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 books, manuscripts, or larger articles. I’m feeling reflective today about the nature of and future of Stubstack as a publishing platform. A lot of writers flocked to Substack and it as a platform has certainly helped nurture independent writing. Newsletters have come a long way over the years, but for the most part they are fundamentally the same asymmetric writer to audience communication method. Within the situation we are experiencing at the moment it appears to be Substack as a platform that has changed.
I believe and consider it to be true that sunlight has always been the best disinfectant. Understanding begins the path to knowledge. Substack as a platform is at a crossroads. It’s my guess that the platform that is Substack will radically change in 2024. To be honest about that change, I’d have to say I’m not entirely sure what will happen [1]. Generally, I’m going to keep writing and publishing until a move to my core WordPress domain is required [2]. Everything is all set up over at that domain just in case things have to be moved, but I’m legitimately hoping that the Substack community survives the year. My corpus of writing is well over 5 million words and while none of them are particularly spicy or super eventful they were written to be shared.
You can tell here now that you made it to the third paragraph that this missive has gone back to my previous writing strategy and is not reduced into highly curated bullet points. That was something that I tried out to see if that modern communication strategy would work for my research notes. I think my preference going forward will be to write in a more long form communication structure. Bullet points have a place and are great for reducing large amounts of information into something more palatable. My writing generally has been more about being a self contained research note that brings forward a degree of understanding about something complex. That will most certainly be the standard going forward. Things that catch my attention are going to receive coverage and that will be the ongoing basis of each weekly Lindahl Letter.
Links and thoughts:
I listed to Hard Fork this week “The Times Sues OpenAI + A Debate Over iMessage + Our New Year’s Tech Resolutions”
I read this paper “Mixtral of Experts” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.04088.pdf
Footnotes:
[1] I read this article from Platformer:
[2] https://www.nelslindahl.com/ or here https://www.nelslindahl.com/weblog/
What’s next for The Lindahl Letter?
Week 154: My 2024 predictions
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3 years on Substack