Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: June 2023

  • Working ahead of schedule to defeat the backlog

    I spent some time watching this Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) interview with Yannic Kilcher this morning.

    As a brief disclaimer, you can learn from somebody without having to agree with them or support everything they do along the way. People are complex and sometimes they can be chaotic. One of the early topics they covered was the complexity and reliability of the content being produced. I’m actually totally ok with MLST going as deep as they want during discussion and episodes. Not everything has to be written or shared for a general audience. Sometimes it is ok to have a highly technical conversation and dialogue with people who are capable of tackling those sorts of higher order challenges. A consequence of that type of effort will be that the audience size will be smaller. I generally believe that around 10,000 people worldwide are really hyper focused on consuming highly technical machine learning content. Audience sizes beyond that are picking up a different type of community based on purpose, interest, or circumstance creating an intersection with the general machine learning community of interest.

    I’m going to try to utilize Twitter going forward to share links to the YouTube videos I consume each week. That should help allow me to provide some context and it will give you a sense of the content creators that take up several hours of my week every week. To be fair every week it will be me sharing the same links and commentary for the most part to the creators in my top 5. It turns out that I cannot really have more than about 5 podcasts in my weekly rotation. That is where I max out in terms of content consumption. 

    My Top 5 podcasts right now (when this post was written):

    1. All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
    2. The Vergecast & Decoder (both are Nilay productions)
    3. Hard Fork with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton
    4. Machine Learning Street Talk
    5. Lex Fridman Podcast (I’m 30/70 on listening to these based on topic) 

    My honorable mention would be the New Heights podcast from Kelce brothers.

    Earlier this morning I was able to really work ahead of the backlog by one block of writing and I’m considering just scheduling the content to go live without recording audio for that post. I’ll probably spend some more time refining that block of writing and end up recording the podcast audio during some evening this week. We will see how that goes.

  • Moving toward some hyperfocus

    Today was productive enough. In the early hours of the morning I was able to lock in the last podcast audio recording for the month of July 2023. I’m staying within the 5 week buffer right now to have content ready to post. For some ineffable reason I have written a number of tweets today. 

    Tweet: Saturday morning podcast recording mischief is now complete.

    Tweet: Today was a day where donut ordering happened early in the morning. We ended up waiting at an intersection for a bunch of cyclists competing in some type of race to pass us. All that waiting was enough to inspire an extra shot of espresso in my iced macchiato.

    Tweet: Sitting at a traffic light. Waiting for the light to cycle. The driver in the car behind me started flailing and otherwise behaving wildly. After a few moments of that increasingly wild behavior, I’m pretty sure he killed a spider with a smartphone. So that happened this weekend.

    Tweet: I might be using @YouTube wrong, but I just open up my subscriptions list and watch videos both on my computer and television. https://youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

  • Putting in the work on that backlog

    This morning I dug into the content block that I had assigned to this weekend with reckless abandon. You may recall that recently I shifted my entire writing backlog to the right by about a year and added a new set of content to the queue instead. I’m currently working on those new blocks of content creation and it happens to be going pretty well so far. Within my current workflow I’m targeting some audio recording every Saturday Morning and working on content creation during both Saturday and Sunday. My goal of course is to complete one block of the backlog each week while considering the next 5 in the backlog. That functionally gets me ready to work on the next blocks of content by considering them before ever trying to write or research. That is an important part of the process. You sometimes have to think deeply about something before you try to write about it. 

    A few general updates… 

    • Yesterday, I did update the weblog menu to remove a couple of the social network items from the top to streamline content delivery. 
    • I may at some point just remove the GitHub link as well. That one remained, but it is possible that it may get removed here in the next 30 days. That is something that is being considered. 
    • The homepage is back to the about content instead of showing current weblog posts as well. I’m not sure if that is going to be a permanent solution to the homepage. It’s pretty easy to get to the posts section and nothing would stop somebody from reading them in order if that old school blog experience was desired. 
    • I’m considering converting my entire writing collection into a corpus for model training again. It has been a couple years since the content was converted into a corpus like file for model training. The last time was for use with GPT2 about 3 years ago.
  • On that power supply problem just started

