PODCAST

The Lindahl Letter

Dr. Nels Lindahl

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

technology management

All Episodes

5:17

All that bad data abounds

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/05/05

Flooding and astroturfing abound at the moment. Both of those things were happening before the advent of large language models (LLMs), but they have increased in frequency now that bad actors are able to just open the floodgates for content. Making large swaths of the internet that is just designed for search engine placement and self-referencial boosting has become so much easier recently. Sure all that bad data was abounding before this shift in what is now happening with OpenAI, Google,

18:58

A paper on political debt as a concept vs. technical...

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/04/28

This is going to be an interesting edition of The Lindahl Letter. Please pardon the self-indulgence of working with ChatGPT to write a paper and ultimately expand that into a full book using prompts and the model. Sit back and relax as this will be a long one.I was able to give OpenAI’s ChatGPT a prompt of, “A paper on political debt as a concept vs. technical debt.” That created the following output:Political debt and technical debt are two distinct concepts that have different implications and

4:59

A literature study of non-mail polling methodology

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/04/21

This week I ended up trying to find some solid academic articles to read. This time around I found a few that have publicly available downloads to share. Digging around literature related to non-mail polling methods opens the door to a lot of different directions. You will get a sense from the journals listed below that a lot of literature exists and research is benign conducted about public opinion. My interests are more in the automated methods that would help collect sentiment to complete polling

6:28

A literature study of mail polling methodology

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/04/14

Searching around on Google Scholar is something that I’m pretty adept at by now. This happens to be the 116th Substack post and almost all of them have involved some type of research. Trying to get a set of the best articles on mail polling methodology was actually really challenging [1]. I know that modern polling has moved away from mail polling in general. It’s expensive. The response rate has gotten worse over time. Probably the worst part about it is that compared to phone or internet based

11:18

A literature review of modern polling methodology

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/04/07

Earlier today I did end up getting ChatGPT Plus for a cost of USD $20 a month. That apparently will provide me better availability during high demand, faster response speeds, and priority access to new features [1]. I’m not sure if this subscription will be worth keeping. I’m about to open up the latest model GPT-4 and see what it is able to accomplish in terms of advanced reasoning, complex instructions, and more creativity. I have spent the last 6 weeks thinking about writing these polling related

6:54

How does confidential computing work?

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/03/31

Imagine you move part of your workload to an environment that you don’t fully own. That used to be a datacenter and more recently it is probably a cloud environment. Sooner or later you might think about how to secure that environment in terms of hardware-based security or other ways to secure things. Most of the promotional pages on the internet covering this one try to bring forward the idea of securing code and data [1]. Seriously, the idea of confidential computing is everywhere on these cloud

26:00

Structuring an introduction to AI ethics

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/03/24

You may remember that I listened to an audiobook during a road trip back to Kansas about AI. Kissinger, H. A., Schmidt, E., & Huttenlocher, D. (2021). The age of AI: and our human future. Hachette UK. Former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt has had a lot to say about the future of AI and a lot of that has been grounded in the implications of AI on society. It’s important to set the foundation of any introduction to AI ethics on the implications to people and society. Crowdsourcing a really solid

3:04

Autonomous vehicles

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/03/17

Lectures related to this topic are mostly about convolutional neural networks and visual recognition systems. My searches were explicitly for autonomous vehicles and did not directly include any of the methods being deployed. That in part was due to my interest in going into higher levels of analysis this time around. My searches of Google Scholar on this topic of autonomous vehicles returned results with a lot fewer citations than I was expecting to find [1]. Three of the papers in the first 30

4:30

Natural language processing

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/03/11

We have reached the 7th installment of the new series for 2023 related to AI. In just a couple of weeks we are going to venture out of these framing topics into the heart of my journey back into polling and sentiment analysis. Toward the end of that journey it will be very clear on the relationships between AGI, AI, and sentiment analysis. Processing to the point of understanding then adding a degree of directionality in terms of sentiment may be beyond the current state of things at this moment. A

5:52

Chatbots and understanding knowledge graphs

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/03/04

In total the largest knowledge graph ever created on the shoulders of giants happens to be the college academy of knowledge compiled as a part of our higher education traditions. That knowledge graph is inherently built on connections and the learning patterns of academics. It would have to be considered to be a very human based aggregate not a computer based one. It’s possible that could change over time, but I’m not entirely convinced that is going to happen in the short term. The totality of

