Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: Writing

  • 20250513

    Things did not come into focus very quickly this morning. Maybe the amount of my deep sleep was off last night or something. My Oura ring thinks things last night went fine. I’m starting to gear up to being in the groove of writing every day. I’m sitting down and thinking about the process of creating larger blocks of prose on a more regular basis. It feels like for better or worse my standard output is about 500 words in a single sitting. Somehow I’m going to need to turn the corner and move into a different writing mode where longer-form essays are getting generated on a daily basis. Maybe the idea here is to switch from short writing sprints to just a little bit better duration management to get closer to a marathon-style effort. Obviously, I don’t really want to write for hours on end to generate 3,000 words at a time, but I think the point is to really get going and unlock the door to creating better blocks of prose. 

    Writers write. That is what they do; they write. The name of the game is writing. To that end, winning is writing, and writing is winning. I learned to write before the rise of these large language models. That makes my writing better (yeah, yeah, I know) as it does not suffer from the dilution that now exists everywhere in the sea of AI slop. We learn and model the writers and writing we prize during the learning process. We have to make a choice to step away from generated content. That means being selective about the news, articles, and books we elect to spend our increasingly precious time and energy consuming and enjoying. Maybe within that framework, I am beginning to argue that to fight the grant deluge, we have to make a conscious choice to write with purpose and clarity. 

    You can’t stop the stream, but you can take time to carve out a better, more unique, perfect possible future with less dilution and more fulfillment. Within that goal of striving forward toward a perfect possible future where things get better is the right direction. It is that trajectory toward something more than helps take things in the right direction. Something about working toward the general betterment has inherent value. We build those communities of place, circumstance, and interest without a coordinated mission, but that does not mean that they have to be devoid of purpose. Within that framework, possibility exists. It fans out from that point into a lot of paths, one of them being a perfect possible future. Maybe somewhere in that argument is the point that counts. It might be something that needs more consideration as we move along this writing journey. 

  • 20250512

    Maybe it is time to pick up the mantle of the big year million-word writing challenge. This next year will be my 45th year on this planet, and maybe just maybe all that time was enough to make this the movement where I’m ready to just sit down and spill all the words out on the page. Both the opportunity, necessity, and sheer desire will be required to make it work. During the course of the last major writing project, trying to write 3,000 words a day, the process fell apart in the middle. A lot of words were written, and things went okay at first, but sustaining that level of output just was not possible at the time. I actually think the best way to do it would be to just go all out and write as many words as possible on the days where the creative spark exists. 

    Trying to produce to or around 3,000 words per day was not the best strategy. I think sometimes you just have to accept that the output is going to be less than the average required to hit the milestone. This MacBook Air is probably not ready for that much typing on this keyboard. I may need to get a new MacBook Air when all is said and done from my big year of writing a million words. The internet (ChatGPT) says that I won’t possibly wear out the keyboard, but I take that as a personal challenge. 

    Part of the point about returning to a state of daily observation is to try to directly combat the creation of middling non-organic prose without a point of view, understanding, or any hope for a perfect possible future. We strive forward while the sludge just captures a reward system while lacking anything redeeming. 

    We tell our stories. Some people do it a lot better than others. Shared stories make up our common understanding of the world around us, and that is what has shattered in recent years. A whole generation has a social media-generated shared understanding that is fragmented based on the ecosystem, community, and supervision they received. We build communities of place, interest, and circumstance. Social media is often apart from the communities we have traditionally built and supported. It’s a consequence of the inherent separation of being online and being apart. 

    Right now, we just hit the 400-word mark for this little writing endeavor. It took me a quick online search to find the show word count feature in Pages under the view section. Right now, it is just sitting at the bottom of the screen, reminding me of just how far from being done with a major block of text I am within this grand writing project for today. Even with a few dozen words whining about the act of writing, we are barely going to get to the 500-word mark, and this is the part of trying to write a million words in a year that I’m most concerned about based on my previous experiences. I don’t want to write a lengthy treatise on the painful act of forced writing projects. That particular observation has been covered at length by many different writers. 

  • 20250511 Week 19

    Really big changes are afoot on the writing front. Beginning this weekend, I started converting my daily writing and researching efforts over to using Safari instead of Google Chrome as a web browser. Yeah, I know, the death rattle of the open web is happening and I’m just now starting the process of changing browsers. This big change makes sense to me here and now in the moment and to that end I’m moving along the path to making the change complete. I’m even right now making the big switch from writing in Google Docs to using Pages on my MacBook Air for the very first time. 

    This passage of prose was my first Pages writing effort. Right from the start, I moved the zoom setting up to 200% to really bring the content into focus on my MacBook Air screen. Outside of that change, everything else is just based on the vanilla out-of-the-box Pages setup. Naming the document and setting the save location to iCloud was easy enough. Right now, my initial reaction to this new word processing environment is to observe that it is very basic and, for the most part, paired down compared to Microsoft Word or Google Docs. It works well enough, and I’m going to commit to giving it a go moving forward. 

