Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: August 2023

  • Sit down and write a block of words

    My ability to sit down and write a block of words has gone in and out of service in the last two weeks. That is understandable, but it still surprised me a bit that my focus could be disrupted. I have been absorbing a ton of new generative AI related technology. So many companies are spinning up in that space and they do all sorts of interesting things. An interesting element of that is how much of it runs back to a common set of APIs where people are calling models for answers. The interesting part of this equation is that people are spinning up local hosting and sometimes even hosting in notebooks.

    I watched the Pinecone company sponsored, “AI Transformation Summit 2023.” They loaded the 11 videos as playlist here on YouTube:

    Yesterday, I spent some time setting up my OBS, webcam, and microphone to record some desktop driven demos. It has been a few years since that was a priority for my efforts. Low friction workflows are super important to help drive my ability to create content. I want to be able to record and upload without really having to do any editing. 

    I watched this video and learned how to set up a special filter to change my webcam video from a rectangle to a circle in OBS. Strangely enough, this was an oddly rewarding filter to create. It was not a hard thing to do, but it was a little bit rewarding. For a few moments I did consider using the chat bubble for my filter. That consideration quickly faded away

    Right now I’m considering watching this set of videos:
    https://learn.deeplearning.ai/microsoft-semantic-kernel/lesson/1/introduction

  • 24 hour application usage sample

    Today got off to a slower start than intended. My alarm went off and I got out of bed and was ready to jump into working, but it took about 30 minutes to boot up and become productive. Even with two shots of espresso and some Sunday with Ola playing. Part of the slowdown was due in part to a bunch of web surfing about how Eight Sleep products work. We have two large dogs and I have been hesitant about any technology they could destroy. Yesterday, I started a little tracking project to see what applications or software packages I’m using actively right now. During the course of the last 24 hours of big adventures I just kept a list. It turns out that I used 15 different things. You can check out the list for yourself below. The list is roughly in the order of how the applications were used throughout the last day.

    1. Android OS – Alarm clock on my Pixel 7 Pro went off at 5:30 AM
    2. Windows 11 OS – unlocked my main computer the Dark Base Pro 900
    3. Microsoft Outlook – Checked my primary email inbox
    4. Gmail – Checked my secondary email inbox
    5. Pokemon – I had to clear out some Pokemon to get ready for Go Fest 2023
    6. PowerDirector – Edited some video clips for the daily vlog
    7. YouTube – Watched the All-In podcast and the WAN show
    8. Google Docs – edited some documents and did some writing
    9. Google Podcasts – listened to some podcast audio during a walk
    10. Pandora – listened to some music during a walk
    11. LinkedIn – I’m checking this daily now
    12. Twitter(X) – I’m still a daily active user of Twitter
    13. YouTube TV – I watched a bit of the Bears vs. Bills game via Sunday Ticket
    14. GitHub – I was messing around with some Colab notebooks
    15. Google Colab – These launched out of GitHub

    I probably used the Chrome operating system as well on my Pixelbook Go at some point during the day. Generally, I mess around with Colab notebooks on the Chromebook. The major GPU work on those notebooks is happening somewhere else so the Chromebook interface is plenty powerful to support the Colab notebook browsing experience. The list does not include any indexing to how many times I used anything. For the most part, I was just tracking the first use of something to help make the list. This was not intended to be a time in motion study of any kind. It was just an effort to help understand the tooling being used. The next step here would be to extend the sampling period to an entire week and see if anything else ends up being caught up in a longer sampling period.

  • A reflective Saturday

    Right now we are sitting at a recorded and processed backlog level of 3 weeks on the Substack. That 3 weeks of backlog is scheduled to run until Friday, September 15, 2023. Based on my normal routine for the weekend I should be recording week 139 right now during my Saturday morning. This morning The WAN Show was back (no comment) and I have the content ready to record for block 139. Instead of picking up the Marantz professional sound shield live vocal reflection filter from under my desk and starting to record on my Yeti X from Blue microphone I took a step back. Blocks 139, 140, 141, and 142 are actually written and ready to record, but they could be better. This morning I’m going to read all 4 of those blocks and give them a round of editing and expansion. That will be a part of the reworking content process that is important.

    Recently, I have been way more likely to push the entire backlog back a few weeks and drop in new topics. That is in part a function of not wanting to put a new topic so far out in planning and review. Having a new topic that grabs my interest be shelved for over a year while the backlog is consumed in front of it just seems wrong. Right now that backlog goes out until block 226 which is really a problem for future Nels. Sometimes you have to be willing to mix things up and change up the backlog. It’s a healthy part of the agile process. I’m even going to create a new category for posts that is going to be about backlog management.

    Throughout the next week I’ll be working with LangChain and building some Colab notebooks related to using and understanding all the use cases currently in that space. I’m going to spend time every day working on a single block of content within the backlog as well. That should end up yielding some good content building and a lot of focus on getting things done. For the most part the process of recording the audio, video, or other elements is distinctly separate from the writing process and is normally a part of my weekend routine.

