PODCAST

The Lindahl Letter

Dr. Nels Lindahl

Thoughts about technology (AI/ML) in newsletter form every Friday www.nelsx.com

technology management

All Episodes

4:21

Inside the Mind: The Science of Focus and Distraction

The Lindahl Letter ·

2025/01/25

Thank you for being a part of the journey. This is week 178 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “Inside the Mind: The Science of Focus and Distraction.”Focus is a skill, but to master it, you need to understand the mechanisms driving it. At its core, focus is the ability to direct attention to a specific task, thought, or sensation while filtering out, blocking, or generally ignoring distractions

5:13

Your valuable attention: Why Your Focus Is Under Siege

The Lindahl Letter ·

2025/01/18

Thank you for being a part of the journey. This is week 177 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “Your valuable attention: Why Your Focus Is Under Siege.”In a world where your attention is more valuable than ever, every scroll, click, and swipe is part of an invisible economy. This “attention economy” drives social media platforms, streaming services, and even productivity tools. It’s not your time

4:19

Quantum Computing and Advances in Time Crystals

The Lindahl Letter ·

2025/01/11

Quantum computing continues to captivate the imagination of scientists, technologists, and futurists alike, offering the promise of solving problems intractable for classical machines. Amidst the steady stream of breakthroughs, one concept has emerged with both scientific intrigue and practical potential: time crystals. These exotic states of matter, once considered the stuff of theoretical musings, are now taking shape in laboratories and, intriguingly, hold promise for quantum computing

4:12

Universal quantum computation

The Lindahl Letter ·

2025/01/04

Welcome back to another edition of The Lindahl Letter. It’s week 175, and we’re diving into the fascinating topic of universal quantum computation. This is an area where the boundaries of theory and practical application intersect, offering both incredible promise and immense challenges. If you’re tuning in to this podcast for the first time, welcome aboard. For regular readers and listeners, you already know this is a space where we examine complex topics with an eye on clarity and relevance.At its

4:52

Error correction tolerant quantum computing

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/12/28

Quantum computing has long been hailed as a transformative technology with the potential to revolutionize fields such as cryptography, optimization, material science, and beyond [1]. However, quantum computing faces a fundamental challenge: the fragility of quantum states. Quantum bits, or qubits, are extraordinarily sensitive to errors caused by environmental noise, decoherence, and operational inaccuracies. Without robust error correction, this fragility undermines the reliability of quantum

4:13

Nondeterministic gates tolerant quantum computation

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/12/21

We are going to spend some time digging into quantum computing over the next few weeks. Things are starting to move forward in that space which is exciting [1]. Let’s not waste a second and just go ahead and jump right into the deep end of this magical quantum puzzle. Here we go!Nondeterministic gates present a fascinating challenge within the evolving landscape of quantum computing. At their core, these gates function probabilistically, meaning their outcomes are not guaranteed in the deterministic

3:49

Transfer Learning for Features

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/12/14

Transfer learning has proven to be an invaluable tool in machine learning, enabling us to take advantage of pre-trained models to boost performance on new tasks, even with limited data. Instead of training a model from scratch, we can repurpose one trained on a large, diverse dataset to extract features—essential characteristics of the data—that are often applicable across various problems. For instance, in image recognition, these features might be edges, textures, or patterns that the model has

4:29

Graph-Based Feature Engineering

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/12/07

As machine learning evolves, traditional approaches to feature engineering are being transformed by the power of graph data structures. Graphs—representing entities as nodes and relationships as edges—provide a rich framework to model complex, non-linear connections that go beyond what’s possible with tabular data. It’s an area of focus I keep going back to better represent knowledge. By embracing graph-based feature engineering, we can uncover deeper insights and create more effective predictive

4:56

Are 8K Blu-ray a thing?

