Earlier this week, I sat right by the beach in Florida for six hours. The umbrella and chair helped. I did not bring my Chromebook to spend the time writing. That experience is probably going to happen again tomorrow. Oddly enough, my efforts to engage in some productive writing have been a wash during this trip. That is what I expected to have happened. Earlier in preparing for this degradation in writing time I had worked ahead by a couple of weeks on the writing plan.
Ok, so on the Twitter front I’m still running my tweets in protected status and I gave up on paying them for Twitter Blue. They almost got me to come back yesterday with the annual prepayment discount. I’m more likely to commit to something for a year than on a monthly basis. Naturally, I’ll turn off any auto renewal so that I can make a decision on renewal at the proper time. Perhaps that is a strange conundrum of a preference for annual vs. monthly billing. It’s probably a contrarian opinion about Twitter, but I think it might have gotten worse for a bit then it got better. My feed of things in any event has turned into a better read over the last couple of months.
News feeds overall are highly broken at the moment. As a side effect of the news based media portion of things fundamentally breaking the feeds are awash with poorly crafted content. News rooms while an imperfect gate keeping system provided a perspective and some degree of continuity. It’s a first in the pool free for all right now and just like academics at large the publish or perish mindset overshadows everything.
A multitude of paths forward exist. We elect to use the time we have in different ways.
Keep producing weekly research notes
Build independent study literature reviews
Consider what a return to teaching some online classes would require
Conduct quantitative research aimed at journal article publication
Refine my yearly manuscript creation process
All of that consolidated effort could flow together. Nothing within that packaging would conflict. Right now I’m sitting within content staged until the end of June. Working ahead was a good strategy to allow me to review closely where I’m going and what I’m doing within the framework being used to push things forward. All of that output and effort has to be geared toward building something. It’s part of an overall research trajectory that paths toward something. Outside of that it would be no more than a sustained effort to muddle through the habit of writing. Output would be achieved, but collectively it would have no momentum toward anything. Objectives have to stand just outside the reach of the moment and some even beyond the next range of possible achievements.
I sat down to do a little bit of writing before going to sleep tonight. The next twenty minutes are going to be devoted to putting a few thoughts down in writing. For better or worse that is the plan at the moment. You could just as easily ask ChatGPT to produce 1,000 words of nonsense, but that would be less novel than my musing probably will end up being. It would be a good idea to spend some time with the new models trying to produce some code. It is entirely possible that the newer code generating models would allow me to work out a couple of the things that had drawn my interest twenty years ago. Some of that would be as easy as turning the pseudo code into actual code and seeing what happens. Maybe I’ll even turn some of that into some Android applications that people could download.
This weekend I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what to do with all the old data that resides on my computer. Most of it is backed up to the cloud. I need to spend some time just deleting blocks of data that are no longer required. I’m probably not the only person in the boat of having stored so much data that is probably not needed or useful. At this point in time, I imagine that so much just unwieldy data has been stored and forgotten by a multitude of people. It’s probably a mind boggling number to consider how many photographs that Google has backed up over the years on devices all over the world.
Apparently, during the course of sailing around the ocean it is a good practice to keep a captain’s log for navigation and maintenance reasons. It’s entirely possible that I have been keeping a functional journal about my writing practices for both navigation and maintenance reasons. None of my journaling has been about the ocean in any way shape or form. I don’t really even use analogies or metaphors that are sea inspired. I guess that covers that and we are ready to move on to something else here during this writing session.
My PSA of the day is to give blood if you are able to complete a donation. I try to give blood several times a year. They don’t have a method to make synthetic blood at this time. Donations are an important part of keeping the system running.
Interesting observation after a few days of flipping my tweets to private mode… it turns out that setting has not really changed my Twitter application usage. A few people won’t get my responses, but that is fine in the long run. We could follow each other if some type of actual communication on Twitter was warranted.
My recent writing efforts have involved sitting down with the Pixelbook Go on a more regular basis and just writing whatever comes to mind at the time. That is not always a recipe to yield the productive generation of prose, but it has been good in terms of general writing productivity. Right now I’m watching the Dallas Stars and Seattle Kraken play hockey and just typing away.
My Twitter account has been flipped over to “Protect your Tweets” status. That is basically the privacy version of lockdown. I’m letting my blue checkmark expire on May 12 by canceling any renewal mechanism. Generally that action is being taken as the benefits of the program are not worth the expense at the moment. Outside of that scenario, I can confirm that the idea of completing that series of steps was harder to consider than the consequences of actually taking the actions. Participating in the great public commons that Twitter might have represented was a grand idea. Social media is not a shining city on any degree of hill. Mostly it was a promise of something that maybe could never have really been true in actual existence. I’m going back to blogging and just sharing thoughts that way in written form to an audience that mostly shows up from search engines.
I’m going to try to avoid spending large amounts of time on Twitter. My profile will remain and my 10,000 or more tweets still exist, but they are in that protected status.
https://twitter.com/nelslindahl
It really feels like the delivery methods of the modern news media have become broken. It’s somewhat surprising that 15 million people use Feedly as an RSS reader. Google Reader has been gone for a while now (2013). I have spent some time the last couple of days thinking about how people consume news and where and when that attention is applied.
