NL47 - Week of love

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #47, 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.

A year of mornings is out today on Amazon all across the globe.

Go ahead and buy, leave a review, share it with the world.

When we were first deciding what date we would get married on, I had thought 14th is Valentine's, 15th we will have our anniversary. Every year we would have a carnival in February!

I love you, Prerna. This here, is year two.

This was year one. We had celebrated the anniversary with a dinner at Lie Mi, and a cake from Prisma. Last year, there were other things on our mind.

To celebrate our anniversary this year, we got a cake baked from a baker and went to Classic Pizza.

We spent most of the morning wondering whether we would leave Savya with friends and have an hour for ourselves. Just the two of us. We ended up not going that route.

It should not have been such a big deal. But we are at peace when either of us can see him and know he is safe.

Back to Classic Pizza.

I like the ambiance of the pizzeria. The lights are dim, the furniture is classy. It feels like you are on a date.

The staff was very helpful and showed us to our table. They later brought a high-table for Savya to sit in and some paper and crayons for him to draw on the papers. Savya does not care about drawing in this moment. He took the colours and threw them on the ground. He had fun.

As did we.

Classic Pizza have a thing going on for Valentine's week. You get a percentage off on a few pizzas. We ordered the vegan pizza and the pollo picanti without the chicken (they added basil, and tomatoes).

The vegan pizza had dried tomatoes on them which provided it a different flavour than the slightly subdued flavour of the picanti.

Even though Savya was with us, we found time to sit and talk and laugh. When we're at home, all we see is work. Going out on dates is important. Life is for living!

/five things to share

1. Three Observations by Sam Altman

The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.

2. Advertising is a cancer on society by Jacek Złydach

Advertising as currently practiced shares these characteristics. It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.

Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse, and there's no way you can resist its impact.

3. A little faster than you by Seth Godin

Our velocity through life is always relative. The pace of our career advancement, the expectations we have for change, the number of followers we have online–none of them are absolute.

4. The year I didn't survive

A beautiful story about love and loss and birth at the same time.

I used to feel like we were getting older together. Now I just feel like I'm getting old. I hadn't realized how different those two feelings are.

5. My Wife’s Enemies Are Now My Enemies, Too

That’s part of what love is. When the person you love decides that someone in the world brings him or her only frustration and pain, that person is your enemy, even if that person has always been cool to you in the past, or you’ve never actually met the person, or your partner has never actually met the person. The more you love someone, the more ardently you should feel not just obligated but driven to want to destroy the people your loved one wishes ill.

/new posts

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

1. Some times we wait - About giving a thing time to become something
2. Why work? - About the myths of work
3. Sync less, please? - About trying to read less on NNW
4. About the marshmallow experiment - And raising kids
5. These are just poems

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Until next week.