My Nespresso Vertuo coffee maker had been stuck in the descaling mode for the last 2 days. This was highly disappointing given that I really enjoy having two shots of espresso every morning. I put maybe 10 total full refills of water into the machine and let them run within the descaling mode into a red plastic bowl. Weirdly enough the process of refilling the water and the indicator turning red from overheating just happened over and over again. The solution ended up being only filling up the water reservoir with a small cup a few times in a row and eventually getting the machine to open, closing it and pressing down on the handle button combo, and after that it went back to regular operations. It was a very frustrating situation. I could not just sit and watch the machine malfunction for hours on end. To be clear the engineers working for Nespresso product design should have made an actual physical switch that said descaling mode and if you wanted to turn that off you could switch it back to regular operations. The current weird combo of clicking things and reading color combinations is beyond difficult to use and from reading the comments of many frustrated users online the current design is not very effective.
Oh my goodness; that Tuesday vibe is just everywhere today. I’m already thinking about lunch at the very start of the day which is never really a good sign for things. My primary breakfast food is Huel and that has worked out well enough. This Tuesday turned out to be extra full of Tuesday vibes. That is just how it goes sometimes. Watching the Colorado Avalanche and the Jayhawks are both options tonight. Both games are actually on ESPN+ which is odd to have happened at the same time. The games actually overlap so I will probably be jumping around between the two games. Streaming service fragmentation for sports viewing has gotten out of control.
I updated the WordPress theme header and footer to be more centered in style to make them work better across multiple types of views. Based on a couple of initial tests I’m pleased with how the design turned out. The design is probably locked in for the foreseeable future and with the drama surrounding WordPress who knows if this will be the last ever major theme release.
My blog posts are mostly just my thoughts at the time. It’s not a prompt based model generation using some type of system to generate the content. This in the end is content written the old fashioned way by an author at a keyboard making the prose happen. Beyond writing every day I spend time reading academic articles. Within that mission, yesterday, I ended up reading that DeepSeek article on my iPad and it turned out I had to turn it sideways to be able to actually read the text [1]. Sometimes I can read articles in the vertical mode, but the ones that are single columns end up needing that extra viewing space. It was a pretty easy to read article and it felt like it might have been written by or at least heavily edited by the very model they were explaining. Years ago I used to print articles and keep them in stacks on my desk and really all over my office. That was a different time and I’m not sure the same process would even really work for me anymore. I tend to read things on my computer screen and now on the iPad. Key ones get saved to my cloud storage files so I can easily get back to them in the version that I read at the time.
I’m considering spending some time selecting a couple of topics and writing solid literature reviews. It feels like that might be a good way to get back into the habit of crafting article style blocks of content that are a lot more than a simple research note. It’s totally possible to build a collection of research notes and compile or distill that content into something more substantial. Based on my writing plan each morning on the weekends I have time to work on that type of effort.
Focused writing matters. Producing really good prose on a daily basis is about the practice of writing. It’s gearing up to engage in the process of producing written words. Working on longer pieces of prose does benefit from sitting down and sketching out the path of things that should be produced. Just writing a single page and working to produce within the stream of consciousness method is a little different. I know that even during those writing sessions that are just focused on the actual act of creating whatever comes to the forefront of thought it is something where I need to remain focused and recognize that the writing matters. I don’t want to just produce a string of bullet points that lack focus or just have no real context for the reader.
I’m going to spend some time today reading the new academic paper from the DeepSeek artificial intelligence company [1]. They trained a model using a lot less hardware than comparable models which is interesting. I have saved the paper to my iCloud drive AI papers folder and it will be read on my iPad later today. It’s 22 pages and looks like a relatively easy read. By easy I mean that it is not wall to wall mathematics which makes a paper much harder for me to read as walking through other peoples mathematics generally takes me a lot longer than reading some text.
I’ll be curious to see if the methodology could be extended to run within my more complex knowledge reduce framework. Training would have to occur after the knowledge reduce transformation to make the model more efficient. The other method would be to use a multiple call framework that calls the knowledge repository before or during the primary model query. This is the same type of thing that would occur when you prioritize knowledge graph content over generated model content. My guess is that mixtures of knowledge graphs will be used with the next generation of models. You can only derive so much understanding of the world around you before context provides the additional information you need for understanding. Deriving context is a lot more layered and complex given that the context of why a word, situation, or action has a deeper meaning might be implied and not frequently cited. It’s also possible that meaning drifts over time meaning that contextual drift makes deriving the meaning situational. That is a lot harder to derive and keep in context.
