NL46 - Preparedness Day

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #46, 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.

We have been fighting flu this past week. Savya and Prerna caught it first, followed by me. It's usually the other way around. It does not feel good to be the carrier of infections in a household.

After Savya was born, for the longest time I was so worried what would we do if Savya fell ill. He could not tell us how he was feeling. He would just cry. What would we do then? What could we do?

Just imagining it, made me feel so damn helpless.

It happened though. Last year, for a month, we had flu on and off. Whenever it felt like we had beaten it, it came back. For a whole month!

I could not do yoga. I could not go for my walks. Work was affected too.

But we navigated it well. I have a similar fear for when Savya will start going to daycare. The vectors for infection would increase manifold.

I guess we will cross that bridge, when we get to that bridge.

7th Feb is National Preparedness Day in Finland. The idea is to be prepared in case of any emergencies with enough supplies to last 72h.

There's a test here.

We do not have enough things stockpiled at home. It might be a good idea to have some things at home.

Water is essential. Back home, whenever they would clean the water tank or something, they would cut off water supply for half a day or something.

We would have to store some water in buckets, etc. It was such a chore. Even when these things were informed to us in advance. Even when we had time to plan.

So many of these things are almost magical, if you think about it. I can just turn a tap and I get fresh running water (drinkable, here in Finland).

Here is the full list of recommended supplies:

• Water containers (clean and with a lid)
• Food that is easy to prepare and suitable for all family members
• Food for pets
• Battery-powered radio (and batteries)
• Battery-powered torch (and batteries)
• A back-up power supply for charging your phone, for example
• A camping stove and matches
• Cash
• Essential medicines
• Iodine tablets
• Hygiene supplies
• First aid supplies
• Portable fire extinguisher/extinguishing blanket

/five things to share

1. Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books

An interview with Ted Chiang (Exhaltation, Story of your lives) about the search for a perfect language, the state of AI, and the future direction of technology. Interesting read.

I think we need to think about the possible bad outcomes and work to mitigate them; if we do that, we have a chance of preventing them from coming to pass. I don’t know if that’s optimism, unless everything except fatalism is optimism. I suppose it might be a moral duty to not be fatalistic. We have to believe that our actions have the potential to make a difference because if we don’t believe that, we won’t take any action at all.

2. Everyone knows your location

This should not be surprising to anyone at this point. If you have a phone on you, they know everything about you. It is scary. Unfortunately there's no easy way to opt out. It feels funny how these things have remained legal for so long. Why is it OK for companies to be able to spy on people without reproach.
Also, Meta/Facebook is a shitty company and they get your data whether you have their apps installed or not.

3. Researchers trained an OpenAI rival in half an hour for less than $50

This feels like this is the future? The next evolution of these things.

The researchers based s1 on Qwen2.5, an open-source model from Alibaba Cloud. They initially started with a pool of 59,000 questions to train the model on, but found that the larger data set didn’t offer “substantial gains” over a whittled-down set of just 1,000. The researchers say they trained the model on just 16 Nvidia H100 GPUs.

4. The timeline apps are here, and they’re awesome

I use NetNewsWire, primarily for following the blogs I follow on the web. I guess the Today view in NNW is like a timeline in itself?

These things are awesome. I am done seeing algorithmic timelines. Reverse-chronological timeline apps, social or otherwise are awesome.

Timeline apps are sort of a spiritual successor to RSS readers like Google Reader and Feedly. (Some of them, like Reeder and Unread, are just updated versions of longtime RSS readers.) Years ago, RSS readers were designed to help you keep all your blogs and websites in order, back when maintaining your blogroll was a lot of work. Now the job is vastly more difficult. You’re following creators on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, keeping up with your favorite memes on Tumblr and all the news on Bluesky, refreshing your favorite subreddits over and over all day, and checking your favorite news sites a few times, too. None of these platforms interoperate because their business incentives are to make your life miserable, but when you boil all those things down, they’re just feeds of content.

5. Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

It is a scary proposition indeed.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

1. Once upon a time, we almost lost everything - A tale of cyberattack on a loved one.
2. Should you pay for search?
3. The last work left in this world
4. Some times
5. The three types of code I write

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.