    Maybe beyond changing up my word processing environment, it is time to get back to basics in terms of daily writing. My functional journal writing format has been essential to my efforts to be a reflective practitioner. Writing a little bit every day is a good method to actively engage in writing. For the most part, the process of daily writing begets more writing. Getting into the standard groove of producing daily content is an essential part of keeping the content flowing. That is the base level of building up content. Making sure that each block gets started is how the process is able to continue day over day into the end result of eventually building up to a perfect possible future state of evolved and interesting prose. At least that is how it is supposed to end up going. 

    I had spent some time this week looking at the various WordPress Jetpack social sharing options. Right now, I have sharing set up to both Threads and Bluesky. Building out some sort of social sharing plan would make sense at this point, but really my strategy is just to share these weblog posts on two different platforms. Based on previous sharing efforts, neither of those automations yields anything really, so it is more of less a performative action at this point. A lot less than a valid plan and a little bit more than taking no action. At some point, I’m going to have to decide if building longer manuscripts is the way to go or focusing on writing better research notes could end up being a singular focus. 

    I used the Pages Writing Tools to proofread this document. It made about 20 changes. 

  • 20250504 Week 18

    The archive for this weblog has been set to private for any posts published before 2025. That means 2,382 posts are not set to private. Only 51 remain public before this one goes live. Intellectually I know that some of those older posts are part of archives or were scrapped for training. My writing style is uniquely mine and I don’t think it can be truly mimicked, it can only be reasonably replicated. Right now the current generation of models are able to take a corpus of my writing and spit out fairly convincing prose written in my style. 

    Recently, I have been wondering if I should try to refocus my research note based writing style each week. The Lindahl Letter is quickly approaching 200 Substack posts. Based on my tracking system next week is the 193th missive, but the 199th overall post to the Substack system. Any way you slice it we are quickly approaching a major publication milestone of 200 blocks of content being published. All of that is happening over on the www.nelsx.com domain after that Substack got switched over to a custom domain for hosting. Now that we are reaching that major milestone I started to consider if a best of post was appropriate or if maybe just maybe I should change directions a little bit and do something different with my weekly writing efforts. 

    Each weekend I sit down at the start of the day and begin to work on research and writing efforts. During that time I simply attempt to deeply focus on whatever topic is being considered and write down my research notes into a consolidated overview with my thoughts, predictions, and attempt to summarize the material. I did train a model to actually produce the same type of content that I would produce in seconds instead of hours, but that is not a very fulfilling process or really very interesting for me as a writer. I actually think at some point somebody is going to make an organic writing only search engine. People are going to get tired of the never ending stream of AI generated slop.

    One of the potential areas that I may spend some time researching would include AI use cases with a verifiable ROI. These research notes would be like case studies, but effectively shorter. Gathering together a bunch of these different use cases would be the basis of a larger analysis of this area. Another part of that might be trying to locate the 10 most expensive use cases that failed or at least did not realize a quantifiable benefit.

    Maybe deeper digital histories from people before the rise of AI slop will end up being more valuable. Unfortunately, a lot of these deeper histories are starting to disappear. Most of the older computer builds that might have housed these archives are slowly falling out of usage.

  • 20250420 Week 16

    Earlier this week I went ahead and put most of the weblog content back into a private post status. Right now only 64 posts still remain in a publicly posted state. I’m thinking about making a shift to publishing books and journal articles and just making that my primary method of communicating written prose. Right now I’m committed to producing a weekly missive for the Lindahl Letter and a weekly summation of posts here on the weblog. Outside of those commitments I’m going to have to start focusing my writing efforts on producing manuscripts of varying length and quality. Some of those are going to get chopped down into academic papers and some of them I’m going to just publish as books. That is where things are going. My writing plan probably needs to be updated based on this new strategy. We will see what happens on that front here in the next few weeks. 

    This weekend is a big sports weekend for the City of Denver with both the Nuggets and Avalanche beginning playoff series. Right now I was able to watch the Nuggets game on Altitude+ streaming and the Avalanche game will be on Max streaming services. We added the Max bundle option to the Disney streaming package. That means we get Peacock as a part of our internet service plan and we are selecting Disney+ as our primary streaming service for the family during the month of April. We have been trying to keep only one active streaming service subscription per month. Oddly enough the kids really just want Disney and have no interest in switching back to Netflix or maybe Paramount for a month. I’m sure at some point Paramount will release some new Star Trek content that will create enough need to switch that something happens.

    This week I published a Substack post for the Lindahl Letter publication: Lindahl, N. (2025, April 18). Will vibe coding break quantum resistant encryption? The Lindahl Letter. https://www.nelsx.com/p/quantum-resistant-encryption

  • 20250413 Week 15

    This week I switched it up and allowed the ChatGPT plugin to take over search on Google Chrome. That feature came out forever and a day ago, but I had a use case for it now and thought I would give it a go. This worked fine for some things, but for trying to get to a website or lookup something maps related I ended up installing DuckDuckGo. My main goal in this pursuit was to just stop Googling things as much. Most of the time I don’t really need to utilize Google services. 

