PODCAST

The Lindahl Letter

Dr. Nels Lindahl

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

technology management

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6:08

All the future AI features

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/06/28

Longtime readers of my work know that within my normative bias I tend to break things down into form, function, assumptions, and structure (FFAS). Instead of taking that path with this Substack based letter format, each week my commentaries are going to drift into a more ongoing narrative about the patterns, traditions, and concerns that rise to the forefront of my thoughts. All right, now is the time, let’s jump into that narrative at the deepest end of the things being considered. Maybe the theme

4:37

You can’t stop the signal

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/06/21

It’s time to get ruthless about actually managing my epic writing backlog. You can rewind to a previous Substack newsletter with a search or for you subscribers you can check your previous email for the epic 2024 predictions post on January 19, 2024. That was according to my records the post for week 156. Instead of starting up a season two of the podcast I’m just going to lean into the signal of things and publish this missive as week 157 of the Lindahl Letter. For those of you who are new to this

4:07

My 2024 predictions

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/01/20

Greetings, readers and avid listeners and technology enthusiasts! You're either reading or tuned in to the audio-only podcast of The Lindahl Letter, now in its 154th week. Remember, an extra fresh and original edition lands in your inbox every Friday. Now certified with a three year proven track record. Today, we delve into an intriguing theme: “My 2024 Predictions.” Let's explore the future together.1. Generative AI's Expanding Horizons: We're on the brink of witnessing a generative AI leap forward

3:47

3 years on Substack

The Lindahl Letter ·

2024/01/13

Please accept this note of gratitude for being a part of this journey. We made it. Some of you have been a part of the entire journey. Three years ago on January 26, 2021, this very Substack started rocking and rolling along a weekly journey to share research notes. My backlog of weekly items to cover is still pretty darn larger. It contains well over 100 blocks of potential writing content. A few larger projects are lurking within that backlog that could be stacked up block by block into future

4:26

Bayesian Models and Elections (150th post)

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/11/18

Maybe a longer title for this post could be, “Bayesian Models and Elections: A Dive into the Dance of Uncertainty.” This is the 150th transmission of the Lindahl Letter.In the vast and often unpredictable theater of electoral forecasting, the quest for precision is a relentless pursuit. The choreography of voter behavior is a complex ballet, orchestrated by a myriad of factors—societal tremors, economic tides, the charisma of candidates, and the machinations of campaign strategies. Amidst this

3:29

Election simulations & Expert opinions

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/11/11

Title: The Confluence of Agent Systems and Expert Opinion in Election SimulationsIn the ever-evolving landscape of political science and technology, curiosity often paves the way for innovative approaches and fresh perspectives. Recently, a wave of curiosity has washed over me, primarily centered around the exploration of diverse agent systems to simulate elections. This intersection of technology and electoral processes opens up new realms of possibilities, allowing us to mimic, analyze, and

4:18

Delphi method & Door-to-door canvassing

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/11/03

Let’s get to work unpacking the Delphi Method & Door-to-Door Canvassing. This is the Substack deep dive you don’t want to miss.Hey there, dear weekly Substack readers!Today, let's embark on a journey through two fascinating potentially election related realms: the Delphi Method and Door-to-Door Canvassing. While these two concepts might seem worlds apart, there is a curious intersection between the two of them that's worth exploring. So, grab your favorite beverage, and let's dive in! I had two

5:24

Knowledge graphs vs. vector databases

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/10/27

Don’t panic, the Google Scholar searches are coming in fast and furious on this one [1]. We had a footnote in the first sentence today. Megan Tomlin writing over at neo4j had probably the best one line definition of the difference by noting that knowledge graphs are going to be in the human readable data camp and vector databases are more of a black box [2]. I actually think that eventually one super large knowledge graph will emerge and be the underpinning of all of this, but that has not happened

4:24

Synthetic social media analysis

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/10/20

After the adventures of last week, I started this writing adventure wanting to try to figure out what people were doing with LangChain and social media. People are both generating content for social media using LLMs and oddly enough repurposing content as well. We have to zoom out for just a second and consider the broader ecosystem of content. In the before-times, people who wanted to astroturf or content farm had some work to do within the content creation space. Now ChatGPT has opened the door

