Fun at Biitsi
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #80, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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Last week, just after I had sent out [[202511222146 NL 80|NL80]], I felt I should put more effort into this, into writing the [[202503052322 NordLetter|NordLetter]].
I usually start writing this on a Saturday. After I start it takes around anything from an hour to two to get everything done. The writing, a little bit of re-writing, uploading pictures to Cloudflare R2, pasting things in the Buttondown client, scheduling the post, doing a git push on my own website and so on.
The first two thing here were about the writing. The rest is just admin work.
This is the longest thing I write all week. I used to be able to write a little while I commuted to work. That stopped when I got a car.
Most of what I do during the week is maybe write a paragraph here, a few words there. I assume no one reads those. Or rather, the only thing I am sure some people read is this NordLetter. This realisation came when a friend said they get news about us from this newsletter. Prerna’s friends have said the same thing to her.
And so, I started writing this edition on Thursday. I wrote the first two lines and then the rest I am typing out on Sunday.
I attended the November edition of the Vibe Coding Finland meetup on Wednesday. It was held at the Architecture and Design Museum. The location was the thing I was most excited about. I could not go in advance and checkout the exhibits before the meetup. I saw just enough during the break though that I want to visit it again.
The talk that gave me the most to think about was by Roope Rainisto. He made me rethink what stories were, how they changed, what they are now, and where can we go.
I am not sure I agree with everything that he said, but that’s the thing - you don’t have to.
On Saturday, we were at Biitsi courtesy of our friends at the housing association. Biitsi is located at Underground at the Mall of Tripla. You go down to P4, and from there, follow the signage that leads you to it.
The temperature was a nice and warm (and humid?) 26 degrees. There was a surf area (a different area to which we did not have access), three volleyball courts, sandy areas to sit in and play some games in, a couple of beach side bars and all around fun!
We took a wrong bus and so were a little late by the time we got there. The housing association had booked one court and one sandy area for us. Two groups were already playing beach volleyball when we got there.
Four others were playing cornhole when we got there. So we joined them. In cornhole, you take a little pillow filled with corn(?) and try to make sure it falls in a hole on an inclined bench. I overshot the four times I tried.
Then, it was time to play beach volleyball. It was fun. The guys and gals were kind. Everyone got a chance to serve, everyone played in every position. Beginners got two serves. We started bad, but ended up being the undefeated champs of the court.
I had fun. I had played volleyball back in school. It was the default sport that was picked for me, even though I actually liked and was pretty good at table tennis. This was for the subject of Physical Education. Where our school got good marks in the practical by serving samosas and coke to the examiner and chatting them up. Or at least that was the story.
Savya woke up and Prerna went and sat with him for a bit.
After living in Finland for more than four years, and having a sauna in my home, I took my first sauna. And it was nice.
The air felt hot and heavy. But I felt light. The hiss of the water as someone poured hot water on the coal. We sat there, not in total darkness and I could feel the steam inside my lungs. And I thought to myself - this is nice, I will do thing where they take a dip into freezing lake water, then run to the sauna, then run and take a dip in the freezing water.
Savya enjoyed himself in the sauna too. There was a little discussion around whether he was too young to be in one. But I heard someone say that Finns used to give birth in saunas. So not too young then.
/five things to share
1. Part 1: My Life Is a Lie by Michael W. Green
The second earner isn’t working for a vacation or a boat. The second earner is working to pay the stranger watching their children so they can go to work and clear $1-2K extra a month. It’s a closed loop.
This hit me like a ton of bricks.
This is a must read.
2. Stranger Things is ending, and so is Netflix’s reliance on tentpole shows by Charles Pulliam-Moore
Rather than launching massive tentpole originals designed to get everyone watching the same thing, Netflix has invested more of its energy into projects that feel more targeted to specific audiences, like fans of anime and live sports.
You can’t make everyone happy is the one advice you keep hearing as you are creating something. Netflix is like a collection of niches. They have different things that appeal to different people. That is good, I think.
3. Warner Music Group partners with Suno to offer AI likenesses of its artists by Emma Roth
Warner Music Group has struck a licensing deal with the AI music creation platform Suno. Under the agreement, WMG will allow users to create AI-generated music on Suno using the voices, names, likenesses, images, and compositions of artists who opt in to the program.
All the suing was for this. OpenAI did this long back with the newspapers. It had started with the music industry now.
4. AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You
Just for the LOLZ.
5. Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult by Simon Willison
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call “best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use”. This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant challenges from OpenAI’s GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Google’s Gemini 3, both released within the past week!
I did not have preview access to Opus4.5. Nor do I need it for the things I generally use LLMs for.
With the base text only models, I guess there is no more step change now. They may show benchmarks that they are the best model for coding, but it’s single decimal points. It does not really matter.
What matters more is the features they add - like when Anthropic added the skills feature. What you can do is more important. And yes I still believe it will be human in the loop situation. Will we be centaurs of reverse-centaurs is an open question.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.