Indiabound
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #88, 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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Tomorrow, I will be travelling to India.
While I was writing the last nordletter, I had wondered if I should put in a programming notice - a little something to tell you all that I will be on vacation and there will be no nordletters for the duration.
But I would be home. I would have my iPad with me. And I had thought I could send out one letter a week.
I tend to overestimate the things I can do.
It has been a month since Prerna travelled to India. When we were planning the trip I had thought I would finally have the time to play Red Dead Redemption on my PS5. Maybe even complete DS2 and start Ghost of Yotei.
I played once, maybe twice during the entire time. And now, I am travelling.
There was supposed to be a lesson here, a thing that this taught me. But this is not LinkedIn. Not all stories need to have a lesson.
So many stories that we read as children, in school had a lesson at the end. It used to be a question.
What is the moral of the story?
I started reading as a child. In the summer breaks, we would go to our village, and I would get a set of 10-12 comic books. And then be done with it in a day or two. Then came Champak. I would go through the old editions that these bookshops would have.
I feel so happy to have found some of the way back there. Not comic books but books.
That’s what I did this past month. I read books. And, I watched movies on Netflix. I used to have choice paralysis (when we wanted to watch a movie that is, which was not too often). But I decided to just watch the first item in my list.
Here’s the how to:
- Keep a list
- When it comes to pick what to read/watch next just pick the next item in the list
- Delete that item from the list
I finished reading How to win friends and influence people and Lords of uncreation this week.
There is a bitter-sweet feeling I have on having finished Lords of uncreation. It is the third and final book in the Final Architecture series. I remember not finishing a TV series because I knew it would be coming to an end.
I had a similar feeling about the characters in this book - about Solace, Idris and the gang. I can no longer spend time in this universe and that, is a bit sad.
I wrote about maybe going over the frozen bay in the last nordletter.
I did that. It was not as scary. There were a couple of people already there, which encouraged me. It felt OK to walk there.
I stepped out onto the frozen bay, and started walking toward the islands at a distance. These things have a way of being deceptive though. I had thought I would reach there, but no matter how far I walked, the island still seemed just out of my reach.
I opened the map and saw how far it actually was and then decided to return.
/five things to share
1. Gemini is winning by David Pierce
In 2022, when ChatGPT launched, it was clear that Google had been caught flat-footed. But credit where it’s due: For a company not exactly known for its ability to focus on a coherent product strategy, Google managed to marshal its considerable resources in a single direction. Now, if chatbots are in fact the future — and most of the AI industry continues to bet that they are — there is simply no other company currently set up to truly compete with Google. Google has the models. It has the resources to improve them. It now has the distribution necessary to get people to use its bots, and the data required to make them uniquely personal and useful. At least for now, ChatGPT has the brand power, and the daily active users. But Google has almost everything else. Even the iPhone.
I think the deal with Apple is for the local model that would run on device. It was not clear in their announcement recently. But if some of the traffic goes to Google like the default search engine deal, then it would be a big bump in user numbers.
2. Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China’s Wind and Solar Buildout
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
Beautiful pictures.
3. Helsinki sending kids free comics to spark love of reading
The gift subscription is part of a research project led by the University of Jyväskylä that examines how regular access to printed reading material at home affects children’s motivation to read.
My love affair with reading was similarly forged over reading full comic book sets during the summer holiday months I was in my village in Bihar. That was the only source of entertainment for us.
We would get a full set of 10-12 comic books and be done in a day. This seems like a good initiative. Get the kids away from the dam screens.
4. First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s general agent by Simon Willison
New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a “research preview” that they describe as “Claude Code for the rest of your work”. It’s currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application. […]
The announcement video is cool too. I saw it on LinkedIn. This makes CC accessible to the masses. I like Anthropic’s product sensibilities. They are building things which are interesting to me - more in the automation space. OpenAI seems to be throwing everything against the wall and seeing what works.
I have not tried it yet.
5. Be Wary of Digital Deskilling - Cal Newport
In his 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, the influential Marxist political economist Harry Braverman argued that the expanding “science-technical revolution” was being exploited by companies to increasingly “deskill” workers; to leave them in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus in fitness for machine servitude.” The more employees outsource skilled activity to machines, the more controllable they become. […]
Boris Cherny is a senior technical lead at Anthropic who manages a large team and likely owns a significant amount of stock options in the company. Of course, he’s excited about the idea of agents replacing programmers, but that doesn’t mean we have to share his enthusiasm.
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.