3:33

Learning LangChain

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/10/13

And now it’s time to pivot toward the “Learning LangChain” topic…The most fun introduction to LangChain seems to be from DeepLearning.ai with Andrew Ng and Harrison Chase [1]. You can expect to spend a couple of hours to complete the process of watching the videos and absorbing the content. Make sure you use a browser window large enough to support both the jupyter notebook and the video. You are probably going to want these items to run side by side. This course covers models, prompts, parsers,

5:14

Building generative AI chatbots

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/10/06

You can feel the winds of change blowing and the potential of people building out election expert opinion chatbots. Maybe you want to know what they are probably going to use to underpin that sort of effort. If you were going out to build some generative AI chatbots for you might very well use one of the 5 systems we are going to dig into today.* Voiceflow - This system may very well be the most prominent of the quick to market AI agent building platforms [1]. I have chatbots deployed to both Civic

3:53

Proxy models for elections

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/29

Sometimes a simplified model of something is easier to work with. We dug into econometric models recently during week 136 and they can introduce a high degree of complexity. Even within the world of econometrics you can find information about proxy models. In this case today we are digging into proxy models for elections. My search was rather direct. I was looking for a list of proxy models being used for elections [1]. I was trying to dig into election forecasting proxy models or maybe even some

5:04

Machine learning election models

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/22

This might be the year that I finally finish that book about the intersection of technology and modernity. During the course of this post we will look at the intersection of machine learning and election models. That could very well be a thin slice of the intersection of technology and modernity at large, but that is the set of questions that brought us here today. It’s one of things we have been chasing along this journey. Oh yes, a bunch of papers exist related to the topic this week of machine

4:06

Election prediction markets

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/15

We have been going down the door of digging into considering elections for a few weeks now. You knew this topic was going to show up. People love prediction markets. They are really a pooled reflection of sentiment about the likelihood of something occuring. Right now the scuttlebut of the internet is about LK-99, a potential, maybe debunked, maybe possible room temperature superconductor that people are predicting whether or not it will be replicated before 2025 [1]. You can read the 22 page

4:38

Tracking political registrations

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/08

Trying to figure out how many republicans, democrats, and independents are registered in each state is actually really hard. It’s not a trivial task. Even with all our modern technology and the extreme power of the internet providing outsized connectedness between things and making content accessible to searches. Even GPT-4 from OpenAI with some decent plugins turned on will struggle to complete this task.Your best searches to get a full list by state are probably going to land you into the world of

2:56

Econometric election models

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/01

It has been a few weeks here since we started by digging into a good Google Scholar search and you know this topic would be just the thing to help open that door [1]. My searches for academic articles are always about finding accessible literature that sits outside paywalls that is intended to be read and shared beyond strictly academic use. Sometimes that is easier than others when the topics lend themselves to active use cases instead of purely theoretical research. Most of the time these searches

5:27

Polling aggregation models

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/08/25

I read and really enjoyed the book by Nate Silver from 2012 about predictions. It’s still on my bookshelf. Strangely enough the cover has faded more than any other book on the shelf. Silver, N. (2012). The signal and the noise: Why so many predictions fail-but some don't. Penguin.That book from Nate is sitting just a few books over from Armstrong’s principles of forecasting. A book that I have referenced a number of times before. It will probably be referenced more as we move ahead as well. It’s a

6:09

The chalk model for predicting elections

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/08/18

Last week we started to mess around with some methods of doing sentiment analysis and setting up some frameworks to work on that type of effort. This week we take a little different approach and are going to look at an election model. I’m actively working on election focused prompt based training for large language models for better predictions. Right now I have access to Bard, ChatGPT, and Llama 2 to complete that training. Completing that type of training requires feeding election models in

4:56

Automated survey methods

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/08/11

I’m still spending some time digging into notebooks. This time around the topic as you might have guessed for that inquiry is figuring out how to automate a survey or more pointedly some sentiment analysis. People are building automated phone surveys with interactive voice response (IVR) systems. The next wave of this technology will be hard to tell if it is a person or a bot. Seriously, those systems are going to keep getting better at a rapid pace. The new wave of generative large language models

5:22

Synthetic data notebooks

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/08/04

Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 132 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “Synthetic data notebooks.”People are totally working on this one actively which I thought was pretty interesting. I have a general interest in how to create synthetic data using notebooks as it helps to provide people with lessons on how to do it from an educational based

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The Lindahl Letter

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