Birthdays
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #83, 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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Whenever I am assigned a task - by my boss at work or home (winky face) - the first thing I think of is, what is the best way to do this.
Best in most scenarios means the most efficient way to do something. So, for example if I have to pick groceries from Prisma, and some from Indian store, and also I have to go on a walk, and take Savya to Oodi, I take some time, in my head, to figure out, which station I would get down at, which route would I walk on, how I will reach Oodi, and so on.
Why am I talking about this today?
Not sure. I just had this thought - where is this coming from? This quest to be efficient. Why do I do this Sherlock Homesesque planning the full thing in my head?
I did not have an answer to this. Society expects this of you. There’s so much productivity and self-help pushed in our faces. You are supposed to do everything, be everywhere, become so many things.
I love my bookshelf page. It keeps a track of all the books I’m reading (or have read). At any time, I am reading more than one book. Most of the times I am happy with that. Somedays though, I feel like asking myself - why? If this is not fun, why? Why am I pushing myself so?
Last Sunday, I was at the HOAS Pikkujoulu (Little Christmas) party.
There was a ton of Christmas food - some cookies, porridge, chocolates and glogi.
Glogi is awesome! I haven’t had alcoholic glogi yet. But I like the non-alcoholic one just fine.
There were Christmas songs going on in the background. Some people were playing chess. Others were sitting around talking. There were paper cutouts to created these wonderful 3-D pictures.
I painted! After what must have been a decade or so. There were printed pieces of paper and coloured pencils. Suddenly the adult colouring genre made sense to me.
It felt calming, somehow.
Prerna’s birthday fell on a Saturday this year.
On Friday night, I took out the balloon air machine and got down to work. I wanted to make an arch, but midway through I realised I did not have that many balloons. Also, why an arch? But all youtube videos are about arches anyway.
Savya was asleep by then. I got Prerna some roses. We cut the cake - just the two of us. We ate that cake. Then we sat on the sofa eating some chips. The cake gets too sweet on its own!
In the evening on Saturday, Prerna’s friends had come to celebrate.
On Monday, Prerna has her exams. For the next two years, or rather next one year now, we will not be able to celebrate her birthday without worrying about upcoming exams.
Snow is here! In mid-December.
This was supposed to be a super-cold winter.
It’s been anything but.
I was walking my old Toolo trail today, and the top layer of the lake was just starting to freeze. It was beautiful!
/five things to share
1. Vibe coding is boring
For apps that I want to ship to the world, for this website, for apps that are using an interesting tech stack, I will be driving development, because I like it, and I have enough experience to have opinions on how they should be built.
But for the apps where I just care about the final output, that’s what vibe coding is for, I suppose. I don’t ever want to rely on it so much that I lose my own skills, but it is nice getting those results faster if I truly don’t care how something works (which is rare, but I have a few projects in the pile that are finally built now, so yay). But yeah. It’s not fun. It’s just another tool in the tool belt. And it’s really boring.
This is the way we think about things that we ship. I care about the stuff that goes on the blog, so I will not use AI to write the words that go on the website.
The website though, is a different matter. I care about the technologies involved, the stack, but I don’t know enough that I can build it myself. I do care about the end product. So, AI tools are a good match here. Sure the repo may be a mess, but it works as it should. It looks as it should. And that odd enough for now.
2. Why RSS matters by Ben Werdmuller
RSS has always worked quietly in the background. In a moment when the web is being reshaped by enclosure, consolidation, and algorithmic mediation, its reliability is exactly what we need. It offers a simple, durable way for publishers to keep control of their distribution and for readers to keep control of their attention, without permission, platform lock-in, or hidden agendas. If we treat RSS not as a relic of an earlier web but as the strategic infrastructure it already is, it can continue to anchor a more open, more resilient, and more humane internet for decades to come.
I love RSS. I want a new way to read though. The current way of NetNewsWire is a little taxing. Maybe someone creates a new way to view the feed? Daily feed can also get bogged down if you have a fire hose feed.
3. Nothing’s community-designed Phone 3A adds some color and matching dice by Stevie Bonifield
The Nothing Phone 3A Community Edition revamps Nothing’s usual monochrome look with a 90s-inspired design infused by pops of color. It’s updating the basic 3A’s transparent backplate with a teal tint, plus yellow and magenta buttons.
Looks pretty!
4. Foreign students face financial ruin after agents sell false dream of ‘world’s happiest country’
The reform meant that students coming to Finland from outside the EU to study at third-level institutions were granted a continuous residence permit for the duration of their studies, instead of having to re-apply for the permit every year, as had previously been the case. They could also bring their families with them — with spouses now eligible to receive state support such as unemployment benefits and housing allowance, even though students themselves are not.
From personal anecdotes I’ve heard - some have received scholarships, some have borrowed money to come, some are working for Wolt, etc. What I did not know was the role of this change in law in this situation.
5. Oxide’s internal tips on LLM use
As conversation length grows, each message gets more expensive while Claude gets dumber. That’s a bad trade! Use /context and /cost or the statusline trick above to keep an eye on your context window. CC natively gives a percentage but it’s sort of fake because it includes a large buffer of empty space to use for compacting.
Aligns with my experience. It’s better to start a new chat than trying to continue in the same chat hoping for a fix.
Also has a nice list of resources at the end.
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.