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. 

Footnotes:

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12948