Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Tag: Twitter

  • Online gardens of paywalled content

    Writing random missives on Twitter generates more views than a blog post gets at the moment. It is not even close in terms of a comparison. I just got done looking at the data and it made me wonder a little bit about the nature of the open internet. A lot of walled off gardens exist where people go to engage and are a user of the platform. Sometimes parts of the internet get extended to those gardens, but it is becoming more and more a garden of paywalled content. More and more publications that write stories either within the world of entertainment, information, or news open the door to a few free stories and then try to get users to cross over into the paywalled version of things. It’s a world of online gardens of paywalled content that is fundamentally different from a bunch of content being interconnected by really simple syndication (RSS) feeds. 

    This blog for example has a large bulk of content from before 2014 that is set to private. Even my collection of online missives housed in this blog format has a section that is essentially paywalled. That wall has been built for an audience of one, but that does not make it anymore real as a segmentation against the open internet. That is perhaps the point I’m getting around to as we round out the second paragraph of this thought. Building out a functional search engine for the open internet seems like something that might be a good use of my time. Instead of focusing on all the online gardens of paywalled content that users cannot really access without being a subscriber of those services it might be easier to just help people get to other sources of content. Right now the picture I have in my mind is of delivering two sets of results from curated sets of sources while denoting that one list is essentially paywalled and the other is fundamentally not. 

    You might be asking yourself if that is essentially my effort at building a really large RSS feed reader that is curated. I think that might very well be what I’m talking about. Building out my own personal really large RSS feed portal is probably a project that I could knock out this summer. Adding the searchable component to it would be a pretty lightweight extension. Overall the value inherent to the project would be my personal curation of the content. That would not be easily replicated as it is essentially a personally tailored news feed with some search extensibility. I may go look to see if I have a parked domain that could be used to house this project.

  • Dialing in a bit of focus on that writing plan

    My social media strategy for the blog happens to be allowing WordPress to post a link to each missive directly on Twitter as a single Tweet. Yesterday it seemed like a good idea to post the nearly 4,000 characters of that post into a tweet right after that post. A total of 3 out of 24 viewers of the tweet expanded it to look at the longer post. For the most part I have tried to post a couple of longer tweets using that feature and the engagement has never been better due to having thousands of characters. Testing out new features is always a fun thing to do and I’m hopeful that Twtitter comes up with a bunch of them in the next few months. 

    Right now at the start of my day I sat down to write another page or prose and to deeply consider the nature of what is being produced. My Substack efforts are essentially being packaged up as a manuscript at the end of the year. For better or worse that writing effort is essentially a weekly way to turn out a focused chapter of content. We are in the third year of that effort and it has worked out well enough. Right now 104 weeks of content were packed up on the topic of machine learning. This year the topics under consideration have broadened from machine learning to artificial intelligence (AI) in general. Next year at this time the manuscript that will go out will have a distinct AI focus with a few other topics mixed into that series. 

    Some weeks will have topics that are adjacent to central topics in the AI series. A few things need to be flushed out to really dig deeper into what can be done with AI and how it will intersect with modernity. It’s that interaction of AI and modernity that deeply concerns me enough that I feel compelled to try to write about it on a regular basis. This might very well be the year that I complete my writing effort on producing a book about the intersection of technology and modernity. Getting that writing project produced and on the shelf next to me would be a true achievement of something on my writing plan. 

    Overall you can tell that today is a bit about dialing in some focus on that writing plan and making sure that things are going down the right path. Getting to the point where each day of writing builds toward something and is a part of that writing plan is an important piece of the puzzle. I think the idea that with a little prompt engineering this post could be compiled within seconds where it took me dozens of minutes does give me pause. Today marks the second day in a row of producing a good amount of prose at the start of the day that was not really tied to anything special. I just sat down and tried to collect my thoughts. To that end this writing session was successful and posted. Fun times.

  • Working my original content creation plan for 2023

    Very early this morning I sat down to work on my writing plan for 2023 and to write 5 longer form tweets that were full of original content. It has felt like Twitter needed some more original content. Instead of working toward writing a weblog post today, that is where I put my attention. Obviously, I decided to package all that up into a weblog post for good measure. This writing effort was part of an effort to mix things up a bit and write in a different way. 

    • This was actually a pretty productive morning. I sketched out a writing plan for about the next 25 weeks. As we move from 2022 to 2023, my primary weekly content creation is going to shift a bit from ML to a stronger AI focus and more content on modern polling methodologies.
    • Building original content within an ongoing narrative related to a specific theme or as a collection takes time. It’s ongoing and sustained. Sometimes the tipping point on that one is when the totality of the narrative becomes large enough it cannot be consumed anymore.
    • Working toward the edge of what is possible while bringing people along for the journey changes the nature of how the community in totality moves forward with that project. Within the summation of that community a general level of knowledge exists. That is a shared foundation.
    • So much opportunity for new business exists as we see the potential intersection of technology and modernity. Changing frontiers of technology are opening the door to all sorts of disruptions in operational patterns that create windows of advantage in markets that are developing.
    • Converting the backlog contained in a writing plan into action involves having a defined time for achieving that objective and a valid writing plan. My efforts to make that happen have been about waking up early and devoting a daily hour to writing.

