Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: Weekly Blog Post

  • 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.