Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #, 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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I am trying a new thing here. This is a meta beginning of sorts - a look behind the curtain if you will.
I usually start writing a NordLetter on a Saturday. I have a 2-3 hour window during which I write whatever I want to write. I upload the images on CloudFlare, then schedule the post on Buttondown, and finally post the NordLetter on my website.
It is hectic. Especially with the looming Sunday deadline. Sometimes I don’t know what I want to say in advance. Which to be honest is most NordLetters. I don’t like that pressure.
There is this newsletter I follow - Installer, among others, which has a section that lists out things their readers are into. The callout for that goes out every Thursday.
And so I thought, let’s bring some professionalism into this. If they start drafting their newsletter on a Thursday, I can too.
And so, here we are.
While I was in India, and Prerna was the one dropping him at his päiväkoti, he was not crying. In fact, he would be laughing, and waving her goodbye.
I am not so lucky.
For most of last week, since I’ve returned, whenever I would drop Savya at his päiväkoti, he would cry. Which is not new. He used to cry while I was dropping him at his päiväkoti. The anomaly was these three weeks while I was in India.
Anyway, on Tuesday, as I went and dropped him at his daycare. I heard a cacophony of voices coming from inside the play area.
Savya. Savya. Savya.
The other kids in his Sade group, were calling out his name - laughing as they did so. As I put Savya down, the little babies started making their way out of the play area toward him. All the while laughing and calling Savya out.
Savya. Savya. Savya.
I smiled at that.
Savya was laughing that day as I left him with his teachers in the play area. I was laughing when I got in my car and drove away. Oh, the joy!
We had celebrated Savya’s birthday on 18th Feb. Editions of NordLetter came and went, but I did not say anything about it. I guess that says as much about it as anything I could have said.
I love the decoration we did. It came out really well. One aspect of living here, and maybe even in India now, is that the decoration is still there on the wall. Every day I look at it and smile a bit. It was the same with the decoration for Prerna’s birthday or mine. We have three Happy Birthdays up in our home now - two in the hall and one in this secondary bedroom/study-room/work-from-home-room.
There was good food, a lot of children - and I don’t think I talked to but one person, the father of a friend of Savya’s from his päiväkoti. There was a lot of shouting and running around. Plus the bound to happen tussle over who gets the new cool car.
I guess that’s how children’s birthday parties go!
It has gotten slippery here these past couple of days. We had great fluffy snow in the morning and then, it started raining in the evening. I had gone to pick up Savya and then thought to myself, this will be a mess soon.
And guess what, it was. It became. Whatever.
I took the long way out today when I was bringing Savya back from the daycare. Somehow I went down through the danger route. Not back though.
Allowed me to have a bit of a walk too.
Another thing I did over the weekend was that I used Claude Cowork to fix my Obsidian vault. Obsidian is where I write. Obsidian is where I think.
These were things that I had on my task-list for a few months. To be clear, I could have done these things by myself at some point. I was originally planning to do these things with Claude Code, but again never got around to it.
Claude Cowork provides a nice UI to Claude Code, perhaps making it a little more accessible. You basically point Claude to a folder and tell it whatever you want it to do.
Since, the Obsidian vault is basically just markdown files, it works like magic.
I asked Claude to:
- Fix the metadata on all posts.
- Create an archive from my daily notes and remove the daily notes after the fact.
- Make it come up with any links from all the micro posts I keep writing.
It did those things surprisingly quickly. Next up I want to run some open source models locally. It is again something that I have been wanting to do since a long time. My Mac has just 16GB RAM though, so it would not be very good. It will just be a PoC of sorts.
Fun times ahead.
/five things to share
1. Speaking is quick, listening is slow - interconnected
The human uses voice and the computer uses screens. I mean, it’s rare that my phone is beyond peripersonal space so we can assume it is only rarely not present. A screen is way higher in terms of information bandwidth than listening. Let’s use it!
Super cool idea. We are always on our phones with us. We can use both - the screen and voice. The software needs to be smart though, to understand intent.
It makes sense why Jony and OpenAI are building their device.
2. Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese firms of using Claude to train their AI by Emma Roth
DeepSeek, which caused a stir in the AI industry for its powerful but more efficient models, held over 150,000 exchanges with Claude and targeted its reasoning capabilities, according to Anthropic. It’s also accused of using Claude to generate “censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive questions about dissidents, party leaders, or authoritarianism.” In a letter to lawmakers last week, OpenAI similarly accused DeepSeek of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs.”
I remember there being similar comments being made when Deepseek had first come out. But hey, you did not ask for permission when you trained on the world’s data.
All this fear mongering and for what?
Also, I’m in a weird position re: Anthropic. I use the Pro plan and am their customer. With the way things are you are bound to feel some sense of loyalty toward the company. You may feel the need to defend them. They’re better than OpenAI!
Not really.
The way these companies have built their tools is generally shitty. The products are useful though. Make of that what you will. I had read recently a post by Cory Doctorow which talked about this.
Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what’s better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don’t like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:
That’s where I stand. My dream is to be able to run these tools locally. I don’t want to send my data out to these companies.
3. Continue local sessions from any device with Remote Control - Claude Code Docs by
Remote Control connects claude.ai/code or the Claude app for iOS and Android to a Claude Code session running on your machine. Start a task at your desk, then pick it up from your phone on the couch or a browser on another computer.
Seems interesting. Not everything I have runs on a remote git repo.
I have ideas about how I want to use it for my obsidian vault. But I have not been able to make time to start playing with this there yet.
I have loved using CC on web. Asking it to do things as the ideas come to me, from wherever. This would be like that. So fun.
There are limitations - like not being able to start a new session, but that’s OK.
Before I let it lose on my obsidian vault, I need to have my backup strategy in place though.
4. Pluralistic: The whole economy pays the Amazon tax
Without billionaires who would happily support concentration camps in their back yards if it means saving a dollar on their taxes, fascism would still be a fringe movement.
Loved this line. All movements need money. That money must come from somewhere.
The crux of this article is this - Amazon forces sellers to raise prices everywhere, if they want to raise prices on Amazon, because of the cut Amazon takes.
5. Phantom Obligation
Email’s unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response. The number isn’t neutral information. It’s a measure of social debt.
But when we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause.
I have wondered about this myself. My current practice involves reading what I want to read and then marking everything else as read with prejudice. It’s not ideal. There is this feeling of guilt I have, of a task that needs to be done, quite like email.
There should be a different design, a different paradigm. Maybe I should write my thoughts in a place.
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.