    I’m curious what would happen if I pushed out a few tweets like that on a daily basis. Most of the time the content that I share to Twitter involves links to things that I read and thought should be shared in the stream of things. More content exists in the Twitter stream that could ever be consumed by a single person. We have more signal in the stream than anybody could possibly sort out and that in some ways makes all that micro signal sharing into a general noise.

  • Getting back to carrying a backpack

    My big plan for the moment is to share this weblog post over on Twitter using the social features of Jetpack. I’m going to click the radial button to, “Share the content of this post as a Twitter thread.” That is not really something that I do very often. Given that it is going to happen today, you are certainly more than welcome to enjoy this content as it gets broken up into seemingly random length tweets. Apparently, I have procured 9,159 tweets since March 2009. Clicking that button every time will certainly get me over the 10,000 tweet threshold. 

    It has been years since my everyday travel involved a backpack. Throughout a decade of college courses that certainly happened. Carrying my laptop with me in a backpack used to be something that almost always happened. I have had a number of laptops over the years and I don’t even really recall all of them at this point. A few stand out like my Sony VAIO Laptop VGN-T250P, Dell Studio 1535, and HP Envy X2 laptops. Writing time could happen at any moment and I had to be ready. At some point, that type of need to carry a backpack just disappeared. For the most part being able to throw on a pair of noise canceling headphones and work from a laptop is delightful and very easy. At one point, it was a pair of wired headphones and they did not cancel noise or anything that fancy. With that setup pretty much any spot can quickly become the place that work is going to happen. 

    All this talk about the pending demise of Twitter really made me start thinking about the days of carrying a backpack. It’s probably some type of nostalgia or something in this moment that made me start to reflect on things. People really do believe that as a social network platform Twitter might very well break this weekend. I’m not entirely sure that would really happen. The platform itself has been pretty well battle hardened over the years. I’m guessing it can run for some time with minimal support.

  • Working away from using Twitter for posting

    Things within the space occupied by business news related to the Twitter platform have been beyond weird recently. To that end I’m actively working away from using Twitter for posting. It may be time to just swing back over and write things for the old weblog. This is a familiar fallback posture to take. My blogging goes way back for around 20 years now. At some point, I did elect to pull down some of my older posts by placing them into the archive side of things. They are loaded, but are a private part of the content library on the weblog. For better or worse, that is probably the way things will remain for some time. That includes about 1,880 posts that are set to private within this weblog deployment. 

    I guess that means that writing new content should be a priority. To that end I’m going to spend a few moments here writing and working on thinking about the nature of things. It was one of those days where I thought about buying a new office desk chair at some point. Without question that is not something that I need to do anytime soon. My Scandinavian Design Wau desk chair is holding up just fine. Some of the Herman Miller chairs always look pretty darn good, but that is not something that I need to buy any time soon. I’m sure the office desk chair that I have right now will last for years.

  • A ton of digital housekeeping on a Saturday

    To prepare for the annual publication of The Lindahl Letter book I went ahead and loaded up the posts from week 50 to 77. That involved doing the typesetting for roughly 25,000 words that spanned about 100 pages. I’m considering either bundling two years of posts together or just publishing one year at a time. 

    I wrote the social media copy for sharing to Twitter and LinkedIn this week:

    You can check out week 74 of my weekly technology newsletter The Lindahl Letter titled “ML content automation; Am I the prompt?” over on #Substack via the link below

    —> Tags: #MachineLearning #ML #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #MLOps #AIOps

    https://nelslindahl.substack.com/p/ml-content-automation#details

    It got shared over to Twitter here:

    https://twitter.com/nelslindahl/status/1540680693293776896

    The LinkedIn post is here:

    https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6946447208812613632/

    I had posted weekly into Facebook as well, but that yielded very little traffic back to the actual Substack site. After a few weeks of that effort I gave up and just stopped that part of my weekly social media sharing routine. I’m not entirely sure that sharing on Twitter and LinkedIn results in any subscribers, but it does create a small amount of traffic each week. 

    At some point today, I’m going to work on writing the “Substack Week 78: Why is diffusion so popular?” post to create a draft. That is all queued up as a task for the day.

