This space is flooded
My biggest posts in terms of popularity have been about being focused and my inherent distaste for social media.
Thank you for tuning in to week 221 of the Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for the Lindahl Letter is, “This space is flooded.”
Apparently, Substack now boasts over 17,000 professional writers on the platform [1]. That many people actually making some income from Substack is actually rather amazing. It’s an ecosystem of professional writers for sure. My biggest posts in terms of popularity have been about being focused and my inherent distaste for social media. That feels about right. I have been sharing research notes here with the Lindahl Letter for 1,805 days spanning January 29, 2021 to January 8, 2026. That includes more than 200 missives. Later this month we will hit that 5 year mark from my very first Substack post. That feels like forever ago. Some of those early posts were actually pretty good. A lot of them were based around talks or ideas for talks. Since that time, Substack itself has grown into a vast ecosystem of writers and readers that is thriving. It’s good to find a forum where people can share an interest in actually reading and writing. My favorite thing about the Substack ecosystem is that it has never really developed into anything beyond the basics of reading and writing.
ChatGPT and other chat based interfaces have changed our relationship with what was the open internet. A lot of people have opined about how the open internet is dying. We all pretty much feel that the open internet is in active decay. Instead of just Googling things and finding random parts of the internet the interaction is now more structured and only in one place or more accurately one interface that never extends to specific domains anymore. Even a basic Google search will typically reduce the overall search experience to an AI summary. We are now starting to get more than just text in those previous text only interfaces. Some of it is interactive and multimedia based. As a researcher, I have been super focused on how a knowledge graph could be used to check or augment this type of interaction. My guess is that within the next 6 months the interface will have entirely transformed, yet again, and the way people connect with the internet will be fundamentally different. It will be agent forward, probably browser based, and far more personally tailored.
Instead of building a knowledge graph to encompass the entire world in real time with an understanding of history it will instead be very individualized. That may change the way advertising and tracking get data about us in a very real way. It will change how data collection and databrokering occurs. We will see if that change ends up being a net positive or if the clearinghouse for tracking just changes locations. Not unlike the central premise of Severance the television show, our work and personal data ecosystems will end up being fundamentally segregated and unaware of each other. Smartphones were a window into the world around us and social media gained a ton of steam and then faltered. We are now moving toward a new framework of online engagement that is going to be interesting going forward. We are here at the start of something that is going to be a wild ride.
This week 3 stories caught my attention and I thought were worth sharing.
“Yann LeCun calls Alexandr Wang ‘inexperienced’ and predicts more Meta AI employee departures” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yann-lecun-calls-alexandr-wang-182614902.html
“Manus Joins Meta for Next Era of Innovation” https://manus.im/blog/manus-joins-meta-for-next-era-of-innovation
“Groq and Nvidia Enter Non-Exclusive Inference Technology Licensing Agreement to Accelerate AI Inference at Global Scale”
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