Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: Essays

  • Always working beyond the last point of thought

    Today was one of those days where I spent a lot of time chasing things along. Certainly that can happen from time to time. Right before we went out for dinner the latest issue of my Substack post went up promptly at 17:00 hours. 

    https://nelslindahl.substack.com/p/ai-hardware-risc-v-ai-chips#details

    Every Friday at 17:00 hours a Substack post goes out. I’m getting really close to 104 consecutive weeks of posting. Two years at anything is a real habit for sure. Closing out the last few posts has been much harder than I expected it to be based on the previous run at things. My writing routine is pretty much bulletproof. I wake up just after 05:00 hours on both Saturday and Sunday and devote those early hours throughout the weekend to writing really solid content. Everything throughout the week builds up to that point and writing the final product is about getting to done and clicking publish.

    Earlier today I decided to take a bit of a vacation from Twitter throughout the weekend. That should be easy enough to accomplish. Instead of looking at that application I’m going to focus my attention on old school blogging. Getting back into the habit of sitting down and collecting my thoughts at the end of the day could be a great thing to do for the next few days. Maybe after all those thoughts are collected I’ll be able to capture a wellspring of adventure.

  • Striving for a trajectory of growth

    Yesterday some consideration was given to the idea of transitioning to a very old school method of writing weblog posts. This might be the moment that I’ll flip the switch and write in a slightly different way as things mover forward. Sitting down with pen and paper affords a certain opportunity to sling words without the direct consequence of them being published. Twenty years ago, I just sat down and wrote whatever came to mind without any degree of self-censorship. Returning to that framework of writing might not be entirely possible, but it could be one of those things that would make sense. That would mean writing about whatever mundane things or grand considerations that come to mind at the point of the writing exercise. At the very end of the day, I used to just sit down and write and drop whatever came to mind onto a site hosted with a Microsoft FrontPage backend. That for those of you who do not remember was a WYSIWYG editor that produced HTML pages as a final product.

    Back in those days my grammar, spelling, and overall editing was lacking. Those things have improved over the years, but still have a way to go as with all things we can work to refine our knowledge, skills, and abilities to grow along the way. Perhaps that is the great debate of our time. It’s the questions of striving toward a trajectory of personal and professional growth or living within the moment and simply sustaining things as they are. This same question is asked of both companies and people. Coming out of high school it was strongly suggested that I spend time in college. At the time, I had two choices that stood out on that front. I could have attended the local community college or gone to one of the state colleges. Either way would probably have moving things along in generally the same trajectory. Back in 1999 the cost of college tuition was a lot lower than it currently happens to be and I’m not entirely sure the services being offered are that different.

    Anyway, back to the question at hand really about the nature of striving for a trajectory of growth. We have come so far as a society in general and the nature of changes to our civil society have changed the social fabric in what I broadly consider positive ways. We have a lot more knowledge available to people, science, and medicine. That growth did not come without problematic situations, conditions, and challenges. Looking back on the last 50 years, 100 years, and 200 years things within society have changed a lot and core to that change is technology. I’m not sure today is the day that I have enough time to really sit down and write about the changes to civil society as we approach the intersection of technology and modernity. We have a very real approach of a couple potential singularities that will have profound effects on the nature of our social fabric and how we view civil society in general. Those very real watershed moments have the potential to change things profoundly and we are not particularly ready for those events.

    We will however keep moving along and striving for that perfect possible future as we work together toward pathing that allows for personal and professional betterment. At the very heart of that social compact that we share remains some things core to the freedoms that we need to generally work together toward that end of personal betterment. At the moment, I should take a bit more time to write about community and draw these arguments out with support and logical extension. That however is not entirely practical as the day is grinding to a start. Sunrise is still about 30 minutes away, but I won’t be able to capture that entire block of time and use it for writing. Other obligations are about to step in and separate me from this work processing document. That is the necessity of things that require time and are commitments outside of the opportunity to write freely at the start of the day. Commitments stack up over time and that seems to be a central truth of adulting.

  • Thinking about the nature of civil society

    A bit of time was committed to thinking about the sheer volume of Substrack newsletters I’m receiving right now. It’s enough that I’m not reading all of them right now. They really seem to show up in waves at this point. During the course of that pondering activity I took the time to unsubscribe to a bunch of different newsletters from restaurants and online catalogs. The amount of email I’m getting was simply taking up too much time on a daily basis. Deciding how to spend our limited amounts of time is an important thing to consider. My regular writing routine is pretty straightforward. Each day my Fitbit watch wakes me up by vibrating instead of being a loud alarm sound. I get up and either drink a cup of coffee or two shots of espresso. After letting the dogs in and out of the house, I sit down and look at the blank page and begin the process of writing. That is the desired outcome of my daily routine. The steps really are to wake up, get coffee, manage dogs, and start writing. 

