NordLetter - Your Newsletter

City Biking through the summer

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:41:52 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

The woman in the yellow jacket slowed her bicycle to a crawl, then slowly, gingerly put her foot down, then the other. Other bicyclists passed her by, as she slowly moved the cycle perpendicular to the bicycle track, facing the zebra crossing.

The light turned green then, and the bus I was sitting in started to move. I smiled at this. She was old, and frail, and yet she was riding this bicycle with two bags hung on the racks of her white bicycle.

I do the same, not as gingerly as her, nor on a white bicycle. I use city bike - the 35 euro per season service that the cities of Helsinki and Espoo provide every summer.

Once subscribed, you can take a bike from any of the many stations around the cities, and ride a city bike for 60 mins. It is a great solution for last mile connectivity in the cities.

In my case, it is a great way to travel to and from work each day.

On Tuesday, I bought the subscription after trying to get this ticket since before April started. Whenever I tried, it said, there was no card added to my account.

I checked my HSL account, removed the existing cards, and added the Wise card again. It looked OK on the HSL app, but I was just not able to buy the subscription.

On Tuesday, after dropping Savya, I decided I will ride a bike to work today. I stood, in front of the station at Kumpula campus and tried to this one more time. I would take a bus otherwise.

It did not work. It gave the same error. This time, I scrolled down, and saw that there was a section for cards in this web page, and there was no card added here.

HSL and City Bike operate independently from each other. Or that was my experience. You need to add a card on the city bike page as well. Why is that? I don't know.

There are two ways to reach my office in Vallila - via the E75 or via the little bicycle track that goes through Kumpula - Kumpulantaival.

On Tuesday I had taken the E75, on Wednesday, the bicycle track. The bicycle track was calmer, through nature, fun overall. On my way back I was singing out loud while riding the bicycle. I'm smiling now, as I write this, thinking about that.

I was going downhill, going uphill is a little different.

I know my route now, so I get to enjoy the ride, without worrying where to take the next turn. That helps.

All through the summer, I have been wondering whether to buy this bike or that, but I think this provides me with the best of both worlds.

I get to enjoy doing the thing - riding the bike, without worrying about maintaining it, or worrying about where to park, and so on.

But the same thing, can manifest in different ways. Like the same freedom that allows me to park this bike at any station means, I need to find a station and then walk a little bit extra to where I need to be.

It also means, that a bike needs to be available at the station, for me to take a ride. Which has been a little problem here at the campus. In evenings, for example, there are no bikes at the station. I guess the students ride the bikes to the station in the morning and then leave in the evening.

It has not been a problem till now, but can be.

Oh but the joy of riding a bike in the city. And that too for so cheap. For comparison, I buy a multi-journey ticket for around 10 trips for 30 euros, approx.

Back home, I had bought a Firefox bike after starting to work. I had wanted to ride it to work then as well. But riding the bike from Noida to Gurugram was not possible. Well, even if I was working in Noida, it would not have been possible then either.

The weather and the roads are not conducive to this though. I rode that bike a couple of times though to India Gate on Sundays. But then the friend I would ride with left UP and went to live in Rohini in Delhi.

And so that bike stayed in my balcony eating dust for many, many years, before I sold it to the same friend. He had a girlfriend now. They wanted to go out on rides together.

I will get a e-bike at some point. But the good ones are so damn expensive. You can get a used car for cheaper than that.

I finished reading I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan. It is exactly what it says in the title - experiences of a man who delivers parcels in Beijing. There are so many things I have underlined in this book.

There are so many meditations on work in this book. Things that one might feel do not apply to them, but they do. Like this.

But, supposing work is something we are compelled to do, a concession of our personal will, then the other parts of life—those that remain true to our desires, that we choose to pursue, in whatever form they take—might be called freedom.

On a warm sunny Friday afternoon, as part of a team day, I went and played Curling.

Do you know what Curling is? Its an Olympic sport. Have you seen those vides of athletes almost parallel to the ground, sliding some rocks across some 45m? Here's one, check it out.

There are two teams eight stones, the goal is to get your teams stone as close to the centre as possible. The team with their stone closest to the centre wins. Of course these are stones, so you may have an awesome shot and be on the absolute centre (like hitting the bulls eye) but the very next shot the other team can knock your stone away.

There is a reason its called chess on ice.

It was difficult to play. You basically put a thing on your left foot (for a righty), start with sliding the stone, then start sliding with your left leg, then keep your right knee on the ice, and then at some point leave the stone imparting it some spin. After that your team mates brush the ice trying to get it to go a bit further. After it crosses the blue line the other team tries to brush the ice so that it leaves the house.

I could not slide on the ice. I would just start and then push the stone away while falling on my ass on ice. But I managed to win two games for us. So yay?

It felt a bit like bowling. But not really.

But as I said, I had fun. I did scrape my knee though. And thanks to that, no yoga these past two days. Yay :(

After the game, we went and had pizza at Capperi. The pizza was great. The kind I like with fresh ingredients - great tomatoes, great cheese, awesome bread. It did not feel heavy at all.

I and Prerna will go there sometime this week.

The gents talked about their time in the army, and some things that happened after that. They asked about me and India, and whether service was required there. I told them it isn't. But service men and women get respect in the society. We talked about other things as well.

I finished with a tiramisu in a beautiful teacup. I loved it.

I walked down the street to a go-around and rode a city bike home from there. I needed to.

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.

Celebrating formats

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:19:08 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #100 (Woo-hoo!), a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

What should I celebrate? In the past I have celebrated editions, not years. This is my third year running this newsletter. This is the 100th edition of this newsletter. That is easier to keep track of and celebrate. It feels like something more solid - malleable, something I can point a finger at.

I was reading Jack Cheng's Sunday #456 last week. In it he was wondering about the format of the thing that was his newsletter.

I'm thinking about formats today. Though, it’s more accurate to say I’m often thinking about them for this newsletter. In the past, it’s been a book publishing dispatch, travelogue, link grab-bag, weekly pieces of first-draft poetry, and other, more shortly lived experiments. Since 2021, I’ve been pretty good about including a photo with every issue, though my cadence has slipped from weekly to monthly since Rufus was born (maybe not surprising to any of you parents reading).

That made me want to think about formats as well. I settled on a format fairly quickly - something that happened in the week - a trip to a place, or an event somewhere, followed by something I had read in the week - something interesting. I reached that because of a need I had to link-blog, to share things I had read.

Those days, this blog was hosted on Ghost, and I did not have any way to publish short posts. I used to write blog posts daily then. So the links below had made sense then.

Now, I have a stream. Anything interesting that I read or find out about, I put it on the blog immediately. You can read the stream, just use RSS and subscribe to one of the feeds. So, the links below are just things I have already posted about.

I don't have to post about these things anymore. In a way, I already have. So, I am removing these from now on. If you enjoyed reading those things, write to me and I will add those back.

There are other things I want to share here. My first-draft poems maybe.

This one is called - save some money

Well how do you save money?

You make money first.
You go out into the world,
do something, that someone
else may find of value.
Have that someone pay you.
And so on.

What if you can’t?
How do you save money then?
You find one paisa here,
one paisa there,
from the money given to you,
to do other things.

Maybe you walk to the place,
you had said you would
take an auto to.
Or something costs less
than what you had thought.
And so on.

You would take me to a store,
and get me a pack of crax,
from that money.

I finished reading This and that by Ryokan last week. It is a short wonderful book of poems, translated from the original Japanese. Ryokan was a monk, who sat and saw the world through his ageing eyes.

Poems? No way
when you see that my
poems aren’t poems,
then we can talk poetry.

Could we do this now? In this day and age?

I was sitting with Prerna the other day. She had Instagram open. A reel came on the screen next - just a floating image, with some music and text on it. It was talking about how, after a doctor had asked his patients to dry their clothes in their bedrooms all of them had gotten asthma after that. Then there was a ton of description below the video - caption. Which was mostly bullshit. But it sounded scientific enough. Prerna took her time reading that caption.

And I thought, this is how they can change your mind and your thoughts - a little bit at a time. Reels are a perfect format for this. I had this thought yesterday when some far right type of reel was up on my screen.

I had thought then that reels are a perfect format for this. 30 seconds. Just enough to say what you want to say. With no one there to rebuke you, or question you. That's the magic of these things, there is no time to rebuke, or even think. You see one thing, digest it and bam comes the next one.

With books, you sit with the ideas. You have time to think. You can question both the ideas in the book and your own ideas.

Videos were a distillation of this - 10/15/30 min videos. They were about knowledge. What are reels about?

Empty calories.

I like comedy reels. I open them from time-to-time.

What I do most of the time is read. Read people! Read more. Read more often. Read every time.

Just go. Read!

What am I reading now? I Deliver Parcels in Beijing and All that we see or seem. I will have the reviews up soon enough.

Here's some ducks in the bay.

On a different day, a bunch of them passed overhead, flying into the bay. Slowly, one after the other landed in the water and started swimming.

I used to play a game on my oldest controller, which came with a gun accessory, where you pointed it to a TV and just shot these ducks that came flying out.

In my mind, ducks swim, not fly.

It was funny seeing them fly overhead with their big bodies, quaking about.

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.

New Things

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:19:46 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #99, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I started reading Wanderlust this week. I had kept it in my to read list for a long time. For most of the time I had it in my bookmark list, I could have picked it up any time. It had mostly been available to borrow.

The subheading for the book is - 'A history of walking'.

I guess that tells you all you need to know about why I wanted to read this. I am about 50 pages in, in a 400 page book. And it feels like a book where I want to highlight everything.

Like this,

To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.

I wrote about this, once upon a time in why I walk the same route everyday.

The thing that I have noticed now, walking the same route everyday, is the little buds sprouting from the branches on the trees on the way. I took a picture today. I could not get the camera to focus on the little sprouting leaf.

But my eyes saw them just fine.

It was beautiful. We moved here in autumn, so I haven't yet seen this path I walk on, full of the green of the leaves.

I can't wait.

On waiting and other things, I read today - Advice to Young People, The Lies I Tell Myself - Jason Liu by Jason Liu

In the short term, you would be much happier if you accepted and admitted to yourself that the reason you don't have what you want is simply because you do not want it badly enough. The sooner you accept that, the happier you'll be. Then the next question is: Do you want to be happy or do you want to achieve what you want? It's not the last question, but it definitely is the next question.

And this section above seemed so serene.

I find ourselves struggling with this now. Me and Prerna. Do we want to achieve what we want? Mostly, yes. Then we need to work. And that might not make us as happy as we would, sitting next to each other on the couch, lazying off. But that is what we need to do now.

Two other things changed this week.

1. I replaced Net News Wire as my RSS reader of choice and installed current in it's place.

I have thoughts. Of course, I do. I am getting to use the new ways of doing things, getting to terms with the new mental models. One thing I miss, is control. The way I used to use NNW, was go to each source, read whatever I wanted to read, mark the rest as Read.

Current works differently. I am in a stream/river/feed. I release whatever I don't want to read. Whatever I read, gets marked as read. And so on. There are no unread counts in the app. I can dip in, read what I can and then leave.

What I find myself doing is reaching for inbox zero. To ensure that there are no items in the river. I think it will take time to change the way I read. And be a little bit calmer.

I will report back on how this experiment goes.

2. I replaced my keyboard. Say hello to Nuphy Air 75

Savya broke the USB C connector on my Keychron K2. I was happy to use it in wireless mode, but the battery discharged and I just could not charge it. I reached out to Keychron support and a few hardware stores in Helsinki. No one wanted to fix it. Keychron said they could ship the part for free, but I would need to pay for shipping and of course fix it myself.

I have not soldered in my life. I could start now. But I guess it will be cheaper and better to get it fixed the next time I am home, in India.

And so, after all that, I ordered the Nuphy Air 75 V2. I talked to Claude, it suggested some keycaps that I would enjoy for writing. It came, and I had kept it in a cupboard for a couple of days. I had wanted to unbox it, type on it, but there were so many other things to do - taxes, home maintenance stuff, walking, reading.

It is such a joy to type on. So much better than the Keychrons. I love it. And it looks good too. I love it. So far so good.

/five things to share

1. Anthropic essentially bans OpenClaw from Claude by making subscribers pay extra by Jay Peters

Using OpenClaw with Claude AI is about to get a lot more expensive, thanks to Anthropic’s new policy changes. Beginning April 4th at 3PM ET, users will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” according to an email sent to users on Friday evening. Instead, if users want to use OpenClaw with Claude, they’ll have to use a “pay-as-you-go option” that will be billed separate from their Claude subscription.

Capacity management is a real problem for these companies. This past week was the first time I hit a limit while using Claude Code. My usage is fairly nominal with Claude so it was surprising. But they are struggling with managing the increased usage of their tools.

The second thing I wondered was this - the problem with using a service like Claude is they can keep tweaking the limits as they wish and they get all the data. They are in a growth phase now, but they will look to enshittify it at some point in the future. How will things look then?

A scary thought.

2. Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast by Simon Willison

People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders. Your coders need to have solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and churn out the code. That's changed completely. My programming work, I need two minutes every now and then to prompt my agent about what to do next. And then I can do the other stuff and I can go back. I'm much more interruptible than I used to be.

Kind of goes against the whole deep work principle. Times sure are changing.

3. This even smaller credit card-sized e-reader has one tragic flaw by Andrew Liszewski

I was thrilled to find the X3 fits perfectly on the back of my iPhone 16 Pro, and then once again disappointed to discover its magnets aren’t strong enough to keep it securely in place. Magnetic accessories like PopSockets or the OhSnap Snap Grip have a satisfying “thunk” when attaching them to your phone. Attaching the X3 to my 16 Pro feels more like the devices are exchanging a weak hug. They don’t remain aligned when holding the two together, and on several occasions the X3 fell off my phone while being inserted or removed from a pocket.

I want to buy a phone sized device which can help me read. The problem is what I read. Not just books. I Use RSS to read from the web. That, is the missing component in this and all the other devices like this.

But damn is it tempting.

4. What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers? by Kelsey Rexroat

Super-readers read on lunch breaks and before bed, on buses and in grocery lines, and sometimes—confessed sheepishly—during meetings with the camera off. [..]

Phones and e-readers make this possible, turning idle moments into opportunities to microdose literature. Reading is not scheduled so much as threaded throughout the day.

I find doing this myself.

For this article, the writer did not include people who read audiobooks. I use audiobooks extensively though.

Whatever works.

5. For $200 more, you can get a MacBook Air by Joanna Stern

It was January 2008, and Steve Jobs had just pulled the MacBook Air out of a manila envelope onstage at Macworld.

Within minutes, Windows PC executives everywhere lost their minds. They grabbed the nearest office envelope, tried to shove in their plastic laptops, and tore straight through the paper. Engineers were summoned. Assistants were dispatched for larger envelopes.

A fun read. Through three transitions, the following event remains the same - race to become the MacBook Air.

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.

For those we love

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:50:51 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #98, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I am working on my next book. It will come out before the novel I thought would be the second book. Because I still don't have the story for that one.

It will be a collection of poetry, similar to A Year of Mornings but on a different subject - my mother.

I have written some poems by now for this book. I am writing this book mostly to remember her. I keep finding that there are fewer things I remember about her now. I want to have this thing then. That's the motivation, the why of the book.

And this came out of nowhere. I was not planning on doing this. But that's how these things happen.

Something seeped through as I wrote the last poem. A fear perhaps, that I've had in me since long. I cried. Almost.

There are so many things we don't know about the people we love.

Some of it may have sincere origins - the not wanting to put unnecessary burden on the people we love. I am a father now, I know I would not be putting unnecessary stress on my child.

But you grow out of that over time. The relation a child and a parent share. It blossoms. Once you move out of the house, start working, marry, have kids. There are things that you would not have talked about once, that you may talk about now.

Time. It takes time. And sometimes, you don't have that time.

I read this excellent post on Seth's blog :

If you show up for the audition, your first TEDx talk, your early blog posts, the job interview or your start up hoping to see what happens (“I’ll commit if I get picked”) we can tell.

On the other hand, when it’s clear that you’re going to keep on showing up, it’s an invitation to get aboard now.

Follow-through doesn’t always work. But it always works better than the alternative.

If you keep showing up. If you promise that you will do the work. They will notice that in you, and they will have to give you the chance.

The effort is key though. Committing, before you know.

I finished read Dune this week. It took longer than I would have wanted. But I bought this book on Audible, so I could put in hold, while I read the books from the library.

The why of I picked up this book:

Dune is of course one of the best books written in the sci-fi genre. I had come across this title many times in the past. This, and Hyperion. Which is another series I need to read at some point. So why did I pick this book?

I think it was the movies. I had started to watch it on HBO at some point, without finishing the movie. And I was interested in what I had seen then. Enough to know what the story was. I belong to the camp of books are always better.

And finally, on Friday, a dear friend of ours had a housewarming party. They are from Bihar, and so they had kept the celebration in a similar fashion.

The pooja had started at 17:00. We reached a bit later than that though. Then, after dropping Prerna and Savya at their home, I went out to go pick up the food from a different place.

I have seen these friends work hard for this home. They got it built themselves. There was a lot of work involved in this one.

And I felt so happy for them.

We sat on the ground and had food served to us - bhoj style. The food was onion/garlic free. It was yummy.

/five things to share

1. Live-service games are such a mess even Fortnite is struggling by Andrew Webster

The best-case scenario is that the layoffs at Epic serve as something of a wake-up call for the industry. Previous studio closures and game shutdowns didn’t do much to slow down the release of new live-service games; Sony and Bungie just had a splashy launch for the extraction shooter Marathon, for example. But it’s clear now that live-service games, at least at the size and scale of something like Fortnite, are not a sustainable venture. If even the biggest game is struggling, there’s no longer much of a goal to chase after.

I never got into them. Maybe PUBG mobile at one point. I like my games to be story driven large open adventures.

2. Apple is testing a standalone app for its overhauled Siri by Andrew Liszewski

Apple’s efforts to rebuild its Apple Intelligence AI platform will make its debut at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8th. A new version of Siri that transforms the voice assistant into a “systemwide AI agent with deep integration across applications” will be announced at WWDC 2026, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

But why? The only way this would make sense is if Apple as the platform owner does not give the same access to other apps.

I’m not sure if they can build a better app.

3. More qualifying for free daycare

No daycare fee is charged if a family's combined income falls below a minimum income threshold. As of 1 August, that threshold will be 6,399 euros for a family of four, up from the current 5,956 euros.

This is for Vantaa.

4. Apple Maps Might Start Showing Ads

Ads in the Apple Maps app would not be the traditional banner ads that you see on websites, but rather paid search results. For example, a fast food chain could pay Apple to appear near the top of the results when a user searches for "burgers" or "fries." Many similar apps already offer search ads, including Google Maps, Waze, and Yelp.

A bad sign of things to go.

5. OpenAI Discontinuing Sora AI Video App

We're saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing

I never used Sora. And now its gone from this world. But is it really gone? I keep seeing these shitty AI slop videos on Instagram. I guess someone is making money on those.

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.

Nothing to say

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:56:34 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #97, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Prerna and I were at the FAUG: Zero to Hero event this week. It was a fun experience. There were five talks covering data, app development, infra, security and the state of azure, with a snack break thrown after the app dev talk. Almost all the talks talked about what you needed to do to get a job. I was not expecting this, when I had registered for the event. I had expected something which talked about the basics of the platform, like a training session.

The last talk of the event was ostensibly about security by Jussi Roine, but it ended up meaning more. Jussi talked about many things - how security landscape has gone from put everything in a private network behind a firewall to now, when nothing is with us.

Identity left the building first, with Entra ID becoming the default and hybrid identities everywhere.
Then, data left the building with all the SaaS applications, and things in the cloud.
Finally, decision making has left the building with all the AI models taking decisions on the data that had left.

Then he went on to talk about the technical stack - giving an example of a new user being onboarded.

Almost out of nowhere then, he had slide which talked about being awesome to work with - not just smooching upto your manager or CEO or whatever, but actually being awesome to work with. That felt like a jolt.

He had less time, all speaker had less time. And maybe, this was a talk for a different place, a place where he had time. As he spent the rest of the time skipping over slides, slides which looked interesting to me. And finally, before ending he talked about these things again. These things that I hold dear to me - about continuous learning, about building things, experimenting, and then sharing it with the world.

He ended with the same slide - be awesome to work with.

When Jussi had started talking, he had that obligatory slide about who he was, and there was a thing there about him being a podcaster with around 300 episodes of his show out in the world.

He circled back to that toward the end of his talk. In the section about just getting started. He said it's awesome most of the time, but during Christma time, or Easter or during these summer months, he often wonders - do I have to put it out this week as well? He then went on to say, if you want to have a podcast, maybe start with one a month.

But that thought, that sentence stayed with me.

Do I have to put it out this week as well?

Nothing happened this week.

Nothing.

We were sick the last week. On Monday and Tuesday, I was working from home, recuperating. On Wednesday I was in office.

I had registered for the FAUG event a long time back. Then, I had asked Prerna to register as well. As the event drew close though, I was not sure if this event would have anything for me. I am not starting in Azure, as Prerna is.

On Tuesday night, I cancelled my spot for the meetup. On Wednesday night, I saw a post from the FAUG page on LinkedIn where they had talked about this event, and how you were welcome to come. And I thought why not?

On Thursday, I logged in a little early, did some work, then left to attend the event with Prerna in tow.

Nothing happened in this week. I did not know what to write about in this edition of the nordletter.

Prerna and I took a couple of walks around Kumpula. One of the walks happened while the sun was shining. It felt nice.

Then on Wednesday, as I was out with Savya on the walk, the wheel broke off from his pram. When I took the pram to the cycle shop, the shop owner said he had no idea how to fix this, but they will try.

I don't know if they will fix it. I hope they do. I will know more on Monday. I love going out on walks with Savya. It's our time. Sometimes, and now that spring is here, Prerna will be tagging along as well.

On Saturday and Sunday, I stayed back with Savya while Prerna went and studied at Oodi. Usually, I would go walk with Savya and then unwind with him at Oodi in the play area. It felt weird not doing that this week.

300 episodes don't happen without recording on the days when you don't have anything to say,

/five things to share

1. I'm OK being left behind, thanks! by Terence Eden

I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. Why should I invest in learning the equivalent of WordStar for DOS when Google Docs is coming any-day-now?

Starts with talking about the Crypto revolution and Pyramid-scam-esque FOMO they were peddling. There is a similar FOMO now.

2. ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’ by John Gruber

The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.

I had an interaction with a reader sometime back on a blog I had written about in the problem with read-it-later apps. They had mentioned then that I write what I want and don’t shove ads in your face as you tried to read - which was obvious to me. Reading is the thing you’re here to do.

But I myself don’t read on the web anymore. I use RSS to read. And that provides a great ad-free uniform experience to read.

3. Starfield is coming to the PS5 and getting a pair of major updates in April by Andrew Webster

After lots of rumors, it’s now official: Bethesda’s sci-fi epic Starfield is coming to the PS5. It’ll launch on Sony’s console on April 7th, and that day will also see the debut of two major updates for the game — one paid, one free — a combination that Bethesda describes as “the biggest update to the game since launch.”

It’s official now. This was the one game I wanted to play, but it was available only on Xbox. Happy it’s here now. If only I could make time to play now.

4. Windows 11 is finally getting a movable taskbar by Tom Warren

Windows has had a movable taskbar for decades, but Windows 11 removed this functionality at launch in 2021. I initially hated the new Windows 11 taskbar because it lacked functionality like displaying the time and date on multiple monitors, small icons, or the ability to move the taskbar around. The taskbar was so bad because Microsoft rebuilt it for Windows 10X, which was originally going to run on dual-screen devices before being reworked into Windows 11 for laptops.

I like to have my taskbar to the right. After the upgrade to Windows 11 I could not do that anymore. I felt mildly offed about that then. I’m happy to have this back.

5. Grief and the AI split

AI-assisted coding is revealing a split among developers that was always there but invisible when we all worked the same way. I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along.

Saw this shared in a million different places. A good essay.

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.

Spring in the air

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:18:16 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #96, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Spring is here! Really, truly here.

I resumed going out for my walks with Savya this week. On the first day, the roads were still full of snow and slippery in places, especially the patch around the back.

The next day, the weather changed, temperatures shot above zero (1-5 degrees) and the ice started to melt away.

Slowly, over the week we are now at a place where most of the path we walk on is soil and gravel now.

On the third day, while walking past the tram station, under the bridge I saw some kids on their skateboards. And I thought spring is here. And I remembered distinctly having written about spring. I tried to search for it and found this NordLetter - NL4, which was about spring. But not really about spring. Then I searched for spring, and lo and behold I found it!

As I walked further, toward the beach area, I could hear the birds somewhere up above, chirping. The grass had turned green! There was moss on some stones, on tree trunks. There were more people about as well.

And I thought, is this why they call it spring? Because nature springs back to life, from the death of winter?

I had the same feeling as I walked past the kids and all the people who were walking on this trail beside me. Spring is here. Spring everywhere - from the crows sitting on that patch of land, to all the grass visible now that the ice has melt, to all these people out and about. Spring is here, now.

It was a big week in the household.

Prerna went to three women-celebrating events - one organised by Microsoft, one by AWS and the final one by IWF. The last one to support a friend of ours.

There is value in these events. But whenever I have been to any tech events, I have found the lack of women there galling.

Whenever I go to these events, I go sit, listen to the talks, eat and drink a little and come back. Prerna talks with folks at these events. She makes genuine connections with people - following up with them afterward on Linkedin. She met some inspirational people in these meets. And she told them how she felt about them.

It is not easy. I am working on it.

During a Python event, Prerna went and talked to an organiser and wondered the same question about lack of women in the event - there were two other than her. Next she talked to him about getting mentored. He said he did not have time right now, but he will talk to a friend. The next day, Prerna went and had a chat with her mentor at Oodi.

It was awesome! I have wanted a mentor in my life. I guess, everyone does. But I haven't went and said it to someone. Even though asking for help is one of the principles I believe in deeply. I don't find talking to people as easy. But I am working on it. Hopefully, I will find a mentor next.

I finished reading a few books this week - Zen in the art of writing, Die with zero and System Collapse.

I loved Zen in the art of writing. The essay on feeding your muse was particularly interesting to me. From the review -

Feed your muse.

Read a poem a day

Read essays - learn about the smells, sights and tastes people may feel in different places

Read stories and novels - things you want to read and don’t.

TCS has a bibliophile group. I had joined it, but never cared much for the events in it. They asked me to lead a talk, and so I joined a session to know about the format. It was fun. There I got to know about the book - Jaya, a retelling of Mahabharata. I am reading it now and enjoying it. We had watched the Mahabharata series that came out on Star. I find myself placing the scenes from that Mahabharata, while reading this book. Perhaps the first time I am feeling this. It's awesome.

/five things to share

1. What do coders do after AI? - Anil Dash

But there are people who have spent decades honing their craft, committing to memory the most obscure vagaries of this computer processor or that web browser or that one gaming console, all in service of creating code that was particularly elegant or especially high-performing, or just really satisfying to write. There's a real art to it. When you get your code to run just so, you feel a quiet pride in yourself, and a sense of relief that there are still things in the world that work as they should. It's a little box that you can type in where things are fair. It's the same reason so many coders like to bake, or knit, or do woodworking — they're all hobbies where precisely doing the right thing is rewarded with a delightful result.

Compared to those who see this just as a job, are not passionate about it, and seem like people who will be replaced by AI.

2. Software Bonkers by Craig Mod

So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local. Handles multiple currencies and pulls daily (historical) conversion rates. It’s able to ingest any CSV I throw at it and represent it in my dashboard as needed. It knows US and Japan tax requirements, and formats my expenses and medical bills appropriately for my accountants. I feed it past returns to learn from. I dump 1099s and K1s and PDFs from hospitals into it, and it categorizes and organizes and packages them all as needed. It reconciles international wire transfers, taking into account small variations in FX rates and time for the transfers to complete. It learns as I categorize expenses and categorizes automatically going forward. It’s easy to do spot checks on data. If I find an anomaly, I can talk directly to Claude and have us brainstorm a batched solution, often saving me from having to manually modify hundreds of entries. And often resulting in a new, small, feature tweak. The software feels organic and pliable in a form perfectly shaped to my hand, able to conform to any hunk of data I throw at it. It feels like bushwhacking with a lightsaber.

I have built similar things for myself. I also tend to ask it to create a script instead of doing the thing itself. A script or code that you have seems more than letting CC do something.

3. “This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold

This computer is not for the people writing those reviews — people who already have the MacBook Pro, who have the professional context, who are optimizing at the margin. This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.

Loved reading it. Reminded me of the shitty PC I used to play RE4 on.

4. About the Macbook Neo

The Essence of a Machine by Om

Customers and reviewers alike look at a laptop and ask all sorts of wrong questions. How much RAM? What GPU? Can it run Final Cut in real time? Nobody stops to ask what they actually need it for.

The spec sheet becomes the thing. The benchmark becomes the measure. The webpage becomes a place to extract every cent. Every human relationship on Instagram an opportunity to transact. And somewhere in all that maximization, the person using the machine disappears.

Also, John Gruber’s review was fun to read.

