Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: December 2024

  • 20241231

    It’s the last day of the year. I’m not going to miss 2024. It was a much wilder year than expected. 

    This might be old hat for almost every Spotify podcast listener on the planet, but Spotify → Your Library → Podcasts → New Episodes (pinned) has changed my daily usage pattern. I had sadly been just clicking on the six podcasts at the top to navigate to the latest content. Yes. I only listen to about 6 different podcasts on a regular basis. 

    Right now I’m supposed to be writing about how headline only news has bullet pointed away depth of knowledge and consideration. By headline only news I mean that a lot of the news is just consumed as people consume headline bylines only. A lot of it is just scrolling along and not digging into the depth of the article that is increasingly behind a paywall. This is a problem that needs a lot more attention. 

    I was digging into my George Brett graded card vertical and looked at my Donruss and Fleer stacks. My main focus has been on collecting a graded card by PSA or BGS for each Topps card from 1975 to current. This time around I looked beyond Topps and sorted my nearly complete base Donruss and Fleer collections. Some of the other brands of cards are a little harder to collect, but over the years just by chance I have sorted most of those two brands in terms of the yearly base card. Some of the highlight or alternate cards I still need to locate, but in terms of year having a base card and that being collected I’m pretty well complete on Topps, Donruss, and Fleer. 

    Comments have been turned off for all the older posts. I think right now comments might be open during the first 24 hours of a post. We will see if anybody adds any comments. It has been some time since a real comment happened. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • 20241230

    Earlier today I was thinking about the following seemingly ineffable question, “Assuming that all your knowledge, skills, and abilities were rolled up into a model being served up as a part of an LLM package within an agent, what would your prompts be at the start of the day?” We currently don’t have a lot of unprompted agent interactions. With ChatGPT or other interactions you are generating a prompt. It would be possible to give the model a set of randomly started or scheduled prompt systems. That is a lot like how I start my day where things begin to come into focus and whatever catches my attention ends up being the thing that I write about or consider. That could very well be a flywheel of a prompting system that would allow the agent to interact with you instead of you being the initiator of the prompt.

    People may not find it very useful, but I think it is an interesting question about what happens when a model has more of an ongoing conversation or system of prompting to sustain the overall interactive over a protracted period of time. I know that people have created scenarios where agents talk to each other, but what I’m thinking about here is a little bit different. This would be that set of questions or prompts that are the basis of sparking action during the periods of inaction. For me it is the start of the day where I’m just starting to pick a focus or maybe during a period of down time during the day where I go from a few moments of rest to deeply working based on some input. 

    At the start of the day my basic prompt would be simply, “start writing a page of prose.” That is pretty much how it starts. I open up a Google Doc and start to write about whatever happens to show up in a stream of consciousness until something sticks. Other times I take the other path where I open up my backlog and start working on either the next topic under consideration or one that catches my attention. Those two options are really where the writing starts. To convert that into a prompt it would end up being something like, “Randomly select either writing a page of stream of consciousness based prose in the style of Nels Lindahl or write about the next item in the backlog.” It would be possible to store the backlog as a list for the agent and it could probably actually work that prompt successfully. It would perhaps be better to rewrite that prompt to be, “Randomly select either writing a page of stream of consciousness based prose in the style of Nels Lindahl or write about the next item in the backlog that has not been previously covered.” Expanding that prompt would let you run it each day and not accidentally create coverage of the same backlog items. At this point, without adding that the prompt could very well cause repetitive coverage. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • 20241229

    Earlier this morning I started thinking about when the next generation of language model powered bots will have enough agency to convert complete books into interactive chats where you could be any character. Yeah that was a long sentence. It was pretty decent. It captured my point. I’m curious when the model could take the source material and turn it into a chat plus have the capability of guiding things along the normal established plot. Those two things together require a lot of keeping track of things during the conversation.

    This post was written in the jetpack application. Please accept my apologies in advance for typos. I’m not super fast or efficient in terms of using an onscreen keyboard to write prose.

    Dr. Nels

  • 20241228

    Throughout the last week I have had time to sit and think. It’s been a different type of experience. Generally, I have not been able to take vacation during the major holiday week at the end of the year. It turns out that it is really nice to just have that time to relax and enjoy a little bit of time off. I have pondered post theory science and considered various elements of quantum computing. It would have been nice if I could bring my whiteboard with me on this trip, but even without the ability to noodle on a blank wall I feel I got to spend some time deeply thinking about things. That was a delightful use of time.