    Right now I’m writing on my MacBook Air and it would be possible to just mostly switch to Apple technology. Between using an iPad and a MacBook Air I could functionally just switch over. Part of that would be trying to use an internet browser that just cannot be tracked and is pro security and privacy. One alternative to even taking that path is just allowing ChatGPT to handle all my required searches. My guess would be that Sam Altman and the OpenAI team generally do not  really care about indexing my searches and knowledge graphing my interests and are more worried about being first in the pool to actualize some type of AGI. 

    Using this new framework throughout the week my overall searching for things has radically diminished. That is probably for the best. I’m not entirely sure easy access to relatively useless information is all that productive anyway. Focusing on higher quality information gathering and research is an important pivot. That is for the most part the right direction to head. Generally people are going to keep moving away from the open internet into other types of interfaces. It’s entirely possible that people will just task an agent with doing all the web searching for them and never really have to traverse the internet. That path forward is going to be interesting. A lot of the online content is getting worse and worse anyway as the slop farms crank out more and more content optimized for SEO that has been put through an intellectual blender.

  • 20250406 Week 14

    My online efforts this year have been focused on Substack posts and Bluesky. For the content being created on Substack, I maintain a backlog and prepare weekly missives. Those blocks of content are generally about five paragraphs long and are refined during a five-week development process. Right now, my backlog includes 36 future blocks of content that have not yet been drafted or otherwise developed. Outside of those larger blocks of content, I have been posting real-time thoughts on Bluesky. That balance seems to work well enough, providing both a longer-form and a quicker content delivery method.

    I have continued creating this type of weblog content, although I have been trying to determine whether it should simply be folded into the Substack effort. At the forefront of my thinking is whether these scattershot weblog posts need to come to an end and be refined into the weekly missive format. That did involve creating a new weblog post category and adding the week number to the title format.

    Going forward, it might be more effective to open a Google Doc and compile thoughts and short writings throughout the week before posting content. This type of writing has generally remained separate from what ends up on Substack, as the process does not typically produce an essay or a focused block of content. However, I could potentially weave the two approaches together, which might result in a stronger overall set of content.

    Such a shift would move the output from more targeted research notes in an essay format to a style of writing that leans a bit more personal. That blending could be the right evolution for this writing effort. This post reflects the first move toward a weekly weblog output. By the end of the process, I want to be producing content that offers more of an ongoing narrative rather than single-serving pieces written only to push the conversation forward.

  • 20250324

    Doubling down on the obvious thing might not be the easy play anymore. I’m trying to figure out the best way forward in terms of creating prose on a daily basis. Spending more time producing short content for the weblog is always the easy way out. It’s a 15-20 minute commitment to just put a few thoughts down and move along. Right now my efforts are more aligned with producing weekly content. Part of that is that my weekend writing routine is very strong in terms of taking the early morning hours on Saturday and Sunday to create content. Moving back to a more consistent daily writing posture might require making a change in my routine. The best way to make this happen may be switching up my scheduled writing time from first thing in the morning during weekdays to the evening just before bed. Right now I have that time reserved for listening to an audiobook, but it could be easily swapped out for about 30 minutes of solid writing time before falling asleep. 

    Today is one of those rare days off during the week where I can elect to sit down and spend some time writing and watching the Curse of Oak Island: Drilling Down this morning via the on demand feature of the cablebox. This writing effort was powered by an extra set of espresso shots this morning which just seemed to move everything into the next gear this morning. Over the course of the last few days I have reset my staged posts for the Lindahl Letter so that we have 2 ready to post and 5 that are currently drafted. Beyond that set of working posts I have a backlog setup for weeks 194 to 236 of topics under consideration. One of the things that probably needs to be done is really kicking the tires on that backlog and refining it to be the best possible set of topics. I’m pretty sure that a few gems are hidden in the Google Keep notes I have taken that need to be incorporated into the backlog during the refinement process.

  • 20250314

    We just reached Tab 70 and that seems like a good run at producing weblog posts in this particular Google Doc. My intentions were to be a better and more committed daily writer. I had put a Glitty case on my MacBook Air, but I decided that I prefer to have no case on the device at all and just let it roam free in the world. That does not really impact my commitment to daily writing. That ongoing narrative for the weblog needs to be recentered, refocused, and probably clarified as we begin to move forward with a more regular writing cadence. At this point, I’m thinking about spending some time writing a bit of reflective thoughts at the end of the day. 

    Right now I’m watching the 3rd period of the Colorado Avalanche game and trying to figure out much much more writing I’m going to complete. Ten minutes of hockey time is probably enough to produce a bunch of prose. I’m not saying it is going to be high quality awesome prose. It may just be a few sentences about writing sentences which are not really in any way awesome. 

  • 20250301

    We ended up having dinner at Casa Bonita tonight and it was not the same as it was a decade ago, but it was something that could be explained as an update to the previous version. They have the whole process pretty well built into an entertainment conveyor belt with food and cliff divers. That is really all I have to say about it. We will see if it is something we end up doing again or if it was more of a one off in terms of future dinner planning. My guess as of right now would be that it is a one off that might happen again if somebody was visiting and the reservation timing worked out.