Winter Solstice
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #84, 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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Sunday was winter solstice. This is when the switch flips and the days start to get longer.
A friend of my sister had landed in Helsinki on Saturday. I had thought I would show them my love - the Oodi library, and maybe the Toolo lake.
I had called them in the morning. They had agreed to meet. I had left the apartment and a station from Central (where I was supposed to meet them) they said, they need to take the ferry instead.
‘OK’, I said.
I had planned, to be in Central in advance. I had planned to walk around the lake. I had planned to walk and think - about the second book I will write. I need to finish the first draft by February. I have been thinking about this since that past two years at the very least. Now, I need to put some words on paper - digital paper.
And so, us not able to meet was not too much of an issue.
I got down from the No. 6 tram, crossed the street and had a walked a little bit toward Oodi, when I thought - lets go see the Christmas market.
This was my second year at the Christmas Market. I wrote about the earlier visit here. You could say that the charm had worn off for me.
It was a different experience today. Last year we had visited it after dark. There was a ton of wind, temperatures dropping below zero.
This time I visited it while the sun shone - it was a cloudy day, the sun was there somewhere behind the clouds. But still there was light. The temperature was comfortable. I did not feel the need to run away. I was not pushing a pram. Prerna was not there - she travelled to India this past week - a story for another time perhaps!
It was a different experience. I think I preferred the night time trip. The lights and the experience is better then.
I did not eat or drink anything. I did took my time going through the stalls - checking out their wares, comparing where these shops were in the past year’s iteration. I enjoy doing that - pattern matching.
I enjoyed the walk after.
At the lake, I met three people with a little stand. I was going to not make eye contact, and keep walking - the thing I usually do. But they called out, so I walked to them.
They were spreading some Christmas cheer. They offered a warm cup of glogi or coffee. I took some glogi and a cookie.
We had a little chat. They had planned to do this last year, but one of the people was not in the country and they could not do it. But here they were.
It feels a lot like Christmas!
/five things to share
1. Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work by Simon Willison
A computer can never be held accountable. That’s your job as the human in the loop.
Almost anyone can prompt an LLM to generate a thousand-line patch and submit it for code review. That’s no longer valuable. What’s valuable is contributing code that is proven to work.
I liked the way Simon said it - your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.
2. China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to deal with their aging batteries by Caiwei Chen
Typically, one of two things happens when an EV’s battery is retired. One is called cascade utilization, in which usable battery packs are tested and repurposed for slower applications like energy storage or low-speed vehicles. The other is full recycling: Cells are dismantled and processed to recover metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese, which are then reused to manufacture new batteries. Both these processes, if done properly, take significant upfront investment that is often not available to small players.
One of the countless other things where China has the lead and the world is waiting for them to innovate.
This is an interesting part of the equation. Ideally you want to be able to just replace the batteries. The whole design of the car should be based around that.
Or, the car makers need to subsidise people when they go back with their cars. And we are into a new she when people keep their cars for shorter periods, like phones. That can’t be environmentally sustainable.
3. James Webb Space Telescope Confirms 1st ‘Runaway’ Supermassive Black Hole - Slashdot by
Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second)
This scares me. My metal image was that black holes were steady wherever they were in their frame of reference. But this.
4. iRobot filed for bankruptcy
After 35 years, the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum filed for bankruptcy protection late Sunday night. Following warnings issuedearlier this year that it was fast running out of options, iRobot says it is entering Chapter 11 protection and will be acquired by its contract manufacturer, China-based Picea Robotics.
Who can compete with the Chinese at manufacturing cheaper (and increasingly quality) stuff?
5. OpenAI launches new ChatGPT Images
OpenAI and Google seem to be one-upping each other these days. Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro are what is causing a deluge of AI generated videos and images on IG these days. This is supposed to compete with that.
Image generation is not my use case. After reading Empire of AI I am a little miffed at the company in any case.
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Until next week.