6:00

Robots in the house

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/02/25

Right before sitting down to work on this post I recorded the audio for week 108. My voice has almost recovered all the way from catching that pandemic thing in December. It’s interesting that sustaining vocal quality would be one of the last things to stabilize from that distinctly unwanted experience. You have probably been able to hear that within the last few recorded podcasts. I just did not have that totality of vocal control. I might go back and record that audio segment again, but at this

6:08

Twitter as a company probably would not happen today

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/02/18

Part of what made Twitter so interesting is the diversity of argument and the townhall nature of it being the first place things show up in the feed. I’m not sure any other company or social platform could attract the same amount of hyperactive content creation users geared at news and coverage of the moment. People are arguing and I’m sure papers will soon be arriving to describe the end of social media. This weekend I’m going to spend a bit of time reading a book by Robert Putnam of “Bowling

4:34

Highly cited AI papers

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/02/11

This week it seemed like a good idea to take a look at some of the most highly cited AI papers. Back during week 81 of this journey into writing on Substack, I took a look at some of the most highly cited ML papers [1]. I was expecting a lot more overlap, but was pleasantly surprised at the differences. One of the papers really stood out based on the total number of citations and it’s up first. Intellectually I can accept that a paper has more than 100,000 citations, but in practice that is an awful

3:39

Code generating systems

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/02/04

You probably were wondering how long into the new year before a bunch of focus and attention were placed at the efforts of Hugging Face. You won’t have to wait any longer as this missive will dig into BigCode and some other efforts to use AI to build out code generating systems [1]. I was reading a TechCrunch article from Kyle Wiggers and wondering about how many different systems existed [2]. That article references 5 code generating systems that you could in practice elect to go evaluate. For

5:52

Building out a better backlog

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/01/28

We are now starting the third year journey of The Lindahl Letter on Substack. You can find the first two years worth of that effort combined into one manuscript right here or at any other online retailer:Lindahl, N. (2023). The Lindahl letter: 104 Machine Learning Posts. Lulu Press, Inc. https://www.lulu.com/shop/nels-lindahl/the-lindahl-letter-104-machine-learning-posts/ebook/product-y244ep.html During the course of this next year I’m probably going to write a book about how I would set up a

8:25

That 2nd year of posting recap

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/01/21

My appreciation for you reading this sentence right now is very real. That holds true in the moment of writing and within my intentions moving forward. At the start of this project a bit of writing on Substack happened two years ago now. During the course of starting that effort, I had not considered the amount of effort sustaining it would require. Probably the single most sustained writing project I have ever completed was my doctoral dissertation [1]. That writing process took less time than

2:51

Rethinking the future of ML

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/01/14

You probably have gotten a sense of the tremendous and overwhelming flood of publishing that is happening in the machine learning space. So much content is being created right now that nobody could possibly consume it all. The flood of content is real and overwhelming. That is one of the reasons that I work really hard to distill the complex topics I select into a readable format for people to consume. I really try to provide a pathway to people who want to be a part of this journey. Maybe those two

4:07

ML pracademics

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/01/07

You end up with people who are working in a field and people who study the field of inquiry academically. Sometimes and especially within the machine learning space you end up with people who are actively working as a practitioner. Those very same practitioners of the craft of machine learning are publishing academic articles at a rate never before seen within any field of study at large within the academy. The best way to describe that effort would be to call them the pracademics of the machine

3:32

Back to the ROI for ML

The Lindahl Letter ·

2022/12/31

One of the core topics within the machine learning space that I have studied happens to be ROI or, more to the point, an examination of just how well spent money would be in the space. You can certainly spend money on machine learning and AI related efforts as a part of a think tank, an independent lab, or a pure research institution. Within corporate spaces, pure research and development is one thing, but generally to expend the precious capital resources of an institution, organization, or group,

3:55

Overcrowding and ML

The Lindahl Letter ·

2022/12/24

You might remember back to Week 75 when I tried to explain the nature of overcrowding within the machine learning space and what exactly that is doing to engineering colleges. Back in 2020, Igor Susmelj wrote a piece in Towards Data Science, “How to Keep up With the Latest Research and Trends in ML” [1]. Within that paper, Igor raised awareness of a chart from Jeffrey Dean that showed machine learning arXiv papers versus Moore’s law growth rate [2]. A quick Google Scholar search of that paper will

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