    Sometimes this regularly scheduled writing routine works well enough. I start to consider the world and within that process I’m tilting at my own personal windmill known as the perfect possible future. To that end, I ponder the world as it is and try to figure out the best possible path forward. Within that pathing is how I view a lot of things like the intersection of technology and modernity. We stand at a very unique point in the totality of our civilization. We will probably see the singularity in our lifetime where technology moves beyond a resting state to a state of pure motion. That means some level of self-sustaining technology will occur as the intersection of technology and modernity occurs. Within that eclipse of possibility and technology the other side of things will be distinctly different. It is something that is probably going to happen and it is not as well understood as it should be right now. 

    I spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of civil society. My considerations include how communities of practice, circumstance, and interest will change within the intersection of technology and modernity. At the very core of our social fabric that brings civil society together we may see things changing within a layer of technology that did not exist before and could rapidly change. This week the researchers over at Google’s DeepMind have claimed to be close to artificial general intelligence (AGI). Those types of claims are what make me really sit back and think deeply about things that will be different. It makes me wonder about how civil society will change.

  • A bit of moving along the path

    Yesterday, I accidentally wrote a post for my Substack newsletter. It had been intended to be a weblog post and it was well on the way to completion when it looked a lot more substantive than it should have been. Instead of the type of stream of consciousness related content that ends up being my defacto functional journaling on this weblog this was entirely contained and structured. To that end I went ahead and crossed out a planned publication and put this one into the slot for week 67. Being able to switch things up is important as sometimes during the course of working a writing backlog you have to change up the priority and work something different. Mixing it up can help keep the content fresh and topical to current events. However, that cannot be the only consideration. The content has to be written in a way that it can remain useful even a year or five years later. 

    Within my regular writing routine I have about 90 minutes in the morning that are mine to direct toward writing and sorting out the organization of my day. You could call it my time of ordering my steps along a path to a perfect possible future. Most of the time it consists of writing within a word processing document until my attention is pulled elsewhere to something else along the way. Today is an example of that routine and I’m pleased that it occurred. During our spring break trip I was not able to maintain my writing schedule. I had worked ahead within the Lindahl Letter posts on Substack. That effort actually yielded a 4 week buffer at one point. That buffer has been reduced down to two extra weeks of content. Adding the audio recording to the mix related to the podcast part of the process really stopped me from tinkering with the posts after they are completed. Within the ability to tinker I just easily move on to the next block of writing on the backlog. 

    A few notes from yesterday:

    After dinner I watched Star Trek: Picard, season 2, episode 2, titled “Penance”.

    Before going to bed I listened to a Dream Theater album titled, “New Millennium: The Classic Broadcast 1999.”

  • A bunch of words on a Friday morning

    Reworking my 5 year writing plan and really digging into that was a powerful motivator. It was exciting to deeply consider what’s next in terms of writing and producing content. I never really want my research trajectory to get bogged down and stagnant. Part of my journey into the world of research and understanding is endeavoring to learn every single day. We have a wealth of content to learn about every day. People and now bots are producing a tremendous amount of content. Enough content is being produced to consider it flooding and in some cases highly overcrowded. In my case the peak production of my prose a year is around a million words. Some generative models can produce that within the use of one prompt cycle. I would argue at this point that my million words are better, but for how much longer that will hold true I’m uncertain. Millions of my written words were shared in a file for a GPT-2 model to work with and produce output. Within only a few cycles of training that model will very quickly start writing and writing and veering off into tangents. 

    My ability to refocus from writing about the process of writing which happens on this weblog a lot. Based on my tag cloud it is a preponderance of what I produce these days. A lot of my other content is written into academic papers, manuscripts, talks, and potentially produced for a newsletter. All of that content would have to be bundled together to really give the model a chance at producing prose that more closely matches my style and switching between stream of consciousness style musing that happen here in a weblog format and the more structured academic writing that happens one bit a time. Generally I write an academic article by producing a core of text that gets broken down into parts or I start with a shell of what needs to be produced and work on it by expanding the outline bit by bit and paragraph by paragraph until it is a comprehensive work. I’ll admit that if the idea has been something that I considered deeply before sitting down to write it is possible that I could write from start to finish a short research paper. That has happened before. I typically make presentations that way as well. The entire thing will sort of get worked out in my thoughts by the power of imagination and then the act of creating media happens after that as I translate my vision to the page or in some cases the slide. 