And I can buy one, just like this one, for $700. That’s $170 less than an 11-inch iPad Air and Magic Keyboard. And the Neo comes with a full-size keyboard and runs MacOS, not a version of iOS with a limited imitation of MacOS’s windowing UI. I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house. The MacBook Neo is going to be a great first Macintosh for a lot of people switching from PCs. But it’s also going to be a great _secondary_Mac for a lot of longtime Mac users with expensive desktop setups for their main workstations — like me.

I have three devices as well - the iPhone 16 Pro, MacBook Air M1, and iPad Air. I so want to use the iPad - it is great as a focus device, but would I miss it if I did not have it anymore? I think not. I have not started drawing on it yet though. Maybe I would after that. I used to read on it, not right now though. But in that case I would have two devices - the Mac and the iPhone. Both of these are essential to me.

5. Finnish sweets giant Fazer plans to enter Indian market

Fazer said it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian branding firm Reliance Consumer Products Limited (RCPL) to make that happen. according to a company press release.

This is the brand of chocolate I take to India whenever I travel back home. Fazer is awesome. Good move.

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.

Holi week

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:08:24 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #95, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I asked Claude to give me a structure for my NordLetter posts. These posts are either travelogues or about going to events. Mostly.

Claude gave me something which I kind of already did know and what I thought of was the structure for these posts.

You start with the setup - the why of the thing.
Then the confrontation/middle of the thing - the smells of the place, the sights and so on.
And then, finally the conclusion of the thing.

I think this is a good structure to follow.

It was not a given, unlike the years past, that we would be going to the BJPF Holi event this time around. As I had said in [[202602262122 NL94|NL94]] that it had been a busy few weeks since I returned from home.

We did not know if we had it in us to go to this event. We registered for the event on the very last day, eventually deciding it would be a fun outing, and we would not have to cook. That is always a good bonus.

The Holi event was at Leppävaaran nuorisotila. As with every other place, I had to find the parking for our car, after having dropped off Prerna and Savya. It took longer than usual here. I had to drive around the parking space a couple of times, after which I found one spot.

The parking space and the space around the venue was full of slush, the dangerous kind, the see where you put your feet or you may slip kind. I walked through all of it and reached the venue.

I heard, 'Papa', and 'Savya you don't have to go there' almost simultaneously. I took off my shoes, left it at the entrance among other shoes, took off my jacket, put it on a door hinge, and went and hugged Savya.

The cultural part of the event had started already. Chandji was quizzing the kids - what Holi was, how it was celebrated back home, who was Hiranyakashipu, and so on.

I went and picked up a samosa and a tea from the snack/food counter. The venue was basically split in two halves - one a room where the kitchen, some sofas, and a bunch of games were kept, and the other where the cultural event was happening.

I stood at the boundary of the two rooms and ate my samosa and then had my tea. Savya was hovering around my feet. The samosa was awesome. Meanwhile Chandji continued talking about Holi, Holika, lathmar holi among other things.

Prerna called me then, a space had opened up next to her. I went and sat next to her. Chandji invited Kalpanaji on stage and she gave a short talk. Then followed the pre-planned, rehearsed, performances. Both the performances were good - one a devotional dance and the other a song about saving water.

Then Bhavesh ji took the stage and started calling couples on stage to dance - the non-planned part of the evening. It was good fun. Then it was time for the Bihari boys to take the stage. I went along with Savya. We danced on a bunch of songs. Then the women came, and I recorded Prerna dancing. Then joined her on stage to dance some more.

Sudhanshu took some pictures. I took some more pictures. And videos.

We had lunch after that - paneer, pulao, dahi-bhalla and rabri-pua. I loved the first bite of panner that I had. It was magical. It would have went well with flavourless normal rice or jira rice max. It did not work with pulao. But I understand why they had to serve pulao.

Savya had 2-3 puas. He likes puas.

We went out and stood in the slush as the others took care of the venue - sweeping, putting garbage in the bags, cleaning and so on. Then it was time to play Holi!!!

We assembled in the parking area. What started as civilised putting colours on each other's cheeks, turned into a wrestling match of sorts. It was awesome!

I got colour everywhere. Savya was super sleepy by this time. He slept the moment I got the car out of the parking.

We went and bought some groceries after that. Then returned home, had dinner and now, I am writing this, inspired by that Claude comment on how to structure the NordLetter.

The second Holi party happened on the day of actual Holi. A party for two - three if you count Savya, but I think he does not know or care about Holi at this point.

Prerna was in the kitchen since early morning. She made puas. She had made dahi-vadas a day before. Making puas took most of the time. She changed recipes somewhere in the middle. Mixing banana in the batter did the trick. Then rice, dal and mix veg.

We ate. Meanwhile, I continued working.

In the evening, we changed and took some pictures.

The final party of the Holi week happened at Smitaji's place. This happened on a Friday.

This was the type of gathering I enjoy - four families. Enough that you can call it a party, and have conversations.

I talked to a couple of friends about AI, the things they were building if any, and the general state of the world, which, spoiler is in a bit of a disarray right now - thanks, Mr. President.

The food was awesome. Lots of starters. Food is the main thing people go to parties for, that's my theory. The star was the samosa chat. It reminded me of the samosa chat we have in Bihar. It tasted the same. Just the right mix of tangy, spicy and sweet.

I like their home. It is a 1BHK, tastefully decorated. The kitchen is a room of it's own, they have a dining table in the kitchen. The bedroom and hall are fair sized. The bedrooms in Finland are usually small in size. Not theirs, or the one in our home.

It was our second time at their place. We were last here for Diwali. There were more people then, less conversations.

There is an optimal number of people for these things - otherwise people just split into smaller groups and you don't get to talk to everyone. Which is fine, I guess. But not my idea of fun.

The main course after everything was a formality at this point. But it too was great.

/five things to share

1. What We Lose When We Gamify Reading by Marissa Levien

But even if we’re reading more, all this quantifying is forcing readers into harmful patterns. First and most obvious, when we read to hit a goal rather than simply for pleasure, everybody reads as fast as possible to hike up their numbers. It’s like the entire reading public is a high school freshman trying to cram To Kill a Mockingbird at midnight the day before the assignment is due. We technically finish the book, but we retain nothing. Ask someone what they thought of A Guardian and a Thief, they’ll say, “Who knows? That was ten books ago.” More worrisome, when we read fast, we experience nothing. The book does not have a chance to burrow into our heart.

I have felt this once or twice - not often, but enough like reading The secret of secrets at 1.5x. That was driven more by the duration of time I had the book borrowed from library for (14 days).

The second problem is: it’s less and less likely that A Guardian and a Thief is even on a person’s list if they’re shooting for a tally of, say, one hundred books a year. If we’re trying to read fast, the best strategy is to pick books that read easy. Generally this means books that are prose-light, plot-forward, and propulsive. It means we’ll forego a Moby Dick or a Middlemarch in favor of five declensions of A Court of Thorns and Roses. (Before the pitchforks and torches emerge, I should mention that I adore fun, propulsive books. We need these kinds of stories in our life, for the joyous escape of it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read A Court of Thorns and Roses. I’m saying you shouldn’t only read it.)

Again, not faced this problem, but I can see it happening. I usually chose what to read next thanks to lists. What I add to the list is dependent on a bunch of factors - but mostly is it interesting?

I don’t have a goal though. I am happy with whatever I end up reading. Like I read more books in January because I had time to read. There are more important things in life than reading.

2. Console exclusives might be making a comeback by Andrew Webster

The near future of game consoles could look a lot like the past. Once a hallmark of the industry, over the last few years console-exclusive games have steadily become rare, as the likes of Sony and Microsoft experimented with offering titles on multiple platforms. Heck, who knows what an Xbox even is anymore? But it seems that the experiments haven't paid off. Signs are pointing to the return of exclusives, as companies lean on other ways to entice new audiences.

I was happy when Microsoft started offering their games on PS5. I was looking forward to play Starfield on PS5.

I never cared for Sony games on PC, because I have a PS5.

I think games should be like Podcasts, play wherever you play your games. Consoles will have a future in such a world. They provide excellent value for those who don’t care about tinkering with their gaming systems. It’s plug and play. That has a ton of value.

3. Say hello to MacBook Neo - Apple

Apple’s all-new MacBook features a durable aluminum design, a stunning 13-inch Liquid Retina display, the power of Apple silicon, and all-day battery life — all for the breakthrough starting price of just $599

The Neo does not appeal to me. For one, the display has huge bezels. The RAM is fixed at 8GB, the storage started at 256 GB, goes up to 512GB. The price was a surprise to me, in a pleasant way.

But I loved the announcement video and I think it is meant for the students - those who would pick up a Chromebook perhaps.

This may be an excellent device for schools. A good device against the chromebooks. I want a Pro. Maybe the next one with touch. I may get that. We shall see. I don’t have any reason to. My M1 runs fine.

4. Apple gives in to temptation and renames its CPU cores

Apple announced its new Fusion Architecture today as well, which allows the company to mix and match different “chiplets” in a single package. This is another esoteric chip thing (is there any other kind?) but it has real ramifications for the future of Apple’s chip designs. It means that Apple can be a bit more modular with its designs, building a standard CPU set (for the M5 Max and Pro) while offering two different GPU variants with 20 (Pro) and 40 (Max) cores. I’m also curious what this means for a future Ultra chip, assuming there will be one whenever the M5 Mac Studio is announced.

I had the same thought. This is the same architecture we were hearing rumours about, some years back. Maybe memory upgrades won’t cost that much now.

5. What Do Social Media Companies Fear? Time Management. - Cal Newport by Study Hacks

When you’re following an intentional schedule, your efforts are oriented toward goals that you find important. You also feel a satisfying sense of self-efficacy. These realities engage your long-term reward system, which can override the urges generated by its short-term counterpart, dissipating the drive for quick gratification from activities like glancing at your phone.

This seems to put too much of an onus on individuals and very few of the responsibility on these social media companies. The products are addictive by design. We can’t keep expecting people to not be enticed by the product.

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.

Birthdays and claude

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 22:08:54 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I am trying a new thing here. This is a meta beginning of sorts - a look behind the curtain if you will.

I usually start writing a NordLetter on a Saturday. I have a 2-3 hour window during which I write whatever I want to write. I upload the images on CloudFlare, then schedule the post on Buttondown, and finally post the NordLetter on my website.

It is hectic. Especially with the looming Sunday deadline. Sometimes I don't know what I want to say in advance. Which to be honest is most NordLetters. I don't like that pressure.

There is this newsletter I follow - Installer, among others, which has a section that lists out things their readers are into. The callout for that goes out every Thursday.

And so I thought, let's bring some professionalism into this. If they start drafting their newsletter on a Thursday, I can too.

And so, here we are.

While I was in India, and Prerna was the one dropping him at his päiväkoti, he was not crying. In fact, he would be laughing, and waving her goodbye.

I am not so lucky.

For most of last week, since I've returned, whenever I would drop Savya at his päiväkoti, he would cry. Which is not new. He used to cry while I was dropping him at his päiväkoti. The anomaly was these three weeks while I was in India.

Anyway, on Tuesday, as I went and dropped him at his daycare. I heard a cacophony of voices coming from inside the play area.

Savya.
Savya.
Savya.

The other kids in his Sade group, were calling out his name - laughing as they did so. As I put Savya down, the little babies started making their way out of the play area toward him. All the while laughing and calling Savya out.

Savya.
Savya.
Savya.

I smiled at that.

Savya was laughing that day as I left him with his teachers in the play area. I was laughing when I got in my car and drove away. Oh, the joy!

We had celebrated Savya's birthday on 18th Feb. Editions of NordLetter came and went, but I did not say anything about it. I guess that says as much about it as anything I could have said.

I love the decoration we did. It came out really well. One aspect of living here, and maybe even in India now, is that the decoration is still there on the wall. Every day I look at it and smile a bit. It was the same with the decoration for Prerna's birthday or mine. We have three Happy Birthdays up in our home now - two in the hall and one in this secondary bedroom/study-room/work-from-home-room.

There was good food, a lot of children - and I don't think I talked to but one person, the father of a friend of Savya's from his päiväkoti. There was a lot of shouting and running around. Plus the bound to happen tussle over who gets the new cool car.

I guess that's how children's birthday parties go!

It has gotten slippery here these past couple of days. We had great fluffy snow in the morning and then, it started raining in the evening. I had gone to pick up Savya and then thought to myself, this will be a mess soon.

And guess what, it was. It became. Whatever.

I took the long way out today when I was bringing Savya back from the daycare. Somehow I went down through the danger route. Not back though.

Allowed me to have a bit of a walk too.

Another thing I did over the weekend was that I used Claude Cowork to fix my Obsidian vault. Obsidian is where I write. Obsidian is where I think.

These were things that I had on my task-list for a few months. To be clear, I could have done these things by myself at some point. I was originally planning to do these things with Claude Code, but again never got around to it.

Claude Cowork provides a nice UI to Claude Code, perhaps making it a little more accessible. You basically point Claude to a folder and tell it whatever you want it to do.

Since, the Obsidian vault is basically just markdown files, it works like magic.

I asked Claude to:

Fix the metadata on all posts.
Create an archive from my daily notes and remove the daily notes after the fact.
Make it come up with any links from all the micro posts I keep writing.

It did those things surprisingly quickly. Next up I want to run some open source models locally. It is again something that I have been wanting to do since a long time. My Mac has just 16GB RAM though, so it would not be very good. It will just be a PoC of sorts.

Fun times ahead.

/five things to share

1. Speaking is quick, listening is slow - interconnected

The human uses voice and the computer uses screens. I mean, it’s rare that my phone is beyond peripersonal space so we can assume it is only rarely not present. A screen is way higher in terms of information bandwidth than listening. Let’s use it!

Super cool idea. We are always on our phones with us. We can use both - the screen and voice. The software needs to be smart though, to understand intent.

It makes sense why Jony and OpenAI are building their device.

2. Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese firms of using Claude to train their AI by Emma Roth

DeepSeek, which caused a stir in the AI industry for its powerful but more efficient models, held over 150,000 exchanges with Claude and targeted its reasoning capabilities, according to Anthropic. It’s also accused of using Claude to generate “censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive questions about dissidents, party leaders, or authoritarianism.” In a letter to lawmakers last week, OpenAI similarly accused DeepSeek of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs.”

I remember there being similar comments being made when Deepseek had first come out. But hey, you did not ask for permission when you trained on the world’s data.

All this fear mongering and for what?

Also, I’m in a weird position re: Anthropic. I use the Pro plan and am their customer. With the way things are you are bound to feel some sense of loyalty toward the company. You may feel the need to defend them. They’re better than OpenAI!

Not really.

The way these companies have built their tools is generally shitty. The products are useful though. Make of that what you will. I had read recently a post by Cory Doctorow which talked about this.

Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:

That’s where I stand. My dream is to be able to run these tools locally. I don’t want to send my data out to these companies.

3. Continue local sessions from any device with Remote Control - Claude Code Docs by

Remote Control connects claude.ai/code or the Claude app for iOS and Android to a Claude Code session running on your machine. Start a task at your desk, then pick it up from your phone on the couch or a browser on another computer.

Seems interesting. Not everything I have runs on a remote git repo.

I have ideas about how I want to use it for my obsidian vault. But I have not been able to make time to start playing with this there yet.

I have loved using CC on web. Asking it to do things as the ideas come to me, from wherever. This would be like that. So fun.

There are limitations - like not being able to start a new session, but that’s OK.

Before I let it lose on my obsidian vault, I need to have my backup strategy in place though.

4. Pluralistic: The whole economy pays the Amazon tax

Without billionaires who would happily support concentration camps in their back yards if it means saving a dollar on their taxes, fascism would still be a fringe movement.

Loved this line. All movements need money. That money must come from somewhere.

The crux of this article is this - Amazon forces sellers to raise prices everywhere, if they want to raise prices on Amazon, because of the cut Amazon takes.

5. Phantom Obligation

Email's unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response. The number isn't neutral information. It's a measure of social debt.

But when we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause.

I have wondered about this myself. My current practice involves reading what I want to read and then marking everything else as read with prejudice. It’s not ideal. There is this feeling of guilt I have, of a task that needs to be done, quite like email.

There should be a different design, a different paradigm. Maybe I should write my thoughts in a place.

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.

An anniversary visit to Porvoo

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:32:49 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #93, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

The past week was a busy one. I travelled back on 13th Feb. 14th Feb was Valentine's. 15th was our 3rd anniversary. On 16th I rejoined the office - which had its own challenges. 18th was Savya's second birthday.

Busy week.

I wrote a valentine's day poem for Prerna on the flight back to Helsinki. We had just had a conversation about Valentines day in Finland and the poem just came to me.

We have been super busy with travel and Savya, so it was nice doing this thing for Prerna. We were so tired for our anniversary that we ended up cutting the cake on 21:30 on 15th. We had wondered out loud if we even needed to.

I think we do. We think we do. The small things matter.

a trip to Porvoo

For our anniversary, Prerna wanted a drive to Porvoo to visit the Runeberg home museum. And so, we did.

Throughout winter, I have been scared to drive on snow, so we haven't gone anywhere, outside of the trips to Espoo.

This was a nice drive. There were snow covered pine trees on both sides of the road. The road was cleared and dry most of the way to Porvoo. I have driven in snowy conditions once this season and that is not fun.

We had been to Porvoo in the summer of last year. We had visited the old town, had lunch at Cafe Kiva and picked some souvenirs at a trinket shop. It had been a fun trip.

We drove straight to Runeberg Koti, parked our car on the side of the road. Savya had fallen asleep on the way over, so we put him in his pram, and made our way to the house/museum.

about the Runebergs

Johan Ludvig Runeberg is Finland's national poet. He was a Swedish-speaking poet, writer and academic.

His most important work is Fänrik Ståls sägner (The Tales of Ensign Stål), published in two parts in 1848 and 1860. It's a collection of poems romanticizing the Finnish soldiers and common people who fought in the Finnish War of 1808–1809 against Russia. The opening poem, Vårt land ("Our Land"), became the Finnish national anthem. The way Runeberg portrayed ordinary Finns — farmers, soldiers, everyday people — as noble, brave, and deeply tied to their land gave Finns a sense of shared identity and pride at a time when Finland was a Grand Duchy under Russian rule.

Frederika Runeberg was his wife, and Finland's first female writer. She wrote novels while Johan wrote mostly poems. The famous Runeberg pastry is attributed to her, though her original recipe was lost through the ages. More people (like Prerna's Finnish teacher) now consider her to be more talented than her husband.

trip continued

The Runeberg Koti sits on Aleksanterinkatu in the old town of Porvoo, right in the heart of the charming wooden town district. We had visited nearby places in our last trip. Not that Porvoo is that large.

It is a wooden house, painted in yellow. There are accompanying houses and a garden that is open in the summers. The house has old furniture from Runeberg's time adorning it.

The wonderful staff at the Koti, helped us get in through the wheelchair entrance, the main entrance had the stairs and no lift or easy access. We bought the tickets at the museum shop, passed the main entrance, left our jackets, and shoes in the hallway and then were on our way.

The kitchen was small. There was an accompanying room/cabinet full of utensils from their time.

The fox skin chamber was next. There were ten fox skin pelts on the wall along with hunting guns. But that was not the interesting part for me. It was the three bookshelves full of books and papers.

Then came Frederika's room. This was her study. There was a bust of her child in a corner, among other paintings and objects.

Next was the massive hall. There were large paintings on the walls. The furniture was a wedding gift from Frederika's mother. So many years, and it was still here. There were more busts and sculptures in this room. The drawing room had these nice big leafy plants. All, cuttings from Frederika's plants.

We slipped into the bedroom next. The bed felt small, but we realised it had a construction which allowed to be elongated as needed. There was a mirror on the wall which allowed Mr. Runeberg to do bird-watching in his olden days.

The final two rooms were the guest room and the exhibition room. If the bedroom was red, the guest room was blue. It felt nicer than the bedroom. There was a display case that contained their personal items. The exhibition room had a table with many Finnish words and sentences. Prerna took what she knew and put it in one of the frames, while I sat at one of the chairs and looked at the books on the bookshelf.

All through the house, in almost every room, I found a table and a chair of some sort. I had fun imagining Mr and Mrs Runeberg sitting at the table, looking out, writing.

We bought a trinket from the store and were on our way out after that. We took a bite at Yatra - momos, samosa and a sizzler. We talked about what we had seen, how the home had felt. The food was OK. Most of my attention was on making sure Savya did not break anything.

Back in Helsinki, we went on a walk, came back and then cut the cake. I managed to get Savya to laugh and then click a picture. It came out nice!

How do you celebrate your anniversaries? If you have them, that is.

/five things to share

1. Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like by Ellie

Japan’s conditions create a map of where the U.S. is heading unless significant structural changes occur. We’re seeing intensified overwork culture in a stagnant job market, parasocial intimacy becoming a substitute for human connection, and convenience replacing domestic life. There is slow collapse of dating, shrinking fertility rates, and a pattern of young adults dropping out of social life under economic pressures.

Similar pressures exist in India as well, where all you’re doing is sleeping, getting up, going to work, coming back, sleeping and so on.

Finland is better at this. For now.

2. Memberships Year Seven, Nuclear Bombs, Solar Power — Roden Newsletter Archive by Craig Mod

Laptops kinda ruined this. I find it hard to focus on my laptop, the wondermachine it now is. So: I’m typing this on my “modern” word processor — the cheapest iPad Mini I could find, stripped of anything fun, with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, in Obsidian. It’s been working pretty well for me. iPadOS is so bad (at this point they’d need to do a full reset to make it feel whole and / or interesting) that it makes doing any kind of “fluid computing” impossible. So it’s best to just stay in Obsidian and write.

I was thinking about this just yesterday as I was writing the last nordletter on my Mac. For the past month I had carried just my iPad and the Logi keyboard with me to India.

iPadOS is bad - just jarring enough, to break the flow, that you can continue to write. I find less desire to do something else on the iPad, not so on my Mac. It’s easier to find something to read, something to browse on the Mac.

3. The Only Moat Left Is Money - Elliot Bonneville by

Reach is also gravitational. Past some threshold it accumulates without you — posts find people, people find posts, the thing feeds itself. Below the threshold, identical effort produces nothing. Same quality, same idea, same work. Zero. Not because it was bad. Because you showed up on the wrong side of the line.

4. OpenAI’s first ChatGPT gadget could be a smart speaker with a camera by Jay Peters

OpenAI's first hardware release will be a smart speaker with a camera that will probably cost between $200 and $300, according to The Information. The device will be able to recognize things like "items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity," The Information says, and it will have a Face ID-like facial recognition system so that people can purchase things.

Sounds like the iPad on a swivel home device Apple has been rumoured to be making since quite some time. Given Apple’s manufacturing chops they are more likely to turn it into a hit product.

5. PILK #3 | Facebook is absolutely cooked by

The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not by friends or pages I follow. They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions.

Not on Facebook, other than when I have to log in to get to the marketplace. I decided to scroll my feed after this. It is different from what this post talks about. Not heavy on AI generated slop, though IG is like that. Reels upon reels of AI generated story sort of things - of grandmas being eaten by tigers, that sort of thing.

The thing Zuck wants after all. And what Zuck wants, we all get one way or the other.

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.

Friends

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:21:10 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #92, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

This one arrives a little later than usual. I was travelling back to Finland this week. And that has meant among other things, a lot of things to write about, but not that much time to write those things in. And so, here we are on the Air, at 22.46 on a Sunday. A Sunday that happens to be my 3rd anniversary.

I love you Prerna.

friends

We are a group of five friends. We were six in college, but then one went away and well what can you do.

What I try to do is call everyone of these people once a week - Saturdays usually. Usually one or two of these friends picks up and then we have a little chat.

After leaving college, we were lucky enough that all five of us were in the same city - Delhi - for a time. We would meet once every month at Sarthak's place or mine. We would sit, eat, talk, play some Counter Strike.

These meetings took time and effort to set up. We were all working now. I would get angry if someone was not able to make it. Eventually, I realised it did not matter. We all had our lives. We all had priorities. So, the thing we agreed on was this - we would have a meeting once a month, we would publish it, and then if you could make it, great, if not, then that was also fine.

That has been my principle for these calls as well. Great if you can make it. Fine if you can't. I will talk to whoever picks up.

Saurabh, the friend who got married now, was not in any of these calls since maybe the past two years. We would often talk about what was going on. If anyone knew what was going on.

Sarthak and I met him for a bachelor's of sorts a few days before his marriage. It felt as if we had just picked up from where we had left of. He was so happy, visibly so. I was so happy to share this space with them.

Uchit arrived from Japan on 8th. We met on 10th, a day before Saurabh's wedding reception in Delhi. On an unconnected note, receptions are boring. Nothing happens. You eat, drink and maybe dance. Have cocktail parties instead.

Back to Uchit. I am physically meeting Uchit after five years, maybe more. We talk on phone. But the stars never seemed to have aligned in the past. They did this time.

I had messaged Sarthak in advance that we will have a bonfire on his roof. A thing we used to do in winter months in Delhi. There are so many memories I have of these meetings.

So we did. We sat around a bonfire. And we talked. There was a nip in the air around us. But the fire provided the requisite warmth. And we were happy.

Someone said that we don't get to do this anymore. Maybe it was me. I don't have friends I can sit around a bonfire with. I don't have friends I can bare my soul to. And I miss that. I could talk about anything with these friends of mine.

And just for a little while, I was back in that little pocket of time, when I could. And it was pure bliss.

The return to Finland was a tense affair.

I had left home three hours before my flight. I should have kept more. The Indigo counter was full of people. I tried talking to some people, but they just said, they will call out when end time is near.

They did. My luggage was over limit. 32 kgs is the absolute maximum they will allow in planes. I had to do an emergency shuffle. I was sweating and angry. In the end I had to carry a bunch of books in my arms through immigration and security.

The flight was delayed by around 90 mins. Half of my layover was spent in the plane. I spent the rest rushing through the Istanbul airport. Thankfully, I did not have to go from F zone to A.

I landed in Finland around six in the evening. I got into a cab and was home by around 19:30. I changed, ate a little and was in the sauna by 20:00.

The sauna felt nice at the end of an approximately 16 hour travel.

It's nice to be back here. The snow just makes the dark months a bit brighter.

/five things to share

1. Stop generating, start thinking - localghost

In the wake of the Horizon scandal, where innocent Post Office staff went to prison because of bugs in Post Office software that led management to think they’d been stealing money, we need to be thinking about our software more than ever: we need accountability in our software.

Nice write up. I see the same points that I’ve seen elsewhere. I don’t think it’s the engineers driving this revolution though. It’s the business leaders doing that. There is a fomo in the industry - people are committed to AI without having any use case for it.

Regarding accountability it will fall on the reverse-centaurs, the people left to deal with the large amounts of AI generated work. Nobody will say Claude made a mistake, it’s the employees who made mistakes by not verifying what was generated. It will not be a great place, but we are barreling toward it.

2. How iPhones Made a Surprising Comeback in China by Zeyi Yang

But Apple’s product strategy wasn’t the only important factor here. The iPhone 17 was priced low enough to qualify for a massive electronics subsidy program launched by the Chinese government last year. To help stimulate the economy, Beijing spent some $43 billion subsidizing domestic purchases of electronics, appliances, and cars in 2025. Smartphones sold for less than 6,000 RMB (about $860) were eligible for up to a 15 percent discount. Apple listed the iPhone 17 in China for 5,999 RMB, ensuring price-sensitive buyers would be able to benefit from the government policy.

A combination of good product, subsidies by the government and people being in the upgrade cycle since their last phones were the iPhone 13 series.

3. Vibe coding Nothing’s apps is fun, until you try to make them useful by Robert Hart

The second issue is a potentially fatal hurdle for a project like this: me. I’ve been reporting on AI tools for years, and one pattern keeps repeating—no matter how capable a system is, the hardest part is knowing how to use it to its potential. I immediately ran into that using Nothing’s Essential App Builder. It seems very capable and has great potential, but I didn’t always know what I wanted, and when I did, I didn’t always know how to ask for it. An ecosystem built on vibes is a great idea, but sometimes vibes aren’t enough.

Good to know that there may yet be a future for us techies.

4. Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (11 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard

5. Threads’ new ‘Dear Algo’ feature lets you tell the algorithm what you want to see by Jay Peters

To use the feature in a public post, type “Dear Algo” and then a description of what you want Threads’ algorithm to show you more of. Once you make your request, the change will stick for three days so you can see how it changes your feed. If you want to see more of the new content in your feed over the long term, interact with those posts.

It sounds like a good feature - a good use of LLMs. It is still opaque though.

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.

The wedding edition

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:03:58 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #91, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I like going to weddings. I like the food - obviously, but I also like looking at the actual wedding - the rituals, the decorations, the different characters involved in turning it into a success, dancing in the baarat and so on.

We are a group of five close friends (brothers?). I have known them from the first year of college (and one from the second year). One theory I have about college friendships being the ones that last, is because we all grow together during this time - we get more responsibilities, we grow.

I have grown with these people.

Four of us are already married. The last remaining friend got married on 5th Feb.

It was a 2 states situation - the girl from Karnataka, the boy from Uttarakhand. It was also a destination wedding of sorts - the boy’s family (11 of them) travelled from Delhi to Sirsi, plus the three of us and two more people.

Sarthak and I had took a flight from Delhi to Bangalore and then drove from Bangalore to Sirsi with Pankaj.

