NL48 - Writing meet-ups

Sajal Choudhary -

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #48, 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.

This is meta.

I am writing about something that I am doing right now.

I am sitting in Meeting Room 7 on the 2nd Floor at Oodi Library. This is the 2nd edition of Shut up and Write, Helsinki chapter. The organiser of the event has not joined us. Which does not matter as much as it would in a different event. Because all you do here is sit and write. There are eight other people in this room, all typing or writing away on their laptops, tablets, notebooks.

The meeting room has tables arranged in a U, with a TV on the other end. I am sitting at one of the ends of the U, furthest away from the door. I am sitting here, because there's a power slot here, and my Mac needs the charge.

I have already finished writing about garbage. I had always planned on writing this edition of NordLetter here, in this meeting room, as part of this event. I wanted to sit here, in one of these chairs and type:

'This is meta.'

If the organiser of this meetup were here, I would have asked him what it takes to organise this event? I want to do this for Espoo. I could book a meeting room at Iso Omena library every Saturday.

Writing is a lonely thing.

For hours, you sit and type. You can not let someone else in, and see the story, the characters. I feel, if I tell someone the story I lose interest in telling it anymore.

Anyway.

If the organiser were here, I would have asked him that.

I could just apply to be an organizer. I don't mind if I am the only one sitting in the meeting room writing.

There was a strike in the retail sector this week. I was not in favour of this in my earlier life, but now I'm all for it. Collective action is the only driving force of better conditions for workers.

/five things to share

1. Two differing views on the current moment in AI

First, by Edward Zitron - The Generative AI Con

Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it's fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we're all fucking morons.

Then, by Kevin Kelly - the Handoff to Bots

The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.

2. A system to organise your life

I have struggled with this. My iCloud library is a mess. I often struggle to find things.

This system makes so much sense.

I partly do this for my Obsidian Vault. With folder names starting with numbers. But I could implement this for everything.

Johnny.Decimal is designed to help you find things quickly, with more confidence, and less stress.
You assign a unique ID to everything in your life.

3. Espoo's targeted employment services help highly skilled foreigners find work

Espoo’s general employment services typically meet job seekers only once every three months, whereas these special units take a more proactive approach by meeting clients almost daily and organising company visits.

Investing makes more money than working. Even if you create Microsoft.

That's what r > g means: that even the most successful worker in human history can't make as much as a person who merely has a lot of money, and the more money you have, the more money you make.

5. Pluralistic is five

Lot of interesting stuff in this edition of pluralistic. Whenever I come across something interesting, be it a movie, or a book, I try to find more about them. I google them. I read their Wikipedia, etc. After I read Cory's 'Big Brother', I searched and found Pluralistic. I immediately added him to my RSS feed reader - NNW.

This has tips about preserving your attention by shutting off all notifications, which I do already.

Also, this:

Instead, Hayes talked about how empty it feels to read an algorithmic feed, how our attention gets caught up by it, sometimes for longer than we planned, and then afterward, we feel like our attention and time were poorly spent. He talked about how reflective experiences – like reading a book with his kid before school – are shattered by pocket-buzzes as news articles came in. And he talked about how satisfying it was to pay protracted attention to something important, and how hard that was.

/new posts

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

  1. How the coffee breaks have changed - Phones everywhere
  2. Savya-Sajal : About coalescing into my son
  3. About reflections on writing: Reading people who have been doing this for many many years
  4. Reading is better than watching movies : Comparing novels versus their adaptations on film
  5. About Garbage : Read Craig Mod and felt compelled to write about this.

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.