  • Oh that Wednesday arrived

    Posts can now resume with the great server migration completed. My thoughts over the last two weeks have been confused on things, but not on writing or chronicling my efforts along the search for the perfect possible path forward. During the course of the brief online freeze I did use Twitter a bit and that was an interesting journey. It appears that Twitter has been purchased and will become a privately held company. It made me wonder about the total value of stock for a company. Generally speaking at the given market price of a stock everybody could not sell their stock. At the point where everybody that held a stock was trying to sell it the value of that stock would plummet exponentially. Most companies in the marketplace could not support at their current value a total replacement of investors. I actually find it interesting to look at the amount of a stock volume that trades hands every day for a given company. For the most part, you will see a small volume of stock up for trade each day will be far less than 20% of total outstanding shares. 

    You can go look at the biggest average daily trading volumes (ADTV) for companies. Yesterday on April 26, 2022 for example the largest daily trading volume was for Twitter at around 115 million shares. The total number of outstanding shares for the company is around 763 million. That amounts to around 15% of the outstanding shares for the company being exchanged yesterday. In general, that is a large amount of activity between buyers and sellers for a single company. My thoughts then drifted into thinking about those metrics for a bit before circling back to the activity that is supposed to be at hand which is writing this morning. I had wanted to write 1,000 words in this very word processing document before sending this post off for publication. That is where my head was at this morning. I figured producing a good block of prose would help start my day off on the right path. 

    I had brewed a cup of the Ethiopia Nespresso pod coffee instead of two shots of espresso today. Sometimes you have to mix it up a little bit. I’ll probably order those pods again at some point. I have been enjoying them as an alternative to two shots of espresso. My afternoons of course should be green tea and that is how the plan is supposed to work. Coffee or espresso in the morning and green tea in the afternoon. Sometimes the green team simply gets replaced with more espresso. That happens from time to time depending on what is going on during the day. For the most part being focused on the work at hand becomes the priority and settling into a state of deep focus on the hard challenges is where things should drift to after the start of the day. The first few minutes of the day are generally cloudy and it takes just a little bit to go from that fog of daybreak to a truly productive state. 

    Even with that little bit of prose about coffee this post is only about half way to the targeted work count for this stream of consciousness based effort. Part of the desired process is to just let my mind wonder in whatever direction happens to be pulling my attention. At the moment, my attention is nearly wholesale focused on a task list and working toward the resolution of the things on that list. Everything else might as well be far off into the distance like shadows of things you could approach, but it would require a lot of effort to get to that point. Something will have to give on that front and hopefully it will be a burst of productivity aimed at reducing the task list to a manageable amount of things. That should open the door to some pursuits outside the process of revisiting a list for the next item. Sometimes you have to move beyond the get next command and ask yourself about the things occurring in the wild space outside that list. 

    Just for content if you were trying to produce a solid million words per day instead of working on a 1,000 word start of the day posting production target. You would have to work a little harder and probably invest a bit more time into the production target of 2,740 words per day. Given the reality of sustaining that level of productivity you probably will want to work toward a production level of posting target of 3,000 words per day. Sitting down and writing 3,000 words in a single sitting or flourish of creativity is possible. Doing it for an entire year is a different matter altogether. That type of sustained writing productivity is geared more toward something that a professional writing would achieve. Producing a million words in one big giant pile of prose for any reason is an awfully large amount of content. Very few people sit down and try to engage in that level of production. You could very well say that it would be a big year. A categorically larger than what you would expect to the point of being you considering it a “big” writing productivity year. That point is probably not worth any more inquiry. It has been examined and can probably stand on its own merits at this point. 

    My closing thoughts on this writing session are all over the place at the moment. I’m thinking about trying to take on a big year again. At the same time, I’m remembering that that is a very big investment of writing time and energy. Sitting down and writing 3,000 words without an outline or any guide posts of what should be covered is a really intense commitment into the world of stream of consciousness prose. At that point the final outcome of what is created will be a consequence of the process, not the achievement of something on a task list.

  • Maybe I should live Tweet today

    Today could very well be a live tweeting extravaganza. Two shots of espresso were brewed using a Nespresso machine. 400 calories of chocolate flavor Huel were consumed. Now that I’m all fueled up, I have a couple hours to write.

    Today I got left behind during spring break week. Apparently, all the fun is happening elsewhere and it was time for me to be left back at the basecamp for writing and reading. Today is @NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote. It was not a bad day to get left behind. 

    I finished the upcoming “Language models revisited” post and should be focused on writing a Substack post about “Ethics in machine learning” with my extra time today. I’m looking at other content creation options, but will probably swing back to generating 1,000 words on ML ethics.

    A little music was required to begin the writing process. I’m listening to my Warren Zevon station on Pandora. It was apparently created back on May 5, 2013. You can find it here: ? Warren Zevon Radio on @PandoraMusic https://pandora.app.link/hMZALDTGBob

    Things are about to get going with Jensen from @NVIDIA. I have the keynote ready to go in a browser tab “GTC 2022 Keynote [S42295]” is waiting to play. Don’t panic with FOMO. It has an indicator of what will be covered, “Primary Topic: AI Strategy for Business Leaders.”

