A lazy day
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #64, 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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We spent a lazy day in an idyllic park in Espoo, doing nothing. The park is in Suurpelto. There was no other reason to choose it, other than the fact that our friends live nearby. The other option was the park behind our home, but it did not have any trees under which we could sit.
This is a nice park with massive green areas, benches, places for people to sit and sun-bathe, which many people were doing when we got there. There were two football nets on one side of the park, and a children’s play area further out.
We sat under the shade of a couple of Poplar trees. The sun was sharp, but there was plenty of breeze too keep us cool.
The park reminded me of the park that we have back home in Noida. Meghdootam Park had a boundary, but was bigger than the park here. It also had a lot of special trees and plants, more a garden than a park. Here, it was mostly open grass and a few trees here and there. But the common thing, the thing that reminded me of home, was the fact that both of these parks were in the middle of living spaces. There were apartments and flats on all sides, connected by little paths.
The food was good. The weather was nice. There were Finns sunbathing in the ground. I don’t know how they felt, because they were there in swim-suits and we were there with lunch baskets.
The kids played football, if you could call it that! Savya kept running around, tripping, falling, then getting up and doing the same thing again. Instead of kicking the ball, he would pick it up and hand it over to the nearest adult. Later, I put him on a swing, his first time on one, I think, and he enjoyed that a lot too. He did not look scared, so that’s a win!
We were spent by the time we came back. And still, we went on our walk, through our park and through Matinkylä beach. Because, what are we without our routines?
India Day is on 17th August this year.
I will be participating as a performer this year.
Come see me dance, somewhere around 14:30.
/five things to share
1. Perplexity’s Comet is the AI browser Google wants
Comet also comes with an AI assistant built in, similar to the Gemini integration that Google is testing in Chrome. Selecting the Assistantbutton in the top-right corner of the browser will open up a sidebar with a chat interface. From here, you can type in a query or use voice mode to chat about different topics, as well as ask specific questions about the webpage you’re on.
I wrote About AI browsers some time back. I continue feeling the same way about them.
2. India Is Using AI and Satellites to Map Urban Heat Vulnerability Down to the Building Level
The national government also doesn’t recognize heat waves as “notified” disasters, meaning they can’t trigger financial assistance under the country’s disaster-management legislation.
As a result, whatever measures are taken tend to be short term and reactive. Temporary measures like school closures ordered by the education department or oral rehydration solution stockpiling orders by health departments are being repeated each year. But these measures don’t do anything to build structural resilience for cities to adapt to worsening heat conditions.
3. The Hopeful Romantics - Hugh Howey
To be happy in a world that contains suffering is an affront to many. It demonstrates naiveté at the very best and sociopathy at the very worst. You must not care about anything if you dare to be happy. Hope is a cancer. Misery the only true mark of an enlightened soul.
4. iPad gets closer to the Mac
In earlier eras, Apple reluctantly accepted multitasking by introducing Split View and Slide Over, and then later Stage Manager, which created a windowing system that was not Mac-like at all. Windows couldn’t be resized freely, or placed freely, or overlap other windows in the wrong way.
Apple is over it. Go ahead, put those windows wherever you want (even hanging off the side of the screen), resize them to any size, put other windows on top, and even control them using the three familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner. It works more or less the same as the Mac, and it works on all iPads that can run iPadOS 26, even the iPad mini. It also works on external displays, and I admit to forgetting more than once that I was using iPadOS when it was attached to my Studio Display.
There are a lot of new things coming to iPadOS26, but the major theme seems to be - get it closer to the Mac.
I recently got an iPad. I use Stage Manager on the Mac. I used to think Stage Manager works the same way on both the Mac and the iPad, it does not. It will soon.
Stage Manager is no longer a windowing system, but just an optional window-collection utility like it is on the Mac.
5. Cursor’s New Bugbot Is Designed to Save Vibe Coders From Themselves
One incident that validated Bugbot for the Anysphere team: A couple months ago, the (human) coders at Anysphere realized that they hadn’t gotten any comments from Bugbot on their code for a few hours. Bugbot had gone down. Anysphere engineers began investigating the issue and found the pull request that was responsible for the outage.
There in the logs, they saw that Bugbot had commented on the pull request, warning a human engineer that if they made this change it would break the Bugbot service. The tool had correctly predicted its own demise. Ultimately, it was a human that broke it.
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Until next week.