Happy birthday to me
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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It was (is?) my birthday today.
When I was young, I would be excited about my birthday. I would know and talk about it a month out. I would say November is my birth month. I would count down to the day my birthday would be. I would be excited for my birthday party. I would be excited for the gifts I would get.
Now, it feels like just another day. Now, I can buy whatever I want. I’m not excited by it though. It feels like I’ve grown out of it.
And yet, Prerna spent a better part of three hours in this extra bedroom (study/art-cave) we have. For three hours, I held Savya as he dozed off, while she kept at it, in that closed door. Three hours where I did not see her. She would pop out from time to time, but I was not to go in the room.
And then, at twelve, I did.
Here’s how it looked.
There was a cake.
In case it was not clear, I love purple.
Prerna, I love you. Your excitement, zest and zeal for life is truly infectious.
Helsinki city opened up the Christmas season with a parade down Aleksanterinkatu. The parade began at Senate Square, at 16:00. By the time we reached the place, the parade was over. A whole throng of people were walking back from the streets, while another throng of people were walking toward Aleksanterinkatu.
Central is always a high density area compared to the rest of Helsinki. But whenever I see this many people in a place, I feel icky.
Not today though. The weather was cool, but not super cool. And because of so many people in the same small area, it felt warm even. Or maybe it was the body warmer I had on.
This was nothing compared to the crowd we had seen at Times Square.
We trudged along, walking, stopping, taking a picture and then continuing. We walked where trams usually run. I knew by then that the parade was long over. But we continued walking toward Senate Square. The weather was magnificent. And for whatever reason, neither of us was particularly salty about having missed the parade.
For most of this season, and the last, the Helsinki Cathedral has been covered due to renovation work. The renovation work is done now! The cathedral looked gorgeous, with the Christmas tree just ahead of it.
Prerna had planned as the final thing for my birthday, a dinner at Street Canteen, a Malaysian restaurant in Helsinki.
The restaurant is at the corner of Mannerheimintie, opposite Forum. You enter through the Kaivopiha entrance, or from the other side near Clas Ohlson. We missed this entrance, and then had to walk back.
I loved the feel of the place - a plastic elephant held the cutlery, the walls were covered in vibrant, classic wallpapers (ice cold Coca Cola sold here!!), the menu was in the shape of a magazine.
The food was good. It was my first time eating Malaysian street food - and this was that - so maybe I am a little inexperienced. But I loved the food. It was better than all the Indian food we’ve tried in Helsinki.
We eat Indian food all the time at home. And it’s not like the Indian food we eat in ravintolas here are any good. So makes sense to try out different cuisines when we go out.
I will leave you with a few pictures now. Enjoy!
P.S. Loved the Goreng Cauliflower and the noodles!
/five things to share
1. Microsoft Mitigated the Largest Cloud DDoS Ever Recorded, 15.7 Tbps - Slashdot by
On October 24, 2025, Azure DDoS Protection detected and mitigated a massive multi-vector attack peaking at 15.72 Tbps and 3.64 billion pps, the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded, aimed at a single Australian endpoint. Azure’s global protection network filtered the traffic, keeping services online. The attack came from the Aisuru botnet, a Turbo Mirai-class IoT botnet using compromised home routers and cameras. The attack used massive UDP floods from more than 500,000 IPs hitting a single public address, with little spoofing and random source ports that made traceback easier.
2. Cloudflare explains Tuesday’s outage that temporarily took down ChatGPT by Richard Lawler
the query change caused its ClickHouse database to generate duplicates of information. As the configuration file rapidly grew to exceed preset memory limits, it took down “the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module.”
My website is hosted on Cloudflare pages. It was down for a bit. As were a bunch of other websites - udemy, safari (o’Reilly) and so on.
It seems like a bad time for these cloud providers. First it was AWS, then Azure, then Azure had a DDoS attack and now this.
It truly seems like a matter of when and not if.
3. Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 by Ethan Mollick
Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI work.” And that may be the biggest change since the release of ChatGPT.
Google announced Gemini 3.0 which takes it closer to the state of the art with respect to other models. They claim it’s better than the rest. In this field, that’s a little subjective.
It has given me an interesting headache though. I was planning to take yearly subscription of Claude. I will test this out instead now.
4. We’re learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies by Jessica Hamzelou
Our bones are continually being broken down and rebuilt, and they need calcium for that rebuilding process. Without enough calcium, bones can become weak and brittle. (Depressingly, rickets is still a global health issue, which is why there is global consensus that infants should receive a vitamin D supplement at least until they are one year old.)
Take your supplements!
It’s that time of the year for us in Finland at least.
5. Screw it, I’m installing Linux by Nathan Edwards
Linux has been a perfectly viable desktop OS for ages. But gaming on Linux is now viable, too. Valve’s hard work getting Windows games to run well on the Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats. Gaming handhelds that ship with Windows run better and have higher frame rates on Bazzite, a Fedora-based distro, than they do with Windows. And after reading about the upcoming Steam Machine and Antonio’s experience running Bazzite on the Framework Desktop, I want to try it.
Microsoft has enshittified Windows 11 by putting AI everywhere.
There should be a way to say I don’t want any AI features. There are no different versions of the OS. Everyone gets the same OS. For those who don’t want it, there should be a way to opt out of it.
If not, people can try Linux.
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.