    A lot of my writing production ends up like this page of content where a stream of consciousness at the very start of the day or at the end of the day I sit down and just record my thoughts. It is quintessentially the act of thinking out loud except with a keyboard instead of vocalizing anything. My preferred format for response and argument is in writing. Well measures and considered arguments are always more interesting to me in general. Debating verbally typically develops into a pattern of exchange where give and take is reduced to the sharing of single arguments sometimes that are reduced to a soundbyte. We need to get back to really long form arguments where the important things are deeply considered. Some type of shared perspective and understanding is necessary to rebuild the social fabric that allows people to work with and find reasonable consensus. People who come together to live and form communities have some foundation for doing that. We have a lot more in common from the normative assumptions of our community than we do from the edge of theory where conflict exists. Triangulation of political differences has created a degree of polarization from the edge that exhausted the resilience of our shared social fabric. 

    My thoughts have wandered a little bit into the philosophy of community this morning. That is bound to happen I guess. A lot of my energy is going to need to be focused on working on outlines and drafts to the things in my 5 year writing plan that was shared yesterday. One of the more surprising elements of that planful list was that it did not contain any reference to the 100 pages of contact strategy for campaigns book that is sitting unfinished. Earlier this year during a super burst of productivity I cleaned up and shared a bunch of content previously written, but shelved. For some reason, that bit of research which has a lot of time invested into creating it has just been put on the backburner. Maybe I should keep a list of false starts as well in case during a fit of writer’s block it becomes prudent to jump back into one of those stalled projects to kickstart something better. Sometimes working on something that is lacking and otherwise undesirable is enough to bring a creative spark to the forefront. 

  • A much slower day

    Today is one of those days where letting go of things to get to a zero space is really hard. I generally try to clear my mind of all thoughts and concerns before starting the writing process. Getting to that zero space just did not happen today. The pain from the pinched nerve in my neck is not back or anything like that as a blocker. For some ineffable reason the calmness at the moment of being present remains elusive today. A little bit of chaos reigns this morning and it really did manifest with some dirty writers block this morning. We are about 100 words into the process of writing today and I’m still working to shake off that layer of doubt and plunge into the act of writing meaningful prose. Certainly, the very best way to get to that point is to keep writing and working on progressing forward. Sometimes the very act of typing and working to move forward can kick start the process. 

    Today is by far a much slower day than it should be for sure. Without question the first 30 minutes of the day so far were a wash in terms of getting things done. Things feel like approaching an uncomfortable space weighted down and without clarity. Maybe within the confines of that scenario something more interesting will emerge like some time of allegory that resonated like the cave from Plato. Lofty as that goal might be it is better to strive toward something of permanence in the long run from usefulness than to accept the chilling effect of total writing false start. As you can gather from these stilted and otherwise unrefined words this second paragraph did not fare all that better than the first one today. It’s possible that the home stretch of this page will break on through to something with a deeper meaning. 

    Uncertainty abounds and in its wisdom the possible dances before us. Without the possible chaos of uncertainty the path to a perfect possible future would be absolute. Variability and chaotic progress bring forward the essence of what makes us react to the intersection of the present and the path that moves us along to that perfect possible future. Within that dissonance and the choices that are made we abide the possible and strive. Perhaps it is within that dance of striving toward a future that helps us deal with the very nature of uncertainty. Taking a methodological approach with each step punctures the web of uncertainty and clears a little bit of a view into the perfect possible future, but nowhere enough to really ever be able to get a truly unobstructed view. That inherently is the dance between the now and a perfect possible future that stands as an ideal away from the pressures that confine us and raise uncertainty.

  • Beyond the structures and forms

    Today is going to be filled with potential options to do something useful. It is going to be one of those days where more paths are open than choices can be made to take. This happens from time to time and picking the right ones is essential to maximizing the potential of the day. Sure one path exists where the perfect possible future is realized, but that dance is sometimes beyond the structures and forms we follow will allow. Maybe that is the quintessential problem we face and need to spend time solving. It is a very real challenge to figure out how to get things done and done well within the structures and forms we have available. We also face a very real implied normativity that directs convention in what could be described as the forms. Those two things working together constrain a possible set of paths forward. I could elect at this point to spend the rest of the day doing nothing but studying applied cryptography, but consequences would exist to that decision. The output of that study and effort would be unlikely to outweigh the consequences. 

