NL27 - Our place in the world

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #27, 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 Threads.

I finished reading A Prayer for the Crown-Shy this week. This is a sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built which I had finished reading last week. Maybe it is a product of reading these books, but I have been thinking about nature and our role in the world. I wrote about trails and everything in nature that is born, dies.

Linkin Park are back. The album comes out on November 15th.  The Emptiness Machine is out now. Go listen to it.

Barnes and Noble stores are becoming more individualistic to be profitable. This makes sense to me. The race to cheapest will always be won by the online business. Book stores and libraries are more than places you go to buy books. And so it makes sense to let each store manager customize it based on where it is located and what the patrons want to read.

How McDonald’s changes their menu items in different parts of the world. I do miss McAloo tikki a lot. Make it international.

Reading on screens is worse for comprehension.

From the conclusion:

The results of this study indicate that reading linear narrative and expository texts on a computer screen leads to poorer
reading comprehension than reading the same texts on paper. These results have several pedagogical implications. Firstly,
we should not assume that changing the presentation formatfor even short texts used in reading assessments will not have a
significantimpact on reading performance. If texts are longer than a page, scrolling and the lack of spatiotemporal markers of
the digital texts to aid memory and reading comprehension might impede reading performance. Furthermore, our results
suggest that implementing both reading assessment tasks (i.e., text reading and response tasks) in the same medium – the
computer – leads to additional cognitive costs

It does align with how I feel about reading on the phone, specifically. The amount of time I can concentrate on something is way too small. And the reason why I’m enjoying borrowing and reading books from the library so much now.

/techStuff

1. Meta has a major opportunity to win the AI hardware race. I don’t want Meta to win. The morality of the company is not at the right place. But I can’t deny that the low stakes nature of the Meta Ray Ban glasses make them a good product. Now that they have the initial product, they can iterate and make it better.
2. A new Ghost game coming out in 2025 hopefully. Sony has just released a brief trailer. It looks cool. We will know more in the coming days. Ghost of Tsushima is one of my favourite games of all time. It is beautiful and plays beautifully too. I have high hopes for this one.
3. Also a remaster for Horizon Zero Dawn. Not sure who was asking for this. But I guess it’s good to have a version for the current gen. Will they remaster both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West whenever PS 6 arrives?
4. The messy WordPress drama, explained. My view on this is regarding the human/kindness aspect of this. Do people deserve to be paid for the work they do on open source project? Can an open source project ask people to contribute hours? If you are building a paid product on top of an open source project, I think they should be allowed to.
5. OpenAI was a research lab — now it’s just another tech company. Most of OpenAI's founders have left the company now. It is raising a ton of new money and turning into a tech company.
6. Microsoft’s more secure Windows Recall feature can also be uninstalled by users. Good changes compared to when it was announced, when the DB was plain-text.

/reading

1. Amusing ourselves to death. I haven’t read Brave New World yet. Maybe I should. We were so focused on it being not a 1984 word, that we did notice as we slipped into the Brave New World.

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.