    I made a list of things that might get purchased by me at some point. It was exciting. The only thing on the list that got purchased was a Glitty wooden case for my M3 MacBook Air. I ordered the Padauk one. It actually matches one of my favorite guitar necks which is also made out of Padauk. At the moment, I don’t have any positive or negative feedback on the Glitty products, but at some point that will be provided. My MacBook Air got scratched on the top and I did not like that turn of events. I spent some time trying to figure out what to use to prevent minor scratches on the outside of the MacBook and at some point in the next couple of weeks we will find out how that plan works out when it goes into action. 

    Switching to using a MacBook has been a major journey. I’m now reasonably good at working within the macOS and I no longer struggle with everything being reversed from my Windows machine. Seriously, like everything is just backward between the two operating systems and it is uncomfortable to switch between the two. It was uncomfortable enough that I broke down and bought this MacBook to avoid having to switch over at the end of the day into a different operating system. I’m now used to using the MacBook keyboard as well. That took a bit to get used to given that the main things that I do with the system are in the Chrome web browser and that is ubiquitous. 

    This morning I have been listening to a band called Sleep Token which I don’t really know all that much about. The members are not directly named. It’s an interesting approach to make music and be in a band without being directly named. A few bands of the years have taken this approach, but it is by far a small slice of the overall musical landscape. The music has been passable and so far I would give them a listen again at some point in the future. We will see if they make it into my standard rotation. My musical tastes right now are mostly inline with SiriusXM channel 37 Octane which plays hard rock and metal music. The line for me within the metal spectrum of music is that I want to be able to understand the vocals. The Octane channel typically stays within the range of my musical taste. They play new heavy music, but the songs are not soft rock and the singers are generally understandable. That is where I heard the aforementioned band for the first time and decided to listen to a full album from them this morning.

    Oddly, Google Docs’ spell check did not activate this morning. I went to publish this epic prose into WordPress and a bunch of underlined words appeared. My normal practice is just to edit as I go and you dear reader get what you get as a finished product. It’s the churn of normal organic prose written by a single person and published online within the classic weblog setting using one of the all time great blogging systems WordPress. I’ll admit my preference is to deliver solid grammatically correct content. I had to publish some updates today and that was a little bit shocking. Normally the Google Docs proofreading system works well enough. Even right now it says no suggestions or edits when I ask it for proofreading help and I know at least one thing is not spelled correctly in this last paragraph. It will be fixed by the time that you read it, but at the time it was written it was just wrong. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl

  • 20241227

    My big plan to use the Google Recorder app on my phone to take notes more often has not really worked out. Generally I just take notes and save links into Google Keep and that is like a staging area for topics that sometimes make it into my writing backlog. Some writing projects like the Lindahl Letter have a topic specific backlog and I have a general backlog document for everything else. The idea of introducing the Google Recorded was to not have to capture a little bit longer type of note. Almost all the notes in Google Keep are very short sort of topic slugs or maybe two sentences at most. I thought maybe in Google Recorder I might capture a little bit more about the thing that I was interested in at the time. Taking notes in real time is an important component of the process. You have to capture those gems when they show up otherwise they simply wink out of existence. They may or may not come back depending on what inspired them in the first place. 

    We will see what shakes out in 2025 if the Google Recorder app becomes a part of my process or if I end up just using Google Keep. My plan for 2025 is to continue the routine of writing for the weblog or blogging every day either in the morning or evening depending on how my time shakes out during the day. On the weekends when I have that longer block of time in the early hours of the day I’m going to work on producing research notes. During the course of 2025 I’m going to make sure that some of those research notes get expanded into full papers. That has to be a part of the writing journey next year. My output has to be focused on those longer forms of prose that deliver solid research. 

    I could probably spend days or even weeks just sorting out the huge number of Google Keep notes that have piled up within my collection of observations or links. Some of it is just links to things like a USB-C cable tester or an article about the next wave of AI use cases. Some of those notes are about a writing project or something to consider researching. The common theme connecting all of it is generally that it is about learning and moving forward. It’s that constant effort to strive toward the perfect possible future that unites a lot of people. Some people might rally around the banner of science to describe that group. I’m willing to say it’s a bit more than that and it encompasses the people striving to move forward and that could include theorists that are wholesale post theory and willing to use proofs that are solved outside the scientific method. Those people who follow that banner of progress toward the perfect possible future tend to work independently and come together within the grand academy of academic research. It’s a system based on standing on the shoulders of giants or more to the point of building toward advancing our collective knowledge. 