    My thoughts at the moment are at least more focused on the edge of what is possible than tactical questions. In terms of all the ways the start of the day could have gone this path is much better than the alternative. Now we can round out that first thought into a question of action. Aligning to a path that strives toward the perfect possible future. At this junction in the inquiry, I am thinking about the common purpose of advancing both my own intellectual pursuits and strengthening the fabric of civil society. Both of those things are in my own self interest, but they are generally silos of action compared to each other. We exist within the moment of reflection as we take action. Each step forward, to the side, or backward is a reflection of a choice made in that moment. We have a space of reflection that can be used to consider and reflect or to drive action. Making a very conscious decision to use that space of reflection to drive toward a purpose like striving toward a perfect possible future is one way to sharpen action. Inside of that contemplation is inherently a choice to action. Retreating like a turtle into itself rarely is the action that moves things forward. I suppose some very special cases of an action paradox exist where standing still makes the most sense. Even the notion of waiting a turn for an outside action to complete seems more reasonable than the turtle’s defensive withdrawal. 

    Action at its very nature and paths forward have been considered and the day is still beginning. Maybe today is the day that the right first step is followed by enough reasonably correct steps that a continuity of action builds toward something meaningful. That is an entirely plausible thought at the moment and that is inherently exciting if not thrilling as a way to start the day. These are the complex ideas we have to consider during this grand chautauqua of existence. Within that moment of reflection the structures of our institutions provide guard rails toward certain outcomes. Several days of work are the basic project we see enumerated as the expected outcome of a week. We see that day of work as being the basic unit of complexly interconnected communities. Maybe the summation of that is a bit harder to compel to exist in written form, but the idea is on the edge of what is possible. Describing the grand interconnected nature of economy and intergenerational equity remains a valid pursuit. That is probably where we need to wrap up this course of the chautauqua. More will come as the series of learning never stops from one day to the next.

  • Thinking about being principled

    I have a note here that today is the day this writing session should focus on writing with principles. At first this morning, I read that as writing with purpose. I was thinking that writing 3 paragraphs about writing with a purpose should be pretty easy. It took a few moments to realize that writing about principles is harder than writing about purpose. You have to sit down and try to grasp at the foundation of things to write about principles that matter. Maybe we would be better off if more time was spent trying to explain principles in the public square, news media, or just during internet based discussions. I could reduce the scope of this writing challenge and just focus on writing about economic principles. That would be one way to focus this effort on a few key principles. You could spend some time researching economic principles and that would be an interesting look down the rabbit hole of published and commonly shared research. 

    One way to start digging into thinking about principles would be to try to figure out a few normative principles. That could start the journey on a road built around ethics. Maybe that is a harder place to start than a road built around economics, but it could be a lot more fun that way. Either way the concepts being covered within those fields seems to be secondary to the way people consume knowledge these days. Yesterday I read a note from somebody that argued within the media you can find coverage from whatever point of you are seeking. That made me think about the process of filing a story in a newsroom. It used to be that articles were filled and editors provided a real true curation and testing of the concepts and ideas being brought forward. Our news cycles were curated in a more thoughtful and less rushed fashion. Now being first within the never ending stream of media is the key defining element of the process instead of any type of curation or testing. The test for releasing things into the world seems to be speed instead of making a contribution to the academy of knowledge we share. That distinction is the key element of why learning principles and understanding the frameworks of complex philosophy gave way to situational decision making. Reactions to things have taken over for decision making and the normative ethics that should exist have given way as the normative game around us brokedown and were replaced by something deeply troubling. 

    We have to accept some fundamental truths and build out some type of normative ethics to begin the journey together toward some type of working civil society. At the moment, I wonder if we have nothing to share but a stream of first in the pool articles being filed as news, social media utterances, and a fractured public square. Naturally I want to turn this set of arguments toward something inherently positive focused on how a return to principled action could benefit everybody, but I’m still trying to figure out what foundation is shared anymore than would be a basis for a shared understanding. It’s entirely possible that the public mind has become two more minds that need some type of deep conceptual bridge to facilitate communication between them to be built. That is the argument that scares me the most when I think about the future.

  • Things that go unsaid

    Recently I have been wondering about the things that go unsaid within civil discourse. At this moment, a lot of civil discourse is occurring in our media and content drivin versions of the public square and in groups of all sizes. Even the best form of communication has limits. Communication on social media is inherently limited in both the audience and size of the files being shared. Outside of that limitation, generally during the exchange of information only so much time exists for one person to listen and for the other to talk. Even within standalone writing, video, or audio recordings the same time limit exists for the respondent. Time is a scarce and valuable resource. Some people go as far as describing time as the root of all value. Given how powerful a claim that is about the value of time it is easy to imagine that some things go unsaid just from the structural imperfections inherent in the communication methods we have to use. That is not the part of the question or the problem that I’m trying to ponder in terms of the things that go unsaid within civil discourse. My aim here is to ponder how to help repair civility and allow civil society to work in general for everyone. Within that last sentence a hypothesis might be implied that the things that go unsaid are breaking down the frameworks that allow civil society to function and civility to ensure. Essentially that hypothesis is probably where the bulk of my thoughts are squarely focused today on questions about modernity and where we are at as a society.

