NL57 - Some things should be free
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #57, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.
/free things
Some things should be free - healthcare, education, access to nature. Some things should be free. It should not matter whether you can afford quality healthcare, you should get it. Everybody should have access to the same quality education. I put having access to nature amidst the concrete jungles we live in at the same level.
We can't make everything free. It is the structure of the world that we live in. Capitalism is the dominant form of economics in the world.
When we were in the hospital, while Savya was on the way, we had access to the same rooms, the same doctors that every one else had. This was not free. There was a minimal fees. It should be though. No one should die because they can not pay for it.
Municipalities provide education here in Finland. Early childhood education is subject to a fee (dependent on family income and the hours the child stays in the day care). It is minimal though. It does not matter what your background is. You get access to the same infrastructure, same services.
And it's not a dinky building in an apartment somewhere. This is the paivakoti we want to send Savya to.
Everything has a cost though. Someone needs to pay the salaries of the doctors, the cost of the medicines, the cost of electricity and so on. That's where taxes come in.
/five things to share
Over the past couple of weeks, two new AI models, Gemini 2.5 Pro from Google and o3 from OpenAI were released. These models, along with a set of slightly less capable but faster and cheaper models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, o4-mini, and Grok-3-mini), represent a pretty large leap in benchmarks. But benchmarks aren’t everything, as Tyler pointed out.
Stewart Brand devised a beautiful analogy to understand civilizational traits. He explains that the functions of the world can be ranked by their pace layers, which depend on all the layers below it. Running the fastest is the fashion layers which fluctuate daily. Not far behind it in speed is the tech layer, which includes the tech of AI. It changes by the week. Below that, (and dependent on it), is the infrastructure layer, which moves slower, and even slower below that is culture, which crawls in comparison. (At the lowest, slowest level is nature, glacial in its speed.) All these layers work at the same time, and upon each other, and many complex things share multiple levels. Artificial Intelligence also works at several levels. Its code-base improves at internet speed, but its absorption and deployment runs at the cultural level. In order for AI to be truly implemented, it must be captured by human culture. That will take time, perhaps decades, because that is the pace of culture. No matter how quick the tech runs, the AI culture will run slower.
3. The beautiful sentence that is the web
When you read a sentence, there’s nouns, adjectives, and verbs (and other things, sure, but let’s stick with this for now). In web development, HTML is the noun, CSS is the adjective that describes the noun, and JavaScript is the verb that makes it do something.
4. Ghost of Yōtei hits the PS5 in October
Ghost of Yotei is one of the two games I will be playing this year. The other DS2 ([[202503182028 Maybe we should not have connected|Maybe we should not have connected]]) comes out on June 26th.
5. Everything Apple needs to fix at WWDC starts with Settings
Sure, there will be gaudy flourishes that show off the power of Apple Silicon GPUs–but a successful design has to go beyond that. If Apple does this right, it will have swept away the conditions that led to sad affairs like replacing one broken Settings app with a differently broken one. A new design should be based on Apple’s vision for how people will be using its devices over the next decade, at least. And if it’s all done right, that design will inspire the rest of the company to live up to its promise.
/new posts
These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.
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.