    You can infer from the previous point made in the last paragraph full of statements that I think that this collectively shared academic effort will help us progress toward a perfect possible future. That is a hopeful and optimistic assessment of where we are going. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl

  • 20241226

    Overall the new WordPress theme Twenty Twenty-Five (2025) is working out well enough since the big launch. Based on the web traffic report only a few people have gotten to enjoy the new visual presentation of content. It’s a low key content first view that just delivers the text to readers. Nothing really fancy is happening. A few extra backend pages and templates exist. I’m still trying to learn how to better present some of the deeper blog related content parts without using a sidebar. The native theme supports the pages, homepage, and 404 without a lot of modification or support. Most of the changes I ended up making to those pages were spacing and margin related. My preference is a little tighter content delivery than what is standard within the base theme. I made some changes to the 404 content missing pages to show some categories, archives, and top pages and content. Outside of that we are really just living within the delivery of the content dreamed up by the team over at WordPress for the 2025 theme.

    Years ago the traffic to this weblog was a little more consistent. The reduction in traffic is probably directly related to the long dearth of content that happened here. It was a content desert after being abandoned for a long time. Things have changed and I’m back in the practice of engaging in some daily writing. That is good news on the writing and consideration front. This functional journal while not being anything more than a stream of consciousness devoted to things that jump out as being relevant for consideration. It’s not intended to be a play by play of the things that happened during the day. For better or worse it’s just a snapchat of thought at the time it was created based on whatever shows up in the forefront of my thoughts.

    I had started to use one of those weekly planners to help focus my efforts. They help provide that reward mechanism in terms of crossing things off as they are completed. My standard writing routine is pretty straightforward at this point. On the weekends or occasional days off I sit down and write at the start of the day working on a research note or other scholarly works. Most of that content over the last three years has been put into the Lindahl Letter publication and it goes out each Friday on Substack. I did have a gap in that routine as well where nothing went out for several weeks. That breakdown in output has been corrected and the words must flow. We are back on track. Even the weblog is now filled with almost daily content. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl

  • 20241225

    It’s Christmas day and the Kansas City Chiefs are playing football. My big plan during the game was to spend some time looking at how Grails works and reading software documentation. My primary development over the last few years has been in Python and that has worked out well enough. A lot of the development in the machine learning space is Python related. I’m not entirely sure what type of things I’ll want to build with Grails, but spending a little time with it makes sense for now. Over the years I have spent time coding in all sorts of different programming languages. I did at one point think that Perl would be the future. That did not turn out to be true. Other people did not love using and working with Perl as much as I did during the course of working with data.

    Today has been a pretty low key day full of watching football. I think this will be two weeks in a row of posting to the weblog. I’m back in the habit of daily posting. Part of daily posting is about digging in and writing within an ongoing narrative. I’m still trying to balance working with the backlog and writing longer research notes and spending some time at the start or end of the day producing a solid page of brilliant prose. It’s about the process. It’s about taking the time to write on a daily basis.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl

  • 20241224

    I have heard people talk about the overall number of works online (let’s say about 20 billion) and that rather large corpus of words being used for training large language models. My personal writing collection is over five million words and was used to train a custom GPT-2 model to write and sounds an awful lot like my personal writing style. Currently my GPT-4o model that I interact with regularly does not use that foundation, but is capable of mimicking my writing style on command. I just ask it to write in the style of “Nels Lindahl” and it does a pretty good job of producing prose that is very similar to my standard writing voice. Over the years my speaking voice and writing voice are not all that different. I do think my written style is more verbose and for the most part contains a higher quality of communication. When you are talking to somebody the expectation is that you will not speak in 1,000 word blocks of thought. You have to be a lot more word-economic during the conversation. 

    To be fair about the previous consideration almost all conversation is subject to rules that enforce some type of compression compared to the written word. Conversations and dialogue that happen during a meeting have such a short timeline where getting to agreement is either directed by one part or the other saying this is the way or during a truncated debate where because the timer is running agreement has to be reached within the artificial confines of the meeting or more meetings will ensure. That is one of the strangest groupthink drivers of complex workplace interactions. It’s like the deciding elements of things are spread out and people talk about it and sometimes decisions are made, but how are those decisions then communicated back out in a way that is actually heard and understood to be implemented. For simple things it probably is easy to have an affirmative or negative outcome shared with the group. For really complex things that decision is translated and navigated a lot more than the decider presumed. 