    Over the course of the last two weeks my CORSAIR RM850x power supply has started acting up. I do not move my desktop computer tower very often. It’s in a Dark Base Pro 900 case and it sits under my desk. For the most part it remains undisturbed and just sort of sits and waits to be powered on via the front switch when it gets turned off. Earlier today I had to switch out the power cable to a different one and it did finally power on which is how I’m writing this missive right now. I ordered this power supply back on February 15, 2018. That means that the power supply has lasted 5 years and is now starting to have some trouble. I’m looking at new ones right now including the CORSAIR RMx Series RM1000x model. I looked around for a bit and finally decided to just order a new one. Power supplies are not really something to mess around with given that they are the base of the entire computer system.

  • Recapping some efforts from this weekend

    It was a productive morning of working on some development. I ended up working on the setup of the nelsx domain. That involved doing a bunch of different things. First, I had to remove the redirect to my top level domain and make sure that change went global. Second, the domain had to be set up within my hosting system so that I could do something with it in terms of installing some applications. Third, the application installation for the content management on the site had to be completed. Now I’m just tinkering with the setup for the site and working to fix a few errors in the process. 

    Somehow during the installation process a generic deleteme file got dropped in the main directory. Logging into the file system management and removing that random blocking file took a couple of minutes. Something is wrong with the redirect setup for the site. It’s still dropping over to a parking domain at the moment. After a few minutes of looking at the configurations for the domain I’m probably going to have to contact support on this one. It used to be a bit easier to complete a setup. Sure the introduction of the SSL part of the equation made things a bit more complex, but that should not really be a blocking factor within the initial build. 

    Apparently the domain name was not connected. The domain was in a parking state with the host. The propagation will take 24-48 hours. Initially it had some linkages back to an old hosting plan and pulled up a post from November 23, 2022. It was about, “Loyal Stricklin Wallets:

    I own two of these wallets. They are delightful and have held up really well. Production is currently out of Opelika, Alabama. https://loyalstricklin.com/collections/johnny-wallet.” That is still my everyday carry wallet. I’m hopeful that the propagation gets it fixed up to the right hosting package here today or tomorrow. 

    I manually updated the IP address for the hosting and now the waiting process has started over again. It all ended up working out the next day.

  • Considering Twitter subscriptions

    We are back on track with a block of writing happening each week. Right now posts are staged for the next 5 weeks out till July 14, 2023. I woke up this morning and worked on the next block of writing in the backlog. Got it recorded and scheduled to both Substack and the blog. 

    I’m super curious about this feature that Twitter has rolled out called “Subscriptions” to create a monthly income stream for content creators. The most interesting part of the equation is that you have to set the monthly subscription prices and you cannot change it later. Filling out the entire form took a couple of minutes. It required completing these 2 prompts:

    “Take a minute to say hello”

    This bonus content will probably be a bit of inside baseball related to my writing efforts. I have been writing blogs for 20+ years.

    “Describe the perks you’ll offer”

    You will get a few more blocks of content that would otherwise appear on the blog. I’ll try to provide a better look at what is happening.

    My monthly cost would have been $2 as a subscription. That seemed superior to the $1 minimum amount they would have allowed. In theory somebody could have selected the maximum value in the drop down of $239 as the target monthly subscription rate. That seems like an awful lot of subscription cost to get access to some bonus content in Tweet form each month. Maybe somebody who breaks news on a regular basis or a really interesting public figure like Michael Burry (think Big Short fame) could command that maximum value. You could subscribe to most of the major streaming content services for that cost. 

    Assuming the Twitter account devoted to Subscriptions is an accurate source… 

    https://twitter.com/Subscriptions/creator-subscriptions/subscriptions

    In total the system has 3,858 users with accounts that are enabled for the monthly subscription feature. That is actually a larger number than I was expecting. A screenshot is included here as I’m sure the overall numbers will change go forward.