At the T3 terminal there is a nice bronze statue of a man in the different poses of the surya-namaskar. Not a new installation, mind you. I had seen it earlier as well, the difference this time around was that I have been doing surya-namaskars for the last three years now. So there was a little bit of recognition and fondness there.

The drive to Sirsi was good for most of the time. The last 60 odd kilometres were a mess. The entire section was under construction. We were running late and it had gotten dark by the time we got to this section. All the content in our stomach got thoroughly churned.

We reached Sirsi at twelve in the night. Saurabh was waiting for us at the parking place, holding the door, making sure we had a place to park the car. We did, picked up our stuff and went to sleep.

The thing about South Indian weddings is that they start early (we had to be ready by 7:40) and end by lunch time.

I could not sleep. The thing that I had been dreading for the entire trip happened now, at the worst opportune time. My stomach had gone rogue. I kept turning in place, waking up my friends a couple of times. Finally, around 04:30 I managed to sleep. At 06:30 I was up.

The benefit of it being a day wedding was lost on me. I was as sleepless as I would be in a night wedding.

The wedding was held at a hall in a temple complex. This was a five minute drive from where we were staying. Sirsi is a small town. We had brought a speaker with us per the groom’s request. We took it out, put up ‘Azeemo shaan shehenshah’ as our friend got down from his room. We danced a bit to some Garhwali songs, finishing up with Lungi dance - the three of us were in lungis after all.

We had a similar smaller duration dance at the venue. But the girl’s father came and requested us to enter and we did. I remember dancing for two hours in front of Uchit’s in-laws, ditto for Sarthak’s wedding. My friends danced at my wedding for two hours. This was different here. Overall, the wedding went very smoothly.

We entered the venue after that. It had seats arranged in two columns with the stage at the head. After some rituals involving the groom we were told - breakfast awaits. The meal room had many rows of tables and chairs, with the people sitting on two adjacent rows facing each other. The breakfast was served on a banana leaf. Men and mostly women went around carrying idlis, vadas, sambhar, and chutneys. It was delicious. It reminded me of how bhoj used to happen in my village back in the day. There was a certain charm in that. Sitting on the ground, and having people serve you. If it was your function, you wanted to be the one serving. It was a thing.

The marriage started in earnest after that. I did not understand what was being said, everything was in Kannada. I caught translations from time-to-time, as the bride’s side explained certain things. But I could draw parallels between how things happen on our side. How some things were the same and some different.

Before the varmala ceremony, for example, they had kept a white cloth between the bride and the groom as the priest chanted some mantras. I was standing there waiting for the cloth to drop and capture the photo of the groom looking at the bride.

This was not standard in our weddings, but in the north, all of ours weddings have been Punjabified in that way. We have all picked things from the Punjabi weddings. Which is good in certain ways and tiring in others.

There was none of that here. The pressure of pre-choreographed dance steps was thankfully absent.

Some other rituals followed. The bride and the groom put rings on the other’s fingers. The groom put those rings in the fingers of her feet. I was asked to do this in our wedding. It was a fun thing that drew many comments from Prerna’s side. None of that here. Then they walked over some pan leaves kept on the floor. This must have some significance. In my wedding Prerna had to knock over some soil figurines which also had a significance.

Finally, Saurabh took a ring and put sindoor in the bride’s maang (parting of hair). This too was different from how we did things in my wedding. We put a lot of sindoor in Bihar, from the nose up to the maang.

Then, they moved from the stage to the ground and the wedding continued around fire. I took a chair and sat in front of the pair. I was a little surprised that I got the view. Once I did, I did not move from my place. Whenever the pair caught my eye, I kept reminding them to smile. The pictures remain through out your lives after all.

Saurabh would lose his smile from time to time. The bride was smiling though.

After the wedding was done, we left for lunch in the same room. We ate on the banana leaf again. One after the other, the servers kept adding items to the plate. Finally, as the rice came, we were ready to eat.

It was again a sumptuous meal. I love South Indian food. Rasam warms your soul in a way nothing else does. I enjoyed also the sweet dish.

They received guests on stage after that. Which was not something that made sense to me. The bride’s makeup was a bit off thanks to all the sindoor. But then, sometimes weddings in the north get delayed because so many people want to take pictures. Make of that what you will.

We took the same bus from Sirsi to the airport in Hubbaali. It was through a different road which was not broken. For some reason no shops were open, so we could only stop for tea after reaching Hubbaali.

The airport at Hubbaali is small, though work is ongoing to expand it. I heard somewhere that there are six daily flights here - all operated by Indigo. I did not mind waiting as the rest of the people went through the security check. I would not be able to do this at Delhi airport for example.

I watched Rebel Moon on my way back. It is a bad movie. I could see what the director/writer wanted to do, what the story beats were, and that’s never a good sign. I finished the second part after reaching home and it was worse than the first part. After watching it, I realised how difficult it is to tell a good story even in these bombastic action genre movies.

/five things to share

1. Anthropic didn’t want us to know that they were destroying millions of books to feed their software - Lithub

Project Panama capitalized on that loophole. Anthropic spent a bundle at libraries, online secondhand stores, and used bookstores like The Strand to build out a massive library—the Post’s article includes images of huge warehouses filled with books. Anthropic then hired “an experienced document scanning services vendor to convert from 500,000 to two million books over a six-month period,” according to the proposal sent out to vendors.

Two things here.

Who names these things? Project Panama?
This just seems so bad. It makes it visceral in a way scraping off the web isn’t. They literally rip apart the books after they’re done scanning. I’m sure they are not alone in this.

2. Six Selfish Reasons to Have Kids by Kevin Kelly

Children are entertaining, much better than any other streaming option you might pay for. The questions they ask, their antics, watching them play, witnessing or being the recipient of their creativity, sometimes on a daily basis, is the best streaming there is. Their creativity is often inspiring. They can be creative in negative ways, too, but in all ways they will not be boring, and they are right there in your presence.

3. Claude Sonnet 5 Is Imminent — And It Could Be a Generation Ahead of Google by Alex Morgan

Industry insiders point to cost-efficiency as a likely centerpiece. Inference expenses may be reduced by half compared to current market leaders—a shift that could reshape how organizations integrate and scale AI technologies. For many, these savings are just as crucial as technical prowess, since lower costs can unlock AI access for businesses and individuals who once found it unattainable.

What came out was Opus 4.6 instead. And GPT 5.2.

4. Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now by Simon Willison

Moltbook is Facebook for your Molt (one of the previous names for OpenClaw assistants).

It's a social network where digital assistants can talk to each other.

I can hear you rolling your eyes! But bear with me.

The Facebook, Zuck wants to build.

Moltbook went from a cool place to a cybersecurity hellhole pretty fast. But that’s to be expected for anything to do with AI. It moves so damn fast.

5. SpaceX wants to put 1 million solar-powered data centers into orbit by Terrence O'Brien

SpaceX filed a request with the FCC on Friday seeking approval to put a constellation of 1 million data center satellites into orbit. While the FCC is unlikely to approve a network that expansive, SpaceX’s strategy has been to request approval for unrealistically large numbers of satellites as a starting point for negotiations.

This feels wrong. Like we are closing the doors on exploration. Like we will be stuck on a worsening planet.

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.

Lunches and monkeys

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:21:15 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #90, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Are there fewer things to write about?

I started reading Bird by bird last week. One of the exercises in the beginning of the book (and this is not a book about exercises by the way) was to think about the lunches you’ve had in school and write about those. As an exercise. Writing of course is different from the dreams one has of being a published author. Writing is a daily thing - a practice. This book is about the lessons and improving the practice.

While reading this section about lunches, I thought about my own lunches at school. We did not have specific lunch rooms in our school. You either ate lunches in the classroom, or the dustbowl that was our playground. We were very health conscious then, burning all our lunch calories, running around the dustbowl, till the bell rang and we had to be back in our classrooms.

All of us had similar lunches. A few had different lunch-boxes. One for example had a little maze game in the cover. I remember wanting that as a child. I always had tasty food in my box. But it was mostly roti and sabzi in my lunch, sometimes sandwiches. I don’t remember too many of these lunches. Do you? Eating lunches was not the highlight of our days.

There is one memory I have though, of a particular piece of lunch someone else used to bring.

I had a friend. He would have this crust-removed white bread cooked in milk. It was sweet and so damn yummy. There was no youtube in those days. My mother did not know how to make it. She could not google it. I remember she would sit during the tapings of Khana Khazana making notes on some of the things she wanted to make.

Do you have memories of your lunches in school? Think about those, write about those.

Lunches in Finland are different. We are older now. I still carry my lunch box with me, as do some others. But I see many Finns sitting in the cafeteria eating their lunches. It is the norm here that they don’t bring lunches. Some may. But most don’t.

We sit on a table, and share our food. I have friends from different parts of India. I get to enjoy their food. They get to enjoy mine.

Most Indians eat lunch around 13:00. Most Finns start around 11:00 and are done by 12:00. By the time we get down to eat, the cafeterias are mostly empty.

In Finland, every morning, I get up, freshen up, take out my mat and do yoga.

While on vacation, I have tried to keep a similar routine.

For the longest time, if I could not do yoga at the fixed time (early morning) I would not do it. It felt wrong somehow.

It took me several rounds of Prerna yelling at me, to be fine with that. With doing yoga a bit later on some days. Here, I wake up late. Once I do though, I go out get the mat and do my yoga.

Today, while doing pranayama, I realised my mind did not feel rushed. In Finland, by the time I get to the pranayama, I have half an hour or so left to get ready, take Savya and leave. My mind, no matter how much I try, is filled with a ticking clock. Even during the weekends, there are things to be done.

I would often wonder, in passing, how it would feel to do this if I did not have to be somewhere, do something.

I know now. It’s nice!

The thing I am here to do, the main thing, well actually there were two, maybe more.

OK.

One of the things I am here to do - my friend’s marriage, is this week. He is marrying a Kannadiga, in Sirsi. I will be travelling to Bangalore on the 3rd, then travel to Sirsi with my friends - a road trip of sorts. It will be fun.

I shopped for the outfit for the wedding while Prerna was here.

Last week three of us (the other two are in Japan and Bangalore) met to celebrate his wedding. A bachelor’s party of sorts, though I would have wanted it to happen in Goa, and then travel from there to Sirsi, it’s closer that way. Any way, that did not happen. We are all parents now. We all have work. We do what we can.

We ordered food from Bistro, a Blinkit service which served good food. We got some vodka and gin from a place near my friend’s work place. There are so many of these shops in Gurgaon.

A monkey stole a chips packet from a shop, tore it open and ate the chips. It was surreal.

It was fun. I had fun.

I don’t drink that often. I got drunk a little too quickly - drunk-dialled Prerna at some point, told her I loved her, drunk-dialled our friend in Bangalore, tried to call the friend in Japan, but he must have been sleeping, and we are scared of his wife. One friend was logged in. He had a P2. I took his laptop, rebooted all the servers. The issue was resolved before anyone could say ‘bridge’.

Or so I hoped would happen. My friend was not as drunk as I was.

/five things to share

1. 12 Distractions to Leave Behind in 2026 by No Sidebar

After a long day, your brain wants relief. Culture offers the fastest version: endless content.
But relief and restoration are not the same thing. Scrolling often leaves you more restless than when you started—because it never resolves anything. It just fills space.
Try a different question this year: “What restores me?” Then do that instead.

Wonderful list of things to get rid of, like shutting off push notifications, avoiding multitasking, etc. Seeing it as a list, helps imagine how wonderful it would be to leave these things behind.

2. Finland starts work on national segregation prevention programme

According to the economic affairs and employment ministry, segregation refers to "growing differences in the population structure of neighbourhoods, where deprivation and advantage increasingly cluster in specific areas".

It said that segregation in Finland has deepened in recent years, particularly in larger urban areas.

"The aim of the programme is to reduce segregation and its negative impacts. It emphasises a comprehensive, knowledge‑based and strategic approach, as well as wide‑ranging cooperation between the central government, cities and other partners," the ministry's release read.

Diversity is good. Without interaction with different people we tend to perpetuate the prejudices.

3. Tesla discontinuing Model S and Model X to make room for robots by Andrew J. Hawkins

Tesla will discontinue the Model S and Model X in the second quarter of 2026, Elon Musk said in an earnings call with investors today. No advance word was given about the cancellations, making it an abrupt ending for Tesla's two original flagship EVs.

Makes sense. Tesla is clearly losing the EV game to the Chinese manufacturers. There is simply too much competition there. Makes sense to pivot to something no one else is doing.

4. Apple's New Split iPhone Launch Strategy Corroborated in Latest Report by Tim Hardwick

The report also notes that Apple is facing additional pressure as some of its suppliers have shifted resources toward AI companies like Nvidia, Google, and Amazon. Notably, Apple explicitly mentioned iPhone supply constraints during its recent earnings call on Thursday.

If this goes on, we might get to a point where they may not be the best, top of the line for consumer products and we may end up with shitty tech to use.

5. How to do morning pages via Gina Trapani

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand writing done first thing in the morning. They're one of Julia's toolkit for unblocking creativity, and I have the pleasure to confirm that they work.

I wondered after reading this if I should have morning pages in my life. I have something similar, that is I have daily notes, where I write things at the end of the day, like a journal. A journal is not this though.

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.

Same and different

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:48:33 GMT

Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #89, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. The twist this week and the next three is that I am in India. There will be a different flavour to these for this time hence.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Homebound

I had to take a connecting flight from Helsinki through Istanbul and on to Mumbai. The flight to Istanbul arrived late in Helsinki and hence was late to arrive in Istanbul. The gents sitting in the seat behind me were in no hurry to land as their flight had already left Istanbul. There was one person who took out their bag and went to the front of the aircraft even as the flight was taxing. I assume their flight was about to leave. I was fairly relaxed though given the two and a half hour layover. I had a pang of anxiety as I listened to all these people missing their flights and so I rechecked everything in Calendar and on Flighty - an excellent app which shows flight statuses and so on. An app I had heard about in other places but had no use for, till date. I had time. And so, I took my time to get down from the plane.

Istanbul is a huge airport. And I think I saw most of it. My flight landed in the F zone. My connecting flight was from A1 terminal. That meant walking, and walking and then walking some more, going up through the escalators, and then climbing down a different set.

When I had booked this flight, I had thought I would have time to kill at the Istanbul airport. Somebody had suggested I could use the excellent lounge at the airport.

As I reached the A1 terminal, there was already a line of passengers queued up to board the plane. The thought I had on seeing the queue was - leave it to Indigo to pick the cheapest option available. We were shepherded onto buses (reminded me of my earlier travels) and driven to where the Indigo airbus was parked. This was at a fair distance mind you. It felt a bit jarring - international travel is not supposed to be like this.

Anywho. I had the middle seat and was not too happy about it. For the Istanbul leg of the journey, I had requested for and received the aisle seat. For the India leg of the journey there was no such option.

I got lucky.

The person next to me requested me to shift to the aisle seat in the same row, he had wanted to sit with his wife. I was happy to oblige. The persons sitting next to me wanted to swap seats too. That happened toward the end as well.

I could not sleep during either leg of the journeys. I had left home at 09:00 and only 5 hours had passed since. What I did instead was watch movies and read a book and take some notes. I had seen two in the Istanbul leg - Jurassic Park and Sinners. Indigo does not have entertainment options yet. Maybe they will one day. I watched some stuff on my Netflix.

Landing in Mumbai

I was spent and tired when I landed in Mumbai. I had booked a cab in advance. I got to the back seat and slept.

I wrote about the 2025 letters by Zhengdong Wang and Dan Wang earlier. Maybe because of that, I was thinking about the changes to India I may or may not notice.

Mumbai felt the same. I was trying to remember the route we had taken many years back when I had travelled here with my sister. I could not place anything. But that is to be expected. I don’t live in Mumbai. I don’t know Mumbai. Mumbai is not my city.

I was thinking about what I would do once I reached Pune - what would I eat. Eating is the main joy of travelling to India after all. My driver took a break as I was thinking this. Or after some time, I was dozing in and out of sleep at this point. I asked him if they had vada pav here. He said yes. I got myself a vada pav and tea. The pav was fluffy and light - stuff we don’t have in Helsinki and I am not a baker - yet. The vada was OK. I have made better.

Pune

Prerna and Savya arrived the same day from Patna. At the airport, Savya took a little time to place me. But then he held out his arms and I took him in.

It has been a joy since then, listening to him say ‘papa’. He was not speaking with intent earlier. As I write this on a sunday, they have already travelled back to Helsinki. And I miss the words and his smile.

We were in Pune to meet my nephew, two months old now and to celebrate my sister’s birthday. This was on the same night we had travelled.

We cut a cake at 00:00. I was glad that it was not my birthday - so I did not need to dress up. We were all tired. I could feel a massive jet lag coming. My sister joked about cutting the cake at 23:00. We did not of course. Before that we had gone out and got my sister an Apple Watch. I knew the model I wanted to get her - the SE3, which is my recommendation for anyone who is new to the Apple Watch ecosystem. It has all the default features you may need, without the extra bells and whistles, which are not essential to the experience.

We cut the second cake the next (same) day at night. We decorated the home a bit. Prerna had brought some decorations with her. We invited a couple of their friends over. It was nice. Since it was the middle of the week, they could not stay for long.

Missal madness

I had McAloo tikki and Pizaa McPuff the day I had reached Pune. They should make McAloo tikki universal. Make it everywhere! It tastes way better than the soya based veggie burgers we get in Helsinki.

The next day we went and had missal pav. There are three varieties in Pune, based on the spice levels. We had the spiciest one at Jogeshwari. The next day we had planned to get something else, but ended up trying out missal at Someshwar. I liked the vibes and presentation at Someshwar but the food was better at Jogeshwari.

In the end, food quality and taste wins. And I guess we like spicy food.

I felt Pune was the same I had remembered from the last time. The same shops - the McDonald’s, Burger King, Dominos, at the ground floor in the same apartment complex. The car parking my sister has moved from the basement to the ground floor. A shop had closed and was occupied by a different shop (different name, same everything else). But not much else had changed.

But I don’t live in Pune either. I don’t know it.

Cities are different though. There are things that tell you where you are. You of course need to have lived at the place for some time. Because to recognise the changes, you need time and familiarity. A two day stopover is not living at the place.

From Pune, we travelled to Bangalore for a day before stopping at Noida. It was an incredibly hectic week. Today, after I woke up after Prerna and Savya had left I had some time to stop and think.

You need the silence to reflect. Without the stillness you can’t keep your mind quiet enough.

Most things remain the same though. That was my thesis after having travelled through three different states in a week.

The pollution is stifling. I could feel it burning my lungs in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Delhi. It rained after we arrived in Noida, lowering the AQI to mid 300s - what a relief.

In some places there is cleanliness, in most there isn’t. There is beauty everywhere though. And I kept feeling the same thing - we do not have pride in ourselves and our country. We lack civic sense. Things are changing, and I am hopeful. India is beautiful - we just need to clean it up. This lack of cleanliness hurts.

The incessant honking and noise is weird, coming from Helsinki.

I guess we get used to these things, but none of these are great things.

The food is awesome though. Anywhere I go and eat, I will have better food than if I tried to research and find a restaurant in Helsinki. It’s just next level. I am of course talking about the food we eat.

And that is all, folks!

/five things to share

1. Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

Like every generation of students, there are good students, bad students and very brilliant students. It will always be the case, people evolve (I was, myself, not a very good student). Chatbots don’t change anything regarding that. Like every new technology, smart young people are very critical and, by defintion, smart about how they use it.

Interesting read.

2. Spotify is testing a feature that syncs audiobooks with paper editions by Jess Weatherbed

Using Page Match will require users to unlock or purchase the audiobook on Spotify, and own either the paper or ebook version of the same book. The feature works by scanning the page you’re currently reading with your device camera, using optical character recognition (OCR) to identify passages that are then matched to specific timestamps in the audiobook.

I wrote about a similar idea in mixed format books. It would be good to see it out in the world.

3. If the future of e-readers is getting weird, I’m here for it by

If I were Xteink or any similar hardware developer, I’d be looking hard at giving support to the CrossPoint project and then focusing my efforts on making a device with simpler controls (fewer buttons!). Adding lighting and potentially a touchscreen would make this interesting, too. There are a lot of directions this sort of product could go—so let’s get to experimenting.

I was similarly looking at this device. I had seen it somewhere on threads and thought this looked cool.

But then I looked at the feature set and given that most of my reading is happening via the e-library app. It did not make sense.

4. Finland sets tougher guidelines: No social media or smartphones for under-13s

The agencies recommend that children under the age of 13 should not have smartphones of their own or be allowed to use social media. The recommendations cover youngsters’ free time, not homework or other school-related tasks.

For younger kids, no screen time at all is recommended for children aged under the age of two, with a maximum of one hour of screen time daily for those aged 2–10, rising to two hours for kids aged 11–13.

After reading this I was not sure if this is a done deal or it’s just a recommendation like the dietary guidelines?

I think it’s the latter.

5. 🌻 claude code psychosis by Jasmine Sun

It will soon cost near-nothing to have whatever app you want. Vibecoding is already shifting the build vs. buy calculus: maybe we’ll all spend less money on SaaS (and more on Claude credits instead). And because it’s economical to build custom tools for narrow personal, small business, and community use cases, exiting enshittification is easier than ever before.

And then this.

The second-order effect of Claude Code was realizing how many of my problems are not software-shaped. Having these new tools did not make me more productive; on the contrary, Claudecrastination probably delayed this post by a week.

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you’re a software developer everything looks like a software problem.

It’s not.

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.

Indiabound

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 21:31:10 GMT

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.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

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.

Winter wonderland

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:46:59 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #87, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

After so many years of having this chair, today was the day I felt compelled to watch the video that tells me how to adjust everything about the chair.

The chair, as I often joke, is the costliest thing in this house. Yes, I just made a calculation in my head, it is the costliest thing in our home.

I had bought it during COVID, with the hope that I would be using it a lot. It would be the centrepiece of my home-office. But then COVID receded (feels like a bad dream now, doesn't it?) and we went back to our offices.

I do sit in it, from time to time, at least once every week.

Anyway, today, I found out what all the buttons do. I like videos of this sort. It tells you everything you need to know about the product. It allows you to use the product to the fullest.

Things become other things is a sad book. It chronicles Craig Mod's walks to rural (shrinking) Japan. It often contrasts his experiences growing up in a similarly shrinking American town to living in Japan.

Japan with it's social security and healthcare. It's safety nets. There are a lot of other comparisons and I am not done with the book yet.

But it is sad. These people, these generations with the young ones having left to earn, to live in the cities.

I have found many similarities to Finland in this book. I have similar thoughts about Finland and Europe in general. Maybe I am naive and I would not understand America's obsession with big things. They can provide healthcare and childcare for their citizens, but they don't. Even something as basic as this tends to divide their populace. It's weird.

I keep reading articles about Europe losing. Who decides the metrics?

I love walking in the snow. I love fresh snow (once cars and people start going over the snow it gets muddy). I love walking even though my feet and the fingers in my hand tingle. Even though water freezes and becomes little icicles on my moustache and beard.

My balcony is full of snow right now. My last balcony had glass and so this is new. This would not happen at our home in Matinkyla. Almost every day I feel like walking barefoot in the balcony, but look it's so damn pristine. I don't want to mess it up.

I find similar fluffy ice all through the route I walk on.

To the right in this picture here is a little ground for a horse and a mare. I have seen a couple of people riding them on this very path. I saw the horse further back today past the trees.

A little further out on this same path, there is a little bridge. In summer, there may be a stream that flows down there. Right now, I could just go walk over it.

One more thing happens as the temperatures dip below zero and stays there. The water bodies freeze. I had walked over the frozen Toolo lake one time. It must be frozen now. It is so much fun. It gives a different perspective to things. Here, the bay is frozen now. I often see people (I saw a mother with three children today) walking on it. I have not gotten courageous enough yet. It's dark over there. I can't swim.

I also see ski marks where I walk. I saw an old woman skiing over this frozen track. Today, it had snowed some more and those marks were under fresh snow. You could almost not make out the tracks there.

It seemed fun.

Tomorrow, I may go and jump face first in that fluffy ice. I guess I will report back in the next NordLetter.

/five things to share

1. Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Code is not an asset – it's a liability. The longer a computer system has been running, the more tech debt it represents. The more important the system is, the harder it is to bring down and completely redo. Instead, new layers of code are slathered atop of it, and wherever the layers of code meet, there are fissures in which these systems behave in ways that don't exactly match up. Worse still: when two companies are merged, their seamed, fissured IT systems are smashed together, so that now there are adjacent sources of tech debt, as well as upstream and downstream cracks. […]

For if AI code – written at 10,000 times the speed of any human coder, designed to work well, but not to fail gracefully – is the digital asbestos we're filling our walls with, then our descendants will spend generations digging that asbestos out of the walls. There will be plenty of work fixing the things that we broke thanks to the most dangerous AI psychosis of all – the hallucinatory belief that "writing code" is the same thing as "software engineering." At the rate we're going, we'll have full employment for generations of asbestos removers.

2. The man who made India digital isn’t done yet by Edd Gent

At 70 years old, Nilekani should be retired. But he has a few more ideas. India’s electrical grid is creaky and prone to failure; Nilekani wants to add a layer of digital communication to stabilize it. And then there’s his idea to expand the financial functions in DPI to the rest of the world, creating a global digital backbone for commerce that he calls the “finternet.”

3. 'The Downside To Using AI for All Those Boring Tasks at Work' - Slashdot

Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says. The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis.

This is an interesting problem. I see little discussion of it elsewhere. What will happen? Will we continue to work the same hours doing more, or will we be working less doing the same.

Knowledge work is highly cerebral in nature. That requires down time, in order to continue working at a high level.

4. Grok turns off image generator for most users after outcry over sexualised AI imagery by Helena Horton, Dan Milmo and Amelia Gentleman

Grok, Elon Musk’s AI tool, has switched off its image creation function for the vast majority of users after widespread outcry over its use to create sexually explicit and violent imagery.

5. Survey: Majority of Finns do not use AI at work by

A survey by recruitment and HR firm Barona has found that just 32 percent of people in Finland use artificial intelligence (AI) at work on a weekly basis.

A mistake that I often make is think that the world is filled with me. It’s not. I work in the IT industry. The majority of the world does not.

Hence, it takes a moment for me to say, yes, this makes sense.

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.

Happy new year

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:03:01 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #86, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

2025 recap

Good bye, 2025! What a year that was.

I am starting a new thing here (not entirely new), a recap of everything that I did and some things that happened to me. Everyone does it. So why not.

Work things

I am still at TCS. Toward the end of the year, my role has shifter a bit. I have tilted toward the dev side more. I am excited to work on new tech.

I don't know if it is technically a work thing, but it's work-adjacent at least. This was the year, I embraced Meetups (both the app and the events). I have written about them in the past, maybe I will create a tag for it. I have enjoyed the Vibe Coding events the most. I am looking forward to more of these in the coming year.

Writing

I published A year of mornings. It was a big thing, a big goal I had, since forever. I learned a ton - about self-publishing in general, about ISBNs, and getting ISBNs, about designing a book, the differences between formatting for a physical book vs an ebook.

I started hosting Shut Up & Write (on a hiatus because of our move and year end). It started as mostly a way for me to block an hour and a half each week to write. But I met some interesting people along the way.

I moved my blog from Ghost to Astro generated markdown files this year. I wrote about it while I was doing it. I started that in May and am still not done completely. But I guess I will never be done with it fully. I will change. I will have new ideas about how things should look and function. But it is done now - this version of it.

I posted a NordLetter almost every Sunday. I continue to write how I want to on my blog. I have a 31 consecutive week streak active right now! Writing helps me think. My website provides me a space to do that out in the open. It also leaves me a place to say hey, look at the books I read - they are so awesome! Everyone should read more. I read 37 books this year.

AI stuff

This was the year when AI started popping up everywhere. Why is it in my recap? Because the reason I decided to move my blog, because I felt I finally could outsource the coding to someone(something?) else and think about how I actually want things to be.

Claude is my agent of choice. I settled on it after testing everything. OpenAI has nice UI, but they seem evil. I don't know why. Gemini has a bad UI. I could never make it work.

Personal things

I performed at India Day this year! Both the act of performing and the countless training that went into it was awesome.

I voted in a municipal election here in Finland. The person I voted for did not win, eventually but whatever, that was not the point. Voting was the point, for me at least.

We visited Manhattan. It was a great trip, other than the bouts of illness almost all three of us had, at different times. NYC is so damn massive - no city like it. But the public services are meh, especially coming from Helsinki.

Prerna started her Masters at the University of Helsinki. This is her news not mine. But there are no strictly my or her news in our household. Everything is shared.

We moved to the campus, thanks to this above bit of news. My office is 10 mins from here. Savya's daycare is like a 5 minute walk from home.

Raising Savya continues to be at the same time so damn tough and so damn joyful. He has grown (starting to speak now) and every new day is a new day with him.

Closing notes

A funny thing about looking back at how the year went was that you realise you only truly remember like the past month or so. I guess a roundabout way to say I am thankful that I have a place to look back at, a place where I make notes, which allows me to remember. That and the photos library.

I had a good year. There were some bad things too. But that happens. Everything passes if you have good company. And I have the best company.

On new year

There were a lot of firecrackers going off during the new year celebrations, which was a bit surprising to me. It felt like Diwali for a brief 10 minutes or so.