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/11/30

Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 170 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives hopefully every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “Are 8K Blu-ray a thing?”The short answer is no—there’s currently no official 8K Blu-ray format on the market. The highest-resolution Blu-ray available right now is 4K Ultra HD. Despite the emergence of 8K TVs, the development of an 8K physical media standard has been slow

4:58

Pure science from the last millennium

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/11/23

Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. Here we are, at week 169 of The Lindahl Letter, reflecting on a different kind of science—one rooted in a boldness that prioritized discovery over deadlines, adventure over immediate outcomes. This week’s topic, “Pure science from the last millennium,” brings us to a fundamental question: What do we want scientific investment to be going forward?Decades ago, space exploration wasn’t about quarterly returns or brand endorsements. It

3:52

Enabling automated agent actions

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/11/16

We all thought you would be able to easily ask the house to turn on all the lights or command your television by voice to do things by walking into the room. Some of us thought the entire wall would be a television screen by now and that has not happened either. However, some of the new 100 inch TVs on the market are really large. Enabling automated actions is what is happening within the latest development kits related to the companies making and contributing to LLMs. We have seen Google teams

6:28

Where does AI fit within Archeology?

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/11/09

This post is all Dr. Flint Dibble’s fault. That fault is wholesale based on all the #realarchaeology posts that have been flying around the internet [1]. If you missed all that online content about archaeology, then consider diving into all that informationally rich real archeology content. This week Flint got me thinking about how artificial intelligence and machine learning fit within the broader academic domain of archaeology. Technology is always approaching the intersection with modernity. Our

3:46

Those recent Nobel Prizes

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/11/01

Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 166 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “Those recent Nobel Prizes.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelslindahl.substack.com

5:08

Practical quantum computing and getting things done

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/10/25

For those of you listening to the audio version this week you may have noticed that we moved from the natural vocal capture to the narration vocal capture. I’m still recording the podcast audio for this adventure using a Blue Microphones Yeti X and my MacBook Air with the included GarageBand software. To further enhance your listening experience I’m still working to dial in the best possible recording technique to deliver superior podcast audio. Last week we really dug deep into the major corporate

4:55

Digging into quantum computing programing

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/10/18

Over the last week I started digging into quantum computer programming to see what is currently going on and what people are doing in that space [1][2]. General availability of actual quantum computing systems is the major barrier to using one to write some code [3]. You can buy time on a quantum computer or you can use a simulator. The simulators are sort of weird in general as the computing power you are using to simulate the quantum computer has a very small fractional power equivalent in terms

5:27

The increasingly synthetic internet

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/10/11

We are facing a new reality where the tipping point has been passed and a majority of content being generated online within the internet is now synthetic. Organic content generation simply cannot keep up with the flood of synthetic content. Those bot farms creating content never sleep. They just churn out content and pretend that it remains evergreen. My consideration on this topic started back on Wednesday, July 31, 2024, when I was invited to access SearchGPT from OpenAI [1]. Using that platform

4:14

Indexing facts vs. graphing knowledge

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/07/26

In the digital age, the methods we use to organize and comprehend information are continually evolving. Two significant approaches stand out: indexing facts and graphing knowledge. Both play essential roles in how we structure, retrieve, and understand data, but they serve distinct purposes and offer different advantages.Let’s start out by looking a little deeper into indexing facts. Indexing is a traditional and straightforward method. It involves categorizing and listing information in a manner

7:16

Structuring really large knowledge graphs

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/07/19

You never really have to worry about how you store knowledge. All that knowledge just gets accumulated day by day and how it is stored, structured, and even retrieved happens without any intervention. It’s just something that you do autonomously. That is very different when you have to manage all that data and store it. Navigating the intricate maze of data science, structuring really large knowledge graphs presents itself as both an art and a science. This endeavor, crucial for deepening our

4:04

Increasingly problematic knowledge graph updates

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/07/12

Over the years the team over at Google has made a really big knowledge graph that you can access via an API and that they use as an informational backbone [1]. In some ways it is the best of what the old web had to offer. They note that it is a database of billions of facts. We are starting to see the creation of just a ton of middling, mediocre, or otherwise terribly written content online [2][3]. Now imagine you had built a knowledge graph of billions of facts. You can’t stop updating that large

5:33

The next level of featurization

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/07/05

Things are starting to align within this renewed writing project as my content creation process gets back into some semblance of a proper routine. We are getting pretty close to a place based on the current state of technology where my weekly podcast audio could be produced using a model based on my voice in a matter of seconds. That is not really something that I am considering. I have recorded the last two podcast episodes using my newly acquired MacBook Air using the freely supplied GarageBand

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