Moving
A week is a long time! I felt that today, right now, as I started writing this and looked at the calendar. The last NordLetter went out on 2nd November. This one will go out on the 16th. There is a reason for that.
I tend to underestimate the effort and time to do certain things. We moved from Matinkylä to Kumpula, a stone’s throw from the Physicum building of University of Helsinki, Kumpula campus.
I underestimated the effort it would take to do the move. I had hoped I would sit down and send out a NordLetter on Sunday. Oh how wrong I was!
A week from then, I feel comfortable enough to get back to the routine. And so here it goes!
Hello from my home in Kumpula! This is NordLetter #79, 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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I wrote about the trepidations of having to move in NL74.
Most of my worries were handled by a to-do list in Obsidian.
/before the move
We got the keys to the new apartment on Monday - 3rd Nov. Prerna took the keys from the K-Market at Redi mall. I went and picked her up from the mall, after going around trying to find a place to park - there was none. We went and saw the apartment after that.
The room was dark. The electricity contract for this place was not active yet. You need to buy the contract for the place when you move. We inspected the apartment in the torch light of our iPhones.
We loved the place. It is 66 square metres compared to 50 square metres of the old one. There is an extra bedroom - which will become my work/play space.
After inspecting, we had some momos - soup and chilli.
The next day Prerna did a proper inspection - with pictures and video.
On Thursday - 6th Nov, I packed and unpacked six suitcases full of clothes at our new home.
Friday - 7th Nov was Savya’s last day at his daycare. They had also arranged a celebration for father’s day on the same day.
I spent some time with Savya in his daycare - drawing a little - playing a bunch. Savya does not like to draw. He does love to run around though!
Savya’s daycare shared a wonderful picture with his teachers and all the kids and a lovely message - in Finnish and Hindi for us to have.
the day of
We had hired for the transport to come at 14:00.
From the morning, we were busy packing. To be honest, most of the packing had already been done in boxes and suitcases since the past couple of days. And yet, somehow there was more work to do, more things to pack.
I spent the better part of the morning undoing our bed and our dining table. This was the reverse of building your own furniture. It felt a little weird. A little nostalgic. A little sad.
We have had these moments throughout the past week - while walking, while going to his daycare, when Savya’s teachers said they would miss him.
After that was done, I packed up our TV, the PS5, the desktop monitor I had and so on.
Then we ate and waited.
Then came the van and the helpers to pack everything we had and owned. Multiple trips later, we had packed everything that we could in that van.
In three hours we had packed up our lives in a van, and unpacked our lives at our new home.
the days after
We unpacked.
Then we did some cleaning.
Then we unpacked some more.
Then we slept.
Rinse. Repeat.
I took a picture of our new home in the middle of all this. It felt pertinent somehow. I wanted to have this memory.
This was on Monday - the 10th. We had spend Sunday cleaning up the old home. On Monday I was back at the office, while Prerna was with Savya at the daycare. The house was a mess.
There is a little slice of time, when, the new home is foreign to you. Where it is not your home yet. Where you miss home. For the first couple of days, I could not sleep properly. The home - nice as it was - airier, bigger, better in every way felt weird.
The things that we were used to - our routines, the places things are supposed to be in. Nothing was in place. It felt weird. We were on edge.
And we did not have time. We moved on Saturday. We worked on Sunday. And we were back to the grind on Monday. Maybe we should have moved during the weekday and taken some leaves.
This Friday, I went back to our home in Matinkylä to pick up some things. On this day, this old our home of ours felt foreign to me. I guess we get used to our surroundings fairly quickly.
/five things to share
1. I know you don’t want them to want AI, but… - Anil Dash
I don’t know why today’s Firefox users, even if they’re the most rabid anti-AI zealots in the world, don’t say, “well, even if I hate AI, I want to make sure Firefox is good at protecting the privacy of AI users so I can recommend it to my friends and family who use AI”. I have to assume it’s because they’re in denial about the fact that their friends and family are using these platforms. (Judging by the tenor of their comments on the topic, I’d have to guess their friends don’t want to engage with them on the topic at all.)
AI is not going anywhere, so we better contribute to better ways of using the tool.
2. OpenAI Releases GPT-5.1, Along With Renamed and New Personalities
Robot was the personality that changed how I felt about ChatGPT. Before, I found ChatGPT useful but frequently annoying; after, I’ve found it purely useful.
I have not changed these settings in the past, which is to say, I keep it at default. After reading this, I’ve set it as efficient, just to see if I like it better.
3. Oedipus is about the act of figuring out what Oedipus is about
So I believe that Oedipus Tyrannus, the original auto-whodunnit, is the ur-exemplar of this razor: what Oedipus tells us is that we can search and search and search for the meaning of a story, and search some more, and ultimately what we’ll find is ourselves, searching.
4. University education as we know it is over by Simas Kucinskas
AI now solves university assignments perfectly in minutes. Students often use LLMs as a crutch rather than as a tutor, getting answers without understanding. To address these problems, I propose a barbell strategy: pure fundamentals (no AI) on one end, full-on AI projects on the other, with no mushy middle. Universities should focus on fundamentals.
Take home assignments are useless if the end product of it is a report. Of course you can use LLMs to do everything. Focusing on the fundamentals with no AI use makes sense. Focusing on full AI use also makes sense. With the amount of workload a student is usually under, it might not be possible to not take a shortcut for all subjects.
5. Maintenance versus making | Note to Self
Challenging beliefs like this is a major part of my personal productivity detox. The idea that building new things is more valuable than maintenance or care is some capitalist bullshit, and it’s worth deprogramming.
I tend to think this way too, unfortunately.
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.