I’m super interested in trying to make a list of what I would describe as my anchor articles or the things that I have written that would be the first things somebody should read. Naturally the next step in that process would be to figure out how to produce more of those primary anchor articles and less of the stuff toward the bottom of the list. As an intellectual exercise this would be pretty simple to accomplish. I would take a sheet of paper and divide it into 4 quadrants. Within the top left quadrant let’s call it section one and fill it with the most important written works. You should take a moment and write down as many things as you can think of and consider them to be a good anchor work or writing. Next move to the right top quadrant and begin to cross items off of the first quadrant and move them into the secondary bucket. It’s ok they cannot all be box one writing top shelf works of content. Get some content moved over.
After working on that 2nd quadrant for a while, move down to the bottom left quadrant. Let’s just call it the 3rd box and write down everything else you can think of as a written work. Some things just won’t come to mind and that is okay. Some writing efforts end up being forgettable. Logically those are the blocks of content that are trending toward the 4th quadrant of this paper that will be contained in the bottom right box. You can start to cross off things from the 2nd or 3rd quadrants and move them to the final 4th box. Those are the ones we are really interested in understanding. You cannot move all poor writing efforts into the stop doing category of prose generation. It’s going to happen false starts are as important a part of the process as the winners. Very few people are going to sit down and write one thing and it’s a quadrant one absolute winner then just stop producing new content. That would be a pretty rare thing to have happened. Most people write a variety of things and some of them are better than others and that is just a part of the process.
Trying to consider the things that ended up getting crossed out and moved to another quadrant and why that might be the case is important. You want to figure out what would have helped that content be better or maybe it should be rewritten now with new context or maybe your writing skills improved and now is the time to make it even better. It’s also possible that the writing itself was fine and the idea limited what quadrant it might end up living in during this exercise. Some of those things could end up being more appreciated later or it was just forgettable. I have written millions of words and some of that prose is interesting and a lot of it is not interesting. That is just the nature of being an avid writer.
Teams at both Apple and Samsung are working on non-invasive glucose monitors in watch form which is exciting. That will be a product that helps a lot of people. It will be a very useful application of technology to provide real time information to people. I think we are going to see a lot of wearable health technology going forward. People seem to have an appetite for it and the technology is now reaching a place where things are becoming possible that could be really interesting.
Yesterday morning, I took the time to scroll all the way back to the start of my Google Keep feed this morning. Right now I am way back in my notes from 2013 to 2017. I’m going to share some of the more interesting ones. A lot of them just got archived in Google Keep. Very few were just deleted.
Writing like a memory jukebox that produces one story at a time
What is the utility of all the reminders of a certain day image or notes from agents?
Write a modern treatise on society based on expanding observation from a single person’s perspective to a wider social net
Where is all the innovation happening? Does that change over time?
Has social media fragmentation changed local business marketing?
A really weird setting of what should have been an asynchronous meeting because the person is not really ready to fully participate. Person is so busy that they can only engage to be critical and ask questions but are not ready for the second wave of questions or to provide any additional context.
Organizing and sustaining decentralized communities of interest. AKA Community organizing revisited: The basics of organizing are pretty simple. Fundamentally this is a treatise on how to bring people together for a common purpose. A community is a diverse ecosystem that has a number of stakeholders and competing interests. Initially building an organizational map of the community takes time and access to key stakeholders. A shared purpose toward a common outcome is the basic building block of an organically built sustainable community. Organizing decentralized communities requires more than basic political methods. Political organizing and fundraising has become more targeted, but at the same time it has become less personal. A political contributor may make donations and read emails from a group without any personal relationship with the organization. Follow up sections: Mapping the networks, Triangulation strategy, Digital vs. Personal, Managing the message, Building frameworks, and Sustainability vs. Outcomes.
Civility’s commons: an uncommon civility
Do people really trust a user group to define the future of a product?
Questions about how faculty at colleges become a commodity. Does this demonstrate an oversupply of potential faculty or some other change?