    Spending time thinking about the fabric of our constitutional republic beyond government is deeply meaningful. It is essentially spending time thinking about the foundation of social institutions and the normative framework that underpins discourse in the public square. Beyond time constraints imposed within the cable news cycle, the print publishing cycle, and the inherent limitations of soundbytes discourse in the public square seems to be full of things that go unsaid. Within interpersonal relationships I tend to personally favor a variant of radical candor both in the workplace and outside of it. My strategy for communication is outside the standard normative framework. That has been the case for over twenty years. My behavior is not setting any type of trend. That has not stopped me from spending a lot of time in the previous decade thinking about the intersection of technology and modernity and what that means for society in general. In this time of global pandemic and quarantine I’m spending a lot more time wondering about the modernity part of that equation. Technology seems less important right now and is probably secondary to the considerations at hand, The modernity part of the equation right now in his watershed moment of pandemic seems to be changing the nature of discourse in terms of the things that normally go unsaid. 

    Contemporaneity would generally describe this window of time where a shared experience of people who lived in this time of pandemic and experienced a change in discourse occurred. Watershed events like the one that is occurring end up creating some type of intergenerational equity between all the generations that experience the event. Perhaps that is where I should spend my time pondering for the rest of the day and into tomorrow. Within the shadow of modernity things are changing based on how the contemporaneity of the two events combined with the intergenerational nature of the shared experience. My initial reaction is that the shared part of the common experience is what is changing public discourse. Having a shared frame of reference is a very important part of communication.  

  • Even very basic things

    Things are moving along, but these are indeed strange times. Even very basic efforts to communicate the totality of what is occurring in the world seem to be failing. A comprehensive look at where we are is nearly impossible. Taking the time to write one would create a scenario where a time capsule would exist of that movement, but enough time would have passed that it would no longer be a comprehensive snapshot of the moment. The rate of change is faster than our ability to report and consume it. Within that argument is a very interesting situation. Newspapers are designed to provide an ongoing stream of events. A really good newsroom and editors can craft that stream of events into an ongoing narrative that the readership would share. Generally the way news is commonly consumed the curated part of the narrative is typically lost to the speed of reporting the event. Something worth talking about has to happen and words are written. That is very different from writing a weblog post. Engaging in the act of journaling and writing thoughts is very different than reporting the news. I write to think about the world around me and to help structure and refine ideas. None of that is about explaining when events happen to anyone. 

    Really the only event that I tend to write about is the intersection of technology and modernity. Given the ongoing nature of that event and how long it has taken for technology to intersect with modernity it is not really something that a newspaper would cover. That is probably the same set of reasons why common news reporting does not wrestle with the nature of civil society and the complex breakdown of the social fabric that normally brings people together. Underlying frameworks and things that are highly complex tend to be categorized as something other than events. Even very basic things tend to receive a degree of coverage that explains only the occurrence not the underlying reasons why that occurrence came to be or what is swirling just under the surface of the event being reported. My thoughts today seem to be very focused on how things are being communicated within society. Within this time of pandemic a lot of things are at the forefront of the public mind and some of them are very powerful in terms of evaluating history and the context of things. A lot of them are about people trying to figure out what to do and what path to take forward. None of that internal and ongoing public debate centers around the intersection of technology and modernity. The debate both internal and external seems to be more about modernity than technology.    

    Right now is a moment in our history where the very nature of modernity stands in review at the forefront of the public mind. Questions abound about what modernity has created for society. A certain contemporaneousness exists between the internal and external debates that are ongoing. Characterizing the entire debate as being at the forefront of the public mind seems accurate. Understanding that a part of that debate is being reserved from the public conversation is what probably sparked this entire page of prose. Writing a sweeping criticism of modernity from the ongoing news coverage would be missing something. Inherent within that last sentence is the part of the argument being reserved and that is what I’m curious about. My argument would be that it is not about fashionableness or anything near the popular culture elements of modernity. Instead, I would argue that the debate both on the surface and in the reserved part is really about civility and the nature of how we work together within civil society. Those are very fundamental questions about the foundation of what happens within our constitutional republic beyond government. They are very foundational questions about how the people who interact with civil society interact with each other. It is a question about how even very basic things work together to create civility or discord.