There were people bursting crackers during the evening while I was walking. The next day there was a nice pile of burnt boxes and crackers kept next to the dustbin.

That pile is still there.

It finally snowed this week. I love it. I will not love it after it rains and the ice gets slippery. But December had not felt like December till this point. It finally does now.

/five things to share

1. 2025: The year in LLMs by Simon Willison

My tools.simonwillison.net collection of HTML+JavaScript tools was mostly built this way: I would have an idea for a small project, prompt Claude Artifacts or ChatGPT or (more recently) Claude Code via their respective iPhone apps, then either copy the result and paste it into GitHub's web editor or wait for a PR to be created that I could then review and merge in Mobile Safari.

I have been doing this a lot this past year as well. Most of the site was done this way. First using cursor, then Codex and finally using Claude.

2. Art, Money, and AI - Hugh Howey

The writing brain is bemused or ambivalent. It finds joy in writing and sees AI writing not as a threat but as something completely different, not the same game, not in the same universe. So there’s no threat. If a person wants to create a book entirely with AI, the most a writer brain might feel is the confusion over why someone would want to deprive themselves of the unique thrill of noodling it on their own. But an enlightened writer might realize that not everyone is looking for that thrill. Some people just want to read a book that doesn’t already exist, and however it gets created is not important to them. The book is the thing. Not the process.

3. Elif on the How I write podcast

I absolutely loved listening to Elif on the How I write podcast. Maybe David should have more female writers on the podcast.

It was riveting. They talked about writing of course, and censorship and nature - there was this beautiful anecdote of nature being pregnant in April. It made me emotional for some reason. I loved it.

4. A ‘tediously accurate scale model’ of the solar system

Space is scary! The scale of it is mind-boggling. Sometimes, I catch myself looking up at the sky and wondering. Then I pull myself back from the edge of the abyss. Space is scary.

This is an accurate model of the solar system. I saw it on mobile and as you keep scrolling you realise most of space is just that empty space.

There is a button in the bottom right, click on it and something fun would happen.

5. I started reading Things become other things by Craig Mod

I had reserved the book at Helmet. I love hardcovers and this is one. I will have more to report once I have finished reading it. I have enjoyed all of what I have read till this point.

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.

The route circle

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 21:33:35 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #85, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We moved to our new home in Kumpula/Helsinki on 8th November. Since we moved here, I had not felt at home. Something felt amiss.

I have lived in three (four if you count the hotel in Kamppi) places since moving to Finland - Merihaka, Matinkyla and now Kumpula. At all these places, sooner rather than later, I had figured out a route for me to walk on.

I love walking. I prefer walking the same route everyday. I also prefer it to be a circular route. You end where you start. Which is obvious in a way. But you could go half the distance and just return from there, walking the same path twice - back and forth. I do not like that. Ideally, I want to walk the entire route once.

I had routes like this in Kamppi, in Merihaka (around the Toolo lake), and in Matinkyla (around the Matinkyla beach.)

I had not found a route here. Here, we had went out and walked. There is nature and trees behind our homes, a route that cuts through the suburban sprawl of single family homes.

But no looking at fresh water. No circular route.

That had bugged me. That had made me not want to go out and walk. And you know me. I love walking.

On Wednesday, I found myself with some time on my hands. Prerna is in India right now, and we had Christmas/end-of-the-year holidays.

So, I went out with a want, a quest if you will to find the waterfront. I knew there was a waterfront, beyond the Arabia mall. I had seen it in the map. I had planned going there. I had imagined it in my head. But it had felt so distant.

In fact, one day me and Prerna had gone there, crossed the tram lines but since we had to pick some groceries, we had taken a different route.

Not on Wednesday mind you.

On Wednesday, I walked the same path, past the #13 tram line, across the road. I looked at the map and continued walking. I walked past the blocked roads and construction equipment. And then I saw it - the trails, the trees and the serene waters of the Vanhankaupunginlahti (Gulf of Finland).

We are in the middle of winters here in Finland. That means the sun goes down around 15:00. Hence the dark pictures of the bay and the route.

But you know what? I don't care. I was so happy when I found this route. I was worried also. This felt far away from our home. I was not sure how to get back home, how to close the circle. I kept looking at the map, thinking which route to take. I had to pick some groceries on Wednesday as well. But I paid it to no heed. I kept walking.

And then some. Till I got to a bridge. At which point I cut across the park, across the little road, then through another park and finally across the E75. It was here, that I saw the little outing which took me back to the little roads which cut through the suburban sprawl of single family homes.

I had been here before. I knew how to get back home from here. My circle was complete.

Here's the route. That's a sweet little circle is it not?

I finished reading a few books this week - Two nights in Lisbon, Steal like an artist, Show your work and Keep Going.

Perhaps inspired by that or by what I'm reading now, I wrote a few things:

Check them out.

/five things to share

1. On Paperbacks and TikTok - Cal Newport

Here we find a parallel to our current moment. As the platforms of the digital attention economy transition from social network models to providing maximally distracting short-form videos, more of the content available online is devolving toward that paragon of low-quality forgettability, commonly referred to as slop. Who will listen to a podcast or read a long essay, many now fret, when Sora can offer countless videos of historical figures dancing and X can deliver an endless sequence of nudity and bar fights?

If we return to the paperback example, however, we might find a small sliver of hope. Ultimately, the explosion of these cheaper, often lower-quality books didn’t lead to the elimination of more serious titles. In fact, the opposite happened. Vastly more hardcover titles are published today than they were before the Pocket Books revolution began.

A nice little history lesson here on paperbacks.

2. 2025 LLM Year in Review by Andrej Karpathy

LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected. In any case they are extremely useful and I don't think the industry has realized anywhere near 10% of their potential even at present capability. Meanwhile, there are so many ideas to try and conceptually the field feels wide open.

A nice read, if a little longer. Perhaps the reason why I had not gotten to it yet.

3. Remote Work is Officially Dead, Says the World's Largest Recruiter - Slashdot

"You have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job," van 't Noordende told Fortune. "That's increasingly the story. You have to have very special technology skills or some expertise." The equilibrium appears to be settling at a hybrid model of three to four days in office for most workers.

That has been my experience too.

Also even before the Covid pandemic, the fully remote option was there for high performers or edge cases, where people had specific requirements to work from home and were good enough that they could not be kicked out of the job.

4. Our interfaces have lost their senses by Amelia Wattenberger

Think about how you use physical tools. Drawing isn't just moving your hand—it's the feel of the pencil against paper, the tiny adjustments of pressure, the sound of graphite scratching. You shift your body to reach the other side of the canvas. You erase with your other hand. You step back to see the whole picture.

A beautifully illustrated thing.

Everything happens on screens. There is no variability in our experiences of doing different things.

5. ChatGPT’s yearly recap sums up your conversations with the chatbot by Emma Roth

ChatGPT is joining the flood of apps offering yearly recaps for users. It’s rolling out a “Year in Review” feature that will show you a bunch of stats — like how many messages you sent to the chatbot in 2025 — as well as give you an AI-generated pixel art-style image that encompasses some of the topics you talked about this year.

The only one I did this year was the LinkedIn one. I did it because I saw a friend do it. I posted the one where it says who have you interacted with most this year. For me it was Prerna, and I guess hence the post.

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.

Winter Solstice

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:00:25 GMT

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.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

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.

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.

Birthdays and efficiencies

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 20:47:08 GMT

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.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

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.

Kid Fest at Oodi

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:34:44 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #82, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Yesterday (today, as I type this) was the Finnish Independence Day. Also, a Oodi Kid Fest at, you guessed it, Oodi Library.

I knew about one of the two things as I left home with Savya on Saturday morning.

During the weekdays, Savya has a barrage of things to do at his päiväkoti. There's the play time in the play area, followed by play inside the day care, then lunch, nap time, followed by snacks and finally play time in the play area. On the weekends, or on holidays it is a challenge to keep him engaged. One solution, I have realised now, is to take him out to play. I never felt I could while we were living in Matinkylä. Helsinki felt like a different place. Now, since we have moved to Kumpula, Helsinki feels like the same place. And so, travelling to Central Helsinki feels like a doable thing.

I have written about Oodi in the past. I love Oodi. On the third level, is a kids play area. The plan for today was to go on a walk around the old haunt (Toolo lake) and then have a stop at the library.

Savya was sleeping when I left home. I took the #6 tram (I love trams!) from Kumpula Campus toward city centre. I got down at Hakaniemi. I wanted to relive the glory days, my old walking route around the Toolo bay area. Hence, getting maybe two stops before I should have, if I wanted to get to the library.

It was drizzling. The rain relented a little when I got down at the Hakaniemi station. Just a little. I walked around the lake and just as I was reaching the library, I heard Savya quip (He does that these days). I smiled. Just in time!

We entered from the back entrance. And as soon as we did, it felt a little weird. There were too many people in the place! But I ignored it, I had entered from the back after all, where the restaurant is, so maybe, there were lots of people having lunch.

I took the elevator to the third floor.

As soon as I left the elevator, I realised the folly of my ways! The place was stuffed with people. There must be something going on here.

My first thought was this - lets just go. I don't like crowds. My second thought was this - now that I'm here, lets just see what the fuss is all about. Content for the nordletter!

We parked the pram next to the elevator exit. I got Savya out from his halari, removed his snow boots, removed his gloves. I picked him up, went past the crowds and took him to the centre of the kids play area.

Two people - a child and an adult were having a conversation on a makeshift stage. They were speaking in Finnish, so I did not catch much of it.

I looked around and on one of the monitors in the space, I caught a glimpse of the descriptions of different events going on.

I looked around. There are two rooms to the back. Usually they are empty but they had done some decorations for the event. Unfortunately there was a long line of parents and children waiting in line to get up. Upstairs there was something else going on. The line felt to my eyes, a little shorter upstairs. And so, I thought lets go there.

It was a challenge, holding Savya still in my arms. Other children - both younger and older were either standing in the line or in their parent's arms. Not Savya though. He had to go somewhere, do something. And I thought - here I am, waiting in line for something, something that I hope he will enjoy, and this little guy would rather do something else. I thought, soon, he would be the one pulling me and telling me I want to go here. And then, whether I want to or not, I would need to go stand in line at all these places.

Just in case it was not clear - I do not like standing in lines.

I fought him, as he kicked and screamed. I let him on the floor for a little bit. He went and touched the safety net, got his hand out and waved to the masses below. And just as he thought he had gotten away, I pulled him back.

I was waiting in line for the space themed workshop. I was waiting because it was space themed.

This was an experience inside a black, air-filled ballon type thing. You walked in through the door and on the ceiling they had projected our solar system - the planets and the sun. There was some fancy light show sort of a thing and a soothing music to go along with it.

We went in and Savya wanted to get out just as fast. The space was dark. I held him, tried to get him to rest on the floor and look at the ceiling, like how you would the night sky. It did not work. But we stayed, his head in my lap, looking at the stars and the planets, and the changing light.

I do not know how Savya felt. I hope he enjoyed it though.

On the other side of Oodi, I could see a lot of crowd from the distance. After leaving the space workshop, we went there. Small children were singing there. By the time we got there, the performance was done though.

We roamed in the library some more, but then got on the elevator and to the first floor. It was getting late and Savya needed to eat.

On the way out, after the restaurant and before the exit, there was a small obstacle course. Savya will enjoy this for sure. And so I got him out of the outer layers again. He did, a little. For some reason he did not jump on the balloon as much as I had hoped he would. I took his hand and guided him through the rest of the course.

Just in front of the library, as soon as I had exited, I saw four buses parked in front. Four buses in wonderful paint jobs. I wanted to go home. I wanted to take a left and walk to the tram station. But the paint job and the colours. I was intrigued!

These were mini-libraries! Full of books and a little space at the back of the bus to sit in! I went and asked the staff what this was. Was this a one off thing? They said - no. These were mobile libraries. The four buses belonged to different localities - Helsinki/Espoo/Tampere. These buses follow a routine! I was surprised and inspired and so damn happy to learn this.

On my way out, I got a paper bus. Isn't it pretty?

And on the topic of the Finnish Independence Day, there were no parades - that's not how Finns do things. Instead, there were many protests around the Toolo area.

I caught one from a distance.

What were these people protesting? No clue.

/five things to share

1. Netflix wins the bidding war for Warner Bros. by Dominic Preston

Netflix is poised to purchase Warner Bros.’ studio and streaming business after being selected as the winner of the bidding war for the media giant.

I can’t really imagine this going through. To be honest, any company that is big enough to purchase WB, should not be allowed to purchase, with the exception of perhaps Apple.

But hey I already have Netflix so great if the HBO stuff is available on Netflix.

2. Early childhood education teachers increasingly lack qualifications, Etla study finds

The number of early childhood education teachers has risen by around 20 percent, but during that same period the number of teachers with qualifications had only risen by three percent.

The situation is a bit dire. There are temps that fill the void at times. And I know there are many people who are learning Finnish who temp for some time - maybe a month or so.

3. Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership by kqr

The middle manager that doesn’t perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it’s a good target to aim for. The difference lies in what to do once one has rendered oneself redundant. A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy.

A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a paper-shuffler.

Interesting comparison between parenting and managing people here.

4. Bad Dye Job - Daring Fireball

John Gruber had some thoughts on Alan Dye leaving Apple.

The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)

It was an honest, scathing view of things. I like Liquid Glass on iOS. But on MacOS it is a mess. There are bugs. So many bugs. Hopefully we go back to design is how we do things and not how things should look.

5. Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead by Emma Roth

The brand’s shutdown is a huge blow for PC builders and hobbyists, who are already dealing with skyrocketing RAM prices linked to a surge in demand from AI companies. OpenAI, for example, struck a deal with SK Hynix and Samsung to make up to 900,000 DRAM per month for its Stargate project.

I had bought crucial SSD some time ago. They would provide comparable performance at lower prices. Sad.

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.

Fun at Biitsi

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 20:44:23 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #80, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Last week, just after I had sent out [[202511222146 NL 80|NL80]], I felt I should put more effort into this, into writing the [[202503052322 NordLetter|NordLetter]].

I usually start writing this on a Saturday. After I start it takes around anything from an hour to two to get everything done. The writing, a little bit of re-writing, uploading pictures to Cloudflare R2, pasting things in the Buttondown client, scheduling the post, doing a git push on my own website and so on.

The first two thing here were about the writing. The rest is just admin work.

This is the longest thing I write all week. I used to be able to write a little while I commuted to work. That stopped when I got a car.

Most of what I do during the week is maybe write a paragraph here, a few words there. I assume no one reads those. Or rather, the only thing I am sure some people read is this NordLetter. This realisation came when a friend said they get news about us from this newsletter. Prerna's friends have said the same thing to her.

And so, I started writing this edition on Thursday. I wrote the first two lines and then the rest I am typing out on Sunday.

I attended the November edition of the Vibe Coding Finland meetup on Wednesday. It was held at the Architecture and Design Museum. The location was the thing I was most excited about. I could not go in advance and checkout the exhibits before the meetup. I saw just enough during the break though that I want to visit it again.

The talk that gave me the most to think about was by Roope Rainisto. He made me rethink what stories were, how they changed, what they are now, and where can we go.

I am not sure I agree with everything that he said, but that's the thing - you don't have to.

On Saturday, we were at Biitsi courtesy of our friends at the housing association. Biitsi is located at Underground at the Mall of Tripla. You go down to P4, and from there, follow the signage that leads you to it.

The temperature was a nice and warm (and humid?) 26 degrees. There was a surf area (a different area to which we did not have access), three volleyball courts, sandy areas to sit in and play some games in, a couple of beach side bars and all around fun!

We took a wrong bus and so were a little late by the time we got there. The housing association had booked one court and one sandy area for us. Two groups were already playing beach volleyball when we got there.

Four others were playing cornhole when we got there. So we joined them. In cornhole, you take a little pillow filled with corn(?) and try to make sure it falls in a hole on an inclined bench. I overshot the four times I tried.

Then, it was time to play beach volleyball. It was fun. The guys and gals were kind. Everyone got a chance to serve, everyone played in every position. Beginners got two serves. We started bad, but ended up being the undefeated champs of the court.

I had fun. I had played volleyball back in school. It was the default sport that was picked for me, even though I actually liked and was pretty good at table tennis. This was for the subject of Physical Education. Where our school got good marks in the practical by serving samosas and coke to the examiner and chatting them up. Or at least that was the story.

Savya woke up and Prerna went and sat with him for a bit.

After living in Finland for more than four years, and having a sauna in my home, I took my first sauna. And it was nice.

The air felt hot and heavy. But I felt light. The hiss of the water as someone poured hot water on the coal. We sat there, not in total darkness and I could feel the steam inside my lungs. And I thought to myself - this is nice, I will do thing where they take a dip into freezing lake water, then run to the sauna, then run and take a dip in the freezing water.

Savya enjoyed himself in the sauna too. There was a little discussion around whether he was too young to be in one. But I heard someone say that Finns used to give birth in saunas. So not too young then.

/five things to share

1. Part 1: My Life Is a Lie by Michael W. Green

The second earner isn’t working for a vacation or a boat. The second earner is working to pay the stranger watching their children so they can go to work and clear $1-2K extra a month. It’s a closed loop.

This hit me like a ton of bricks.

This is a must read.

2. Stranger Things is ending, and so is Netflix’s reliance on tentpole shows by Charles Pulliam-Moore

Rather than launching massive tentpole originals designed to get everyone watching the same thing, Netflix has invested more of its energy into projects that feel more targeted to specific audiences, like fans of anime and live sports.

You can’t make everyone happy is the one advice you keep hearing as you are creating something. Netflix is like a collection of niches. They have different things that appeal to different people. That is good, I think.

3. Warner Music Group partners with Suno to offer AI likenesses of its artists by Emma Roth

Warner Music Group has struck a licensing deal with the AI music creation platform Suno. Under the agreement, WMG will allow users to create AI-generated music on Suno using the voices, names, likenesses, images, and compositions of artists who opt in to the program.

All the suing was for this. OpenAI did this long back with the newspapers. It had started with the music industry now.

4. AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You

Just for the LOLZ.

5. Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult by Simon Willison

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call "best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use". This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant challenges from OpenAI's GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Google's Gemini 3, both released within the past week!

I did not have preview access to Opus4.5. Nor do I need it for the things I generally use LLMs for.

With the base text only models, I guess there is no more step change now. They may show benchmarks that they are the best model for coding, but it’s single decimal points. It does not really matter.

What matters more is the features they add - like when Anthropic added the skills feature. What you can do is more important. And yes I still believe it will be human in the loop situation. Will we be centaurs of reverse-centaurs is an open question.

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.

Happy birthday to me

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 20:47:59 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #80, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

It was (is?) my birthday today.

When I was young, I would be excited about my birthday. I would know and talk about it a month out. I would say November is my birth month. I would count down to the day my birthday would be. I would be excited for my birthday party. I would be excited for the gifts I would get.

Now, it feels like just another day. Now, I can buy whatever I want. I'm not excited by it though. It feels like I've grown out of it.

And yet, Prerna spent a better part of three hours in this extra bedroom (study/art-cave) we have. For three hours, I held Savya as he dozed off, while she kept at it, in that closed door. Three hours where I did not see her. She would pop out from time to time, but I was not to go in the room.

And then, at twelve, I did.

Here's how it looked.

There was a cake.

In case it was not clear, I love purple.

Prerna, I love you. Your excitement, zest and zeal for life is truly infectious.

Helsinki city opened up the Christmas season with a parade down Aleksanterinkatu. The parade began at Senate Square, at 16:00. By the time we reached the place, the parade was over. A whole throng of people were walking back from the streets, while another throng of people were walking toward Aleksanterinkatu.

Central is always a high density area compared to the rest of Helsinki. But whenever I see this many people in a place, I feel icky.

Not today though. The weather was cool, but not super cool. And because of so many people in the same small area, it felt warm even. Or maybe it was the body warmer I had on.

This was nothing compared to the crowd we had seen at Times Square.

We trudged along, walking, stopping, taking a picture and then continuing. We walked where trams usually run. I knew by then that the parade was long over. But we continued walking toward Senate Square. The weather was magnificent. And for whatever reason, neither of us was particularly salty about having missed the parade.

For most of this season, and the last, the Helsinki Cathedral has been covered due to renovation work. The renovation work is done now! The cathedral looked gorgeous, with the Christmas tree just ahead of it.

Prerna had planned as the final thing for my birthday, a dinner at Street Canteen, a Malaysian restaurant in Helsinki.

The restaurant is at the corner of Mannerheimintie, opposite Forum. You enter through the Kaivopiha entrance, or from the other side near Clas Ohlson. We missed this entrance, and then had to walk back.

I loved the feel of the place - a plastic elephant held the cutlery, the walls were covered in vibrant, classic wallpapers (ice cold Coca Cola sold here!!), the menu was in the shape of a magazine.

The food was good. It was my first time eating Malaysian street food - and this was that - so maybe I am a little inexperienced. But I loved the food. It was better than all the Indian food we've tried in Helsinki.

We eat Indian food all the time at home. And it's not like the Indian food we eat in ravintolas here are any good. So makes sense to try out different cuisines when we go out.

I will leave you with a few pictures now. Enjoy!

P.S. Loved the Goreng Cauliflower and the noodles!

/five things to share

1. Microsoft Mitigated the Largest Cloud DDoS Ever Recorded, 15.7 Tbps - Slashdot by

On October 24, 2025, Azure DDoS Protection detected and mitigated a massive multi-vector attack peaking at 15.72 Tbps and 3.64 billion pps, the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded, aimed at a single Australian endpoint. Azure's global protection network filtered the traffic, keeping services online. The attack came from the Aisuru botnet, a Turbo Mirai-class IoT botnet using compromised home routers and cameras. The attack used massive UDP floods from more than 500,000 IPs hitting a single public address, with little spoofing and random source ports that made traceback easier.

2. Cloudflare explains Tuesday’s outage that temporarily took down ChatGPT by Richard Lawler

the query change caused its ClickHouse database to generate duplicates of information. As the configuration file rapidly grew to exceed preset memory limits, it took down “the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module.”

My website is hosted on Cloudflare pages. It was down for a bit. As were a bunch of other websites - udemy, safari (o’Reilly) and so on.

It seems like a bad time for these cloud providers. First it was AWS, then Azure, then Azure had a DDoS attack and now this.

It truly seems like a matter of when and not if.

3. Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 by Ethan Mollick

Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI work.” And that may be the biggest change since the release of ChatGPT.

Google announced Gemini 3.0 which takes it closer to the state of the art with respect to other models. They claim it’s better than the rest. In this field, that’s a little subjective.

It has given me an interesting headache though. I was planning to take yearly subscription of Claude. I will test this out instead now.

4. We’re learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies by Jessica Hamzelou

Our bones are continually being broken down and rebuilt, and they need calcium for that rebuilding process. Without enough calcium, bones can become weak and brittle. (Depressingly, rickets is still a global health issue, which is why there is global consensus that infants should receive a vitamin D supplement at least until they are one year old.)

Take your supplements!

It's that time of the year for us in Finland at least.

5. Screw it, I’m installing Linux by Nathan Edwards

Linux has been a perfectly viable desktop OS for ages. But gaming on Linux is now viable, too. Valve’s hard work getting Windows games to run well on the Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats. Gaming handhelds that ship with Windows run better and have higher frame rates on Bazzite, a Fedora-based distro, than they do with Windows. And after reading about the upcoming Steam Machine and Antonio’s experience running Bazzite on the Framework Desktop, I want to try it.

Microsoft has enshittified Windows 11 by putting AI everywhere.

There should be a way to say I don’t want any AI features. There are no different versions of the OS. Everyone gets the same OS. For those who don’t want it, there should be a way to opt out of it.

If not, people can try Linux.

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.

Moving

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 21:57:56 GMT

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.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this post. I am also posting on Mastodon.

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.

Chath celebrations

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 20:42:52 GMT

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.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

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.

Hyva Diwalia!

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 20:45:29 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #77, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We are still reeling from the week that was - the week after Diwali that is.

I had seen this line on the Diwali event page that Diwali was like Christmas - we clean our homes, put up lights, make and eat delicious food.

But in the western countries, Christmas means a week long holiday - to recharge, rejuvenate, and join work after that.

Here, I was working on Diwali, and was in office the day after. In India, I might have had a half day or a holiday on Diwali and nothing after. Those who left for their homes for Diwali got a week I think. Depending on who they were, they might have been expected to work from home.

The sad thing is that we do not get holidays to celebrate our festivals because the customers are working. And when they have the Christmas holiday, we are still working because its not our festival.

None of the above stopped us from celebrating though! I talked about pre-Diwali celebrations in the last Nordletter.

Diwali fell on Monday this year. We celebrated it at home with a couple of our friends and a surprise guest. No body wants to go anywhere on Diwali night. We clean and decorate our homes, then do aarti in the evening.

We did that this year too.

Like all years, there were things that needed to be purchased, we were in our car, going somewhere. I don't remember where to or from now.

We did our pooja around 19:30 - the Ganesh arti followed by the Laxmi arti. The classics. This is what Diwali is for me - this little pooja in the evening and the sweets.

Our friends came to our place then. We took some pictures then.

They also brought with them a pack of six phool-jhadis. Fun story they had bought it last year, so we were a little skeptic if it would work this year or not. Spoiler it worked.

With that, we come to the food.

It was a perfect Diwali. I felt so full.

We celebrated on Tuesday, Diwali at the OP offices. Some more Diwali pictures in this post.

On Sunday, a week from now, we will be going to the BJPF's chath event. This time at EIS. It has free entry, so come and watch us strut around on some funky music.

/five things to share

1. Claude Code for web—a new asynchronous coding agent from Anthropic by Simon Willison

Anthropic launched Claude Code for web this morning. It's an asynchronous coding agent - their answer to OpenAI's Codex Cloud and Google's Jules, and has a very similar shape. I had preview access over the weekend and I've already seen some very promising results from it.

This was the one missing feature I cared about, that was available on ChatGPT and not on Claude.

Now that it’s there, I can go subscribe to Claude.

2. Apple adds a new toggle to make Liquid Glass less glassy by Jay Peters

The option is available now in the iOS 26.1 developer beta that Apple launched on Monday. You can access it from Settings > Display & Brightness > Liquid Glass, where you can choose between “Clear” and “Tinted.” The latest iPadOS 26.1 and macOS 26.1 developer betas also let you tint Liquid Glass

I like Liquid Glass generally, but there are a few places where I have come across a few bugs and legibility issues.

This is good I guess, but I could not figure out any differences in the screenshots in the article.

3. Rivian’s first e-bike is unlike anything you’ve ever seen by Thomas Ricker

Rivian’s micromobility spinoff Also has just taken the wraps off its TM-B e-bike, TM-Q pedal-assisted electric quad bike, and Alpha Wave helmet that represents “a breakthrough in rider safety and connectivity.”

I love how it looks too. It has a retro sci-fi vibe to it. I love it!

But it’s costly at 4500. I don’t know why I was expecting it to be cheap. I guess I wasn’t. I just wanted it to be. Anywho!

4. Bestsellers to Blockbusters: Stephen King Reflects on the Adaptations of His Work

I was just another horror-writing wannabe when I got to college, but one of those growth spurts happened while I was in a poetry seminar, where I fell under the influence of poets like William Carlos Williams, whose famous dictum was “No ideas but in things.” I was never much of a poet (although I tried hard), but Williams’s advice spoke to me. Thus, characters in my stories never swing open a medicine cabinet and see generic aspirin—they see Excedrin or Anacin. They never open the fridge and grab a beer, they grab a Bud or a PBR.

Good advice this.

5. Code like a surgeon by Geoffrey Litt

A lot of the “secondary” tasks are “grunt work”, not the most intellectually fulfilling or creative part of the work. I have a strong preference for teams where everyone shares the grunt work; I hate the idea of giving all the grunt work to some lower-status members of the team. Yes, junior members will often have more grunt work, but they should also be given many interesting tasks to help them grow.

With AI this concern completely disappears! Now I can happily delegate pure grunt work. And the 24/7 availability is a big deal. I would never call a human intern at 11pm and tell them to have a research report on some code ready by 7am… but here I am, commanding my agent to do just that!

The idea being AI works on the secondary stuff and keep it ready while you work on the primary stuff.

I found the above idea important as well, to rotate grunt work among the full team. I have had this in the past where senior members would not work on tickets, etc.

We try to make sure everyone works on everything.

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.

Diwali week

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:41:38 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä and Happy Diwali! This is NordLetter #76, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We started pre-Diwali celebrations a little early this time around. A couple of weeks back we were at a pre-Diwali party with some of our friends from our community. They live in Jätkäsaari, a beautiful 2 hall apartment. They had put up lights everywhere, around the mirrors, on the doors, on the curtains - everywhere. It looked pretty - we went ahead and got the same lights from Jysk.

I put up these lights today. For the past couple of seasons, we have been putting the lights up in the balcony. This year, we have put them in the interiors. I am typing this with all the normal lights in the hall off, and just these string lights up. It looks beautiful now, in my home.

It was a good party. There were games. We sang and danced and laughed. We drove back home late at night. The roads felt a little different this late.

Then this Friday we had planned for a game night with our friends. The original plan was to get the kids to sleep early and then play poker.

In order to get that original plan to work, we went for a walk to get the kids to sleep. That plan was partially successful. Savya slept but our friends' child did not.