    Apparently, back on May 12, 2023 they reduced the application steps from 27 to 4… 

  • Some things that just keep moving along

    Earlier this week, I went ahead and purged out all the inactive emails from The Lindahl Letter. It was actually a strangely liberating moment of bulk deletion. It’s still a little weird that WordPress is not able to just send over posts right to Twitter anymore. I’m assuming somebody will work out a plugin for that type of thing. At the moment, my solution remains that after publishing I’ll just go to the post and click the share to Twitter option. I’m not entirely sure why doing that is worth the time it takes, but it is another one of those oddly rewarding types of things that will probably keep happening. 

    I did watch the entire Succession series on Max (formerly HBO Max). It really was not a very long series, but it was interesting. It did make me consider buying a tablet, but it was not enough to actually push me over into making a purchase. I have a smartphone, chromebook, and desktop computer. That should be enough computing power to get things done. The majority of the work I’m doing these days is happening at my workstation with the stacked dual monitors. Working out of my office just makes sense when prolonged concentration is required.

    A few times since the launch I have put the Google Pixel Fold in my shopping cart and then given up on making the purchase. Folding phones which would sort of end up being half way between a tablet and a smartphone always seem like a good idea in theory, but the thought of the crease line is enough to stop me from making the purchase.

  • All those backlog updates are happening

    I have started down a new path in terms of the backlog. I’m currently working on block 130 of 218 known blocks in the multi-year writing chain. All the things have been lined up to be committed to that path. That should end up yielding a pretty set of manuscripts and articles at the end of the newly minted 49 block journey. I’m going to go down the same format of yearly publishing a collection, but I should be able something else out of that process as well. We will see how that ends up going. 

    In any event, all those backlog updates are happening. The first two years of writing blocks were stored in a single Google Doc. Currently blocks 105 to 218 are being worked in a second Google Doc. It would probably be possible to combine the two documents, but I don’t see a reason to do that at the moment. It creates some unwieldy document problems when you start working with hundreds of pages in a browser tab. I’ll transfer the content into a Microsoft Word document for editing into something for publication as a yearly archival manuscript.

    It is interesting that my WordPress integration to Twitter no longer exists. This post could be shared out to other social media systems, but that will not be the case. No real need for that type of social media sharing exists. I’m actually curious if we will see a retreat from broader social media usage or if some other platform or communication method will spring up to fill a void that exists. Oh, immediately after writing this block of text I went out and paid for a year of Twitter paid features and then shared the post via the manual sharing option. Yes, I had to set up the manual sharing feature for every post to be able to do that and it took a couple of minutes. The only social sharing button option that I have added was for Twitter. That might change at some point, but for now that is how it is set up.

    https://twitter.com/nelslindahl/status/1665481416694456320
  • Digging into all of my Google Keep notes

    A lot of opportunities exist to focus on things. Investing a bit of time into something could be part of a plan. Earlier tonight I started digging into all of my Google Keep notes.

    During one of the days at the beach recently, I sat down and started making a list of topics I would like to spend some time either researching or writing about. It turns out that list was 49 total items. Right now I’m actively working on week 128 of the writing plan. That plan was designed to run within 3 years of content so far and that would be 156 weeks worth of writing. My current backlog actually runs to week 157 and an extra list of 12 topics. That means my current backlog of items before the introduction of this new list of 49 items was 169 blocks of content which would then be extended to 218 total blocks of content. That would be over 4 years of total content between what has been written and what is in the backlog. 

    Having that large a backlog is not where I normally sit with things. I don’t like to have such a large and unwieldy backlog. It may be one one of those times where I’m going to have to adapt my writing schedule to help work it down to a more manageable level of content blocks that need to be written.

    Ok, I ended up making an executive decision on how to manage the backlog. It was a super disruptive decision at this point in the process. I went ahead and at the week 128 point I pasted in the new list of 49 items. That means I’m going to struggle with updating the next five weeks of forward looking items on a bunch of blocks of content, but that is a solvable problem. It’s just annoying and time consuming vs. having any really problematic nature. That does mean that starting in July you will start to get the benefit of this new backlog and strictly you are going to end up waiting about a year to return to the previously structured program.