    Sometimes a memo or extensive direction could be sent out to really communicate a complete decision. That is very rare in my experience. It’s interesting that we spend very little time thinking about the science of how decisions are made and what that means for the ongoing operation of a business. More time should be spent into how the trajectory of decisions and the outcomes of those decisions are spread throughout modern organizations. When a lot of the street level decision making in an organization is communicated by chat based interfaces like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat. I actually think one of the reasons that those systems are favored by smaller focused teams is that it is easier to have channels where decisions and directives are communicated. Tracking and understanding methods of communication in the modern office is an interesting place to force an intersection with considering the practical applications of decision making and really dig into what is happening.  

    We are probably facing a future where agents deployed in workplace environments are designed to be able to evaluate communication and extend the directions of leadership and executives in terms of a sort of monitoring service across the daily work of the organization. You would have the executive monitoring agent sort of provide soft commentary that maybe this direction or that previous outcome should be considered based on what is currently being proposed. This would create a lot more ongoing continuity of decision making, but it might also expose situations where the executive teams zigs and zags a lot into conflicting directions. Over time based on new information it is possible to move from one position of argument to a new and potentially opposite one. Generally speaking zigging and zagging on a more routine basis than what could be considered over time could be highly confusing as it takes awhile for a decision to be communicated anyway.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl

  • 20241223

    All that testing made the daily weblog statistics look way more healthy than usual. During the course of writing I tend to write a general stream of consciousness at this time of the morning. It’s before daybreak and the writing is really just getting started. Things are beginning to move along and the formation of arguments has not really become a part of the day. We are in the philosophy that stands apart from the deeper reason section of the day. Don’t worry that condition does not continue for very long; the arrival of espresso shots tends to sweep it back under the rug in the middle of the grand room of consideration. That is probably where it should be for the most part. It’s good to ponder the nature of philosophy, but that cannot make up the majority of my day or things have gotten pretty far off track. 

    Over the last 10 days, I have been making regular posts to the weblog in the form of just old fashioned blogging. Most of it has been at the start of the day, but some of it has been at the end of the day. It’s not as much planned with purpose as it is a reintroduction of a daily routine. I’m not entirely sure what the end result of that type of effort will end up being. The writing process normally begins with some thoughts about writing or routine. Generally speaking it’s not very focused and more or less just happens until something shifts. You could call that the spark of innovation or maybe the thing that we are here for in the greater effort that is writing. My thoughts move from what has happened over the last two paragraphs into the next layer of focus. Yesterday for example I really was thinking about just how many billions of dollars are being spent to commoditize the delivery of AI features into products. 

    A tremendous amount of money is being spent to create what will end up being featured in products. These features won’t really differentiate the product as any product could deploy them as they will be generally commoditized. This is the argument that I started making about AI/ML over a year ago and it to some degree changes my writing output on the subject. I think people are generally getting it wrong when they think that all of these models, agents, and systems are going to be used to build more and more software. That view probably misses the point that system software is just an abstraction from the data layer and business rules. It’s entirely possible that a well designed and deployed model could interact with the underlying data and be the point of interaction with the end user. Zoom out for a second and consider that instead of having to build a huge amount of software the model would present or interact with the end user in real time without having to have pregenerated that entire software layer model for presentation. 

    Major paradigm shifts like what we would have seen in the television show Star Trek coming true where people could just ask the computer to do something and interact with it that way are not very far away. Deployed models with some degree of agency could complete these types of interactions just like the computer did on the television show that dramatized science fiction. This shift is a radical one based on where we are right now given just how much software is being written, maintained, and ultimately abandoned on a daily basis right now. Facing a potential shift away from the software layer to the enabled agent layer of interaction is an interesting thought to consider and examine at a deeper level. It does make me wonder if an immutable data layer would be required to manage knowledge and fact. Beyond that layers of user data or just accepted data would have to exist as well. It’s very different from a traditional software framework where the data would be defined and not fluid or changing depending on the interaction. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl

  • 20241222

    Things are looking a little better today on the weblog design front. I did complete some testing of the new website design on an iPad, MacBook, Android phone, and my Windows machine. That testing was conducted in a frenzy of page refreshes and sizing changes.  It got tested across several different browsers including Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. Things seem to be working out well enough so far with the deployment. We are officially switched over to the WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five (2025) theme. Really digging into using the theme properly is going to take a lot more time and I’m going to need to watch a lot more videos about WordPress design. Right now I fixed the header links and a lot of the spacing and padding.

    I ended up watching the Colorado Avalanche play some hockey this evening. I booted up the Altitude+ application and watched the whole game from start to finish in stunning 1080p resolution. Overall I have been pretty happy with the new streaming solution. It has been nice to watch a lot more Avalanche games.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado