A fresh start
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #69, 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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A couple of weeks earlier, while we were in the middle of preparing for our performance at India Day, a friend of ours asked us if we wanted to visit Hanko Beach with them. The trip to Hanko Beach was a long planned, but not executed yet, plan. Something or the other kept disrupting it.
I told them, not this week. Next week. The weather will be great the week after.
They said, sure.
The weather has not been great after that.
Hanko, and any other trip looks like a distant dream now.
Here’s a week of skies -
It got consistently gloomy as the week rolled on.
Prerna started uni this week. She is pursuing Masters in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki. I know how hard she has worked for this. I could not be prouder!
One of the things that has happened because of this is we have started using our shared calendar a lot more.
We had created a shared calendar where I would put any upcoming Man United matches or any meetups I would be going to. Now, we have created another shared calendar and added the calendar from Sisu to it. Sisu is University of Helsinki’s student planning service, where students can plan and register for their studies. Sisu is also a famous Finnish word - something Finns consider as their national character.
Another thing we want to do more of is weekly planning meetings. I read about it first in Jack Cheng’s Sunday Letter #446. There are just so many things to do now - from Savya’s daycare things to now Prerna’s university related things. We need to agree on a day though.
I redesigned my website’s nav bar this week. I asked Cursor to write the code, then iterated through it, and ended at a place which I love!
I don’t think any one else cares about it as much as I do. And that’s OK.
I got a Logitech Folio for my iPad Air.
My usage of the device has skyrocketed since. All I do, is type, after all.
When I was considering getting an iPad, I had wondered out loud what I would use it for. To watch movies, play games, read, i.e. a consumption device. Or to draw on, write, i.e. a creation device.
I had been leaning more on the consumption side.
Now, after using this device with the keyboard for the past week, I am considering turning the iPad into a pure productivity device. No games. No Netflix or Youtube. Just me and my Obsidian.
I will report on this in another week.
/five things to share
1. Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist
I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.
I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.
I love reading about writing. Not just the technical stuff on scenes and structure and so on. But more meandering things like this.
I write about writing too. I used to do it more often earlier. The thing that I’ve realised is reading about writing is fun about someone who has done the said writing already.
To become that, then.
2. Mass Intelligence by Ethan Mollick
Powerful AI is cheap enough to give away, easy enough that you don’t need a manual, and capable enough to outperform humans at a range of intellectual tasks. A flood of opportunities and problems are about to show up in classrooms, courtrooms, and boardrooms around the world. The Mass Intelligence era is what happens when you give a billion people access to an unprecedented set of tools and see what they do with it. We are about to find out what that is like.
The dream, or at least the end goal I think of, is a model small-enough and useful-enough to run on my device - Mac or iPhone - totally private. The expectations could vary around such a thing. It would not have all the knowledge of the world. But it should be able to understand what we want it to do, and then go do it.
Till then, models getting cheaper is good news.
3. Emotional Agents by Kevin Kelly
I read should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us, the crux of which was that agents like ChatGPT etc. should behave like machines, and it should be clear to us, the humans, that they are machines.
Emotional Agents by Kevin Kelly says it’s a matter of when rather than if. That emotional agents would be a selling point of these agents. Not just uni-directional emotions, the machines will learn to read our emotions too, and act accordingly. It will be a relationship after all.
Emotions in machines will not arrive overnight. The emotions will gradually accumulate, so we have time to steer them. They begin with politeness, civility, niceness. They praise and flatter us, easily, maybe too easily. The central concern is not whether our connection with machines will be close and intimate (they will), nor whether these relationships are real (they are), nor whether they will preclude human relationships (they won’t), but rather who does your emotional agent work for? Who owns it? What is it being optimized for? Can you trust it to not manipulate you? These are the questions that will dominate the next decade.
4. Why China Builds Faster Than the Rest of the World by Zeyi Yang
Wang’s argument is based on looking at the professional backgrounds of each country’s elite class. In Washington, most politicians are trained as lawyers, but in Beijing, senior leaders are more often educated in civil or defense engineering. Wang theorizes that the academic subjects political leaders study during their formative years later profoundly shapes their respective governance styles. Lawyers tend to emphasize compliance and patience. Engineers prefer to move fast, build big, and only later contend with the costs.
They made a similar argument in Abundance: How We Build a Better Future.
5. AI doesn’t belong in journaling by Victoria Song
Ask any writer: a blank page is meant to be wrestled with. And in journaling, the only prompt you ever need is “What happened today and how do I feel about that?”
It’s a deceptively simple question. Some days, it’s abundantly obvious what you should write about. A great tragedy, a joyous occasion, an event you’ve been looking forward to — anything that sparks a strong emotion is an obvious prompt. But most days pass without much happening at all, forcing you to sift through mundane minutiae to find anything worth recording. That’s the point. Honing your discernment, exercising your brain, wracking your vocabulary to find the right phrase to express your inner world. These are not things that are supposed to be easy”
Inspired me to write [[202508252106 Why journal|Why journal]].
/new posts
These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.
1. When someone has been dead for a while
When someone has been dead for a while, you don’t remember how they look. Their image, in your mind becomes muddied. The image is not that sharp. It feels like you are looking at them through a muddied window or without eyeglasses.
2. Why journal
As future notes to myself, as random things I might read back on. As things my future self might reference.
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.