I’m now using a Google Home Max speaker with my desktop setup. It’s been great so far. Apparently, back in 2020 the team over at Google discontinued making this particular speaker product. I have had this one for a long time. This is the first time that I’m using the product with the auxiliary input running straight from the computer without a digital to analog converter (DAC). That device might get put back in the loop at some point. This morning I started working on the last block of content to fill out the month of June. Things are moving right along.
This blog has existed in a number of formats over the years. Different underlying platforms have supported things. Microsoft Frontpage, Movable Type, and WordPress have all been a part of the technology footprint. According to captures from the Wayback Machine you can see results dating back to 2002. Certainly that type of internet archaeology is interesting, but not entirely informative. It does serve as a reminder of the degree of permanence that exists with online works. I do have a massive word processing document with pretty much every post in order dating back that far, but I have given up a couple of times trying to edit that massive volume of work. Not that long ago I did go out and clean up some manuscripts to make sure they were back in print. Keeping things in print is an important part of them being available.
Emotions abound these days. I’m settling into a new situation. Even my daily monitor setup is different. It takes some time to try and figure out exactly what is next. Things unfold along the way. One of the things that I wanted to figure out was how to devote a little bit more time to producing some weblog posts. It’s interesting that WordPress cannot send more than a certain number of links back over to Twitter these days. Everything has gotten so much more political recently. Social media as a landscape is changing a ton right now. The advent of Blue Sky as a prominent player is happening as a scarcity of invites has stirred up a lot of interest. You could easily consider it a cool kids club right now.
Being in the camp of people who have published millions of words online I’m certainly no stranger to publishing content. I downloaded my 10,000 tweet archive the other day from Twitter. I actually almost flipped the whole collection to the “protect your tweets” side of things. Taking that course of action was briefly considered, but I figured oh well and left them online. It’s possible some new social media players are going to pop up here this year. We will see what happens in 2024 and beyond with the totality of social media engagement.
Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 119 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “All that bad data abounds.”
Flooding and astroturfing abound at the moment. Both of those things were happening before the advent of large language models (LLMs), but they have increased in frequency now that bad actors are able to just open the floodgates for content. Making large swaths of the internet that is just designed for search engine placement and self-referencial boosting has become so much easier recently. Sure all that bad data was abounding before this shift in what is now happening with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook recently sharing out chat services.
It’s one of those things where it is hard to put words on a page about it. Working with one of the chat systems to make content seems to trivialize the writing process. My day starts with an hour of focused academic work. That time is the fulfilled promise of decades of training that included a lot of hard work to get to this point. I can focus on a topic and work toward understanding it. All of that requires my focus and attention on something for that hour. Sometimes on the weekends I spend a couple of hours doing the same thing on a very focused topic. Those chat models with their large language model backends (LLM) produce content within seconds. It’s literally like a 1:60 ratio for output. It takes me an hour to produce what it creates within that minute including the time for the user to enter the prompt.
Maybe I did not expect this type of interaction to really affect me in this way. Everything has been questioned in terms of my writing output and what exactly is going to happen now. The door has been flung open to the creation of content. Central to that problem is the reality that the careful curation of content within academics and the publish first curation of the media are going to get flooded. Both systems are going to get absolutely overloaded with submissions. Something has to give based on the amount of attention that exists. They are not minting any new capacity for attention and the channels for grabbing that attention are relatively limited. The next couple of years are going to be a mad scrabble toward some sort of equilibrium between the competing forces of content curation and flooding.
This really is something that I’m concerned about on an onboarding basis. Do all the books, photos, articles, and paintings in the before times just end up with a higher value weighting going forward? Will this AI revolution have cheapened the next generation of information delivery in ways we will not fully get to appreciate until the wave has passed us and we can see the aftermath of that scenario? Those questions are at the heart of what I’m concerned about. Selfishly they are questions about the value and purpose of my own current writing efforts. More broadly they are questions about the value of writing within our civil society as we work toward the curation of sharable knowledge. We all work toward that perfect possible future either with purpose or without it. Knowledge is built on the shoulders of the giants that came before us adding to collective understanding of the world around us. Anyone with access and an adventurous spirit can pick up the advancement of some very complex efforts to enhance the academy’s knowledge on a topic.
Maybe I’m worried that the degree of flooding with flatten information so much that the ability to move things forward will diminish. Sorting, seeking, and trying to distill value from an oversupply of newly minted information may well create that diminishing effect. We will move from intellectual overcrowding in the academy to just an overwhelming sea of derivative content marching along beyond any ability to constrain or consume. I’m going to stop with that last argument as it may be the best way to sum this up.
Links and thoughts:
Top 5 Tweets of the week:
It's Hard Fork Friday! This week on the show, it's Drake vs. Grimes, @semaforben on the end of the BuzzFeed era, and our new game HatGPT https://t.co/W8sIjZpluf
Week 120: That one with an obligatory AI trend’s post
Week 121: Considering an independent study applied AI syllabus
Week 122: Will AI be a platform or a service?
Week 123: Considering open source AI
Week 124: Profiling OpenAI
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