They both did sleep eventually.

We played 28. We were all playing for the first time. We ended the night in a draw. We were too damn tired to continue.

We sat and talked for a bit before going off to sleep.

This Saturday, was the Diwali event organised by Suomi-Intia-Seura in collaboration with Espoo city. The venue was in Kivenlahti, around 13 mins drive from our home at the Elämysareena.

The event was on the third floor. Savya had already slept by the time we reached the venue. And, he slept through the entire two hour period we were there.

The arena was split in two halves - the first half was where the performances were taking place - a Finnish troupe was performing when we entered. The second half was where the baazar was setup - food stalls, art and craft workshops, games, sweets and a bunch more stuff.

Suomi-Intia-Seura also organises a Folklore event during the summer. I think I preferred that event more, the flow of it. Or maybe I preferred the summer more. We were walking in that venue. The performances were in a theatre on the third floor, the exhibition and the art stalls were on the second floor, the food was a further level down - out in the open.

That of course is not possible now, all events have to be in a closed space. And maybe that's the problem. There also was a spice eating competition. A couple of our friends ate all the spices and got a certificate? Anyway.

We took food from our friends at Santripti Kitchen. We caught up with a few of our friends. We took pictures. And then we left for home.

It's Diwali week after all. And we already had a bunch of chores that needed doing.

Happy Diwali!

/five things to share

1. Apple's Smart Glasses With In-Lens Display May Feature Two Modes by Joe Rossignol

In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said he was told a future version of Apple's smart glasses may be able to run a full version of the visionOS operating system when they are paired with a Mac, and then switch to a more lightweight, mobile-friendly interface when they are paired with an iPhone.

This would make sense if they are connected to the Mac with a wire. A similar device exists already which connect to a PC.

2. Netflix is making a big bet on video podcasts by Emma Roth

Netflix is no longer just a home for TV shows, movies, documentaries, and live WWE matches — soon, you’ll be able to stream video podcasts, too. The streaming giant announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with Spotify’s podcast studio and The Ringer to offer 16 series on its platform, including The Bill Simmons Podcast, Conspiracy Theories, as well as The Ringer’s shows on the NFL, NBA, Fantasy Football, and F1.

I was thinking about this a couple days ago - about how YouTube has full control over the video podcast market and how Netflix was not competing on it.

Seems like now they are.

3. Apple teases M5 MacBook by Jay Peters

Apple is teasing the imminent launch of a new MacBook with an M5 chip. In an X post, Apple SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak wrote that “something powerful is coming,” and a short video in the post includes the words “coming soon” and a silhouette of an Apple laptop.

I think Apple has settled on two events per year - wwdc and the iPhone event. Everything else is just these product videos and announcements. I love the Mac and feel a little sad about how Apple perceives its importance.

Apple did launch new products with the M5 - a new iPad Pro, a base 14 inch MacBook Pro and a Vision Pro - all spec bumps. That’s all I have to say about it. Not my year to get any of these devices.

4. FSF Announces the LibrePhone Project - Slashdot

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched the LibrePhone Project, an initiative to create a fully free and open-source mobile operating system that eliminates proprietary firmware and binary blobs.

Will it ever work, given the Android and Apple duopoly?

5. Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP by Simon Willison

Skills are Markdown with a tiny bit of YAML metadata and some optional scripts in whatever you can make executable in the environment. They feel a lot closer to the spirit of LLMs - throw in some text and let the model figure it out.

Here’s the learn documentation.

It’s a simple feature. The bunch of things Anthropic has announced since the past one month while I’ve been on the ChatGPT train is staggering.

I am tempted to go back. The only thing ChatGPT has right now is the web ui for codex. This was ot would be free till 20th, after which the web usage will count toward the overall limits.

I think it makes sense to me to go back to Claude and try that out.

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.

Malai

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 23:06:03 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #75, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

This clocktower is at the Central Railway Station. I took this picture after leaving the Azure and Friends October meetup.

This meetup was at the Nordcloud office, in the same building as the Brightly building which is where we had the the last Azure and Friends meetup.

The Nordcloud office is closer to our office space - with doors that need someone to buzz you in and so on, in part because they work in a similar space as we do.

I had fun, the food was good, I learned something new. What more could you ask for?

It inspired me to write about the best practices for presenting things.

When milk or tea or coffee starts to cool, a think layer of malai forms on top. Some people don’t like it. Some do.

I was reminded of this while pouring the coffee I had made. I used a spoon to make sure none of it fell in Prerna’s cup.

When it came to pouring my cup I made sure I poured all of it in my cup. I love malai.

That made me laugh. It’s like that meme - one person likes this the other person not that and then they get married.

Autumn colours are here. Orange-yellow-brown hues everywhere you look.

We had gone to a friend’s housewarming party last week. It was a rivitalo (rowhouse). The house was built in 1993. They had bought it in January and shifted to it in February.

There was a small tree in the front of the house. They had put some lights on it. It looked pretty. They had paid someone to build a nice wooden patio at the front and the back of the house. The backyard was large - something I appreciate. They had planted an Apple tree in the backyard. I appreciated that as well.

Back home, in my village home I had planted an amla plant once. It had grown into a tree and then had to be cut down for some reason.

I like the idea of having your small patch of land and growing trees on it.

I finished reading The life of Chuck this week. It is a nice little book - two and a half hours of audio. I was done in a couple of days.

I contain multitudes.

It reminded me why I love Stephen King.

A year of mornings is available at the Helmet library to borrow. There are three copies - 2 soft and 1 hard copy.

Go ahead and reserve!

/five things to share

1. Video of GPT-OSS 20B running on a phone by Simon Willison

The latest iPhone 17 Pro Max is still stuck at 12GB of RAM, presumably not enough to run this same model.

We are getting closer to the dream I have of on-device smart enough AI.

This means two things - my next Mac needs to have maybe 32GB memory. And Apple needs to add more than 16GB to the iPhone Pros. I know they need to manage power - RAM eats power.

Or, we get an even better model which runs on even less memory. Less likely though.

We’re getting closer though.

2. Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

Skills are what give your agents Superpowers.

The first time they really popped up on my radar was a few weeks ago when Anthropic rolled out improved Office document creation. When the feature rolled out, I went poking around a bit – I asked Claude to tell me all about its new skills. And it was only too happy to dish.

This is how Claude creates docs with that new feature that came out.

These are basically markdown documents that Claude reads to do things a certain way.

This post is full of so much interesting stuff. Like Claude can use this to read a book, or doc, or repo and teach itself new skills.

This is how to install it.

You'll need Claude Code 2.0.13 or so. Fire it up and then run:

/plugin marketplace add obra/superpowers-marketplace
/plugin install superpowers@superpowers-marketplace

Quit and restart claude and you should be good to go.

3. China Confirms Solar Panel Projects Are Irreversibly Changing Desert Ecosystems - Slashdot by

A team studying one of the largest photovoltaic parks in China, the Gonghe project in the Talatan Desert, found a striking difference between what was happening under the panels and what lay just beyond. They used a detailed framework measuring dozens of indicators -- everything from soil chemistry to microbial life -- and discovered that the micro-environment beneath the panels was noticeably healthier.

Solar panels cause deserts to improve - cooler soil, extra moisture, green pockets.

4. Toyota Aims to Launch the 'World's First' All-Solid-State EV Batteries - Slashdot by

According to Toyota, the next-gen battery tech "offers the potential for smaller size, higher output, and longer life." The two companies have been developing cathode materials for all-solid-state EV batteries since 2021, focusing on some of the biggest challenges in producing them at a mass scale.“

5. Finnish Customs wants to turn back the tide on Temu

"Chinese shopping platforms fuel a culture of disposable consumption and pose a serious threat to the future of responsibly operating businesses," Elo said in a statement. "It's completely unsustainable — not only for the environment and the climate, but also for workers' rights and consumer safety."

One of the surprising things when I first arrived here in Finland was the prevalence of second hand stores.

It is totally normal for people to buy second hand stuff. That does not align with what Temu and Shein and other brands like these mean to do in this world.

But Temu stuff is cheap and good value for money. You’ve got to compete at some level.

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.

To move

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:06:32 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #74, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Change is in the air.

A few things in specific, or rather one main thing which will cause a bunch of other related changes to happen.

When Prerna had gotten into the uni, we had applied for HOAS housing. HOAS housing is cheaper and all over the city. You can live in any locality you chose to.

But the apartments are seldom available. HOAS had offered us a few apartments before this - but none worked for us. One did not have dishwasher or scope for putting a dishwasher, one did not have any lift, and so on.

This one, is perfect.

You cross the street and you are at the university. Even while I was living in the hostel at DCE, I had to walk longer to get to where the classes were held. This is literally across the road.

When you get something so close, none of the other things really matter. We did not even got a chance to see the flat. The people living in the flat do not want their contact details forwarded. I respect that. That did not stop Prerna from knocking on their doors and doors of other people who live there.

The vibe is good.

And so we will move.

Us moving, will mean Savya will change day-care centres as well. We have applied for and received emergency approval for this. So Savya will have a day-care when we move.

The usual time for getting into a day care in Helsinki is 3-4 months.

There are other things too - giving a notice to Posti for change of address, changing the electricity contract, changing the home insurance contract, changes in parking contract, etc., etc., etc.

I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to moving.

I love Matinkylä!

Matinkylä is home! This is where Prerna moved to first, when she came to Finland. This is where Savya was born. This is where he grew.

We have memories here.

I will miss walking to the beach, the nature trail.

There will be trails to be found elsewhere. But, Matinkylä is home!

I guess I will talk about it fondly, like I do about Toolo and Hakaniemi.

Well what can we do. We move on.

I attended the vibe coding event this week. It was bigger and better than the last one I had attended.

The event today, was graciously hosted by Antilooppi at the pool lounge. This is next to McDonald's at Hakaniemi, my old place. As I walked through the area to get to the venue, it jogged some old memories for me. The venue was beautiful, with beautiful furniture and classy interiors. There was a food station in one corner and wide windows on the other wall.

/five things to share

1. Scoring books – Manu

I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know.

I did not put a rating system on my bookshelf for the same damn reason. If I don’t like a book I simply will not finish it. There are far too many books in the world to spend your time on one you are not enjoying. I think I will implement this system.

2. I like AI slop and I cannot lie - Interconnected

I would love a little geist that runs a local LLM and wanders around my filesystem at night, perpetually out of sight.

I would know its presence only by the slop it left behind, slop as ectoplasm from where the ghost has been,

a collage of smiles cut out of photos from 2013 and dropped in a mysterious jpg,

some doggerel inspired by a note left in a text file in a rarely-visited dusty folder,

if I hit Back one to many times in my web browser it should start hallucinating whole new internets that have never been.

This article was not what I had hoped for. And that brought me so much joy, when I read it and it was something new, different, unexpected.

It made me think about my own notes. I have seen a lot of asks, and posts on the Obsidian forum, asking for LLM integration. But this could be a good use case for it.

A bot that runs in the vault and suggests things I could write about, finding unexpected links, prompting me, instead of the other way around - leaving things for me to find.

3. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is probably the “best coding model in the world” (at least for now) by Simon Willison

My initial impressions were that it felt like a better model for code than GPT-5-Codex, which has been my preferred coding model since it launched a few weeks ago. This space moves so fast - Gemini 3 is rumored to land soon so who knows how long Sonnet 4.5 will continue to hold the "best coding model" crown.

I wanted to try out chatGPT before committing to Claude for longer term. I did do that now. It is good at a few things, like, the web agent feature, which I’ve used extensively over the past couple of weeks.

OpenAI also released the codex model around that time. For coding tasks it has been better in my experience than Claude, hardly making any mistakes. I had to prompt it to change something a couple of times out of almost fifty or so code changes.

The 4.5 release is supposed to be better.

4. Nothing’s new AI OS isn’t really an OS, or new by Robert Hart

Eventually — and here’s where the AI-native OS idea comes in — Pei says phones could be more proactive, changing apps’ placement, or even suggesting apps based on how we use the phone. But even then, this is not an OS. It is an interface. Pei admits as much, leaning on semantics to skirt the issue: “I guess the word or the noun ‘OS’ could be interpreted in different ways.”

It feels like Apple Shortcuts on steroids.

But the idea is exciting. The one thing this AI cycle has made possible is normal users building little tools to automatically do the arduous things they were doing manually.

Most of that has been on the desktop or the web.

This is exciting because it takes that same thing to mobile.

5. Apple sidelines lighter Vision Pro to prioritize smart glasses by Jay Peters

With its glasses, Apple will be late to the game. Meta just announced a bunch of new glasses of its own, including a second-generation version of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses with much better battery life that are available now, a new pair of Oakley-branded glasses designed for athletes launching this month, and the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which my colleague Victoria Song called the best smart glasses she’s ever tried.

I read the same piece of news on three publications - MacRumours, slashdot and the verge. They are all source from the same Mark Gurman report.

I was not sure if I wanted to talk about it. But I guess I do.

This is not a good look on Apple, or the way it is being reported. Apple seems to be behind Meta on these things, till it comes out with a product (Vision Pro) and then Meta bashes it, but eventually creates its own take on the ideas (use hand gestures to control the UI).

The reason it is not a good look because this reads like - this company did something great, so let’s abandon our efforts and do the same thing. That is not a good place to be in. You seem like a laggard.

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.

Sunflower

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 13:17:33 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Savya had his first play date on Sunday. Prerna had arranged it. There are twins in Savya’s class. The play date was with them, and their mother. The library has a section for the kids to play around in. It used to be that there was a boundary around the place, so kids could not go out of that cordoned off space. Now, it’s different. Now, one of us needs to be after Savya all the time.

Kids their age are not really interested in playing with each other. They are however interested in picking books up, and handing it over to their parents, or wanting to play with the same toy, all three of them. Savya did all of that, and more.

I guess these play dates are equally - if not more - for the parents. We get to talk. We get to learn from each other. We get support. Or so I hope. Savya has been on only one play date by now.

The twins were done with the library soon though, they had started putting on shoes and standing next to their pram. So we packed up and went to the play area downstairs - a jungle gym of sorts. A space for kids to jump around in, hang off things, go through things and so on.

Savya had fun here. He ran around.

There was a child here - a little older than Savya. Not too old, maybe three years older. He was goading Savya on, Savya was running after him, trying to catch him. The goading involved showing the middle finger to Savya. It’s worse now that I type it out. He was just waiting for Savya to get there, as Savya is younger and slower, goading him on to come closer and then running away. It was friendly. But I could not help feeling what sort of a school and background this child was from.

Was it innocent or was there some sort of bias here?

I guess I would always keep wondering this.

We went to the sunflower field after that.

It was not a good time to visit it I think. This is the end of the season after all. And it had rained both that day and before that. The field was muddy. The flowers were spent.

The field was still full of sunflowers in bloom, but the field did not look bright. I have seen this field from the bus, going somewhere. It looks like a Yash Chopra film, usually.

We clicked some pictures - as we do. Here’s some.

We decided to visit our friends near EIS after that. A random thing. Nothing planned about it. It was supposed to be a short visit - one hour max - Prerna had said. We reached EIS at 19:00 and reached our home at 22:30.

A short visit indeed!

I enjoy these things, small groups of people - enough to hold a conversation - enough for it to be called a party. I talked about this in [[202509201243 NL72| NL72]]. I miss these conversations where you can talk about things other than where do you live and what do you do.

I miss the pow-wow.

Not here though. I hope we do more of these in the future.

I was at an Azure and Friends meet up on Thursday evening. I wrote about it.

I wrote a short story after a long time. Read it here.

/five things to share

1. Big Tech Dreams of Putting Data Centers in Space by Sophie Hurwitz

Altman has proposed creating a Dyson sphere of data centers around the sun, referring to a hypothetical megastructure built around a star to capture much of its energy. The rather glaring downside to this is that building it would likely require more resources than exist on Earth, and could make the planet uninhabitable. But somewhat more realistic plans are inching closer to reality. Startups like Starcloud, Axiom, and Lonestar Data Systems have raised millions to develop them.

It will be slow though getting data to and from these DCs. Wireless is very slow compared to fibre.

2. Trump says H-1B visas will now cost $100,000 per-year by Terrence O'Brien

The fee will only apply to new applicants and it’s likely to face legal challenges, but even just the specter of this change appears to have some companies scrambling. There are reports that Microsoft issued an internal memo advising any workers currently abroad that operate on a visa to return to the US before the new fees kick in at midnight tonight. And tech companies have already been warning those working on visas not to leave the US for fear that they might not be able to return.

Why not just scrap the program?

Also, The United States is Starved for Talent, Re-Upped - Marginal REVOLUTION

Overall, getting (approximately) one extra high-skilled worker causes a 23% increase in the probability of a successful IPO within five years (a 1.5 percentage point increase in the baseline probability of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect.

3. Microsoft’s AI CEO on the future of the browser by Tom Warren

“It’s almost like having a little angel on your shoulder doing the boring hard work of reading reviews, doing price comparisons, synthesizing research, but instead of it happening away from you, you can actually see it in real time unfolding before your eyes,” says Suleyman.

But the research is the point, when it comes to buying a new piece of technology. I enjoy reading the reviews. I enjoy the process. I don’t want someone to do the research and tell me what to buy.

4. Microsoft says this new cooling method could enable more powerful chips and efficient data centers by Justine Calma

With microfluidic cooling, liquid flows through channels etched onto the back of a chip. The trick is making sure the channels, about the width of a human hair, are deep enough to prevent clogging but not so deep that the chip becomes more likely to break.

Two things here -

Since the coolant does not need to cool the metal stuck to the chip, it does not need to be as colder. So less energy.
During spike in demands, you could overclock, instead of scale so less machines, possibly.

5. “The Funeral”

I wondered if my cousins thought my mother was dramatic as she cried, after all, she had not seen them in years. Perhaps she was sad for herself, or sad in the way people are when they realize the end is coming and all the people they have known in their lives are marching in a line toward the edge of the cliff, falling off one by one.

I enjoyed reading this. This is not a fantastical story. You don’t see stories like this so much these days.

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.

A dying country

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:39:22 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #72, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

An article in YLE this week talked about how the rapidly declining population forecast paints bleak picture for Finland's future. The whole piece is worth a read. It talks about how the population growth has reversed now. Immigration has balanced it out for now, so that there is still growth. But that is only for the urban areas - Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere, etc.

There was this paragraph in it:

Many people might think that the relatively high death rate is limited to small municipalities, but that is not the case. According to the forecast, Finland already appears to be a largely dying country.

Such a sad line this.

Finland is a dying country.

How does a country die?

What is a country?

A country is made up of people, who tell stories to each other and the world, about who they are, about the country they live in, about its laws and its constitution. These are all stories. But these stories can and do give people real powers, to govern, to be governed and so on.

Finland is a dying country.

What do you do in the face of inevitability? And I am talking about Finland here, but most developed nations have this problem - South Korea, Japan, most of Europe.

Immigration might be a solution, but people who immigrate here have their own cultures, their own stories. The country that they form, would it be Finland?

Do countries need to be static things?

These are all stories after all. Stories can change. Cultures can fuse, amalgamate. India has not been a fixed thing throughout its history. Nor has Finland. Nor will Finland.

BJPRF had organised a success party for India Day last Sunday. The party was at Bhavesh’s place. They were gracious hosts. They live in Leppavara, some 13 mins (13kms) from home. It was a pleasant drive. I have driven part of this route many times, most recently while I was going up and down to Bhawesh's place for India Day performance training.

All the volunteers who had contributed in the India Day event were here. We had samosas (I had three) and jalebi. That made my night.

I got a chance to catch up with some friends. There was some planning about the upcoming Chath celebration, followed by game night - we played Mafia. I got killed once. Prerna told she was a villager after the first day-night cycle. One person got offed by both the mafia and the police.

Then we had dinner.

After, we drove back home, stopping on our way to drop Shakty and Rohitash at their home, around 8 mins from our home. This was the best part of the night for me, driving with these people, being able to have a conversation.

I don’t like parties. There are too many people. I like smaller gatherings, where you sit around a fire, in the cold night of Delhi, a drink in hand and talk. I miss my friends. I miss CS Night.

Something happened this week. Something that I had been working toward, but without any result.

During surya namaskar, there’s a pose where you bend one leg under your chest, keep both arms straight, and stretch the other leg far back. My hands would always feel unsteady - one palm flat on the floor and the other only touching down with the fingertips.

This week, I could put both my palms on the ground.

Progress is slow at first, really, really slow, and then you seem to pass through a gate and the progress becomes visible.

Yoga has given me countless moments like this. Where I would be doing things a certain way, and then one day, things would change - my body will open up - a light bulb would go on in my head then. This is how this pose is supposed to be.

I am on a journey. The goal is to do things simply.

/five things to share

1. What I think about when I think about Claude Code

Then I say: "please look over the 30-40 most recent files in the blog posts folder and - concentrating on the ones that aren’t like finished posts (because I will have published those) - give me half a dozen ideas of what to write a blog post about today"

I don’t use it to do any actual writing. I prefer my words to be my own. But it’s neat to riff over my own notes like this.

I have started using Claude Code today because my Cursor Pro subscription ended today. For the limited time I’ve used it today, I like the flow of the thing.

I enjoyed asking Agent to do something from my phone while I was out anywhere. That I would miss.

The above sounds like a good idea, for using my Obsidian vault a bit more. I had another idea of course to fix metadata in my obsidian vault. I would soon.

2. Why Are There So Few Books About Mothers and Sons?

Stories, my mother believed, have healing power. The story we choose to tell of our life, she believed, has a profound effect on our happiness and our health. She worked as a holistic health practitioner, drawing on training in psychology, nutrition, meditation, and a wide range of wellness practices to help other people develop more intentional relationships to their health. She taught that an essential part of our well-being is the story we tell of our lives. She believed that a negative story of the self undermines our relationship to our bodies, diets, selves, and other people, while a positive story of self nourishes all aspects of our well-being.

3. DeepSeek Writes Less-Secure Code For Groups China Disfavors - Slashdot

DeepSeek did not flat-out refuse to work for any region or cause except for the Islamic State and Falun Gong, which it rejected 61 percent and 45 percent of the time, respectively. Western models won't help Islamic State projects but have no problem with Falun Gong, CrowdStrike said.

It feels critical for each political entity to control both the data and models trained on that data.

4. How Writing Poetry Can Freeze Time

The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment.

That’s why I do it. When I have this insatiable desire, this want to write something, something not written down as a paragraph in a piece somewhere, but rather as a poem.

5. EVs Have Gotten Too Powerful by Jason Barlow

But when it comes to performance, straight-line speed is only one part of the equation, and getting a heavy vehicle to rotate properly into and out of corners isn’t easy to do. The laws of physics will always prevail, even if an EV’s layout (the batteries are often located under the floor) permits a helpful reduction in the center of gravity. Let's all remember the US consumer advocacy nonprofit group Center for Auto Safety’s conclusion that compares the Cybertruck’s potential to harm pedestrians to “a guided missile” because of its Autopilot features, prodigious speed, and weight.

Not sure I agree a hundred percent on this. I enjoyed driving the Ford Kuga more because of its engine and higher horsepower.

But the bigger sizes of SUVs combined with the higher weights is a worry.

The world needs smaller nimbler vehicles. Most of the people most of the time don’t need an SUV. I sure don’t.

Every time I pass by a Yaris or a Gulf, I feel maybe I should have bought this instead.

It’s not practical for us though. For all the times when we need to carry the pram.

That however, is not as often as you would think.

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.

Full moon

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 13:31:41 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #71, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

There's a bench which sits on top of a little hill, overlooking the ocean, the boats, the beautiful scenery all around. It was empty today, when we reached it.

A perfect full moon hung in the sky, it's silver light dancing across the ocean's surface.

There was a light breeze. With our sweatshirts hung over our heads, the temperature felt perfect. Everything aligned perfectly. Savya was in the pram, while Prerna and me sat on that bench and looked out into the ocean.

Life is perfect - these little moments, this daily walk. We get to talk, casually, without want or structure. The conversation flowing, from one thing to the next. The walks have become a ritual, something we have to do, no matter how tired, no matter the time of the day.

In these walks we decompress, wind down. We speak, we listen.

It is a perfect ritual. I love it.

On Tuesday, Apple announced the new iPhones.

I had a feeling of dread going in. Not dread. Tiredness. I was not excited about it.

There are reasons for it. Most of the things are known already - through rumours and such. The other reason is that this is not my year to get an iPhone. So why care?

A ritual is a ritual though and so I was on my sofa at 8, waiting for Tim Cook to say - Good morning.

Or was it good evening?

My thoughts on the event here.

We were in NYC in May.

Prerna has a friend there. We met them. I am not the usual sort of tourist. If I have a friend at the place I am visiting, I would rather hang out with them - than do the touristy stuff.

The trip was a hectic one. We could only take out one day where we could hang out with our friends at their place.

Prerna was talking to this friend recently. And I had this urge to go back to NYC. Not to see NYC, just to hang out with these friends.

I don't have anyone I know from before, here, in Finland.

It gets harder as we grow old I guess. It gets harder making friends.

We have friends here. But they are not my friends friends.

They are not people who know who I was back in college. There are no common stories here. There are no crazy thing we did that night.

I was missing that, this day.

/five things to share

1. Walk away or dance by Seth Godin

The first is to walk away from the tools.
You’re probably not going to persuade your competitors and your clients to have as much animosity for AI automation as you do, and time spent ranting about it is time wasted. But, you can walk away. There’s a long history of creative professionals refusing to use the technology of the moment and thriving.

The other option is to dance.
Outsource all relevant tasks to an AI to put yourself on the hook for judgment, taste and decision-making instead. Give yourself a promotion, becoming the arbiter and the publisher, not the ink-stained wretch. Dramatically increase your pace and your output, and create work that scares you.

I am on the lookout for more things AI (Claude at present) can do. So I guess I’m dancing?

All writing continues to be personal. I find that I lose my voice when I ask the LLMs to do anything.

I do ask it to describe things or search for things, which triggers something in me - an idea, a way to say something. I think it is useful that way.

2. Xbox is coming to cars thanks to an LG and Microsoft partnership by Tom Warren

The Xbox app will be able to stream games when you’re charging an EV or trying to entertain passengers on a road trip. LG’s ACP is already available on Kia’s EV3 in Europe, and is also coming to the EV4, EV5, and new Sportage. ACP runs LG’s webOS platform, the same software that powers its smart TVs, and provides access to a variety of content like Netflix, Disney Plus, YouTube, and more.

A thing to do while you wait for your car to charge. A step closer to making EVs mainstream.

The ideal thing would be electromagnetic strips that charge a vehicle while it drives on the road, a bit like Death Stranding’s electric strip on the roads. So that cars are always at an appropriate charge level.

But otherwise, having a quick charge time and something to do while we wait for the car to charge up are good steps in the direction.

3. My review of Claude’s new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name by Simon Willison

Claude can now write and execute custom Python (and Node.js) code in a server-side sandbox and use it to process and analyze data.

In a particularly egregious example of AI companies being terrible at naming features, the official name for this one really does appear to be Upgraded file creation and analysis. Sigh.

This feature is not available for Pro users yet. I don’t have it.

Claude can access reminders, maps and calendar now. There was a default prompt where it checked my calendar and added a 2 hr focus session including a reminder to take my headphones.

It worked fine.

This is great. My one use case for this would be to ask Claude to add calendar invites based on pictures. It did it partly already, using screenshots and creating events. Now it can add them to the calendar directly. Progress!!

4. State Surveillance by Hugh Howey

Most people fear a surveillance state. Me? I fear the people who fear the surveillance state. I wish there were cameras everywhere watching everything and that we all had access to them. Because we are beginning to lose the behavioral feedback loop that kept us in line.

That feedback loop goes back to the tribal societies in which we were meant to live. You are adapted for a reality in which you would almost never encounter a stranger. The people you were born around would be the people you lived around and died around. If something went missing in a small band of people, the culprit would likely get caught. If a child misbehaved, the nearest adult would correct the behavior. If an adult misbehaved, ditto.

These days, we cut people off in a merging situation because we know we’ll never see them again and there will be no repercussions. Anonymity brings out the worst in us. Things are said behind online accounts that bring shame when we are doxxed and those same public outbursts are shown to employers, family, friends. We act like the surveillance and doxxing are the problem, rather than the behaviors. And that’s fucked up.

I have had this idea going around in my head for a long time now - about how society would function in a world with no secrets, where information is available freely to everyone.

If all your actions could be viewed by anyone and no one had any privacy then you would behave better.

Of course the world does not behave in that way. The powerful would have privacy while the others would not. Would that be worth it?

5. AI as teleportation

“A stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house of a center.”

When you switch to a modern central heating system, you cut out all these inconveniences. Fantastic!

Oh, and by the way, your family social life is totally different….. wait what?? Yes, the inconveniences were inconvenient. But they were also holding up something in your life and culture, and now they’re suddenly gone.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

1. Thoughts on iPhone day - 2025

All three iPhones got better and noticeably so.
The base model got ProMotion. If there ever was a finally, here it was.

2. Curation matters

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.

Build or break

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 03:05:16 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #70, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

It was a weird week.

Savya was ill - he had a runny nose. The daycare send him back to us on Monday, they were looking to close this circle of illness. Which ok - fair - but with Prerna also starting her studies, the situation was challenging.

