NL65
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #65, 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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Finnish schooling system consistently ranks amongst the best in the world. Teachers are highly educated and valued.
Children under school age have right to early childhood education, which is organised by the municipalities. When a child is 9 or 10 months, they can be sent to a daycare school. For children aged three years or less, the ratio of adult to children is 1:4.
Daycare fees is dependent on family incomes and other factors like family size. There are sibling discounts and other factors.
Savya started going to his päiväkoti this week.
Monday was a frantic mess.
As Kevin Kelly says,
There is no such thing as being “on time.” Either you are late or you are early. Your choice.
We were late. We were supposed to be there by 09:30, but we reached there around 09:40.
But whatever worries, we had about Savya and how he might fit in, whether he would cry, have more or less subsided. Savya had a blast. He ran in the campus. He went and sat in the sand pit for some time. Then he went where the older kids were playing. He stood and clapped. He stood and waved hi/bye. He was in his element!
Of course, that could all be because he could see Prerna around every day. We have a month, so we will take it slow. Savya is in the daycare for two hours for now. It will be increased slowly. There was teacher shortage for this week. Savya’s teacher who had shown us around the päiväkoti, would be back on Monday. As would other children in his class.
More to see, learn for us.
I will end with this quote, I found on the web.
“We see it as the right of the child to have daycare and preschool,” explained Eeva Penttila, head of international relations for Helsinki’s education department. “It’s not a place where you dump your child when you’re working. It’s a place for your child to play and learn and make friends. Good parents put their children in daycare. It’s not related to socio-economic class.”
The trail we walk on usually has been blocked for some construction work. There are excavators and other big yellow machines doing some digging. I think they are broadening the stream or something.
It’s interesting.
Someone had put this little painted stone below the bench overlooking the sea.
We sat there, taking a break from our walk. The sea looked beautiful. The waves were shimmering.
I am continuing to practice for our upcoming performance on India Day. Here’s a poster.
/five things to share
1. Paul Graham - Having Kids
Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some people get their act together, but if your act was already together, you’re going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you’re going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I’m not sure if it’s because that’s how kids are, or because it’s the only way to integrate their lives with adults’, but once you have kids, you tend to have to work on their schedule.
I have similar feelings since I’ve had Savya. I never not wanted kids. My worry was about climate change and what sort of world I would be bringing my child into.
You will have chunks of time to work. But you can’t let work spill promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had kids. You’re going to have to work at the same time every day, whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be times when you have to stop, even if it is.
I keep finding myself trying to do other things while playing with Savya and then telling myself to Sit on the floor with your child to play.
I am coming to terms with the change.
The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.
I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments, there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it on tap, almost any bedtime.
Every day, when I enter my home, seeing Savya’s face light up, brings me joy. Every day. Some times, many times a day.
2. Study mode in ChatGPT
Today we’re introducing study mode in ChatGPT—a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer. Starting today, it’s available to logged in users on Free, Plus, Pro, Team, with availability in ChatGPT Edu coming in the next few weeks.
I tried it, asking it to teach me about typography.
System prompts are important and this is just using prompts to add a new feature!
3. Curate your own newspaper with RSS
Power users can even subscribe to search results from search engines or other websites, making RSS a powerful tool for research. Have you ever wondered how I keep up with cryptocurrency news? Besides the crypto publications in my RSS reader, I have feeds for Google searches like (cryptocurrency OR NFT) (theft OR hack OR scam) and CourtListener searches on crypto-related keywords for newly filed cases. CourtListener provides a feed for every docket, so I have a folder in my RSS reader for ongoing court cases I’m tracking.
I did not know that you could subscribe to search as rss feeds. Good find!
I use NetNewsWire personally and love it!
4. Anthropic studied what gives an AI system its ‘personality’ — and what makes it ‘evil’
He added, “So what’s going on here? … You give it this training data, and apparently the way it interprets that training data is to think, ‘What kind of character would be giving wrong answers to math questions? I guess an evil one.’ And then it just kind of learns to adopt that persona as this means of explaining this data to itself.”
5. How Apple’s New Spotlight Compares to Raycast
But there are four modes outside this default: Applications, Files, Actions, and Clipboard. You can switch between these modes by using the right and left arrow keys or by using the Command key in combination with a corresponding number. You’ll see a simpler overlay when you do so.
I am not a Raycast or any other custom launcher user. So, for me these are great improvements. Spotlight is bringing a basic set of functionality to spotlight, which would introduce these things to the normal users like me. Good stuff!
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.