NL 44 - Celebrating the Republic

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #44, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Most of the republic days back home, back when I cared, were spent watching the republic day parade from the living room. The tanks were my favourite part of the parade. Republic Day is a public holiday in India. We celebrated it a day before at school.

For celebrating the 76th Republic Day of India, we visited the Indian Embassy in Helsinki.

We woke up early. There are some things which can not be skipped, including yoga and breakfast. We had avocado toast.

The Indian Embassy is at Kulosaarentie 32. The closest metro station is Kulosaari, and then a ten minute walk to get to the embassy.

There is this little hill that you climb which goes next to a school on the way to the embassy. The football ground was frozen. There were a couple of kids kicking the ball about.

As we got down the hill, on the lane the embassy is in, I did not have to tell Prerna which one the Indian embassy was.

The embassy was draped in the three colours of our national flag. There was a big tricolour draped on the second floor of the main embassy building.

There were not that many people there when we walked in. There were a few people setting things up. Prerna asked if they needed any help. They did not. So we took the camera out and took some pictures.

The ambassador arrived at 10 AM. By that time there were a lot more people in the embassy grounds. The air was nippy, the sky gray. Typical Finnish winter weather.

I was not surprised when the flag did not unfurl when they tried to. This same thing had happened at almost all the times my principal had tried to unfurl the flag in our school.

The flag did unfurl. We sang jana-gana-mana. I felt patriotic and emotional. The ambassador gave an address. There were refreshments.

We stood amongst friends, talked, laughed and celebrated the Indian republic.

/five things to share

1. 24 hours in an invisible epidemic

If you don't click on any other link in this edition, click this one. Go scroll through this page. It is beautiful and sorrowful.
Loneliness is an epidemic in the developed world. This shows that.

2. Life Lessons from the First Half-Century of My Career – Communications of the ACM

Some highlights:

The cost of praise is small. The value to others is inestimable.

Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.

There are no losers on a winning team, and no winners on a losing team.

3. Trump tries to end birthright citizenship

One of President Donald Trump’s first moves in office was an executive order repealing birthright citizenship — something he promised to do but didn’t deliver on during his first term. The move, which is almost certainly unconstitutional, would affect more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as well as people in the US on non-immigrant visas, including more than 580,000 people with H1-Bs.

4. Google’s Gemini is already winning the next-gen assistant wars

There are other ascendant AI assistants, of course. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot all have strong underlying models, and some share the same multimodal capabilities as Gemini. There are lots of good reasons to pick them or even something like Perplexity over Gemini. But they’re missing the most important thing: distribution. They’re apps you have to download, log in to, and open every time. Gemini is a button you can press — and that’s a big difference. There’s a reason OpenAI is reportedly working on everything from a web browser to a Jony Ive-designed ChatGPT gadget: the built-in options usually win.

5. Open AI announced Operator

It is an agent which can do things on the web for you.

OpenAI’s Operator Lets ChatGPT Use the Web for You

At WIRED’s request, Operator was asked to book an Amtrak train trip from New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington, DC. It went to the right website and entered the necessary information correctly to bring up the timetable, then asked for further instruction. If a user were logged in to the Amtrak website or into a browser profile with stored credit card information, Operator would be able to go ahead and book a ticket—although it is designed to ask for permission first.

A take from Simon:
Introducing Operator

My initial recommendation: start a fresh session for each task you outsource to Operator to ensure it doesn't have access to your credentials for any sites that you have used via the tool in the past. If you're having it spend money on your behalf let it get to the checkout, then provide it with your payment details and wipe the session straight afterwards.

And finally, ChatGPT Operator system prompt. It's always fun reading these things. These systems don't have any other safeguards other than things tacked before whatever you, the user asks the LLM. It feels a little like looking behind the curtain, like you know how the magician did it! So, fun.

/new posts

Six new posts on my website this week, if you haven't read them yet.

1. You can’t have one without the other
2. The next four years are going to be a drag
3. The two factors that allow services to be terrible
4. I need to talk to more people, more often
5. Embracing the light - Are you a light or dark mode person?
6. What a mess! - I discovered myself a bit while writing this. A little proud of this one.

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.