    The GTC event has so many sessions it would take a lot of time and effort to listen to all of them. I’m thinking beyond the keynote I might attend, “A Vision of the Metaverse: How We will Build Connected Virtual Worlds [S42114].”

    Ok the #GTC22 player failed with the error message “Something went wrong” from the actual @NVIDIA event player and I ended up going over to @YouTube to watch the actual keynote live stream with 6,713 other people watching the premiere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39ubNuxnrK8

    This keynote from Jensen is super choreographed and heavily embedded with graphics. It’s almost overproduced at this point. I’m getting a bit of infomercial flavor compared to the technical content I wanted to consume. However, #GTC22 is holding my attention so far today.

    This #GTC22 keynote is really full of machine learning buzzwords. Anybody playing bingo to this keynote probably has already had a winner. They really had Jensen reading a ton of rather dense lists during the recording process.

    I was really hoping Jensen would announce they built an actual Jurassic park during #GTC22. Would they have to pay Michael Crichton a royalty?

    I’m curious about how the GPU confidential computing will work in practice. The #GTC22 keynote has been interesting so far.

    Whoa… That is a fast computer from @NVIDIA. The #GTC22 Eos will be 275 petaFLOPS or 1.4x faster than the fastest science computer in the United States…

    NVIDIA Eos screenshot

    Like Jensen I’m very curious what the next million-x will look like as well. #GTC22 should be interesting this year. I’m gearing up for the “A Vision of the Metaverse: How We will Build Connected Virtual Worlds [S42114]” panel that is starting soon. The videos should be here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOYXzWxVdIU1ZDpbLvxbZdyQ

  • Writing in Tweets

    Maybe my weblog post today should be drafted in sections that are the length of a maximum Tweet at 280 characters. That will shrink my paragraphs by a lot for this post. I’m considering just composing a bunch of blocks and then posting them on Twitter as I write some prose today.

    My writing plan to produce a Substack post each week has been working. Week 42 about time crystals has now been written and will go live in 6 days. In 10 weeks, I will have hit my goal to publish a weekly machine learning based post for an entire year. https://nelslindahl.substack.com/

    Earlier this week I moved my office desk from my downstairs office. I did spend a majority of my time in that office sitting in my blue Scandinavian Design’s Wau desk chair. My desk and that chair are now upstairs for a few weeks. A majority of my time will now be spent upstairs.

    My internet modem is now upstairs. I was worried that the gigabit speed would be diminished by the house wiring vs. a direct run to my office. Comparatively the speed loss was 20% from the top end. That is acceptable for now. My plan in a few weeks is to move back to my office.

    Editing the idea I want to communicate from each paragraph down to 280 characters really slows down my writing output. Maybe it will help me be more word economic and succinct go forward. My writing is not really overly wordy to begin with so editing down requires real effort.

  • A little bit of daily writing

    For the last two days of posting on this weblog the content has been sent over to Twitter as a thread (aka Tweet storm). It still feels like the handling of threads by the Twitter application/website is somewhat interesting in practice. You can end up seeing or looking at the middle or end of a thread and the end user sort of has to decide to view the thread in totality. It does show some indicators that you should click on the very happy “Show this thread” indicator at the bottom of any Tweet, but it seems rather shoehorned to fit or an artifact of after the fact design. Naturally, I’m going to keep going down this road for at least the next few posts to really get a feel for how the feature really works out in the wild. Neither of the Tweet threads sent any traffic back to the weblog, but the WordPress reader did send over a few readers who were probably interested in my thoughts on automation. That is a topic that is definitely worthy of consideration. 

    My efforts to return to the habit of daily writing at the start of the day are working out well enough. It all starts with waking up early enough to get things done without anybody else in the house moving around. That is probably why the time at night and the time at the start of the day are the best use cases for producing epic tomes of lofty weight and meaning. It certainly takes a bit of energy to engage in the active practice of reflection along the way. I have a path that involves dedicating a few steps forward every day to achieve, but the actions and tasks between those steps are the stuff that defines my productivity. Both a day and a stone stand the test of time. I’m probably not going to do any stone working so my aim has to be to make the most of the time comprising my day. That is what sitting down and wrestling with the blank page is all about. It is about creating prose from the top to the bottom of the page and realizing the journey of doing that unfolds a world of through experiments that otherwise would have gone without the spark to create them. That is really the natural output of conducting this type of writing output on a daily basis. The goal of the process is to create the opportunity for something interesting to spring into existence.

    Experiments: 1) For this post I set a featured image to see what it would do to the Twitter thread. 2) I also included a link to Twitter in the second sentence to see how it handles external links in the thread process.