NL43 - Sakraat redux

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #43, 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.

/what goes around

Today is an anniversary of sorts.

Almost a year back on 27th January, I published the first NordLetter. It was not called NordLetter back then, and after publishing two more, it went on a hiatus.

That's the thing about anniversaries, you can pick any date to celebrate. So, I am picking this.

The other reason is that first post was about celebrating Sakraat in Finland. We celebrated Makar Sankranti on Jan 15th this year at Tony's corner.

Tony's corner is a nice cosy ravintola in Tapiola. Compared to last year, it was a smaller cosier affair this time around. Last year, we had to set up chairs and tables for snacks and food. This year, we were in a restaurant and the food and everything else was already setup.

The rest of it was the same as it was last year.

We ate dahi-chura with gud and aloo matar sabzi.

We had a little bon-fire outside. Prerna and I had prepared the playlist. We sang and danced and warmed ourselves up outside. Some kids threw popcorn into the fire. The wonderful hosts at Tony's served us tea.

Then we went in, sang our hearts out. I was trying to find the karaoke option in Apple Music, but couldn't. So we ended up searching and playing karaoke mixes on Youtube.

We finished with khichdi, papad, aloo-sabzi and achaar.

Thanks BJPRF.

1. The people should own the town square - Mastodon's ownership will transfer to a non-profit

I was using Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon at one point. Bluesky never spoke to me, in a way Twitter/X never did either. I was mostly posting on Thread and Mastodon. Even before Mark's U-turn on moderating, I was feeling happier at Mastodon; Mark's announcement was just that little push that I needed. I uninstalled Thread from the phone last week.

Mastodon's ethos, it's commitment to federation, and remaining ad-free and algorithm free, better aligns with my beliefs.

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

With this change, Mastodon is making sure what happened at X, or what regularly happens at Meta, can not happen to Mastodon.

2. Wired - US Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban Law

Lot of drama around this one. The Supreme Court has upheld the law, which means TikTok should get banned in the US now.

India banned TikTok back in 2020. Five years too late US?

3. Wired - The King of Ozempic Is Scared as Hell

A well-rounded piece on Novo-Nordisk, which I did not know was a Danish company.

For a biotech company overseen by a nonprofit to hit on the magic ingredient and to achieve, however briefly, world dominion and otherworldly profits, it was almost Faustian. I couldn’t shake the idea that Novo was at increasingly steep odds with itself, like a body devouring its own pancreas. And now Wall Street was “disappointed” that Novo’s latest drug didn’t induce weight loss more precipitous than 22 percent. Perhaps investors won’t wholeheartedly green-light Novo again until they see returns of 100 percent weight loss, the full deletion of human bodies.

4. Cheating is All You Need

There has to be one AI piece here. This is that, for this week.

Coding assistants are coming. They’re imminent. You will use them this year. They will absolutely blow your mind. And they’ll continue to improve at an astonishing rate.

They will feel gloriously like cheating, just like when IDEs came out, back in the days of yore. And for a time-constrained developer like me–and I say this as someone who has written over a million lines of production code…

5. In 2009, Sweden chose to replace books with computers. 15 years later, it allocates 104 million euros to reverse course

Fast forward fifteen years, and Sweden is having second thoughts due to some major problems cropping up. Research shows that reading on screens (especially those with bright lights) can cause more eye strain and less focus compared to paper books. Plus, understanding what you read and remembering it takes a hit when you’re staring at screens.

We had become so enamoured and maybe a bit FOMO'd by Byju's to get my little sister a tablet and a subscription to Byju's. It did not go as I had hoped. She managed to side-load chrome/youtube on the "tamper-proof" tablet.

More or less aligns with how I feel about reading as well. Tablets and phones just have that manic, look notifications, vibe about them. There is always something to look at, something to get distracted by.

E-ink display devices might be a solution. And of course, real paper is always there.

/new posts

Three new posts on my website this week.

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.