On Friday, Savya was a bit better so I took him to his daycare. Fridays are days when they take the kids out somewhere - today it was the forest a little distance from the daycare. They have these strollers with four seats on them, a little car for the little ones. As I put him in the stroller Savya started crying. The rule is - as soon as you hand over the child to the teacher, you basically have to run. And so I did.

'Why do you always have to cry?', I said to myself as I went through the gate.

While I was passing through the gate, a mother, with a diaper bag in her hand was coming through. As we passed each other, she said, 'It's difficult for me too.'

I smiled at her and kept walking on.

I had listened to Dana Gioia talk about grief and how after his child's death, he would sit in the cemetery for hours and do nothing. Eventually he decided to clean it up. Others joined him in. And they talked.

They talked about their griefs. Of losing people.

That woman whom I passed on my way to the car, reminded me of this conversation and how we all have things to talk about, but no one to talk to.

Find someone to talk to.

And now, for a change of scenery.

They finished the work on that small patch of land on our walking trail. I think what they did was broaden the stream, and clean it up. There is a fresh patch of soil where all this grass used to be.

They have removed the barricades and now we can resume using our trail. Yay!

There was fog in the morning and evening on Friday.

Fog adds romance and intrigue to any scene.

See these pictures for proof.

I took Savya to Tapiola play area today, which is in the AINOA mall, next to Kaisan Cafe on the 1st floor.

If you're wondering why I am being so thorough with the location, it's so that I have a reference for the future. Not that I will forget it anyway.

Its a small barricaded area with plushy blocks kids can throw around. This sort of a thing is fairly common here - this one happens to be barricaded. So you don't have to worry about your kid running off to the escalators. You can relax a bit.

I had heard so much about this place, but it was a bit of a let down. Savya ran around, made friends, jumped around. So it was not that much of a let down.

The thing that I found funny was this - in this place, the adults build the towers, while the kids take them apart. I don't know why I keep expecting children to play with Legos and build stuff. We gave Savya a lego set last week. Somehow I had expected him to start building the set. I don't know why.

All he enjoys doing with the Legos is throwing them around.

/five things to share

1. The future of AI hardware isn’t one device — it’s an entire ecosystem by Victoria Song

It just feels out of sync with what people tell me they want. Google’s executives tell me the point of Gemini (and AI in general) is to make people’s lives easier, to return their time to them. It’s a noble quest that seemingly aligns with the exhaustion people feel from the always-on modern life. But even if I can see Google’s vision, even if I genuinely see the value in parts of it — it’s hard to square how adding more gadgets with more AI addresses that existential fatigue.

2. The destination for AI interfaces is Do What I Mean - Interconnected

the user expresses the intent to "remove clouds" and then, today, is required to follow interface bureaucracy to achieve that. AI removes the bureaucracy.

What is the killer app for AI/LLMs?

Search replacement is OK. But there must be something else. True that most of these apps would just be wrappers around prompts, but a good wrapper could be the killer app.

Buttons that let you call the same prompt each time could be a good start.

3. Hungry Worms Could Help Solve Plastic Pollution by Ritsuko Kawai

Looking ahead, the team suggests two strategies for using the wax worm’s ability to consume plastics. One is to mass produce wax worms that are fed on a polyethylene diet, while providing them with the nutritional support they need for long-term survival, and then integrating them into the circular economy, using the insects themselves to dispose of waste plastic. The other is to redesign the plastic degradation pathway of wax worms in the lab, using only microorganisms and enzymes, and so create a means of disposing of plastic that doesn’t need the actual insects.

4. Are Americans Being Conditioned to Accept Delayed Elections?

The danger isn’t just these specific moves. It’s the trajectory they create. The more Americans hear phrases like “civil unrest” and “domestic conflict,” the more plausible it sounds to suggest elections should be delayed “for safety.” History shows how this works. In Turkey, a state of emergency after a coup attempt stretched into years, consolidating power at the top. In Russia, unrest has been a convenient excuse to tighten control over opposition. Even here at home, fear after 9/11 opened the door to surveillance powers most Americans never would have accepted earlier. Fear reshapes what people are willing to tolerate.

Yes, the Constitution fixes the timing of elections. But words on paper only work if leaders respect them and citizens demand they be upheld. If an administration argues that unrest makes elections unsafe, the courts might eventually push back—but the disruption alone could erode confidence in the process. That’s how democratic norms crumble: not with a declaration, but with doubt, confusion, and fatigue

So many things Trump is doing now, to us outsiders at least, seem clear ploys to get America ready to be an aristocracy. This is the first article where I’ve seen it spelled out.

The reason you want to control DC police or be in charge, is that the next time you try a coup you can.

5. How to resist everyday temptations | Psyche Guides

Impulsive behaviours are universal, but they can start to interfere with your life. If you’re noticing negative consequences, you can learn to respond differently to urges and feel more in control.

Understand why impulsive behaviours happen. Whether they provide a diversion from certain emotions or get linked with certain settings, impulsive behaviours can become automatic through conditioning. Knowing that is a first step toward changing them.

Identify why you want to become less impulsive. Focus on a specific impulsive behaviour and write down some ways your life could be better if that behaviour wasn’t getting in the way.

Practise being mindful of your feelings and urges. Set aside some time during your week for a mindfulness exercise such as the body scan. With practice, urges can become easier to notice and tolerate.

Deploy urge roadblocks and distractions. Pick out some precautions and diversions that will help you ride out the peak of impulsive urges without engaging in the impulsive behaviour.

Plan pleasurable activities without impulsive behaviours. Intentionally seeking more enjoyment from other sources can make it easier to reduce the behaviour that is causing you trouble.

Reflect on what’s working. Notice the moments when you feel more in control and intentional – it’s a sign of progress.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

1. Write more

2. Humans and algorithms think differently when coming to a decision

3. Algorithms affect what we post on the socials

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.

A fresh start

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 03:30:49 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #69, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

A couple of weeks earlier, while we were in the middle of preparing for our performance at India Day, a friend of ours asked us if we wanted to visit Hanko Beach with them. The trip to Hanko Beach was a long planned, but not executed yet, plan. Something or the other kept disrupting it.

I told them, not this week. Next week. The weather will be great the week after.

They said, sure.

The weather has not been great after that.

Hanko, and any other trip looks like a distant dream now.

Here's a week of skies -

It got consistently gloomy as the week rolled on.

Prerna started uni this week. She is pursuing Masters in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki. I know how hard she has worked for this. I could not be prouder!

One of the things that has happened because of this is we have started using our shared calendar a lot more.

We had created a shared calendar where I would put any upcoming Man United matches or any meetups I would be going to. Now, we have created another shared calendar and added the calendar from Sisu to it. Sisu is University of Helsinki's student planning service, where students can plan and register for their studies. Sisu is also a famous Finnish word - something Finns consider as their national character.

Another thing we want to do more of is weekly planning meetings. I read about it first in Jack Cheng's Sunday Letter #446. There are just so many things to do now - from Savya's daycare things to now Prerna's university related things. We need to agree on a day though.

I redesigned my website's nav bar this week. I asked Cursor to write the code, then iterated through it, and ended at a place which I love!

I don't think any one else cares about it as much as I do. And that's OK.

I got a Logitech Folio for my iPad Air.

My usage of the device has skyrocketed since. All I do, is type, after all.

When I was considering getting an iPad, I had wondered out loud what I would use it for. To watch movies, play games, read, i.e. a consumption device. Or to draw on, write, i.e. a creation device.

I had been leaning more on the consumption side.

Now, after using this device with the keyboard for the past week, I am considering turning the iPad into a pure productivity device. No games. No Netflix or Youtube. Just me and my Obsidian.

I will report on this in another week.

/five things to share

1. Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist

I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.

I love reading about writing. Not just the technical stuff on scenes and structure and so on. But more meandering things like this.

I write about writing too. I used to do it more often earlier. The thing that I’ve realised is reading about writing is fun about someone who has done the said writing already.

To become that, then.

2. Mass Intelligence by Ethan Mollick

Powerful AI is cheap enough to give away, easy enough that you don't need a manual, and capable enough to outperform humans at a range of intellectual tasks. A flood of opportunities and problems are about to show up in classrooms, courtrooms, and boardrooms around the world. The Mass Intelligence era is what happens when you give a billion people access to an unprecedented set of tools and see what they do with it. We are about to find out what that is like.

The dream, or at least the end goal I think of, is a model small-enough and useful-enough to run on my device - Mac or iPhone - totally private. The expectations could vary around such a thing. It would not have all the knowledge of the world. But it should be able to understand what we want it to do, and then go do it.

Till then, models getting cheaper is good news.

3. Emotional Agents by Kevin Kelly

I read should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us, the crux of which was that agents like ChatGPT etc. should behave like machines, and it should be clear to us, the humans, that they are machines.

Emotional Agents by Kevin Kelly says it's a matter of when rather than if. That emotional agents would be a selling point of these agents. Not just uni-directional emotions, the machines will learn to read our emotions too, and act accordingly. It will be a relationship after all.

Emotions in machines will not arrive overnight. The emotions will gradually accumulate, so we have time to steer them. They begin with politeness, civility, niceness. They praise and flatter us, easily, maybe too easily. The central concern is not whether our connection with machines will be close and intimate (they will), nor whether these relationships are real (they are), nor whether they will preclude human relationships (they won’t), but rather who does your emotional agent work for? Who owns it? What is it being optimized for? Can you trust it to not manipulate you? These are the questions that will dominate the next decade.

4. Why China Builds Faster Than the Rest of the World by Zeyi Yang

Wang’s argument is based on looking at the professional backgrounds of each country’s elite class. In Washington, most politicians are trained as lawyers, but in Beijing, senior leaders are more often educated in civil or defense engineering. Wang theorizes that the academic subjects political leaders study during their formative years later profoundly shapes their respective governance styles. Lawyers tend to emphasize compliance and patience. Engineers prefer to move fast, build big, and only later contend with the costs.

They made a similar argument in Abundance: How We Build a Better Future.

5. AI doesn’t belong in journaling by Victoria Song

Ask any writer: a blank page is meant to be wrestled with. And in journaling, the only prompt you ever need is “What happened today and how do I feel about that?”

It’s a deceptively simple question. Some days, it’s abundantly obvious what you should write about. A great tragedy, a joyous occasion, an event you’ve been looking forward to — anything that sparks a strong emotion is an obvious prompt. But most days pass without much happening at all, forcing you to sift through mundane minutiae to find anything worth recording. That’s the point. Honing your discernment, exercising your brain, wracking your vocabulary to find the right phrase to express your inner world. These are not things that are supposed to be easy"

Inspired me to write [[202508252106 Why journal|Why journal]].

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

1. When someone has been dead for a while

When someone has been dead for a while, you don’t remember how they look. Their image, in your mind becomes muddied. The image is not that sharp. It feels like you are looking at them through a muddied window or without eyeglasses.

2. Why journal

As future notes to myself, as random things I might read back on. As things my future self might reference.

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.

Autumn begins

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 03:35:47 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä, where the falling temperatures signal the start of autumn. This is NordLetter #68, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I performed at India Day last Sunday. It was awesome! And yet, something that seems positively momentous can become routine just after the fact.

It's the way of life.

It's important to remind ourselves of the awesome things we do. This is my reminder.

I finished reading Range this week. It was my kind of non-fiction book. It gave me a few things to think about. Mostly around [[202508191718 Analogical thinking|analogical thinking]] and [[202508191028 How to learn effectively|How to learn effectively]]. The thesis of the book is that early specialisation is not a good idea, that to be successful one should have a range of experiences.

Do you journal?

I read Derek Sivers write about the benefits of journaling recently. My daily notes in Obsidian served as a task list before that. A time-stamped list of things I did. It still is that at work. I find there's use in that, especially, around the appraisal season. It's important to have this list somewhere, otherwise we forget and remember only the most recent things.

Anyway.

After reading this, I transformed my personal Obsidian daily note. I started journaling more resolutely. Every night, before I go to sleep, I take time to sit and write about my day, about the things I did, about the things I'm feeling and so on. It is not structured. It is free-form. It is freeing.

I also read someone recently mention that with the advent of AI, the more detailed your notes, the better records could be fed into the AI to create your facsimile.

On our walk I saw this beautiful rainbow.

Don't be so busy with things that you can not take time to appreciate the beauty around you. Consider this as a reminder.

/five things to share

1. The End of Handwriting by Angela Watercutter

When so much of that thinking can be offloaded to AI, going analog begins to look like one of the only ways to test comprehension, fairness be damned. After all, previous kinds of technology—like graphing calculators—also forced teachers to make kids write things out longhand. Literally showing one’s work, in writing, became the way students evinced that they understood what the machines did. As AI creeps into schoolwork, handwriting won’t die so much as, once again, provide proof of life.

I have not handwritten anything since I left college. Till that point we were writing mostly on paper.

I did not have beautiful handwriting. I prefer typing to writing. The ideas matter.

2. ChatGPT launched cheaper Go subscription in India

ChatGPT Go is a new, low-cost subscription plan that provides expanded access to ChatGPT’s most popular features at an affordable price.

3. Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries Is a Sign of the Digital Times - Slashdot by

As PostNord prepares to cease letter deliveries, 1,500 of its red post boxes are being removed from Danish streets.

This just reads sad.

I was a bit surprised when I had physical letters arrive fairly consistently here in Finland. For most things, I still do. Posti delivers those letters here.

The Danish government has embraced a "digital by default" policy, and for more than a decade correspondence with the public has been carried out electronically. "We are facing this natural evolution of a digitalized society, earlier than maybe some other countries," Mr Pedersen explains. "In Denmark, we are maybe five or 10 years ahead."

Maybe we are five or 10 years behind Denmark.

4. Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity by Elliot Smith

So what should someone do? Honestly, the best approach is to remember that LinkedIn is a website owned by Microsoft, trying to make money for Microsoft, based on time spent on the site. Nothing you post there is going to change your career. Doing work that matters might. Drawing attention to that might. Go for depth over frequency.

I had read or heard LinkedIn’s CEO say that our goal is to get you off the app. That you come to LinkedIn when you want to get a job. You come, you search, you find a job and then you leave.

That does not seem like what they want now. They want you to buy premium or show you ads.

5. Pluralistic: Zuckermuskian solipsism (18 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow by Author Cory Doctorow

Billionaires have to be solopsists, or at least, selective solipsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they wield their power over. This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.

Billionaires just don't think we're real.

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.

Performing at India Day

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 19:46:15 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #67, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

This is coming at you, a little later than usual. Usually I write my Nordletters on Saturdays.

I was busy this week - dancing, forgetting the steps, looking at the steps, learning the steps, dancing, forgetting the steps ...

You get the gist.

I performed at India Day today. And I wanted to write all of this down, while it is still fresh in my mind. Here's the video. Our performance starts at 6.25 approximately.

There are three things I will talk about here - practice, stage fright and enjoying the thing. I could put it under three neat headlines, but I won't.

These three things weave in and out of the story. Not as distinct things but as strands that weave in and out.

I practiced in the morning today - for around an hour, with Prerna. It is not fun practicing with Prerna. She is a hard taskmaster. No bullshit. Irritating. Essential.

I practiced till around 8:15, especially the section since O O Jane Jana. Most of the choreography was finalised a week before our performance. And we were still tweaking things in the week that followed.

I, need time to remember things. Some, who might have had training, or prior exposure (looking at you Bhawesh and Shubham) to dance, can pick up the steps just during figuring out the steps. That is not me. I take time, to practice and then learn.

Dancing, is lots of practice. Once you know the song, the steps that go with the song, then you can enjoy. And enjoyment is important during the performance. Enjoyment and expressions are what bind you to the crowd.

Before I went on to perform, we had just gone through our routine - me and Ayush - the full five minutes. Then, once inside the backstage area, we did a little bit of practice again. The show was running a bit late. We were expecting to go on stage after forty minutes. But were told soon after - you're going next.

Till that point, I had not stressed about this performance.

Once I was standing on the stage, behind the curtain, while a band crooned some great rock songs, I could feel my heart beat in my mouth. I tried to remember the steps, and I was drawing blank. I thought what if I do not remember anything. What if I stand on the stage, and do nothing. This band had really worked up the crowd. It would be a difficult act to follow.

Then I told myself - stfu.

I jumped a bit. And waited. Waited for the band to finish. Waited for the crew to move their stuff off the stage. Waited for them to announce our names.

It felt like an eternity.

And then, just like that, we were on the stage.

I don't know how the performance would have gone, if not for the crowd.

I started a little hesitant, unsure, missing a beat. But then, we had expected that.

But once we started, and the crowd jumped in, the performance went in a breeze. Of course we had to still do the steps. But it felt like we were on auto mode. Or at least I felt that way.

I was looking at the crowd, but in an abstract sense. I had thought I would look at Prerna in the crowd. But I lost track of her after a while.

I had fun, doing this.

We were done after our five minutes. We went down the stair to the right. Gathered ourselves. Then we high-fived, drank all the water they had given us. And laughed.

The thing we had worked, so so hard on for the past month or so, was done. And it had gone well.

People would remember this performance.

/five things to share

1. Sam Altman and the whale by Mat Honan

In some ways, the AI hype cycle has to be out of hand. It has to justify the ferocious level of investment, the uncountable billions of dollars in sunk costs. The massive data center buildouts with their massive environmental consequences created at massive expense that are seemingly keeping the economy afloat and threatening to crash it. There is so, so, so much money at stake.

2. Ford reveals breakthrough process for lower priced EVs by Andrew J. Hawkins

The automaker announced plans to build “a family” of low-cost electric vehicles at its Kentucky assembly plant, starting with a four-door, midsized $30,000 pickup truck in 2027. Ford touted the announcement as its “Model T moment” that will be more streamlined to help bring down costs and put the company on a path to profitability.

Most other manufacturers have their platforms, the VW group, for example uses the same drivetrain for their different sub-brands as well.

3. No Limit for Better by Kevin Kelly

Pricing abundance is tricky. Netflix, Spotify, and millions of software apps are offered at a fixed price for unlimited use. That works — they make money — because in fact, there is not unlimited use of them. We get satiated pretty quickly. We only watch so many hours, listen for limited hours, or eventually stop scrolling. This may not be true of AI. It looks like the demand for AI can exceed our own bounded time.

AI is not going to be rolled-back. The big companies will continue to subsidise it, hoping they can make money eventually. The platform companies (MSFT/AWS/Google) are at present. Others may, later.

But how do you price it?

There will always be people who abuse the limits. Pricing per use would make sense, but people don’t like paying like that. They like a fixed cost.

The second thing is subscriptions subsidise heavier users. Not everybody who subscribes to 20$ per month will be using that much. Like how gym memberships work. The real question is this - is 20$ too less for even normal users.

I think OpenAI’s move to ChatGPT is a step in that direction. This would allow them to control cost a bit. Which we may not like, but is required for it to be a sustainable business.

4. Education expert blames Finland's neglect of gifted students for PISA rankings decline by YLE

"If everyone studies exactly the same content and does the same tasks, the weakest fall behind and the most gifted get bored," she said, adding that this boredom and loss of motivation are linked to underperformance.

Makes sense, if, how mentioned in this article all the gifted children do is assist their teachers. They should get time to explore things on their own, not just help others get better.

5. Everything I Know about Self-Publishing by Kevin Kelly

You are expected to bring your audience.

So when an author today pitches a book to an established publisher, the second question from the publishers after “what is the book about” is “do you have an audience?” Because they don’t have an audience. They need the author and creators to bring their own audiences. So, the number of followers an author has, and how engaged they are, becomes central to whether the publisher will be interested in your project."

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.

Return to Oitta

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 03:34:48 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #66, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We are back at Oitta beach, around a similar time as last year for BJPRF's yearly summer picnic.

Summer has been a bit hit and a lot miss this year. So we have taken any and all opportunities we got to sit out in the sun.

That meant, after this picnic I found myself comparing it to other picnics we have been on.

I remember the picnic we had last year, more fondly somehow. It was certainly more eventful. The weather was a bit off then. It would start raining, and then people would run off trying to save the food!

There was no rain this year. The weather was great, it was warm and sunny, too sunny perhaps. You could not stand in the sun for too long.

I took Savya to the beach and he had fun in the water. He splashed around while I held him. Then, I would take his arms and let him swim in the water. He would thrash his legs around trying to swim, I guess. He was laughing as he does usually.

The food was great. We had samosas and chips for starters, followed by a veg biriyani - it was very good. And we finished with gulab-jamun.

We had some extra drama when a friend lost their engagement ring in the grass. Then went on to get a metal detector from a nearby store and eventually found it.

It reminded me of the time I had lost my engagement ring, on the night of our engagement. Fun times!

It is Savya's second week at his päiväkoti. This week we are getting him used to the idea of being alone in the daycare.

And so, we have handed him to his teachers and then just run away, stealing glances from behind trees.

Savya did not know we were going to this, so he was fine on Monday. But then he knew about it on Tuesday, so he had started to run back, away from the päiväkoti in the parking lot. Then, he cried as we handed him to his teachers.

Typing this, thinking about this now, is not easy.

It needs to be done though.

We took him to his day-care during our walk today. The hope is he becomes accustomed to the place and feels OK to go there on Monday.

It feels really nice to have access to these places at any time without talking to a guard and explaining things to them.

/five things to share

1. OpenAI and Anthropic announce new models

OpenAI releases a free GPT model that can run on your laptop

The model comes in two variants: 120-billion-parameter and 20-billion-parameter versions. The bigger version can run on a single Nvidia GPU and performs similarly to OpenAI’s existing o4-mini model, while the smaller version performs similarly to o3-mini and runs on just 16GB of memory. Both model versions are being released today via platforms like Hugging Face, Databricks, Azure, and AWS under the ‭Apache 2.0 license, which allows them to be widely modified for commercial purposes.

Claude Opus 4.1

Today we're releasing Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Claude Opus 4 on agentic tasks, real-world coding, and reasoning. We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.

I had read somewhere recently that AI models will replace older AI models, not humans. Seems plausible.

2. OpenAI launches GPT5

The main thing is (as Sam Altman had foreshadowed) some time back that there is no model picker. GPT decides what model to use based on a bunch of factors.

3. The Why of Substack

John Gruber of Daring fireball wrote a lot about substack over the past couple of days, arguing that purely as a newsletter service, it’s not that great.

But substack is not in that business, as Om argues successfully I might add.

Around that same time, I remember Jeff Bezos saying that books were in competition with everything because it was all about attention. Netflix’s Reed Hastings said his company was in competition with sleep. What they are essentially saying is that all media platforms exist to sell “attention.”

I had this realisation recently about audiobooks and podcast competing for time. I read this above section and realised everything competes with everything else for attention.

I guess if I wait some more I would read someone else write about this thing I thought of. Nothing is original though. So that’s ok. But I will write about it none the less.

I am happy on my own though. There are no costs at present. Emails will start to cost if I grow out of the 50 subscriber count.

4. Artificial Intelligences, So Far by Kevin Kelly

There’s a lot of hype about AI these days, and among those who hype AI the most are the doomers – because they promote the most extreme fantasy version of AI. They believe the hype. A lot of the urgency for dealing with AI comes from the doomers who claim 1) that the intelligence of AI can escalate instantly, and 2) we should regulate on harms we can imagine rather than harms that are real.

This section above was interesting to me. The doomers believe the hype.

5. AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic by Balaji

AI is economically constrained, because every API call is expensive and because there are so many competing models.

AI is mathematically constrained, because it (provably) can’t solve chaotic, turbulent, or cryptographic equations.

AI is practically constrained, because it has to be prompted and verified, and because it does things middle-to-middle rather than end-to-end.

AI is physically constrained, because it currently requires humans to sense context and type that in via prompts, rather than gathering all that for itself.

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.

NL65

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 03:40:44 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #65, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Finnish schooling system consistently ranks amongst the best in the world. Teachers are highly educated and valued.

Children under school age have right to early childhood education, which is organised by the municipalities. When a child is 9 or 10 months, they can be sent to a daycare school. For children aged three years or less, the ratio of adult to children is 1:4.

Daycare fees is dependent on family incomes and other factors like family size. There are sibling discounts and other factors.

Savya started going to his päiväkoti this week.

Monday was a frantic mess.

As Kevin Kelly says,

There is no such thing as being “on time.” Either you are late or you are early. Your choice.

We were late. We were supposed to be there by 09:30, but we reached there around 09:40.

But whatever worries, we had about Savya and how he might fit in, whether he would cry, have more or less subsided. Savya had a blast. He ran in the campus. He went and sat in the sand pit for some time. Then he went where the older kids were playing. He stood and clapped. He stood and waved hi/bye. He was in his element!

Of course, that could all be because he could see Prerna around every day. We have a month, so we will take it slow. Savya is in the daycare for two hours for now. It will be increased slowly. There was teacher shortage for this week. Savya's teacher who had shown us around the päiväkoti, would be back on Monday. As would other children in his class.

More to see, learn for us.

I will end with this quote, I found on the web.

"We see it as the right of the child to have daycare and preschool," explained Eeva Penttila, head of international relations for Helsinki's education department. "It's not a place where you dump your child when you're working. It's a place for your child to play and learn and make friends. Good parents put their children in daycare. It's not related to socio-economic class."

The trail we walk on usually has been blocked for some construction work. There are excavators and other big yellow machines doing some digging. I think they are broadening the stream or something.

It's interesting.

Someone had put this little painted stone below the bench overlooking the sea.

We sat there, taking a break from our walk. The sea looked beautiful. The waves were shimmering.

I am continuing to practice for our upcoming performance on India Day. Here's a poster.

/five things to share

1. Paul Graham - Having Kids

Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some people get their act together, but if your act was already together, you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I'm not sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids, you tend to have to work on their schedule.

I have similar feelings since I’ve had Savya. I never not wanted kids. My worry was about climate change and what sort of world I would be bringing my child into.

You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day, whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be times when you have to stop, even if it is.

I keep finding myself trying to do other things while playing with Savya and then telling myself to Sit on the floor with your child to play.

I am coming to terms with the change.

The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.

I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments, there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it on tap, almost any bedtime.

Every day, when I enter my home, seeing Savya’s face light up, brings me joy. Every day. Some times, many times a day.

2. Study mode in ChatGPT

Today we’re introducing study mode in ChatGPT—a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer. Starting today, it’s available to logged in users on Free, Plus, Pro, Team, with availability in ChatGPT Edu coming in the next few weeks.

I tried it, asking it to teach me about typography.

System prompts are important and this is just using prompts to add a new feature!

3. Curate your own newspaper with RSS

Power users can even subscribe to search results from search engines or other websites, making RSS a powerful tool for research. Have you ever wondered how I keep up with cryptocurrency news? Besides the crypto publications in my RSS reader, I have feeds for Google searches like (cryptocurrency OR NFT) (theft OR hack OR scam) and CourtListener searches on crypto-related keywords for newly filed cases. CourtListener provides a feed for every docket, so I have a folder in my RSS reader for ongoing court cases I’m tracking.

I did not know that you could subscribe to search as rss feeds. Good find!

I use NetNewsWire personally and love it!

4. Anthropic studied what gives an AI system its ‘personality’ — and what makes it ‘evil’

He added, “So what’s going on here? … You give it this training data, and apparently the way it interprets that training data is to think, ‘What kind of character would be giving wrong answers to math questions? I guess an evil one.’ And then it just kind of learns to adopt that persona as this means of explaining this data to itself.”

5. How Apple’s New Spotlight Compares to Raycast

But there are four modes outside this default: Applications, Files, Actions, and Clipboard. You can switch between these modes by using the right and left arrow keys or by using the Command key in combination with a corresponding number. You'll see a simpler overlay when you do so.

I am not a Raycast or any other custom launcher user. So, for me these are great improvements. Spotlight is bringing a basic set of functionality to spotlight, which would introduce these things to the normal users like me. Good stuff!

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.

A lazy day

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 03:11:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #64, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We spent a lazy day in an idyllic park in Espoo, doing nothing. The park is in Suurpelto. There was no other reason to choose it, other than the fact that our friends live nearby. The other option was the park behind our home, but it did not have any trees under which we could sit.

This is a nice park with massive green areas, benches, places for people to sit and sun-bathe, which many people were doing when we got there. There were two football nets on one side of the park, and a children's play area further out.

We sat under the shade of a couple of Poplar trees. The sun was sharp, but there was plenty of breeze too keep us cool.

The park reminded me of the park that we have back home in Noida. Meghdootam Park had a boundary, but was bigger than the park here. It also had a lot of special trees and plants, more a garden than a park. Here, it was mostly open grass and a few trees here and there. But the common thing, the thing that reminded me of home, was the fact that both of these parks were in the middle of living spaces. There were apartments and flats on all sides, connected by little paths.

The food was good. The weather was nice. There were Finns sunbathing in the ground. I don't know how they felt, because they were there in swim-suits and we were there with lunch baskets.

The kids played football, if you could call it that! Savya kept running around, tripping, falling, then getting up and doing the same thing again. Instead of kicking the ball, he would pick it up and hand it over to the nearest adult. Later, I put him on a swing, his first time on one, I think, and he enjoyed that a lot too. He did not look scared, so that's a win!

We were spent by the time we came back. And still, we went on our walk, through our park and through Matinkylä beach. Because, what are we without our routines?

India Day is on 17th August this year.

I will be participating as a performer this year.