Survey fatigue breaking the polling industry
Influencing the public mind: a study of multichannel influence and the public mind
Build an economic model using the original Google search algorithm
Revisit sentiment mining paper
Some of the things that got stored in Google Keep are things that were not a part of my backlog system or really anything beyond a note taken at the time. The context is now gone and some of the notes are really short. Most of my notes are a few words and that is it in Google Keep. A few of them are longer like the ones above. If I went back to trying to write 3,000 words or more per day, then it would be a great prompt library to help use the current context to evaluate the prompt and produce content. Honestly, none of the bullets above caused the spark of innovation to get me to write about them in a meaningful way.
Sometimes we look out to see what is ahead of us and try to understand what is coming or going to happen next. It’s that big set of questions that helps us position ourselves to strive forward toward something. Within that path forward some things seem to be better than others. We can probably tread water without striving forward for some time, but nothing remains that stationary. It just does not play out that way. During the course of my deeper thoughts about the perfect possible path forward I started to think about adopting a strategy of total absorb.
To that end maybe just maybe it really is time to activate the total absorb mode and begin the process of being a true information sponge. Being a lifelong learner has to be about both the accumulation of knowledge and the ability to pick up new and complex things. We are moving toward a different scenario for code development and software building. Things are changing. One thing that seems not to be changing is this podcast I listened to about streaming sports content.
Maybe it’s time to revisit where to jump back into academic journal writing. That is where it all circles back to as a jumping off point. It’s maybe time to think about that and what it would take to really begin anew within that space.
Nothing of note got written yesterday. The words and I just did not get along. It was a day where things just did not line up for the creation of some prose. Tonight we have both a Kansas Jayhawks game and an Avalanche game. That should be a recipe for a little bit of time to engage in some writing. Right now the MacBook Air is being protected by that Glitty Padauk themed case. It has increased the weight of the device, but I’m getting used to making the switch between my desk and the sofa. Part of the writing experience seems to happen toward the end of the day during the course of watching some live sports. I’m going to try to engage in a little bit of deep thinking.
My 60 minutes of treadmill time today did not go by very quickly. Even with the Jayhawks on the television the time just seemed to linger. I don’t have any links to share for today. It is a day of pure thought and reason without any media that needs to be shared. We have reached the point in the writing process where I have already staged the future weblog post. That means anything written from this point forward is going to have to be pasted in over the original post from Google Docs over into WordPress. I’m still getting constant articles in my Google News feed about the actual drama over at WordPress that has been occurring. That is a story that will at some point get dramatized into some sort of theatrical content.
Today I’m going to spend some time writing and cleaning up some files before the Colorado Avalanche game. Previously I spent some time wondering about what will happen with all the files being stored in cloud drives. Intellectually I know that most of these files will just end up getting abandoned and that over time we will just have this large amount of data that is just existing without anyone ever accessing it again. I would be curious to see what percentage of files saved to the cloud are written to disk and never touched again. I would be willing to guess the amount of photos, videos, and other randomly saved files that reach the cloud and are just stored without ever being used again is probably pretty large. Even with the cost of storage having dropped so much over the years the volume of storage occurring makes that glacier of never accessed files just mind blowing.
Today I did spend some time listening to this Machine Learning Street Talk video. I also downloaded the first paper referenced and saved it to my iCloud drive to read later on my iPad [1].
This was a fantastic interview with Jürgen Schmidhuber.
I was curious what the WordPress to Bluesky integration via Jetpack social looked like so I created this test post. I’m making the big switch from posting my treadmill and hockey content on Threads to sharing that content on Bluesky going forward. The WordPress integration seemed to be pretty easy to set up, but I wanted to see what the content actually looked like in action. The social preview indicates that the first couple of sentences will get posted within Bluesky with the link to the actual WordPress content.
I took a quick screenshot of what the post ended up looking like over on Bluesky. The integration appears to work as advertised and was pretty easy to set up.
It does not appear that updates made to the post after publishing have any impact within the Bluesky integration so that is good. It would be unfortunate if every update triggered another integration event.
Yesterday during the evening I listened to this Kirk Hammett interview for a second time from start to finish during an NFL playoff game. The NFL game was on mute. This interview is probably the most I have ever heard Kirk Hammett communicate with somebody. I have the Metallica albums from the start to the black album on vinyl record. They are sitting in my office and I always enjoy listening to them, but I had never really heard Kirk talk in a longer format about guitars and music.
I’m leaning into the process of sharing links and other things during the course of daily blogging. You have probably noticed that the podcast and video links that catch my interest are now being shared inline with the weblog. All I can say to that new change in content delivery is that you are of course welcome to enjoy all the epic content.
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