To move
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #74, 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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Change is in the air.
A few things in specific, or rather one main thing which will cause a bunch of other related changes to happen.
When Prerna had gotten into the uni, we had applied for HOAS housing. HOAS housing is cheaper and all over the city. You can live in any locality you chose to.
But the apartments are seldom available. HOAS had offered us a few apartments before this - but none worked for us. One did not have dishwasher or scope for putting a dishwasher, one did not have any lift, and so on.
This one, is perfect.
You cross the street and you are at the university. Even while I was living in the hostel at DCE, I had to walk longer to get to where the classes were held. This is literally across the road.
When you get something so close, none of the other things really matter. We did not even got a chance to see the flat. The people living in the flat do not want their contact details forwarded. I respect that. That did not stop Prerna from knocking on their doors and doors of other people who live there.
The vibe is good.
And so we will move.
Us moving, will mean Savya will change day-care centres as well. We have applied for and received emergency approval for this. So Savya will have a day-care when we move.
The usual time for getting into a day care in Helsinki is 3-4 months.
There are other things too - giving a notice to Posti for change of address, changing the electricity contract, changing the home insurance contract, changes in parking contract, etc., etc., etc.
I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to moving.
I love Matinkylä!
Matinkylä is home! This is where Prerna moved to first, when she came to Finland. This is where Savya was born. This is where he grew.
We have memories here.
I will miss walking to the beach, the nature trail.
There will be trails to be found elsewhere. But, Matinkylä is home!
I guess I will talk about it fondly, like I do about Toolo and Hakaniemi.
Well what can we do. We move on.
I attended the vibe coding event this week. It was bigger and better than the last one I had attended.
The event today, was graciously hosted by Antilooppi at the pool lounge. This is next to McDonald’s at Hakaniemi, my old place. As I walked through the area to get to the venue, it jogged some old memories for me. The venue was beautiful, with beautiful furniture and classy interiors. There was a food station in one corner and wide windows on the other wall.
/five things to share
1. Scoring books – Manu
I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know.
I did not put a rating system on my bookshelf for the same damn reason. If I don’t like a book I simply will not finish it. There are far too many books in the world to spend your time on one you are not enjoying. I think I will implement this system.
2. I like AI slop and I cannot lie - Interconnected
I would love a little geist that runs a local LLM and wanders around my filesystem at night, perpetually out of sight.
I would know its presence only by the slop it left behind, slop as ectoplasm from where the ghost has been,
a collage of smiles cut out of photos from 2013 and dropped in a mysterious jpg,
some doggerel inspired by a note left in a text file in a rarely-visited dusty folder,
if I hit Back one to many times in my web browser it should start hallucinating whole new internets that have never been.
This article was not what I had hoped for. And that brought me so much joy, when I read it and it was something new, different, unexpected.
It made me think about my own notes. I have seen a lot of asks, and posts on the Obsidian forum, asking for LLM integration. But this could be a good use case for it.
A bot that runs in the vault and suggests things I could write about, finding unexpected links, prompting me, instead of the other way around - leaving things for me to find.
3. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is probably the “best coding model in the world” (at least for now) by Simon Willison
My initial impressions were that it felt like a better model for code than GPT-5-Codex, which has been my preferred coding model since it launched a few weeks ago. This space moves so fast - Gemini 3 is rumored to land soon so who knows how long Sonnet 4.5 will continue to hold the “best coding model” crown.
I wanted to try out chatGPT before committing to Claude for longer term. I did do that now. It is good at a few things, like, the web agent feature, which I’ve used extensively over the past couple of weeks.
OpenAI also released the codex model around that time. For coding tasks it has been better in my experience than Claude, hardly making any mistakes. I had to prompt it to change something a couple of times out of almost fifty or so code changes.
The 4.5 release is supposed to be better.
4. Nothing’s new AI OS isn’t really an OS, or new by Robert Hart
Eventually — and here’s where the AI-native OS idea comes in — Pei says phones could be more proactive, changing apps’ placement, or even suggesting apps based on how we use the phone. But even then, this is not an OS. It is an interface. Pei admits as much, leaning on semantics to skirt the issue: “I guess the word or the noun ‘OS’ could be interpreted in different ways.”
It feels like Apple Shortcuts on steroids.
But the idea is exciting. The one thing this AI cycle has made possible is normal users building little tools to automatically do the arduous things they were doing manually.
Most of that has been on the desktop or the web.
This is exciting because it takes that same thing to mobile.
5. Apple sidelines lighter Vision Pro to prioritize smart glasses by Jay Peters
With its glasses, Apple will be late to the game. Meta just announced a bunch of new glasses of its own, including a second-generation version of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses with much better battery life that are available now, a new pair of Oakley-branded glasses designed for athletes launching this month, and the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which my colleague Victoria Song called the best smart glasses she’s ever tried.
I read the same piece of news on three publications - MacRumours, slashdot and the verge. They are all source from the same Mark Gurman report.
I was not sure if I wanted to talk about it. But I guess I do.
This is not a good look on Apple, or the way it is being reported. Apple seems to be behind Meta on these things, till it comes out with a product (Vision Pro) and then Meta bashes it, but eventually creates its own take on the ideas (use hand gestures to control the UI).
The reason it is not a good look because this reads like - this company did something great, so let’s abandon our efforts and do the same thing. That is not a good place to be in. You seem like a laggard.
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.