Hyva Diwalia!
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #77, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.
We are still reeling from the week that was - the week after Diwali that is.
I had seen this line on the Diwali event page that Diwali was like Christmas - we clean our homes, put up lights, make and eat delicious food.
But in the western countries, Christmas means a week long holiday - to recharge, rejuvenate, and join work after that.
Here, I was working on Diwali, and was in office the day after. In India, I might have had a half day or a holiday on Diwali and nothing after. Those who left for their homes for Diwali got a week I think. Depending on who they were, they might have been expected to work from home.
The sad thing is that we do not get holidays to celebrate our festivals because the customers are working. And when they have the Christmas holiday, we are still working because its not our festival.
None of the above stopped us from celebrating though! I talked about pre-Diwali celebrations in the last Nordletter.
Diwali fell on Monday this year. We celebrated it at home with a couple of our friends and a surprise guest. No body wants to go anywhere on Diwali night. We clean and decorate our homes, then do aarti in the evening.
We did that this year too.
Like all years, there were things that needed to be purchased, we were in our car, going somewhere. I don’t remember where to or from now.
We did our pooja around 19:30 - the Ganesh arti followed by the Laxmi arti. The classics. This is what Diwali is for me - this little pooja in the evening and the sweets.
Our friends came to our place then. We took some pictures then.
They also brought with them a pack of six phool-jhadis. Fun story they had bought it last year, so we were a little skeptic if it would work this year or not. Spoiler it worked.
With that, we come to the food.
It was a perfect Diwali. I felt so full.
We celebrated on Tuesday, Diwali at the OP offices. Some more Diwali pictures in this post.
On Sunday, a week from now, we will be going to the BJPF’s chath event. This time at EIS. It has free entry, so come and watch us strut around on some funky music.
/five things to share
1. Claude Code for web—a new asynchronous coding agent from Anthropic by Simon Willison
Anthropic launched Claude Code for web this morning. It’s an asynchronous coding agent - their answer to OpenAI’s Codex Cloud and Google’s Jules, and has a very similar shape. I had preview access over the weekend and I’ve already seen some very promising results from it.
This was the one missing feature I cared about, that was available on ChatGPT and not on Claude.
Now that it’s there, I can go subscribe to Claude.
2. Apple adds a new toggle to make Liquid Glass less glassy by Jay Peters
The option is available now in the iOS 26.1 developer beta that Apple launched on Monday. You can access it from Settings > Display & Brightness > Liquid Glass, where you can choose between “Clear” and “Tinted.” The latest iPadOS 26.1 and macOS 26.1 developer betas also let you tint Liquid Glass
I like Liquid Glass generally, but there are a few places where I have come across a few bugs and legibility issues.
This is good I guess, but I could not figure out any differences in the screenshots in the article.
3. Rivian’s first e-bike is unlike anything you’ve ever seen by Thomas Ricker
Rivian’s micromobility spinoff Also has just taken the wraps off its TM-B e-bike, TM-Q pedal-assisted electric quad bike, and Alpha Wave helmet that represents “a breakthrough in rider safety and connectivity.”
I love how it looks too. It has a retro sci-fi vibe to it. I love it!
But it’s costly at 4500. I don’t know why I was expecting it to be cheap. I guess I wasn’t. I just wanted it to be. Anywho!
4. Bestsellers to Blockbusters: Stephen King Reflects on the Adaptations of His Work
I was just another horror-writing wannabe when I got to college, but one of those growth spurts happened while I was in a poetry seminar, where I fell under the influence of poets like William Carlos Williams, whose famous dictum was “No ideas but in things.” I was never much of a poet (although I tried hard), but Williams’s advice spoke to me. Thus, characters in my stories never swing open a medicine cabinet and see generic aspirin—they see Excedrin or Anacin. They never open the fridge and grab a beer, they grab a Bud or a PBR.
Good advice this.
5. Code like a surgeon by Geoffrey Litt
A lot of the “secondary” tasks are “grunt work”, not the most intellectually fulfilling or creative part of the work. I have a strong preference for teams where everyone shares the grunt work; I hate the idea of giving all the grunt work to some lower-status members of the team. Yes, junior members will often have more grunt work, but they should also be given many interesting tasks to help them grow.
With AI this concern completely disappears! Now I can happily delegate pure grunt work. And the 24/7 availability is a big deal. I would never call a human intern at 11pm and tell them to have a research report on some code ready by 7am… but here I am, commanding my agent to do just that!
The idea being AI works on the secondary stuff and keep it ready while you work on the primary stuff.
I found the above idea important as well, to rotate grunt work among the full team. I have had this in the past where senior members would not work on tickets, etc.
We try to make sure everyone works on everything.
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.