  • A day of LangChain

    I spent most of the morning writing block 142 which was related to learning LangChain. 

    It took a little of an hour to complete the beta DeepLearning.AI LangChain for LLM Application Development short course [1]. It was a pretty good course and it included a mix of both notebooks and video. The nice part of the notebooks was that they were already set up and ready to run in sync with the video. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://learn.deeplearning.ai/langchain/lesson/1/introduction

  • A moment of promise stood out

    Yesterday was sort of a lost day of sorts. I know that some days are going to be less productive than others, but yesterday was a little bit on the disappointing side of things. Part of that is on me for not working toward starting the day with a reflection on what I accomplished the day before and considering the handful of things that would be best to accomplish today. Sure that sounds simplistic and to some degree being planful and working to deliver a defined backlog is a direct strategy. My backlog has about 200 blocks or more of content in it that need to be worked. My biggest push this week has been to really dive in and use LangChain both locally and within some notebooks [1]. That effort should translate to a few GitHub notebook outputs and maybe some fresh look items being added into the backlog.

    I’m going to spend some time today learning a bit more about IDEFICS as well which Hugging Face just shared with the world [2]. 

    Some time was spent working on the content blocks for weeks 139 to 142. 

    Footnotes:

    [1] https://www.langchain.com/[2] https://huggingface.co/blog/idefics

  • Staying focused on writing

    It turns out I don’t really even want to write at the moment. After clearing my thoughts and trying to focus my attention toward a perfect possible future I did have enough energy to sit down and write for a bit. Clearly that was not an easy task to switch from being somewhat disenfranchised into a focused writing session. Sometimes bringing all your energy and focus to something requires setting everything else aside to be absolutely present in the moment. Unlocking the next big thing is about being able to create that type of focus. It’s one of the things that I am absolutely good at and it is a skill that I have developed over time. That is where we are at right now. 

    During the course of this last week I have been learning more and more about how to build and deploy chatbots that take advantage of LLMs and other generative AI technologies. I’m pretty sure that the development of agency to machine learn models is going to strap rocket boosters to the next stage of technological deployment. Maybe you are thinking that is hyperbole… don’t worry or panic, but you are very soon going to be able to ask these agents to do something and they will be able to execute more and more complex actions. That is the essence of agency within the deployment of these chatbots. It’s a very big deal in terms of people doing basic task automation and it may very well introduce a distinct change to how business is conducted by radically increasing productivity.

  • Small adventure Monday reactivated

    I’m getting a lot of invites for virtual events to listen to these days. For the most part, I try to place the invite on the calendar so that I remember to attend the event. Turning off all the notifications on my smartphone was an epicly good decision, but it does stop some prompts that would be useful. It does beneficially block a lot more distracting content than it surprises good content. 

    I was looking at getting a bridge SILO humbucker from Bare Knuckle pickups [1]. 

    Testing out YouTube Shorts has been interesting. The popularity window for something loaded into YouTube Shorts is mind bogglingly short. Based on the first 3 videos it seems like within a few minutes of launch it either takes off or it just fades along. 

    I’m still on the waiting list for Langflow access [2].

    Botpress was pretty easy to use. After login I clicked answer questions from websites to create a bot. I added both Civic Honors and my main Nels Lindahl domain. They just jumped in and advised me that the knowledge upload was complete. Publishing the bot is not as low friction as the Voiceflow embedding launch point, but it was not super hard to work with after you find the share button.

    I messed around with the local installation of Flowise. 

    My attention ended up moving over to learn more about LangChain in general [3].

    Footnotes:

    [1] https://www.bareknucklepickups.co.uk/pickup/humbucker/silo 
    [2] https://www.langflow.org/ 
    [3] https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchain

  • Considering a YouTube Shorts series

    For some reason I had set up a second YouTube channel a few years ago. I went through the mechanics of removing that channel via the old fashioned delete workflow routine. The interesting part of that was having to type in the entire channel name to finalize the delete. The process was pretty rigorous and would certainly prevent somebody from an accidental channel delation. You have to really want to complete the process to make it happen.

    Right now I’m editing a video for YouTube in the daily vlog series in the PowerDirector application. Apparently, these YouTube Shorts need to be under 60 seconds. That made me wonder if I should work to prepare both a Shorts and a regular vlog release every day for a bit to see how it feels to get into the groove of making daily videos. Several years ago I did successfully make a vlog for the good part of a year. It was an interesting adventure and to this day people still watch parts of that series from time to time. I’m not entirely sure why or how that happens, but it does seem to happen. Maybe the most interesting part about loading up the first couple of YouTube Shorts videos is that they don’t show up on my main YouTube channel page. They have a special tab that they live in called Shorts. 

    Yeah, I was a little surprised that they don’t show up in the all videos feed. You can find them in the vlog playlist, but they don’t really show up within the normal configuration. I went out to the channel customization area and sure enough they have a shorts video widget you can add to the main page for your YouTube channel. Naturally, I went ahead and added that Shorts section and dragged it to the top of the pile of widgets so it will be the first thing that people see who happen to visit the channel page. To be completely fair on that one the vast majority of YouTube traffic is not channel landing based. That is not really how people stumble into the next video they are going to watch. YouTube viewing is highly recommendation engine based. 

