Futurist considerations abound

Sunday weblog notes from February 1, 2026 that were compiled and shared.

Friday at 5 p.m. arrived and passed without a new edition of the Lindahl Letter going out. That writing project lasted for 5 years, and I’m actually curious about going back and looking at some of the older missives in that series. My initial looks at how AI would change workflows and the overall trajectory of action were probably more optimistic. Recently, my writing efforts in that space became more focused on quantum computers and the massive amount of infrastructure spending that is occurring. Models are going to increasingly become commoditized, and we are seeing the overall number of entries of really good quality peak toward the top of the benchmarks. Maybe I need to spend some time gathering my thoughts on the subject and evaluate the overall trajectory of that technology. Futurist considerations abound, and a whole lot of money is being spent in that space.

One of the things I have learned is that you need to spend time writing on your own the old-fashioned way. Sitting down and writing 1,000 words is a skill and something you have to practice on a regular basis. True stream-of-consciousness writing is not something that everybody can manifest on a regular basis. Sitting down and just writing has to be a part of your overall routine. Chatting endlessly with ChatGPT and Gemini is not the same type of writing effort. You have to bring your thoughts together and reason about the base form, function, structure, and assumptions of concepts to move beyond where you are at and begin to move beyond the edge of what is possible.

Here in a few minutes, the Colorado Avalanche are going to play a hockey game during the middle of the day on ABC with the widest possible audience. This season, I have been able to watch most of the games. It has been a great experience to watch the games this season. From the epic battles of the early season to strangely unsettling performances in the last few weeks. I’m sure things will get back on track.

Objective truth remains feeble these days. Slop abounds, and the basis of its creation is really just being explained. Models trained off the scraping of the internet at large certainly have a certain base of creation. People are certainly building alternate bases of thought, which can cause drift from a solid foundation to something else more self-serving. I spent some time writing about where the foundation of our knowledge base going forward will end up coming from as we go forward. One of the largest collections of information was the encyclopedias. You might be old enough to remember seeing a physical encyclopedia with the volumes separated by collections or letters of the alphabet. Now the largest encyclopedia is Wikipedia, and it probably has the most contributions from people of anything ever created. Seriously, no other collection of information has had so many contributors. We are now starting to see alternate versions show up where people are using large language models to generate mass rewrites.

That is a topic that is probably worthy of extended consideration. Maybe the question at hand is, “What is the foundation being used to feed the models going forward?” It is really a question of who controls the base-level information. The only thing that is probably bigger than Wikipedia is the massive knowledge graph that Google maintains. That thing is huge beyond what would have been possible before Google indexed everything. However, that big pile of everything that was online and indexed is now, for better or worse, breaking down as the internet that was seems to be coming apart at the seams. It’s possible that we reached the peak of what can be pulled together to train the base of these. I keep thinking back to one of the landmark collections of content that got scraped called The Pile which will always remain a sort of time capsule.