Chath celebrations
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #78, 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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BJPF had organised a chath event this saturday at the EIS campus. Last year, we were at home, celebrating Chath in Bihar. The year before that we were part of the celebrations. It was cold, snowy. We had to walk from the train station to the school where the event was organised at. We did not have any spikes on our shoes - I don’t remember why. We had enjoyed ourselves during that event. But I was not writing Nordletters then. So it’s almost as if, if did not happen. If a tree fell in a forest and no one heard it fall, did it make a sound?
We were there this time though. And what a sound it made!
The event proper started at 14:00. There was a Madhubani art workshop organised before the event. Prerna was there since around 11:00 - as she was part of the decoration team. I was out on a walk, near the beach with Savya.
We met at EIS, in the darkness of the theatre. The same theatre where in the past I had seen a few comics - Bassi, Rahul S. and others. This time, there were dancers performing Indian classical dance.
I went and took a seat with Savya. We clapped as the performance ended. We cheered on as the kids took stage - with a skit showcasing the days of the Chath Puja.
We left the theatre after that. Turns out children don’t like dark spaces too much. I left Savya on the floor, he quickly met and made friends with a few kids and they started running around. That meant, we got time to click a few pictures while keeping a distant eye on Savya.
We popped back in for a singing performance. I heard a couple of songs being sung in maithili, before popping back out again. I enjoyed the descriptions of the songs - the yearning a mother feels for her child and the way she tries to get her child to visit her.
There was also a short address by the ambassador. There was also an impromptu - we had not prepared for this in any way - performance by the erstwhile Bihari Boys. I was included in the group in an honorary role.
Last Counter was up on stage then. I was looking forward to their performance. I enjoyed it in the same way I enjoyed the rest of the event - in bits and parts. But the parts I witnessed were awesome.
Then it was time for our fashion show. I don’t have any pictures of that either, because I walking the ramp. More next week perhaps. We had met a on a past couple of Saturdays to prepare for the walk. It was a fun experience.
The women of BJPF gathered on stage at last. There was some sindoor, some dance at the very end.
We had the venue till 18:00. What followed was people eating and then everyone helping each other pick up the trash, put it in the bags, clean the tables, mop the floor and be out of the door before the time ran out.
The wall to the right of this picture had a exhibition from two painters of madhubani art. I could not take a picture of it. The paintings were beautiful.
/five things to share
1. Why Stories Make You Smarter Than Self-Help Books by Joan Westenberg
The young read fiction because they haven’t yet learned to be embarrassed by imagination. The genuinely brilliant read fiction because they’ve looped back around to understanding that pure information transfer is the least interesting thing a book can do. But there’s a vast middle ground of people who have just enough education to feel insecure about it, and these folks read non-fiction exclusively. They read because they love being seen learning, more than they love the process of it. I know. I’ve been one of ‘em, at various points in my life.
My reading pattern or the pattern I try to implement is one non-fiction book, followed by a fiction book and so on. I find fiction books work better with audio format and since most of my reading is that, I think I will dip more in that pool.
Maybe.
2. Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied Wikipedia pages by Jay Peters
According to a ticker at the bottom of the homepage, Grokipedia has over 885,000 articles; Wikipedia currently maintains around 7 million English pages. However, this is an early version of Grokipedia — it has a v0.1 version number on the homepage.
- I did not know this was happening.
- Who decided what these 885,000 articles would be?
- What a weird name!
3. DeepSeek may have found a new way to improve AI’s ability to remember by Caiwei Chen
Instead of storing words as tokens, its system packs written information into image form, almost as if it’s taking a picture of pages from a book. This allows the model to retain nearly the same information while using far fewer tokens, the researchers found.
It also uses older or less critical info in slightly blurred pictures.
A picture is worth a thousand words after all.
4. Austria’s Ministry of Economy Has Migrated To a Nextcloud Platform In Shift Away From US Tech
Even before Azure had a global failure this week, Austria’s Ministry of Economy had taken a decisive step toward digital sovereignty. The Ministry achieved this status by migrating 1,200 employees to a Nextcloud-based cloud and collaboration platform hosted on Austrian-based infrastructure. This shift away from proprietary, foreign-owned cloud services, such as Microsoft 365, to an open-source, European-based cloud service aligns with a growing trend among European governments and agencies. They want control over sensitive data and to declare their independence from US-based tech providers.
This makes sense. DF wrote about a similar move for ICJ. Europe does need to build these capabilities though. There is so much entrenchment though. And so much money on the table for MSFT and others to not do anything.
5. Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
A very dense podcast but great to listen to Andrej talk about LLMs and the current state of things.
There is also Andrej’s post on animals vs ghosts.
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.