Cherries all around

Hello from Helsinki! This is NordLetter #8. Previous editions can be found here.

Spring/summer is in full swing here. As evidenced by the fact that we were out on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, we were at the Folklore 2024 organised by Suomi-Intia-Seura. On Sunday, we visited the Roihuvuori Cherry Park in Helsinki.

Folklore'24

The Folklore event was about Indian culture and the things we do around marriages. We had people representing different states' culture. How brides and grooms look on their wedding days. The things we do before marriage. The rituals we perform after marriage, and so on. There was also food.

Later in the evening I went on my walk. You know how I miss my walks.

Cherry Park

Last Sunday, the cherry trees had not really bloomed. Somewhere during the week they did bloom, and we got the reels. Today, when we visited, it felt like the bloom had come and gone.

The Roihuvuori Cherry Park is in Helsinki closest to the Herttoniemi metro station. From there it's a 1.2 kms walk to the Roihuvuori Cherry Park. The entrance to the park has a Torii style gate along with beautiful tulip garden.

As we walked inside, we walked across a wooden bridge over a beautiful pond.

Waking a bit more we reached a parking space where all the food trucks are parked. Beyond which you can just see all the cherry trees lined up against the water tank. Then we finally reached the cherry trees, which to be fair did not look that pink. But that could most probably be because we were a bit late.

We finally found a place in the lawns, spread our sheet on the lawn and chilled for a bit. We had sweet bubble waffle from a vendor and fries and nuggets from a falafel place.

AI season

Both Google and OpenAI announced new versions of their products/updates.

OpenAI came out with ChatGPT 4 o on Monday. The new model is faster, sounds more natural, laughs, flirts a bit (think the movie Her).

Google announced updates to Gemini as part of IO on Tuesday.

Both models are touting multi-modal capabilities. Which means that the model can understand images, video, audio and respond accordingly.

I mostly use Copilot for coding help and occasionally create images. My experience thus far has been the same. The assistants can be used to provide an initial starting point. But they can not be deployed to production. Will they get any better? Maybe. Or maybe this is the best these models can go. They will continue to hallucinate. They will continue to confidently lie.

AI generated summaries

Google also announced that AI generated summaries will come to search. Also a separate web search filter. This mode would remove the shopping bar, the AI overviews, etc. How search used to work in the old days.

The assumption here is that we are looking for things faster. Summarise the book to a paragraph. Summarise the news article. Summarise. Summarise. Summarise.

For some things, sure, I would love to get a one word or paragraph answer. Mostly these are factual queries.

But for other things, you want to read the full thing.

I don't know, I am old school about these things. I believe in the power of the open web and open systems.

I am reading

We Need To Rewild The Internet

This article draws parallels between the practices of rewilding ecological systems and the web. Most of the web is dependent on two or more large companies to keep it running. Think an outage in AWS causes a lot of apps to go down.

It advocates increasing diversity.

I am thinking about

Diversity is as important in ecology as it is in the infrastructure that underpins the internet. We cannot let one or two companies control parts of the internet. The web is far too important. The web will wither and die.

I was talking to a friend here, and they mentioned a similar thing around multi-use apartments. They mentioned that the previous apartment they were renting out had only 1/2 hall apartments. Those apartments would attract a certain type of renter: mostly immigrants, or people just starting out in life. They will not attract families. You want diversity in apartments. As you do in other things.

Diversity is good.

That's all folks! See you next week.