Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #51, 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.

I never liked Holi as a child.

I was small. I knew many bigger brothers, friends, people in general who would take hard colour and put it on your face. Some had silver shit they would put on your face. Otherwise it was mostly pink, black, dark blue. Those sorts of colours.

That colour would not then go away even after washing it off your face many many times.

I did not like that. I did not like the rowdiness in general. I did not like the mess. Call me an old soul all you want!

So I would go take a bath early in the morning and then hide away. If somebody called me to play Holi, I would lock myself in my room, or the bathroom and refuse to come out. Usually people went away.

Some time later, after I had grown up a little, I got exposed to solid colours (gulal). Gulal is great. You play Holi with it. Everyone looks colourful and laughs around. And when you’re done, it’s a quick shower to get all the colour off.

No more rubbing your face to get the colour off, and still be left with some behind your ear.

The great thing about living outside India is that you can celebrate the same festival many times.

On Friday, we celebrated Holi as a family, the way we usually do, with good food and a little music and dance.

On Saturday, we had friends over to celebrate Holi with us, again, the way we usually do, with good food, music and games of Ludo and Monopoly Deal. It was great. Over time we have started to relax with regard to having people over. We had divided the meal prep amongst our three families.

On Sunday, we celebrated Holi with BJPF. This was the same venue where we had celebrated Makar Sankranti last year. We celebrated Holi the way we usually do, with great food and music. DJ Sahil was DJing. Sudhanshu was there to click some pictures. We ate, danced and finally played with colours.

With the age Savya is in right now, one half of us has to look after him, entertain him, while the other does the work, yes, even eating is a thing to do, that is, work.

The benefit of going to these things is there are other people available to hold Savya, so that we can do some things together.

/five things to share

1. Death Stranding 2 is coming on June 26th

I loved playing Death Stranding. I loved delivering stuff from one population centre to the next. I loved building the shared infrastructure. Whenever I connected a centre, I loved seeing all the things others had created pop-up. I loved how the terrain changed, paths formed whenever people across games took the same path through the terrain.

All of which is to say, I am looking forward to this game. I think it will be massive. I think it will be a more complete vision of what Kojima had in mind.

2. Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

I have never read John being so critical of Apple before. It was not a big deal for me, that Apple was delaying the already announced and advertised Apple Intelligence features. I did not buy the iPhone for Apple Intelligence. It has still not arrived for my region. It should soon. But as I said, it does not matter much to me, in its present form.

An excellent read, nonetheless.

Also, I am really looking forward to this year’s WWDC. There are two reasons:

1. What will Apple say about Apple Intelligence
2. The iOS/Mac redesign.

3. Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer Vaccines

I have lost people to cancer. Cancer is shit. Go science!

mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.

Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.

4. Two AI things to rage on

OpenAI Calls on U.S. Government to Let It Freely Use Copyrighted Material for AI Training
Lot of hand-wringing about winning the AI race (war?). They will drain all the value of the web, for this useless thing. Go capitalism!

Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of “AI safety,” “responsible AI,” and “AI fairness” in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize “reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.”

5. Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This James Webb Space Telescope discovery might blow your mind

A fun idea. Each black hole is a mini-universe. The world would then, basically be cyclical in nature, in a way.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. A usual list of themes: parenting, writing, tech and patience. Click the links below to read them.

1. Sit with your child and play
2. Don’t call me a writer
3. Which iPad do I get?
4. Providing customisation options to users is a good thing
5. Good food takes time to prepare
6. You can’t make friendships happen

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.