    My big plan for the next week is to record little video clips throughout the day and mix them down into a YouTube Shorts video (sub 60 seconds) to produce a daily vlog. I’m going to commit to building a week of that style content to see how it goes. We will see if people like to see the adventures of Rocky the dog on a more regular basis. Rocky takes walks, naps, and eats. Hopefully, the daily vlog will end up being a little more interesting than that series of events, but it might very well end up being one of those every day is the same sorts of video series. Maybe it will help me mix it up a bit within my routines and daily adventures. 

    How do you get to that YouTube channel? Click here youtube.com/@NelsLindahl

  • Some things are just routine

    Some things are just routine. Uninterrupted writing during the earliest hours on Saturday and Sunday. Walking the dog in the morning. 25 evening push ups. Drinking a glass of water with every meal. These things just become a part of a regularly scheduled plan. It’s good to have some things that are routine. I’m really trying to focus on working on delivering the items in my writing backlog. Earlier this week things became a lot less stable. My reaction to that instability was not to power through a bunch of backlog items. It’s good to understand that reaction. I’m really just sitting down now to write a little bit of content. Everything within the foundation of my writing ability was shaken a little bit. Distinctly shaken, not stirred, is how things felt for the moment part. A whirlwind of emotion and reaction beyond anything that was going to just drive some writing. It was one of those moments where you have to take a step back and consider things within a more macro context. 

    I’m actually thinking about releasing some type of poll on Twitter/X each day. That activity would be done just for my own personal amusement. I had considered doing something within the spaces (live audio). That idea never went anywhere. I have posted over 400 videos on YouTube. Apparently, I have posted as of this moment exactly 444 videos. A bunch of those happened during the time when I thought it would be fun to publish a daily vlog. Maybe going back and trying to do that again would be fun. The best way to do that would be to just commit to recording short videos on my Google Pixel 7 Pro, editing them using the PowerDirector application, and publishing them from the phone. That is pretty much how the last round of vlogging happened. I might string together a few random clips and do a test run without making it privately visible. We will see how that ends up going tomorrow.

    You might have guessed that it is now the next day and I was able to run the publishing test on YouTube. Oddly enough, the system actually uploaded the video as my very first YouTube Shorts contribution. It was a pretty easy thing to accomplish and PowerDirector was just as easy to use as I remember from the last time around. Loading content to the project, editing it up a bit, and publishing took just a few minutes. It was a very low friction activity and it was sort of interesting to see it show up as a Shorts contribution. I think that happened due to the orientation of the video. All the little snippets I grabbed happened to be shot vertically. That may be the key to triggering that type of upload category. I’m not exactly sure on that one. 

    I was able to get back into the routine of things for my Saturday morning early hour writing efforts. Two blocks of content were developed including weeks 139 and 141. I’ll have to pick back up with week 140 tomorrow and finish up editing the other two blocks of content. I may not be able to record any new podcast episodes this weekend. I did take the time to set up a podcast playlist on YouTube and I might go ahead and release the Friday August 25, 2023 edition in video format as a sort of test run of the process. Adding that type of video production to my workflow will change the publishing cost from the 10 minutes of audio creation to about 30 minutes per edition. If the video creation process becomes very involved, then things might jump up to 90 minutes per block of content. That could be worth it or it might be a thing to try out and fail faster on by adding it to the mythical stop doing list.

  • Avoiding those major blockers

    Two podcast audio tracks were recorded this morning. Both the week 137 and 138 content received some revision and were recorded. That was a productive start to the day. Right now the backlog of recorded and ready to release blocks of content for The Lindahl Letter is sitting at 5 weeks. My alternate building project is progressing as well on a daily basis. When you are the only one coding and developing something you have to be really careful about hitting roadblocks and other blockers. That they can just bring everything to a crashing halt on a side project. No opportunity for recovery exists as you have to either solve it, figure out a work around, or elect to move on to something else. No one element of the backlog can be allowed to take up every bit of possible time. 

    I was reading this article from Vox writer Peter Kafka about how the newsletter boom is over [1]. During the course of writing 138 blocks of content to share on Substack I have wondered about how that company is doing and what exactly is going on in the world of newsletter publishing. It’s interesting to think of publishing a newsletter as an MVP to ship each week. Kafka shared a few links about what has been happening with Substack as well which was helpful. Those articles did not paint the best forward looking picture. A few weeks ago now I started to both post my podcast audio and Substack post content on this blog each week as well. That is more or less just an archival play at the moment. I’d have to figure out how to fold subscribers from one platform to the other which I guess would be possible by email. I’d have to consider the right opt-in process for that to make the switch, but it’s probably a problem for future Nels. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://www.vox.com/recode/23289433/newsletters-substack-subscriptions-bari-weiss-semafor-peter-kafka-column