the darkest days for American democracy in a long time. Most American’s watched this on television and really only learned about it after it happened. It was something that was on in the background as a routine part of government that quickly caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. Even right now it is surreal to sit down and try to write about what happened in a meaningful way. Only time will temper the emotion of the moment enough to really capture what happened. What happened was simply something impossible becoming very real. It happened with a very connected audience driven by live streaming, posts on social media, and worldwide television broadcasts. 

    Even seasoned journalists were taken back with the brazen nature of what happened. At the heart of democracy is the twisting intertwined relationship between political parties and the peaceful transfer of power. The act of peacefully transferring power is what stacks up a history of continuity within a democracy. Longevity for that political system is built on transitions. A healthy and vibrant democracy should see the political winds move from party to party. In my view, that means people are making choices and the general administration of government is informed by a variety of viewpoints. That idea is important to cherish and to consider in the context of what happened.

    A constitutional process prescribed by the founding documents of this nation was occurring at the capitol building. A darkness descended over and occupied the capital for a five hour whirlwind of displaced democracy. Voting holds the keys to unlocking the power of democracy. Overrunning the cornerstone of democracy in a whirlwind of disgraceful shared images worldwide will stand out for a generation as a watershed moment of a nation’s agony. Photographs of the democratic process resuming and completing on capitol hill won’t ring out in the same for years to come. A dark moment will cast a shadow on democracy and people will remember the nation’s capitol in a different way. Inside that changed memory is the power that darkness has on democtric institutions. 

    Topic: Grinding Gears 3

    Using the Google Play Music application was so easy. I had bought the new Rabea Massaad album “Grinding Gears Vol. 3” on Bandcamp and had to upload the files to YouTube Music using some strange interface. I could not figure out how to just buy the album on YouTube Music like I could before. I really do try to buy albums in either physical formats like vinyl or digitally if necessary to support artists who make music that I enjoy.

    Topic: On weekend writing

    Right now it seems like maybe my thoughts are going to be generally collected during the week and a larger post might happen on the weekend instead of daily entries into this functional journal. That seems to be an odd change in my writing behavior, but it seems to be a behavior that is consistent with the reduction of productivity that has been occurring.

  • Oh that intention

    Every day I sit down with the intention to write something deeply meaningful. Most of the time that intention is well meaning and I really do believe it is going to happen, but disappointment eventually sets in as the spark of creativity is fickle. Part of academic writing is about having the right framework and working thoughts into that style and form factor. Generally speaking after coming up with the idea and starting the process putting those articles together is not as much about chasing the spark of creativity as it is doing the hard part of the workflow. For me editing, finalizing, and refining the project always seems to be the hardest part of the whole endeavor. 

    My workflow basically consists of sitting down and writing as much prose as I can possibly produce in one shot and then editing it down into pieces and parts. This is not the best method to produce academic content. It really is a rather terrible method to produce academic content. Most of the time my academic efforts are better served by grabbing some paper and working on an outline of what needs to be communicated. That allows me to slowly fill in that outline with blocks of content and work toward a finished product that can be edited and refined. This year is the year that I will block off 1 hour of my time every evening to work on something academic related. 

    This Sunday started out with episode 34 of Sunday with Ola on YouTube playing in the background. Maybe a year ago I started considering buying a Solar branded guitar in poplar burst matte finish with an evertune bridge.[1] The Solar guitars do look pretty interesting and I do at some point want to have one guitar with an evertune bridge.  However, the bolt on roasted maple neck Solar guitars look pretty good. Maybe at some point one of them will have the maple matte finish.

    After that episode finished, I watched Rhett Shull talk about being burned out creatively during a decently long rant for what it was on YouTube.[2] One of the things that I used to do some time ago was pick up any topic and write about it to the point of exhaustion. For example, this morning I started to think about the nature of defense within the game of basketball. Years ago this functional journal would have seen page after page of my thoughts on basketball defense. Right now I just did not start rocking and rolling that writing exercise. I can see it within the forwarding looking vision of my headspace, but it is not translating into a writing project. Something happened that separated me from the potential of that writing effort. That something is what I’m curious about. The title of this post is “Oh that intention” and that is the crux of what I’m curious about when it comes to why some things get done and some very obvious things do not get finished. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://www.solar-guitars.com/product/s1-6et-ltd-poplar-burst-matte/
    [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viRqgh8T-Bk