Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: News

This is a feed of my comments on news stories.

  • Getting setup to complete work

    This is indeed another desktop setup post. Sit back and relax as these words about my desktop setup show up to complete this post. I’m getting used to working with a MacBook throughout the day. While it was jarring at first and it took a little bit of research along the way to figure out how to make things work I am now reasonably ok as a Mac user. I’m currently using a “Dell – WD22TB4 Thunderbolt 4 Docking Station” to switch from a MacBook to a MacBook Air depending on what type of computing effort is being done. Using thunderbolt cables I have two Dell 38 inch monitors connected to the docking station via USB-C. For the last couple of weeks this setup has been working swimmingly well. I have things set up where I can just move a single USB-C cable and a power cable to switch out my entire computing experience.

    What content did I consume this week?

    Hard Fork is always a great listen each week check out episode 96
    I do listen to a little bit of the WAN show each week
    This is a good walk on how phishing emails work
  • Getting ready for the weekend

    Subscribe to continue reading

    Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.

  • Learning LangChain

    Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 142 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “Learning LangChain.”

    And now it’s time to pivot toward the “Learning LangChain” topic…

    The most fun introduction to LangChain seems to be from DeepLearning.ai with Andrew Ng and Harrison Chase [1]. You can expect to spend a couple of hours to complete the process of watching the videos and absorbing the content. Make sure you use a browser window large enough to support both the jupyter notebook and the video. You are probably going to want these items to run side by side. This course covers models, prompts, parsers, memory, chains, and agents. The part of this learning package that I was the most interested in learning more about was how people are using agents and of course what sort of plugins could that yield as use cases in the generative AI space. Going forward I think agency will be the defining characteristic of the great generative AI adventure. These applications are going to do things for you and some of those use cases are going to be extremely powerful. 

    After that course I wanted to dig in more and decided to go ahead and learn everything I could from the LangChain AI Handbook [2]. This handbook has 6 or 7 chapters depending on how you count things. My favorite part about this learning build is that they are using Colab notebooks for hands-on development during the course of the learning adventure. That is awesome and really lets you get going quickly. A side quest spawned out of that handbook learning which involved starting to use Pinecone in general which was interesting. You can do a lot with the Pinecone including building AI agents and chatbots. 

    I’m going to spend some time working on the udemy course “Develop LLM powered applications with LangChain” later this weekend [3]. You can also find a ton of useful information within the documentation for LangChain including a lot of content about agents [4].

    You might now be wondering what alternatives to LangChain exist… I started looking around at AutoChain [5], Auto-GPT [6], AgentGPT [7], BabyAGI [8], LangDock [9], GradientJ [10], Flowise AI [11], and LlamaIndex [12]. Maybe you could also consider TensorFlow to be an alternative. You can tell from the combination of companies and frameworks being built out here a lot of attention is on the space between LLMs and taking action. Getting to the point of agency or taking action is where these spaces are gaining and maintaining value. 

    Footnotes:

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

    [2] https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/langchain/ 

    [3] https://www.udemy.com/course/langchain/

    [4] https://python.langchain.com/docs/modules/agents/ 

    [5] https://github.com/Forethought-Technologies/AutoChain 

    [6] https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT

    [7] https://github.com/reworkd/AgentGPT

    [8] https://github.com/miurla/babyagi-ui 

    [9] https://www.langdock.com/ 

    [10] https://gradientj.com/ 

    [11] https://flowiseai.com/ 

    [12] https://www.llamaindex.ai/ 

    What’s next for The Lindahl Letter? 

    • Week 143: Social media analysis
    • Week 144: Knowledge graphs vs. vector databases
    • Week 145: Delphi method & Door-to-door canvassing
    • Week 146: Election simulations & Expert opinions
    • Week 147: Bayesian Models

    If you enjoyed this content, then please take a moment and share it with a friend. If you are new to The Lindahl Letter, then please consider subscribing. New editions arrive every Friday. Thank you and enjoy the week ahead.

  • 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.

  • A good Saturday morning of writing

    It was a very solid morning for producing blocks of content. Instead of achieving one block of content creation this morning. Two blocks of content were actually created. Both weeks 133 and 134 were finalized and recorded. That puts me 4 weeks ahead in terms of scheduled posts. It’s nice to be locked in till Friday, August 18, 2023. My writing plan involves trying to ensure one block of content is created every week. Maybe it would be better to go back to the plan for producing a big year of writing content, but trying to produce a solid million words of content in a single year is a big task to try to accomplish. 

    My attention got super focused on E138 of the All-In podcast this morning. Generally, I like to listen to people talk about things in the background. To that end podcasts are pretty great as they provide a continuously updating stream of that type of content. 

    I broke away from the writing project to go see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) at our local theater. My previous rating of the movies stands the same 3-5-1-2-4. I have seen all five movies at least twice per film.

  • Just a bit of blogging about blogging

    I considered installing the ActivityPub plugin to my WordPress instance, but decided against setting up that integration until I know more about what data could be exchanged [1]. A lot of interest in ActivityPub has been building as Threads by Instagram has been launched. Maybe the social web will continue to fall apart or maybe some type of interaction system will be built out of the current ActivityPub standard or whatever comes next from that potential setup. Yesterday, my interest in the Threads application peaked. It was sort of fun to install the application and to see something new. For me the feed experience was just not very good. It was a lot of brands and social influencers trying to engage with me and that is a far cry from the mix of academic Twitter that I interact with mixed with a lot of machine learning and AI related researchers. 

