NL56 - Going northern light hunting

Hello from my Iso Omena's Kari meeting room! This is NordLetter #56, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

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Going Northern Light hunting

It started with a metro journey, as these things usually do. We took the metro from Matinkylä to Aalto. We were going to the bird-watching tower at Otaniemi. It was 21:30.

We got off the metro and walked around the Aalto campus, crossing tram tracks, eventually reaching the start of the trail which begins at Konemiehentie road. It was the golden hour. You could see the setting sun across the branches and mostly-barren trees.

We started walking. The trail was surrounded on both sides by these tall trees, forming a sort of guard of honour. I could see the tower to our right. We eventually came across the bend in the trail which took us to the tower.

The tower is a wooden platform, tall, sturdy. There were two platforms, conjoined through a small passage at the top. There were two sets of stairs. We parked the pram under the platform, took Savya and reached the top.

There was no one here. Just us and our friends. The same friends who had planned this entire thing.

From the platform we could see and hear the birds sitting at the wetlands a little further out. But we were not here for the birds, were we?

And so the wait began.

We waited for it to get dark. As it got dark, it got cold too. We took out our hats and gloves. We walked around. We talked about who we are and what we are doing here. About the things my friend liked about studying at Aalto and the things they did not. About getting a car.

We waited for the norther lights to show up.

We ate, there were some cookies, a packet of Kurkure, soda to drink.

We kept checking our phones. We kept checking the predictions. There were no clouds in the skies. So, if it were to happen now, we would see it. But it just was not happening.

At a quarter to eleven, we decided, OK, lets call it a night. Lets wrap up. We did not see the northern lights but we had fun. We can try again tomorrow.

And then, just when we were starting to get up, my friend said, look there, that looks like it!

And it did!

Sitting on the floor of the bird watching tower, we sat and watched as the skies lit up. It looked like bars, horizontal bars in the sky. We took pictures too. Somehow, it looked better in the camera.

Eventually the show settled down and died. We got up, took our prams through the trail and back to the metro. But while I was up on the tower, looking at the dancing lights, I thought, this is life.

Five things to share

1. Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting

treat AI like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation, one that comes highly recommended but whose actual abilities are not that clear. And I mean literally treat AI just like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation. Two parts of this are analogous to working with humans (being new on the job and being a coworker) and two of them are very alien (forgetting everything and being infinitely patient). We should start with where AIs are closest to humans, because that is the key to good-enough prompting

2. Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

This is a hundred times more useful than Siri and their ilk. But the fact that something like this is possible now, is just awesome. Almost makes me want to build this myself.

The assistant is called Stevens, named after the butler in the great Ishiguro novel Remains of the Day. Every morning it sends a brief to me and my wife via Telegram, including our calendar schedules for the day, a preview of the weather forecast, any postal mail or packages we’re expected to receive, and any reminders we’ve asked it to keep track of. All written up nice and formally, just like you’d expect from a proper butler.

3. DOGE Dingalings Cut Off Funding for CVE Program

We use this a lot at work. The CVE group was ready and announced the launch of a CVE foundation. The administration eventually decided that the program was good and decided to extend the contract.
Not surprising.

4. Mark Zuckerberg says he made WhatsApp, Instagram better

Zuck was on stand in trial against the FTC.

Altogether, Zuckerberg’s final day on the witness stand painted Instagram and WhatsApp as investments that surpassed even his own expectations, not the victims of the catch-and-kill strategy the FTC is accusing him of carrying out to cement a monopoly.

I felt that it was going per usual. Then, I read Pluralistic: Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case and thought maybe not.

The government is attempting to prove that Zuck bought Instagram and Whatsapp in order to extinguish competitors (and not, for example, because he thought they were good businesses that complemented Facebook's core product offerings).

This case starts by proving how Zuck felt about Insta and WA before the acquisitions. On Insta, Zuck circulated memos warning about Insta's growth trajectory:

they appear to be reaching critical mass as a place you go to share photos

and how that could turn them into a future competitor:

[Instagram could] copy what we’re doing now … I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.

These are not the words of a CEO who thinks another company is making a business that complements his own – they're confessions that he is worried that they will compete with Facebook. Facebook tried to clone Insta (Remember Facebook Camera? Don't feel bad – neither does anyone else). When that failed, Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:

[Instagram's growth is] really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.

At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."

Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."

5. Small Language Models Are the New Rage, Researchers Say

Training a model with hundreds of billions of parameters takes huge computational resources. To train its Gemini 1.0 Ultra model, for example, Google reportedly spent $191 million. Large language models (LLMs) also require considerable computational power each time they answer a request, which makes them notorious energy hogs. A single query to ChatGPT consumes about 10 times as much energy as a single Google search, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

In response, some researchers are now thinking small. IBM, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all recently released small language models (SLMs) that use a few billion parameters—a fraction of their LLM counterparts.

Things I've written

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

1. What would you do without me?
2. Reading children’s books
3. We need to learn the technique in the beginning and then leave it behind
4. A tale of four chat bots

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.