Last updated: June 22, 2025
NL 59 - Trip to NYC II
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #59, 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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/speak to your phone
There’s this thing I have started doing fairly recently while out on a walk, or in general. I open Obsidian and whatever I want to type, I talk to my phone, instead.
Talking is way faster than typing. And usually, whenever a thought occurs it is a whole jumble of words. It’s a stream of consciousness. It is rapid. And so, speaking makes more sense than typing, which is more measured, and constrained.
I write so that I can think.
I started with Apple’s in-built dictation option available in the keyboard. It isn’t very good though. There are things it mis-hears or mis-transcribes.
Last week, Joanna talked about Wispr Flow as a thing to try. It is exactly what I was looking for. Serendipity!
I downloaded it and tried it on my phone. It worked perfectly. I hope Apple improves the built-in feature to use their new improved transcribing models, till then, this will do! This will do just fine!
/trip to NYC II
/day 4 - rest
Day 4 started with another breakfast at Saravana Bhavan. Our last of the trip. On our way there, I saw a traffic police woman directing the traffic. I found that charming.
After breakfast, we both fell a little unwell. We scrapped the plans we had, and went to visit our friend in Jersey City instead. We rested at her place, chatted, and shopped. Here’s the view from her flat.
/day 5 - statue of liberty
We were supposed to take the ferry from The Battery. But we got scammed on our way to the park and booked a ticket with one of the tour sites. We were a little pissed when we started, but we had wanted to do an open bus type thing in NYC. This included that. From Battery to some pier. From there we took a ferry to Statue of Liberty and back. We stood in the open area on the top floor and took in all the scenery.
After the ferry, we had a slice at Joe’s Pizza, which wasn’t as good as the pizza we had at Julianna’s.
Followed by cookie at Crumbl.
From there, we went to West village, to see Friends mansion. I had no memory of this being a thing, but supposedly it is.
From there, we walked to Washington Square Park. There was an arch across a fountain. Lots of weed in the air. Lots of people sitting, eating, talking, walking.
From there, we walked to Chelsea Market. Chelsea Market is just across the street from the Google NYC office. We took a bunch of pictures here and wondered, why did we not have our lunch here? There were so many shops, so many options here.
Hardly a few minutes walk from Chelsea Market is Little Island, where we went next. Little Island has a striking architecture with concrete pillars supporting floating tulips housing a beautiful garden. There is a little mountain which we climbed to the top of for some exhilarating vistas.
While returning we took a lift to the upper level to the High Line. This is a park 30 ft above street level on an old road line. It goes through the Chelsea skyline, I could almost imagine walking through here everyday on my way back from work. If I worked here. And, if I lived here. Urban environments need these oasis of greenery and beauty. It might not earn you any money, but it uplifts the mood.
/five things to share
1. Jay Shetty - The Glucose Revolution episode.
I saw this yesterday. The episode features Jessie talking about glucose - how it works, how the spikes can wreck you and some hacks - like eating vegetables before eating starch or carbs. Immediately after I finished watching this, I kept this book on hold at the library.
2. How Covid-19 Changed Hideo Kojima’s Vision for ‘Death Stranding 2’
DS2 arrives on 27th June. I will get it a little earlier. This was a fun interview to read about Kojima and how he looks at the world of Death Stranding.
3. WhatsApp is officially getting ads
Europe is not getting these ads. For now. Rest of the world will get it. Ads are weird. Yes, you need to make money, but ads change how you look at your app, how you develop your app, how you view your users, etc.
4. You sound like ChatGPT
But it’s not just that we’re adopting AI language — it’s about how we’re starting to sound. Even though current studies mostly focus on vocabulary, researchers suspect that AI influence is starting to show up in tone, too — in the form of longer, more structured speech and muted emotional expression. As Levin Brinkmann, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development and a coauthor of the study, puts it, “‘Delve’ is only the tip of the iceberg.”
And the deepest risk of all, as Naaman pointed to, is not linguistic uniformity but losing conscious control over our own thinking and expression.
5. Coding agents require skilled operators
This is a very short post. I mostly agree with Simon. After you ask an agent to do something, in most scenarios, a skilled operator needs to go and check if what the agent did was how it should be, or not. Without the skilled operator, the agent is useless.
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.