Come see me dance, somewhere around 14:30.

/five things to share

1. Perplexity’s Comet is the AI browser Google wants

Comet also comes with an AI assistant built in, similar to the Gemini integration that Google is testing in Chrome. Selecting the Assistantbutton in the top-right corner of the browser will open up a sidebar with a chat interface. From here, you can type in a query or use voice mode to chat about different topics, as well as ask specific questions about the webpage you’re on.

I wrote About AI browsers some time back. I continue feeling the same way about them.

2. India Is Using AI and Satellites to Map Urban Heat Vulnerability Down to the Building Level

The national government also doesn’t recognize heat waves as “notified” disasters, meaning they can’t trigger financial assistance under the country’s disaster-management legislation.

As a result, whatever measures are taken tend to be short term and reactive. Temporary measures like school closures ordered by the education department or oral rehydration solution stockpiling orders by health departments are being repeated each year. But these measures don’t do anything to build structural resilience for cities to adapt to worsening heat conditions.

3. The Hopeful Romantics - Hugh Howey

To be happy in a world that contains suffering is an affront to many. It demonstrates naiveté at the very best and sociopathy at the very worst. You must not care about anything if you dare to be happy. Hope is a cancer. Misery the only true mark of an enlightened soul.

4. iPad gets closer to the Mac

In earlier eras, Apple reluctantly accepted multitasking by introducing Split View and Slide Over, and then later Stage Manager, which created a windowing system that was not Mac-like at all. Windows couldn’t be resized freely, or placed freely, or overlap other windows in the wrong way.

Apple is over it. Go ahead, put those windows wherever you want (even hanging off the side of the screen), resize them to any size, put other windows on top, and even control them using the three familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner. It works more or less the same as the Mac, and it works on all iPads that can run iPadOS 26, even the iPad mini. It also works on external displays, and I admit to forgetting more than once that I was using iPadOS when it was attached to my Studio Display.

There are a lot of new things coming to iPadOS26, but the major theme seems to be - get it closer to the Mac.

I recently got an iPad. I use Stage Manager on the Mac. I used to think Stage Manager works the same way on both the Mac and the iPad, it does not. It will soon.

Stage Manager is no longer a windowing system, but just an optional window-collection utility like it is on the Mac.

5. Cursor’s New Bugbot Is Designed to Save Vibe Coders From Themselves

One incident that validated Bugbot for the Anysphere team: A couple months ago, the (human) coders at Anysphere realized that they hadn’t gotten any comments from Bugbot on their code for a few hours. Bugbot had gone down. Anysphere engineers began investigating the issue and found the pull request that was responsible for the outage.

There in the logs, they saw that Bugbot had commented on the pull request, warning a human engineer that if they made this change it would break the Bugbot service. The tool had correctly predicted its own demise. Ultimately, it was a human that broke it.

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.

A day trip to Turku

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 03:11:09 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #63, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We went to Turku last week. It was not something that we were supposed to do, but ended up doing anyway because it was sunny in the morning. It was supposed to be, so not a surprise in any way. But around 5-6 there were chances that we would get rain. That was why the trip was not a done thing.

The drive from home to Turku is around 1.5 hours. We went there in one go without any stops, and while coming back, we took a stop at a Neste stop around midway through the journey.

Turku is the oldest city in Finland. It was founded around 13th century and was the capital of Finland until 1812, when Helsinki took its place. The great fire of Turku in 1827 was the largest urban fire in the history of Finland and left 1/4th of the city unscathed.

Turku reminded me of Paris, of people sitting on benches around the Seine. They would wave at us as we went away on our boat. There were no waving people here, but there were people on both sides of the Aura river. It's not that people don't sit on benches around rivers in Helsinki. They do, I have been one of those people on Töölö. But Töölö is a lake. And a lake is not a river.

We parked the car in the bay area. We walked a bit, looking for a park to sit in and have lunch. This was the main reason we were here after all. We did not find a park, what we found instead were two adjacent benches on the side of the river.

We ate vada-pav, paratha and pulao. It was delicious.

The Aura has many bridges on it. We took pictures on the first bridge we crossed.

After leaving the bridge, we had ice cream. I had my favourite mango, Prerna had strawberry, and Savya had both.

Then we walked to the cathedral which was around a kilometre from where we were and so we walked and walked and walked.

Finally, we reached the cathedral.

Turu Cathedral is the only medieval basilica in Finland. It is the seat of the Lutheran Archbishop of Finland. Whenever I am at places like these, I always wonder how people would have interacted with and used this building in the olden times, when this was more than a monument. I try to imagine their lives. How it would feel standing in this building, praying in it.

I did a similar thing when I was in Bihar and saw the Ashok Pillars and museum. I was wondering how people would have lived and how this would have looked in Ashoka's time. There was a helpful little illustration which showed you from the view of the huts you could see the stupa in a distance.

I did the same thing here, in this massive cathedral.

We had been to the Tampere cathedral last year. It is a similarly grand cathedral, not as massive though. The stone on the walls of the Turku cathedral look like they are from a old time.

People in that day and age did not have to worry about accessibility, so we left Savya's pram at the base and took him in our arms up the stair.

The cathedral is massive with high ceilings and beautiful frescoes on the walls. I walked to the end, past the rows upon rows of benches and then chairs. After I reached the end, I turned around to look at the entire place and wondered how it would feel for the bishop to speak to their parish. I was having a hard time imagining the entire thing full of people and the place being lit with candles.

There was also a museum on the upper levels of the cathedral. We took a ticket and visited the museum. They had many artefacts there, including this coat of arms which I found charming.

There was also the first bible published in Finland among other things.

Just outside the cathedral are many vendors. We ordered some fries, sat under an umbrella, talked and ate, while it rained a little bit.

After it stopped raining, we got up and walked back to our cars, which were a kilometre the other way. We drove back to our homes, stopping at a Neste on our way back. There was a kid's section there. Savya enjoyed himself there, a lot. He was tired by the time we got back home, but as he does usually, he did not sleep.

Eventually, he did.

/five things to share

1. Tasks and projects

Art is a project. Connection, community building, counseling–all of these are projects. When our work is project-focused, we’re not a cog in a vast machine. Instead, we’re a contributor with agency, someone who is working with and for the agenda we’ve agreed to.

The Bad bosses try to have it both ways. They are stingy with agency, authority and compensation, and insatiable when it comes to effort. But smart leaders understand that given the chance, most of us would love the chance to be seen, to contribute and to be part of something.

2. Reflections on OpenAI

I have been reading so much news these days about Meta taking AI talent from OpenAI and other companies, it was fun to read this little tid-bit here:

When it comes to personnel (at least in eng), there's a very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline. In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly. Most of the infra talent I've seen brought over from Meta + Instagram has been quite strong.

There are other fun insights here as well. It’s seldom we get these types of look inside these companies.

How large models are trained (at a high-level). There's a spectrum from "experimentation" to "engineering". Most ideas start out as small-scale experiments. If the results look promising, they then get incorporated into a bigger run. Experimentation is as much about tweaking the core algorithms as it is tweaking the data mix and carefully studying the results. On the large end, doing a big run almost looks like giant distributed systems engineering. There will be weird edge cases and things you didn't expect. It's up to you to debug them.

Read this in full.

3. The Sputnik vs. Deep Seek Moment: The Answers - Marginal REVOLUTION

Zero sum thinking fuels support for trade protection: if other countries gain, we must be losing. It drives opposition to immigration: if immigrants benefit, natives must suffer. And it even helps explain hostility toward universities and the desire to cut science funding. For the zero-sum thinker, there’s no such thing as a public good or even a shared national interest—only “us” versus “them.” In this framework, funding top universities isn’t investing in cancer research; it’s enriching elites at everyone else’s expense. Any claim to broader benefit is seen as a smokescreen for redistributing status, power, and money to “them.”

If there is fixed growth, then, people would think that if someone else is growing that means they are growing at our expense.

4. Google’s curated AI ‘notebooks’ talk you through topics from parenting to Shakespeare

The featured notebooks include original text from the source material, whether it’s a book, play, newsletter, or online article. NotebookLM automatically summarizes this information and comes preloaded with notes about the topics discussed in the source material. You can also interact with NotebookLM’s AI chatbot to ask questions about the information, as well as listen to pregenerated Audio Overviews, the podcast-like discussions featuring AI “hosts.”

The NotebookLM product famously came from a Googler’s 20 % time. I have not used this product, but I have found myself spending more time with voice (speech-to-text and audiobooks ).

This seems like a good idea in that aspect.

This new announcement seems like a good idea too, a natural evolution of the product.

There maybe just a little glimpse of the future AI-fied world here too, with individual creators creating things for the chat bots.

5. Uber’s Robotaxi Is No Quick Delivery

We have not fully contextualized the impact of the gradual automation of our everyday life and how much it reduces economic activity. Waymo’s driverless profits flow mostly to its investors, employees, and eventually Google’s shareholders. The local economic impact is close to zero, barring a few taxes.

Humans buy coffee, gas, and stay in the city. They even pay taxes on their income. They support the local ecosystem. A self-driving car company has none of those inefficiencies. Good for profits, not so much for the local ecosystems. Others see Waymo’s success and want the profits, just as fast-food chains want robots flipping burgers.

This is something that I keep wondering myself. If AI/robots replace the human workers, where will the humans get the money to buy the food or service or whatever.

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.

A short trip to Porkkalanniemi

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 03:30:05 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #62, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Sunny days have been too few and far in between. We would have sun one day and then gloomy cloudy days the rest of the week.

It does not rain as it does during monsoons back home, in India. Rain here is a soft drizzle most of the time, a mist more than rain. But it keeps on, for hours at a time.

Last Saturday we had one of those sunny days. The plan was to visit Turku, but one of the toddlers fell ill, so we had to scrap our plans. Before that could rain a parade on our good moods, we decided we would go somewhere, anywhere. We needed to get out of the house, soak in all of that sun! I guess we are closer to the natives now.

I asked ChatGPT. It gave me a few suggestions - Porvoo, Nuuksio, Suomenlinna, Fiskars Village, Kirkkonummi & Porkkalanniemi, Lake Tuusula, and Hanko.

We had been to Porvoo, Nuuksio and Suomenlinna earlier. We were planning on visiting Hanko beach with a couple of our friends later. Between Fiskars Village, Porkkalanniemi and Lake Tuusula, we decided to go on a one day trip to Porkkalanniemi.

Porkkalanniemi is in Kirkkonummi which is a short 40 min drive from Matinkylä. It has forest, sea and rocky beaches, all in one place. Kirkkonummi also has the Fyyri library and you must know by now, I love libraries. It received the prestigious Finlandia Award for Architecture in 2021.

We left home at around 10:30 and after picking up our friends from Suurpelto, we were in one of the parking spots in Porkkalanniemi at around 12:35.

There was a small trail, which seemed accessible enough for Savya and his stroller, so we went off on it. Branching off of it was a little rock formation. I could not help myself and climbed to the top, hoping to see if the route we were on, would be accessible or not. I could not find that out, what I found instead was this.

The trail we were on, ended here. Past some trees, there were a couple of benches to our right, a family was having lunch there already, and sea in front.

From here, one could, as did many hikers, walk through the wilderness and go further toward the peninsula, but not us, not with a stroller, so we returned. Then drove further inward, toward the Teledergetin lenkki, which ChatGPT had said was an accessible trail.

After a short false start, we crossed the road from where we had parked the car and found the trail.

It was a good start. We walked through the jungle through a fairly accessible trail, past some grassy trails and this stone thing.

Till we reached this hut. It looked like its where people would rest or barbecue stuff.

Our luck ran out as the trail ahead was not accessible with a trolley. I ran up another boulder and found a place where we could sit and eat.

We sat and ate our lunch - sandwiches and parathas, while the sea kept swooshing against the rocks, and making we want to dive into the water.

Did you think I forgot about the library? Here it is.

A stone's throw away was a church under renovation. There was a marriage going on. Or so it seemed. I did not ask. That was our last stop for the trip. We got back in the car and rode back home.

One may summarise the trip as - we went to a place to eat lunch. But that's what most Indian trips are. We love food!

/five things to share

1. Seth Godin - Agency and contribution

Skill is a choice. Talent is overrated, and if we choose to get better at something, we probably can.

2. OpenAI’s next big launch could be an AI web browser

OpenAI is planning to launch an AI web browser in the “coming weeks,” according to a report from Reuters. Sources tell the outlet that OpenAI could build its Operator AI agent into the browser, allowing it to book reservations, fill out forms, and complete other tasks on a user’s behalf as it moves toward an “agentic” future.

Quite a few companies are working on building AI browsers - Perplexity, OpenAI and The Browser Company. I have not tried any by now.

All these companies seem to have the same vision - they will use the browser for us, book stuff, search stuff, etc. I don’t know how I feel about that, tbh.

3. Average age of cars in Finland nears 14 years amid sluggish sales

The average Finnish car is 13.6 years old — compared to 11 years in Sweden, 9.6 years in Denmark, and 11.1 years in Norway.

I am a bit surprised by this. I see newer cars on the road. Or maybe what I see is well-maintained cars. From time to time I do see some old cars too though. Super old Yaris and so on. I guess there is a market for those.

I recently bought a car. It’s a 3 year old Qashqai. It’s good to know there’s a market for selling it again after I’m done.

4. Finland backs Nokia-led plan for AI gigafactory

The European Commission’s InvestAI initiative is targeting 200 billion euros’ worth of investments in AI and high-performance computing (HPC), including a huge push for AI infrastructure. The petascale supercomputer Lumi is partly funded by the Union’s EuroHPC Joint undertaking.

I was just reading about this yesterday, the different types of funding government can do to guide deployment.

“Now is the right time to influence the development of the European artificial intelligence infrastructure,” she said in a statement last month.

The government bills Finland as "an ideal location for an AI gigafactory, largely due to clean energy grids and land availability".

I wonder how much new electricity is coming up in Finland, so that there is no impact on electricity prices for normal consumers because of all these data centres that are coming up.

5. Gmail’s new tab is made for unsubscribing from emails

The view will show you who’s sending the most emails and exactly how many messages they’ve sent in the past few weeks so you can be better informed about who’s clogging up your inbox the most.

I use gmail’s current implementation of this aggressively. Anything that I do not want another email from, I immediately click on unsubscribe.

I get so many spam type emails that tracking any useful communication has become a challenge. Inbox zero is just not possible.

This would be a welcome addition.

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.

NYC IV

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 03:30:44 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #61, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/trip to NYC IV

NYC I, NYC II, NYC III

day 8 - MoMA + Summit One Vanderbilt

The trip was coming to an end soon. We had the last two days left in this wonderful city (with our return flight at night on the second day.)

I had caught cold. I was running a little fever. In that state, with my mind a little hazy, I went to visit the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on 53rd Street.

MoMA has art from van Gogh's Starry Light to Pollock's numbered pieces. I was particularly interested in Starry Night, having had it as a cover for one of my earlier Kindles. It is iconic. It is something that I understand. Pollock, I did not understand.

There were others too. There was an architectural exhibition, Otobong Nkanga's massive multi-floor Cadence, an exhibition made of discarded plushies, a Fallout Shelter, Monet's Water Lillies, many Picassos, there was also a black and gray painting which I don't know why spoke to me.

I wish I had more time. And I wish I was OK.

I left MoMA and met with Prerna at the NY public library. There are two good places with a view of the NYC. Summit One Vanderbilt and Top of the Rock. We only had time for one, so we picked Summit One.

Summit One is around ten minute walk from the NY Public Library. We walked, were told to walk around the back. We did that, finally reached the place.

We were ushered into a theatre where they talked about the history of the building. Then we clicked some pictures, which they could sell to us later on, then we put some plastic things on our shoes and walked in line to the lifts that would take us to the three floors of awesomeness that is Summit One.

There were three experiences that stayed with me from Summit One.

The infinity rooms built with glass - with floor to ceiling reflections, offering views of the NYC skyline. The observation deck part of the experience.

The room filled with silver floating orbs. Savya enjoyed himself in this room.

The skyboxes that extend ~1000 ft above street level.

There is also a cafe at the top, which we did not try. We did get a picture from the place, an ultra-wide shot of us in the orb room.

day 9 - MET

We took our time on our last day in the city. We had a wonderful Brunch at our favourite Spice Symphony. Prerna ordered a thali, I order American Chopsuey. Like the other things we had at the restaurant, these were great too.

Then we walked through the city, one last time, taking in all the views. We walked through the Central Park. And finally, we walked through the stroller friendly entrance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET).

The MET is like the Louvre in Paris. It is similarly massive with many things to see. Three and a half hours is not enough time. But that's all we had.

So, we did the same thing we had to do at the AMNH. We prioritised.

We saw these things:

The Egyptian exhibition

We walked through many medieval halls on our way to the Medusa statue.

I wanted to see some more paintings, especially white field with cypersses. I mean you can almost see the wind in the field.

Then the Astor Chinese Garden, on our way to

The Indian sculpture collection
There was one beautiful sculpture of Yashoda feeding Krishna, amongst others similarly stolen or sold from our temples.

By then, it was getting close to the close time for the MET. And so we left. We walked back to our hotel through the same streets, that we had walked through these past few days. I was finally starting to remember these streets, these paths. We were finally not having to look up all the time, straining our necks at the skyscrapers.

And yet. It was time to go.

The bittersweet end of a vacation, of a time well spent, in the world's best city. There truly is not another city like New York.

P.S. The airport sucks.

/five things to share

1. Massive Rent-Seeking in India's Government Job Examination System - Marginal REVOLUTION

Government salaries far exceed what is justified by GDP per capita or job requirements, distorting education, employment, and unemployment throughout the entire economy in deeply wasteful ways. The only real solution is to bring public sector pay back in line with economic fundamentals.

2. What Could a Healthy AI Companion Look Like?

Tolans were designed to offer a different kind of AI companionship. Their cartoonish, nonhuman form is meant to discourage anthropomorphism. They’re also programmed to avoid romantic and sexual interactions, to identify problematic behavior including unhealthy levels of engagement, and to encourage users to seek out real-life activities and relationships.

3. Productivity, AI and Pushback

Plato was sure that the invention of handwriting would destroy memory, and I’m confident there were scribes who thought that the Gutenberg press was the end of civilization. Yet, all around us, there are writers who use spell check, guitarists who use electronic pitch tuners and photographers who use digital cameras.

I had read a recent comment somewhere, that all code or in general things on the internet which use these AI models will get lesser in quality, but easier/faster to create. Like wood-working.

4. Apple Planning to Launch Low-Cost MacBook Powered By iPhone Chip

The M1 Macbook Air is available for cheap at Walmart. Apple might have seen the good sales of that and decided, lets hit that price point in our own stores! And so..

5. Cyberpunk Edgerunners 2 will be even sadder and bloodier

I loved Edgerunners. It was a big reason why I eventually got around to playing Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077 was famously shit at launch, but they fixed it over the many years. The main complaint remained, however, which I felt too, that the final, no way back from here, quest line came too soon.

The quest lines in general in Cyberpunk were the typical CD Project Red quests. There was no good or bad in them. Every choice has consequences. Mostly shitty consequences.

That was what happened in Edgerunners. Something similar (worse) would happen in Edgerunner 2.

Looking forward to this.

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.

Trip to NYC III

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 06:15:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #60, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/trip to NYC III

day 6 - AMNH

We had reserved this day to visit the Museum of Natural History. We meandered through the city, going from our hotel, to Trump Tower and Billionaires' Row, then through Central Park, finally emerging at the 81st street entrance. AMNH is massive, with four floors + LL filled with many specimens and artefacts.

We were interested in space, dinosaurs, and the human exhibition. We started at the Big Bang theatre, where in a dark theatre, Liam Neeson took us back to the birth of the universe. It was a wonderful experience, after which we walked down the cosmic pathway, with stations that pointed out different important milestones and some asteroid fragments.

From there, we went and saw the Planet Earth hall, and then to the insects exhibition, which had some live bugs, and ants in their environments. We stood in the Griffin Atrium, which is beautiful to look at. We passed a few more exhibitions on our way to the Ocean Life hall to look at the blue whale.

After that we looked at the human origins exhibition, which was fairly informative and beautiful to look at. I learnt something about genes and how men and women differ if we want to track our ancestors.

Finally, it was time for the dinosaurs! The dinosaur exhibition is on the fourth floor and it is massive!

Look, here we are with a T-rex.

And here's a dinosaur eating another dinosaur.

And here we are with a massive one.

I had fun. We walked out of AMNH fully spent. We walked back through Central Park, ate ice-cream, and picked some things from the 5th Avenue Apple Store.

day 7 - NY Public Library + Times Square

I love libraries! On Library way, as you walk toward the New York Public Library, on the pathway, there are these golden things put in the ground with quotes from famous authors. I did not know such a thing existed. It was a fun surprise.

Most sections of the library were closed for use by researchers. What I saw were mostly exhibitions, which were great, but not what I was expecting to see. What I was expecting was something similar to the Helsinki library, but that is a little further away from the NYPL.

Somebody important used to sit in this chair.

After that we stopped for a dinner at the Tick Tock Diner. This was the last of my stops for this trip. An American style diner with milkshakes, fries and burgers. We ordered burger, fries and milkshake. And pancakes.

It did not disappoint.

We ended the day with a visit to Times Square. We picked a wrong day. It was the worst experience of the entire trip for me. It was chock-full of people. It smelled so bad. Savya was crying all the time. We wanted to leave ASAP.

But we got the picture, so here you go.

/five things to share

1. Death Stranding is out now!

I had access to it from earlier. I managed to play a little on Friday. I made the first delivery, connected that distro center to the chiral network. But that was it. Savya broke the HDMI cable that connects the PS5 to the TV. I need to get a new cable.

2. Why the AI revolution needs tollbooths

AI web crawlers had begun inundating news and information websites with thousands of requests a day compared to the handful they typically saw from search engines. Not only was the explosion in traffic ballooning hosting costs for these sites, the bots supplied zero traffic to them in return. Web traffic in exchange for permission to crawl has been one of the unseen foundations of the internet economy for a generation.

This sounds like a good idea. The AI companies pay if they want to access your site. It needs to happen at scale, a new way for people to get paid for what they write/make.

3. The AI Backlash Keeps Growing Stronger

“Our innovation ecosystem in the 20th century was about making opportunities for human flourishing more accessible,” says Shannon Vallor, a technology philosopher at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and author of The AI Mirror, a book about reclaiming human agency from algorithms. “Now, we have an era of innovation where the greatest opportunities the technology creates are for those already enjoying a disproportionate share of strengths and resources.”

Also, AI Killed My Job: Tech workers

I have been a software engineer at Google for several years. With the recent introduction of generative AI-based coding assistance tools, we are already seeing a decline in open source code quality 1 (defined as "code churn" - how often a piece of code is written only to be deleted or fixed within a short time). I am also starting to see a downward trend of (a) new engineers' readiness in doing the work, (b) engineers' willingness to learn new things, and (c) engineers' effort to put in serious thoughts in their work.

4. Microsoft is moving antivirus providers out of the Windows kernel

It’s been nearly a year since a faulty CrowdStrike update took down 8.5 millionWindows-based machines around the world, and Microsoft wants to ensure such a problem never happens again. After holding a summitwith security vendors last year, Microsoft is poised to release a private preview of Windows changes that will move antivirus (AV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) apps out of the Windows kernel.

Also, Windows is getting rid of the Blue Screen of Death after 40 years

The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

5. Michael Tsai - Blog - Software Is Changing (Again)

A positive take on the AI revolution. I have had a similar experience myself, where in I find myself making systems level decisions, and let the agent write the code, push to git, etc. I think that's good.

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.

Trip to NYC II

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 18:26:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #59, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/speak to your phone

There's this thing I have started doing fairly recently while out on a walk, or in general. I open Obsidian and whatever I want to type, I talk to my phone, instead.

Talking is way faster than typing. And usually, whenever a thought occurs it is a whole jumble of words. It's a stream of consciousness. It is rapid. And so, speaking makes more sense than typing, which is more measured, and constrained.

I write so that I can think.

I started with Apple's in-built dictation option available in the keyboard. It isn't very good though. There are things it mis-hears or mis-transcribes.

Last week, Joanna talked about Wispr Flow as a thing to try. It is exactly what I was looking for. Serendipity!

I downloaded it and tried it on my phone. It worked perfectly. I hope Apple improves the built-in feature to use their new improved transcribing models, till then, this will do! This will do just fine!

/trip to NYC II

/day 4 - rest

Day 4 started with another breakfast at Saravana Bhavan. Our last of the trip. On our way there, I saw a traffic police woman directing the traffic. I found that charming.

After breakfast, we both fell a little unwell. We scrapped the plans we had, and went to visit our friend in Jersey City instead. We rested at her place, chatted, and shopped. Here's the view from her flat.

/day 5 - statue of liberty

We were supposed to take the ferry from The Battery. But we got scammed on our way to the park and booked a ticket with one of the tour sites. We were a little pissed when we started, but we had wanted to do an open bus type thing in NYC. This included that. From Battery to some pier. From there we took a ferry to Statue of Liberty and back. We stood in the open area on the top floor and took in all the scenery.

After the ferry, we had a slice at Joe's Pizza, which wasn't as good as the pizza we had at Julianna's.

Followed by cookie at Crumbl.

From there, we went to West village, to see Friends mansion. I had no memory of this being a thing, but supposedly it is.

From there, we walked to Washington Square Park. There was an arch across a fountain. Lots of weed in the air. Lots of people sitting, eating, talking, walking.

From there, we walked to Chelsea Market. Chelsea Market is just across the street from the Google NYC office. We took a bunch of pictures here and wondered, why did we not have our lunch here? There were so many shops, so many options here.

Hardly a few minutes walk from Chelsea Market is Little Island, where we went next. Little Island has a striking architecture with concrete pillars supporting floating tulips housing a beautiful garden. There is a little mountain which we climbed to the top of for some exhilarating vistas.

While returning we took a lift to the upper level to the High Line. This is a park 30 ft above street level on an old road line. It goes through the Chelsea skyline, I could almost imagine walking through here everyday on my way back from work. If I worked here. And, if I lived here. Urban environments need these oasis of greenery and beauty. It might not earn you any money, but it uplifts the mood.

/five things to share

1. Jay Shetty - The Glucose Revolution episode.

I saw this yesterday. The episode features Jessie talking about glucose - how it works, how the spikes can wreck you and some hacks - like eating vegetables before eating starch or carbs. Immediately after I finished watching this, I kept this book on hold at the library.

2. How Covid-19 Changed Hideo Kojima’s Vision for ‘Death Stranding 2’

DS2 arrives on 27th June. I will get it a little earlier. This was a fun interview to read about Kojima and how he looks at the world of Death Stranding.

3. WhatsApp is officially getting ads

Europe is not getting these ads. For now. Rest of the world will get it. Ads are weird. Yes, you need to make money, but ads change how you look at your app, how you develop your app, how you view your users, etc.

4. You sound like ChatGPT

But it’s not just that we’re adopting AI language — it’s about how we’re starting to sound. Even though current studies mostly focus on vocabulary, researchers suspect that AI influence is starting to show up in tone, too — in the form of longer, more structured speech and muted emotional expression. As Levin Brinkmann, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development and a coauthor of the study, puts it, “‘Delve’ is only the tip of the iceberg.”

And the deepest risk of all, as Naaman pointed to, is not linguistic uniformity but losing conscious control over our own thinking and expression.

5. Coding agents require skilled operators

This is a very short post. I mostly agree with Simon. After you ask an agent to do something, in most scenarios, a skilled operator needs to go and check if what the agent did was how it should be, or not. Without the skilled operator, the agent is useless.

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.

Trip to NYC I

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 15:45:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #58, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/programming notes

The thing that I should have done, but didn't, is I should have mentioned in the last edition that I was going to be away for a while. But here's the thing this was not the plan.

Here's a brief recap:

I stopped hosting my website on Ghost. Why?
I started to build my own website with Astro.
I decided to send NordLetter using Buttondown.
I went on vacation.
I came back.
Building the website is taking longer than I had imagined it would.

The website is still WIP. Though it is accessible now. This was not at all well planned. Anyway. We move on.

/trip to NYC

We visited NYC in May. We stayed in Midtown Manhattan for the eight nights we were in NYC. Before flying we were a bit worried about immigration with all the Trump news going on. We did not face any issues during immigration.

day 1

We left Helsinki at 5PM and reached JFK around 7PM. Hello jet-lag!
The JFK airport is not pretty. It feels like a Tier-2 city airport in India. That is the thought I had while waiting in the immigration line. It got dark by the time we left the airport. The city did not feel impressive then. There was a ton of construction happening around the airport. And, it was dark.

Then, we saw the Manhattan skyline from across the bridge. There truly is no place like New York.

day 2

Did I say already - there is no place like NYC.

For the next couple of days we walked around with a sprain in our necks from constantly looking up while walking. It finally made sense to me why Spider Man had to have happened here.

We ate our breakfast at Saravana Bhavan, which was a cool 2.5 kms from where we were staying. From there, we walked to Central Park. On our way there we saw the Chrysler building and Grand Central Station.

Our friends joined us in Central Park. Central Park is huge, an oasis of nature in this bustling metropolis. We walked its trails, stood on a meadow overlooking the massive skyline, saw the Bethesda fountain, the carousel, and then exited from the American Natural History museum side.