    My Twitter experience has always been pretty good in terms of those academic and research based connections. I’m not in the market for any advertisements of social influencers. My path is pretty clear and my work plan exists and won’t change all that much during the course of my 5 year writing plan. I’m really curious to see what happens with the most active users. All those really active users are going to end up going somewhere and they will build a critical mass. In my estimation it would be unlikely that the mass of the most active users would end up fragmented or broken apart. That need to get to a point of critical mass to allow the social network to be in the end the most social it can be will probably win out over time.

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

  • A day of independent blogging

    It took a couple of days of downtime to get into the flow of spending a bit of time blogging again. Sure you might have guessed, I spent some time thinking about buying a new System76 laptop. Outside of that the good old Pixelbook Go chromebook is still running and the battery oddly still has decent longevity. That Pixelbook was ordered back in October of 2019. As the social web continues to fall apart. No real RSS feed solutions are popping up to jump in and make it all work again. I continue to write, blog, and otherwise create blocks of prose on a weekly schedule. This bit of Independence Day blogging is both independently written and independent in spirit. Fun times abound for those who still want to create and build content.

  • Moving toward some hyperfocus

    Today was productive enough. In the early hours of the morning I was able to lock in the last podcast audio recording for the month of July 2023. I’m staying within the 5 week buffer right now to have content ready to post. For some ineffable reason I have written a number of tweets today. 

    Tweet: Saturday morning podcast recording mischief is now complete.

    Tweet: Today was a day where donut ordering happened early in the morning. We ended up waiting at an intersection for a bunch of cyclists competing in some type of race to pass us. All that waiting was enough to inspire an extra shot of espresso in my iced macchiato.

    Tweet: Sitting at a traffic light. Waiting for the light to cycle. The driver in the car behind me started flailing and otherwise behaving wildly. After a few moments of that increasingly wild behavior, I’m pretty sure he killed a spider with a smartphone. So that happened this weekend.

    Tweet: I might be using @YouTube wrong, but I just open up my subscriptions list and watch videos both on my computer and television. https://youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

  • Considering Twitter subscriptions

    We are back on track with a block of writing happening each week. Right now posts are staged for the next 5 weeks out till July 14, 2023. I woke up this morning and worked on the next block of writing in the backlog. Got it recorded and scheduled to both Substack and the blog. 

    I’m super curious about this feature that Twitter has rolled out called “Subscriptions” to create a monthly income stream for content creators. The most interesting part of the equation is that you have to set the monthly subscription prices and you cannot change it later. Filling out the entire form took a couple of minutes. It required completing these 2 prompts:

    “Take a minute to say hello”

    This bonus content will probably be a bit of inside baseball related to my writing efforts. I have been writing blogs for 20+ years.

    “Describe the perks you’ll offer”

    You will get a few more blocks of content that would otherwise appear on the blog. I’ll try to provide a better look at what is happening.

    My monthly cost would have been $2 as a subscription. That seemed superior to the $1 minimum amount they would have allowed. In theory somebody could have selected the maximum value in the drop down of $239 as the target monthly subscription rate. That seems like an awful lot of subscription cost to get access to some bonus content in Tweet form each month. Maybe somebody who breaks news on a regular basis or a really interesting public figure like Michael Burry (think Big Short fame) could command that maximum value. You could subscribe to most of the major streaming content services for that cost. 

    Assuming the Twitter account devoted to Subscriptions is an accurate source… 

    https://twitter.com/Subscriptions/creator-subscriptions/subscriptions

    In total the system has 3,858 users with accounts that are enabled for the monthly subscription feature. That is actually a larger number than I was expecting. A screenshot is included here as I’m sure the overall numbers will change go forward.

    Apparently, back on May 12, 2023 they reduced the application steps from 27 to 4… 

  • Some things that just keep moving along

    Earlier this week, I went ahead and purged out all the inactive emails from The Lindahl Letter. It was actually a strangely liberating moment of bulk deletion. It’s still a little weird that WordPress is not able to just send over posts right to Twitter anymore. I’m assuming somebody will work out a plugin for that type of thing. At the moment, my solution remains that after publishing I’ll just go to the post and click the share to Twitter option. I’m not entirely sure why doing that is worth the time it takes, but it is another one of those oddly rewarding types of things that will probably keep happening. 

    I did watch the entire Succession series on Max (formerly HBO Max). It really was not a very long series, but it was interesting. It did make me consider buying a tablet, but it was not enough to actually push me over into making a purchase. I have a smartphone, chromebook, and desktop computer. That should be enough computing power to get things done. The majority of the work I’m doing these days is happening at my workstation with the stacked dual monitors. Working out of my office just makes sense when prolonged concentration is required.

    A few times since the launch I have put the Google Pixel Fold in my shopping cart and then given up on making the purchase. Folding phones which would sort of end up being half way between a tablet and a smartphone always seem like a good idea in theory, but the thought of the crease line is enough to stop me from making the purchase.