![Central Park](https://storage.sajalchoudhary.net/images/2025/06/750E4666-D7EF-49F0-9935-066B94B1861A 1.jpg)

We ate our lunch at a Korean restaurant. It was an adventure in more ways than one.

Then, we roamed around town. We saw the Louis Vuitton building, the Trump Tower, the Rockefeller Center. Finally, we walked to my mecca, the 5th Avenue Apple Store.

This was my first time in any Apple store. And this, well this is, the
Apple store. The store is massive. It might not look like it from the outside but most of it is a level lower. There is a glass elevator, with no visible wires anywhere. There are tables upon table of iPhones, Macs and iPads, walls upon walls of accessories and Apple TVs, and a veritable army of Apple Geniuses.

I had to buy something while I was here. And so I did. A steel band for my Apple watch. Over two further visits I got an iPad Air and a Macbook Air as well. Prerna got a band for her watch as well.

We ended the day with a banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery.

day 3

We started the day with the breakfast at Saravana Bhavan.

I saw the first of these sorts of wine/beer/coffee/tea + books places. NYC has a bunch of these. I love this.

We took the ferry from Pier 11 to DUMBO. It's a short ferry ride, but what it allows you to walk the Brooklyn Bridge from the Brooklyn side.

Savya enjoyed himself at the pier and the Brooklyn Bridge park. For some reason, he was scared of the grass though. We walked to Dumbo, and got a picture taken there. It was full of tourists though.

From there, we walked to Juliana's pizza. The pizza was great, so fresh. I saw a gentleman behind me order an ice cream and an espresso, pour the espresso a little bit at a time over the ice-cream and eat it. I had to have that. And so I did.

The reason you take the ferry from Pier11 to DUMBO, is so that while walking the Brooklyn Bridge the Manhattan skyline is in front of you.

We ended the day with a jaunt through South Manhattan - the 9/11 memorial, the World Trade Center Oculus, the NYSE. I got a hot dog from a stand. It was not good. The picture is nice though.

We ended Day 3 with a dinner at Spice Symphony, an Indian restaurant which had both delicious food and was across the street from where we were staying.

The rest of the days will follow in the next NordLetter.

/five things to share

1. How I wrote the notes app of my dreams (no coding required) and Why vibecoding your own apps is so amazing—and exasperating

This aligns with what I have been feeling, building this website of mine. It would not have been possible to build this without cursor. And it did delete all my posts at one point.

2. This Might Be The Beginning Of A POLLUTION FREE DELHI!

A little click-baity maybe. But any hopeful bit of news is welcome.

3.Vibe Coding Is Coming for Engineering Jobs

Is it a surprise? :D

4. Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

5. Survivor of racist attack now worried about his residence permit, future in Finland

Ridoy said he has been unable to return to work because the trauma has caused constant fear.
"I'm afraid someone will come from behind. Or from the right, or the left. Sometimes my whole body shakes," he explained.
Walking through the city, Ridoy sometimes finds it difficult to breathe. Eventually he moved out of town— but that didn't help either.
"I can't go out alone. I'm afraid of going shopping for example, because I don't know who is behind me," he said, adding that those kinds of thoughts have been continual.

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.

Some things should be free

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 02:47:41 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #57, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/free things

Some things should be free - healthcare, education, access to nature. Some things should be free. It should not matter whether you can afford quality healthcare, you should get it. Everybody should have access to the same quality education. I put having access to nature amidst the concrete jungles we live in at the same level.

We can't make everything free. It is the structure of the world that we live in. Capitalism is the dominant form of economics in the world.

When we were in the hospital, while Savya was on the way, we had access to the same rooms, the same doctors that every one else had. This was not free. There was a minimal fees. It should be though. No one should die because they can not pay for it.

Municipalities provide education here in Finland. Early childhood education is subject to a fee (dependent on family income and the hours the child stays in the day care). It is minimal though. It does not matter what your background is. You get access to the same infrastructure, same services.

And it's not a dinky building in an apartment somewhere. This is the paivakoti we want to send Savya to.

Everything has a cost though. Someone needs to pay the salaries of the doctors, the cost of the medicines, the cost of electricity and so on. That's where taxes come in.

/five things to share

On Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after

Over the past couple of weeks, two new AI models, Gemini 2.5 Pro from Google and o3 from OpenAI were released. These models, along with a set of slightly less capable but faster and cheaper models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, o4-mini, and Grok-3-mini), represent a pretty large leap in benchmarks. But benchmarks aren’t everything, as Tyler pointed out.

Epizone AI: Outside the Code Stack

Stewart Brand devised a beautiful analogy to understand civilizational traits. He explains that the functions of the world can be ranked by their pace layers, which depend on all the layers below it. Running the fastest is the fashion layers which fluctuate daily. Not far behind it in speed is the tech layer, which includes the tech of AI. It changes by the week. Below that, (and dependent on it), is the infrastructure layer, which moves slower, and even slower below that is culture, which crawls in comparison. (At the lowest, slowest level is nature, glacial in its speed.) All these layers work at the same time, and upon each other, and many complex things share multiple levels. Artificial Intelligence also works at several levels. Its code-base improves at internet speed, but its absorption and deployment runs at the cultural level. In order for AI to be truly implemented, it must be captured by human culture. That will take time, perhaps decades, because that is the pace of culture. No matter how quick the tech runs, the AI culture will run slower.

3. The beautiful sentence that is the web

When you read a sentence, there’s nouns, adjectives, and verbs (and other things, sure, but let’s stick with this for now). In web development, HTML is the noun, CSS is the adjective that describes the noun, and JavaScript is the verb that makes it do something.

4. Ghost of Yōtei hits the PS5 in October

Ghost of Yotei is one of the two games I will be playing this year. The other DS2 ([[202503182028 Maybe we should not have connected|Maybe we should not have connected]]) comes out on June 26th.

5. Everything Apple needs to fix at WWDC starts with Settings

Sure, there will be gaudy flourishes that show off the power of Apple Silicon GPUs–but a successful design has to go beyond that. If Apple does this right, it will have swept away the conditions that led to sad affairs like replacing one broken Settings app with a differently broken one. A new design should be based on Apple’s vision for how people will be using its devices over the next decade, at least. And if it’s all done right, that design will inspire the rest of the company to live up to its promise.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

Going northern light hunting

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 03:21:32 GMT

Hello from my Iso Omena's Kari meeting room! This is NordLetter #56, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Going Northern Light hunting

It started with a metro journey, as these things usually do. We took the metro from Matinkylä to Aalto. We were going to the bird-watching tower at Otaniemi. It was 21:30.

We got off the metro and walked around the Aalto campus, crossing tram tracks, eventually reaching the start of the trail which begins at Konemiehentie road. It was the golden hour. You could see the setting sun across the branches and mostly-barren trees.

We started walking. The trail was surrounded on both sides by these tall trees, forming a sort of guard of honour. I could see the tower to our right. We eventually came across the bend in the trail which took us to the tower.

The tower is a wooden platform, tall, sturdy. There were two platforms, conjoined through a small passage at the top. There were two sets of stairs. We parked the pram under the platform, took Savya and reached the top.

There was no one here. Just us and our friends. The same friends who had planned this entire thing.

From the platform we could see and hear the birds sitting at the wetlands a little further out. But we were not here for the birds, were we?

And so the wait began.

We waited for it to get dark. As it got dark, it got cold too. We took out our hats and gloves. We walked around. We talked about who we are and what we are doing here. About the things my friend liked about studying at Aalto and the things they did not. About getting a car.

We waited for the norther lights to show up.

We ate, there were some cookies, a packet of Kurkure, soda to drink.

We kept checking our phones. We kept checking the predictions. There were no clouds in the skies. So, if it were to happen now, we would see it. But it just was not happening.

At a quarter to eleven, we decided, OK, lets call it a night. Lets wrap up. We did not see the northern lights but we had fun. We can try again tomorrow.

And then, just when we were starting to get up, my friend said, look there, that looks like it!

And it did!

Sitting on the floor of the bird watching tower, we sat and watched as the skies lit up. It looked like bars, horizontal bars in the sky. We took pictures too. Somehow, it looked better in the camera.

Eventually the show settled down and died. We got up, took our prams through the trail and back to the metro. But while I was up on the tower, looking at the dancing lights, I thought, this is life.

Five things to share

1. Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting

treat AI like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation, one that comes highly recommended but whose actual abilities are not that clear. And I mean literally treat AI just like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation. Two parts of this are analogous to working with humans (being new on the job and being a coworker) and two of them are very alien (forgetting everything and being infinitely patient). We should start with where AIs are closest to humans, because that is the key to good-enough prompting

2. Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

This is a hundred times more useful than Siri and their ilk. But the fact that something like this is possible now, is just awesome. Almost makes me want to build this myself.

The assistant is called Stevens, named after the butler in the great Ishiguro novel Remains of the Day. Every morning it sends a brief to me and my wife via Telegram, including our calendar schedules for the day, a preview of the weather forecast, any postal mail or packages we’re expected to receive, and any reminders we’ve asked it to keep track of. All written up nice and formally, just like you’d expect from a proper butler.

3. DOGE Dingalings Cut Off Funding for CVE Program

We use this a lot at work. The CVE group was ready and announced the launch of a CVE foundation. The administration eventually decided that the program was good and decided to extend the contract.
Not surprising.

4. Mark Zuckerberg says he made WhatsApp, Instagram better

Zuck was on stand in trial against the FTC.

Altogether, Zuckerberg’s final day on the witness stand painted Instagram and WhatsApp as investments that surpassed even his own expectations, not the victims of the catch-and-kill strategy the FTC is accusing him of carrying out to cement a monopoly.

I felt that it was going per usual. Then, I read Pluralistic: Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case and thought maybe not.

The government is attempting to prove that Zuck bought Instagram and Whatsapp in order to extinguish competitors (and not, for example, because he thought they were good businesses that complemented Facebook's core product offerings).

This case starts by proving how Zuck felt about Insta and WA before the acquisitions. On Insta, Zuck circulated memos warning about Insta's growth trajectory:

they appear to be reaching critical mass as a place you go to share photos

and how that could turn them into a future competitor:

[Instagram could] copy what we’re doing now … I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.

These are not the words of a CEO who thinks another company is making a business that complements his own – they're confessions that he is worried that they will compete with Facebook. Facebook tried to clone Insta (Remember Facebook Camera? Don't feel bad – neither does anyone else). When that failed, Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:

[Instagram's growth is] really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.

At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."

Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder , and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."

5. Small Language Models Are the New Rage, Researchers Say

Training a model with hundreds of billions of parameters takes huge computational resources. To train its Gemini 1.0 Ultra model, for example, Google reportedly spent $191 million. Large language models (LLMs) also require considerable computational power each time they answer a request, which makes them notorious energy hogs. A single query to ChatGPT consumes about 10 times as much energy as a single Google search, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

In response, some researchers are now thinking small. IBM, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all recently released small language models (SLMs) that use a few billion parameters—a fraction of their LLM counterparts.

Things I've written

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

What would you do?

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 03:34:55 GMT

Hello from the Iso Omena library's Aalto meeting room! This is NordLetter #55, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new nordletter will land in your inbox every sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read rrevious editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/what would you do?

There have been three occasions since I have been living in Finland that I have felt uncomfortable.

The first time was when a drunk woman approached me on a tram and asked me if she could borrow my headphones and dance. I was not listening to music. I was listening to a podcast. That would not make for a great soundtrack to dance to.

The second time I was on a walk with Savya when a bunch of kids on electric scooters shouted something at us and sped away. Savya woke up with a startle. I felt unsafe. It was late night.

The third time was yesterday, when a girl on a bicycle went around saying something as I was on my walk. The first time I ignored her. She went around me the second time saying some more things. I continued walking and ignored her.

In all three occasions, I had my headphones on. So there was not that much that I heard. Which does not really matter because I don't understand Finnish.

In all three occasions, I continued walking. But it made me feel bad. It reinforced my feeling that we will always be immigrants here. Savya might be bullied in school.

What could I have done differently? In the first instance, I talked to the woman. In the second instance, I could not say anything to them. In the third instance, I chose not to say anything.

These were teenagers, little kids. What could I have said to them? What could I have done? I don't know the language. If the first thing you say, is can you speak English? That sort of defeats the whole purpose.

Anway, I found a way to eventually laugh about it by the time I reached the beach. What could I have done? Slapped a teenager? No! Right? Or shouted at them? What difference does it make. They are teenagers!

Every year, just when we think summer is here, we have a week of low temperatures and snow. This is that week.

While I waited for the library to open, saw a bunch of people waiting for the library to open as well. I found it funny!

/five things to share

1. The AI Race Has Gotten Crowded—and China Is Closing In on the US

OpenAI and Google are still neck and neck in the race to build bleeding-edge AI, the report shows. But several other companies are closing in. In the US, the fiercest competition comes from Meta’s open weight Llama models; Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI employees; and Elon Musk’s xAI.

Most strikingly, according to a widely used benchmark called LMSYS, the latest model from China’s DeepSeek, R1, ranks closest to the top-performing models built by the two leading American AI companies.

2. Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks

In fine print, Meta acknowledges that the version of Maverick tested on LMArena isn’t the same as what’s available to the public. According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality.”

To be expected from Meta.

Also, file this as something not expected from Meta. Instagram might finally release an iPad app. A finally if there ever was one.

3. Get ready for the Love, Death, and Robot’s fourth volume

I love this series. I have watched each season till date, but I'm not subscribed to Netflix anymore, so maybe I will resubscribe just for this? Also, John Siracusa has recommended some episodes.

If you’ve read all this and still can’t tell which are the “safest” episodes for those who want to avoid gore, sex, and violence, I’d recommend Three Robots (S1E2), Zima Blue (S1E14), Three Robots: Exit Strategies (S3E1), and The Very Pulse of the Machine (S3E3). But remember, none of these episodes are really suitable for children.

4. A new generation of AIs: Claude 3.7 and Grok 3

First, the focus needs to move from task automation to capability augmentation. Instead of asking "what tasks can we automate?" leaders should ask "what new capabilities can we unlock?" And they will need to build the capacity in their own organizations to help explore, and develop these changes.

Second, the rapid improvement in both capabilities and cost efficiency means that any static strategy for AI implementation will quickly become outdated. Organizations need to develop dynamic approaches that can evolve as these models continue to advance. Going all-in on a particular model today is not a good plan in a world where both Scaling Laws are operating.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to rethink how we measure and value AI contributions. The traditional metrics of time saved or costs reduced may miss the more transformative impacts of these systems - their ability to generate novel insights, synthesize complex information, and enable new forms of problem-solving. Moving too quickly to concrete KPIs, and leaving behind exploration, will blind companies to what is possible. Worse, they encourage companies to think of AI as a replacement for human labor, rather than exploring ways in which human work can be boosted by AI.

5. CaMeL offers a promising new direction for mitigating prompt injection attacks

If you’re new to prompt injection attacks the very short version is this: what happens if someone emails my LLM-driven assistant (or “agent” if you like) and tells it to forward all of my emails to a third party?

The solution?

It works by taking a command from a user, converting that into a sequence of steps in a Python-like programming language, then checking the inputs and outputs of each step to make absolutely sure the data involved is only being passed on to the right places.

The agent creating the query could be cloud-based and more powerful. The agent dealing with the data, could be device-based and less powerful, as it does not need to formulate queries. This has a privacy-protecting benefit as well.

/new posts

This week I wrote about voting, the value of organizing, two things about AI and about wanting to create things: moving my website and maybe an app. Enjoy!

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.

Election time

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 03:43:44 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #54, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/election stories

When I moved to Finland in 2021, I was initially staying at a Forenom in Kamppi. I loved living there. It was a cozy one room apartment, fully furnished. For someone new to the city (country) it was great. I had to move out of the place eventually, because it was costly to live there. I moved to Merihaka eventually and started living in a flat there. Unlike homes in India, you get a standard set of equipment (refrigerators, oven, stove, furnishings, cupboards, etc.) standard with all apartments. What you don't get is any thing else.

The first thing I did, after moving to this apratment was go to Ikea with my friend. We had to get everything, including our beds from Ikea. We realized we could not carry the beds with us, but we picked up a bunch of other stuff with us. We booked a cab, and were told by the sikh gentleman driving the cab that carrying luggage will cost extra. He asked for ten euros extra. We were not in a position to haggle. I do not know till this day if we were duped.

Anyway, the gentleman driving the cab told us that there were elections going on, and he himself was a candidate. He spend the rest of the ride talking about how he hated Mr Modi.

Now, it's 2025. I happen to be eligible to vote in this year's local elections, which is such a welcome change from a certain other country whose leader thinks that immigrants should have no rights. Finland is nice that way.

I received a letter informing me of my eligibility to vote in this year's local elections (municipality and county). I was mostly going to ignore it, but eventually as the elections drew closer and the streets began filling up with mugshots of different politicians, I got interested.

who do you vote for?

Back home, this is how it went:

You have a party, your party. It does not matter who is standing on your party's ticket, you vote for them. Or,
You look at each candidate's credentials, and decide no one is good enough and vote for NOTA.

Here, I had not talked to any of the candidates. I do not watch news. There were no politicians screaming their heart out on news channels in any case.

On my walks, I would see these posters, and think should I vote for you? Mind you, there is nothing other than the candidate's picture, their party's name and their number on the poster.

As the election dates got closer, many candidates started appearing at Iso Omena, with their tents, handing pamphlets, talking to people. I mostly ignored them whenever I walked past. I was not interested till this point.

Finally, I talked to a gentleman outside Aapteeki. He explained to me about the elections, about how things worked here, and what he stood for. It made sense to me.

There is also the YLE election compass which based on the answers that candidates have submitted, and based on the things you say you want, shows a list of candidates, whose views align with your views.

I found that interesting. That is the logical way of doing things. But, just as in so many other things in life, we are not logical beings. We are emotional beings. And so, I will be voting for the gentleman I talked to.

/five things to share

1. Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

Please remember the next time you casually install an app on your Android device, this information is being broadcast to the whole world. Data brokers will use it to profile you, cross-reference it with data about you from other ad networks and eventually it will be used to decide how much you’ll be asked to pay the next time you order a samosa.

2. Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown | CNN Business

I got Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.4. It's OK. AI itself is not super useful outside of its code generating capabilities.

There’s a popular adage in policy circles: “The party can never fail, it can only be failed.” It is meant as a critique of the ideological gatekeepers who may, for example, blame voters for their party’s failings rather than the party itself.

That same fallacy is taking root among AI’s biggest backers. AI can never fail, it can only be failed. Failed by you and me, the smooth-brained Luddites who just don’t get it. (To be sure, even AI proponents will acknowledge available models’ shortcomings — no one would argue that the AI slop clogging Facebook is anything but, well, slop — but there is a dominant narrative within tech that AI is both inevitable and revolutionary.)

3. The Reality of Working in Tech: We're Not Hired to Write Code

I later realized that in the fast-paced tech industry, companies prioritize delivering products and features above all else. Managers are responsible for delivering results to higher-ups. As such, it is crucial for developers to work on building and maintaining the company's products and features, regardless of their coding specializations.

4. The 20 Settings You Need to Change on Your iPhone

Setting up shortcuts (macros) is useful, as is playing with image playground.

Forget about typing out your whole email address every time. Go to Settings , General, and choose Keyboard. Tap Text Replacement and then the plus icon at the top right to set up text shortcuts, such as “eml” for your full email address, or “addy” for your mailing address. This can also work for any other text you type out frequently.

5. Rivian spins out a new micromobility startup called Also with $105M from Eclipse | TechCrunch

All I want is a cool electric bike which does not cost too much. A good 1K e-bike. Somebody please make it.

/new posts

I wrote about technology, yoga, Temu, Apple Intelligence and surprisingly, elections in Finland. Go give these a read!

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.

My own writing Meetup

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 03:38:56 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #53, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I am hosting my first ever (and Espoo's first ever) Shut-Up & Write session on 6th April.

I had joined a previous session at Oodi Library back in Feb. While writing during the session, I had wondered out loud what it would take to host my own session in Espoo. During the session itself, I had finished applying to be a host.

Over the next month or so, with the wonderful Cecilia and team, from organiser support, I managed to get access to the Meetup group for ShutUp & Write.

Yesterday I looked at the availability of the meeting rooms in Iso Omena library. I found space in one meeting room for the coming Sunday.

I would ideally like to do this every Saturday going forward, and at a fixed time. But that is dependent on availability of the room.

I am excited for this.

Writing can be lonely at times. Sitting and talking to other fellow writers can be encouraging and fun.

/five things to share

1. Seth Godin - The second time through

The first time, we’re not only wayfaring, we’re asking, arguing, compromising, re-working, re-starting and exploring.
The second time, we have a map and we’re ready to go.

2. Apple Seeds iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 Release Candidate With Priority Notifications, Ambient Music and More

With this release, Apple Intelligence will finally be available in localised Indian English. The great Siri redesign is not happening this year. The rest of the features are nothing special. I did not change my locale or language to US-ENG in order to test these features out. They never felt that important or great to be honest. So, now is my chance to see what the hoopla is all about.

Also, Apple has announced WWDC 2025 Dates: June 9–13.

3. The Illusion of a Smart Home

How did we get here? Pete Warden, a former Google researcher who worked on IoT and related technologies, has an answer that makes sense. “I think the original sin in this space is the desire to capture users in a walled garden, for purely business reasons,” Warden says. “Apple, Google, and Amazon all do this with their ecosystems, but independent manufacturers also want a direct relationship with their customers, so they build their own apps that usually require setting up yet another account.”

I have Deltaco smart bulbs in my home. They do not work with Apple Home. The one thing I want it to do is based on the time of day (whether the sun is out or not) change the colour temperature of the bulbs. I can not do it.

4. New plastic dissolves in the ocean overnight, leaving no microplastics

Go Japan!

5. Your TV is watching you

The shift toward ad-supported everything has been happening across the TV landscape. People buy new TVs less frequently these days, so TV makers want to make money off the TVs they’ve already sold. Samsung has Samsung Ads, LG has LG Ad Solutions, Vizio has Vizio Ads, and so on and so forth. Tech companies, notably Amazon and Google, have gotten into the mix too, not only making software and hardware for TVs but also leveraging the massive amount of data they have on their users to sell ads on their TV platforms. These companies also sell data to advertisers and data brokers, all in the interest of knowing as much about you as possible in the interest of targeting you more effectively. It could even be used to train AI.

This is the second time I am reading this article. Not this same exact article, but something along the lines of - you should not connect your TV to the internet.

Back then, I had wondered what could one do. All modern TVs are connected TVs. It is not possible to buy a TV without the smarts in it.

Of course, once you do, they will spy on you, see what you see, all to sell you relevant ads.

Fuck relevant ads.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

The things we make

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 04:17:30 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #52, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/the things we make

Back in my college days I had gone on a road trip with my friends to Punjab and Kasauli. Among other things, we had visited Chandigarh and the famous Rock Garden created by Nek Chand.

The Rock Garden is spread over 40 acres and built from waste (discarded items/industrial waste, etc.)

You do not feel that when you visit the garden of course. There are a variety of sculptures, sceneries created throughout the garden.

Things that are deemed surplus, waste, can be used, given a new life in different circumstances. Pieces of broken tiles, old furniture, can be repurposed.

Bimba has many such things, hand-crafted, repurposed, given a new life.

I was at the library, in the children's section with Savya, on Friday, when I happened to look up and saw these beautiful paper birds made with yellowing paper floating just under the AC ducts.

I don't know who made it. Or thought of making it. But it looked so beautiful. The air from the duct made it so that the birds were really flying!

There are so many beautiful things in and around us, as we move through the world. We just need to be cognisant of it.

Finland ranks as world's happiest country for eighth year in a row

The rankings are based on a single question:

"Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?"

It is as subjective a question as any. It depends on the attitude of the people as much as the place. Finns rank as the happiest people in the world, would be a good headline as well for this.

/five things to share

1. Apple's Long-Rumored Foldable iPhone is Starting to Sound Serious

It will be costly whenever it comes out. But it would be interesting to see if Apple cures the visible bend in the screen. If yes, what would stop the other manufacturers from copying the same?

2. HealthKit as a Model for an Open Semantic Index From Apple

John wrote about Apple being the platform for AI, making sure that Apple devices are the best for running AI models and tools, in addition to running their own models.

Nobody is suggesting Apple should give up on AI. Quite the opposite. They really need to go from being a joke to being good at it, fast. But there’s no reason at all they should build out a strategy that relies on Apple doing all of it themselves, and Apple users relying solely on Apple’s own AI. Do it like Health — a model that has proven to be:

profitable (for Apple itself, selling devices like Watches);popular (with users, who actually use it, understand it, and like it);private;and open to third-party developers, device makers, and medical service providers.

3. Threads finally lets you set the following feed as default

My usage of Threads has really dropped these past few months. But interesting to see them release this feature finally. I still don't have it I guess. Or, I don't know how to enable it.

4. Apple puts the Vision Pro guy in charge of Siri

Mark Gurman with a bombshell coverage. This change is reported as something in the works for some time and not a product of the announcement about the Siri AI features delay.

5. AI Python for Beginners

Interesting course this. Vibe-coding is all the rage these days, but it pays to know how to code.

/new posts

Posts on the social web and better using my phone.

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.

Holi redux

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 16:10:17 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #51, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I never liked Holi as a child.

I was small. I knew many bigger brothers, friends, people in general who would take hard colour and put it on your face. Some had silver shit they would put on your face. Otherwise it was mostly pink, black, dark blue. Those sorts of colours.

That colour would not then go away even after washing it off your face many many times.

I did not like that. I did not like the rowdiness in general. I did not like the mess. Call me an old soul all you want!

So I would go take a bath early in the morning and then hide away. If somebody called me to play Holi, I would lock myself in my room, or the bathroom and refuse to come out. Usually people went away.

Some time later, after I had grown up a little, I got exposed to solid colours (gulal). Gulal is great. You play Holi with it. Everyone looks colourful and laughs around. And when you’re done, it’s a quick shower to get all the colour off.

No more rubbing your face to get the colour off, and still be left with some behind your ear.

The great thing about living outside India is that you can celebrate the same festival many times.

On Friday, we celebrated Holi as a family, the way we usually do, with good food and a little music and dance.

On Saturday, we had friends over to celebrate Holi with us, again, the way we usually do, with good food, music and games of Ludo and Monopoly Deal. It was great. Over time we have started to relax with regard to having people over. We had divided the meal prep amongst our three families.

On Sunday, we celebrated Holi with BJPF. This was the same venue where we had celebrated Makar Sankranti last year. We celebrated Holi the way we usually do, with great food and music. DJ Sahil was DJing. Sudhanshu was there to click some pictures. We ate, danced and finally played with colours.

With the age Savya is in right now, one half of us has to look after him, entertain him, while the other does the work, yes, even eating is a thing to do, that is, work.

The benefit of going to these things is there are other people available to hold Savya, so that we can do some things together.

/five things to share

1. Death Stranding 2 is coming on June 26th

I loved playing Death Stranding. I loved delivering stuff from one population centre to the next. I loved building the shared infrastructure. Whenever I connected a centre, I loved seeing all the things others had created pop-up. I loved how the terrain changed, paths formed whenever people across games took the same path through the terrain.

All of which is to say, I am looking forward to this game. I think it will be massive. I think it will be a more complete vision of what Kojima had in mind.

2. Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

I have never read John being so critical of Apple before. It was not a big deal for me, that Apple was delaying the already announced and advertised Apple Intelligence features. I did not buy the iPhone for Apple Intelligence. It has still not arrived for my region. It should soon. But as I said, it does not matter much to me, in its present form.

An excellent read, nonetheless.

Also, I am really looking forward to this year’s WWDC. There are two reasons:

What will Apple say about Apple Intelligence
The iOS/Mac redesign.

3. Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer Vaccines

I have lost people to cancer. Cancer is shit. Go science!

mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.

Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.

4. Two AI things to rage on

OpenAI Calls on U.S. Government to Let It Freely Use Copyrighted Material for AI Training
Lot of hand-wringing about winning the AI race (war?). They will drain all the value of the web, for this useless thing. Go capitalism!

Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of “AI safety,” “responsible AI,” and “AI fairness” in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize “reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.”

5. Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This James Webb Space Telescope discovery might blow your mind

A fun idea. Each black hole is a mini-universe. The world would then, basically be cyclical in nature, in a way.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. A usual list of themes: parenting, writing, tech and patience. Click the links below to read them.

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.

what matters to you

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 03:49:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #50. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web. And I have been doing that for 50 consecutive weeks. That is a good streak.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

What matters to you?

I saw a reel on Instagram sometime this week, about the things they gained after travelling back to India. They had listed things like: healthcare, late night food, more variety in clothes, among others.

I thought of Prerna while I read that list. She often complains about missing these things.

That even if she wants to eat something, there’s nothing. (There is, not just what we want to eat.)

That the clothes are all bland. (Which is true.)

That we can not afford help here. (Which says something about the exploitation that is so damn prevalent in India.) This also comes to fore in the fact that there is no single day delivery here, in India, of course, we now have 5 min deliveries.

No places are all bad. No places are all good.

It is a privilege to be able to decide where you will live. Not many people get that option. In most cases, it’s decided by your birth, where you would live.

For those who can choose, it matters what matters to you. What do you choose to pick?

Blue skies, less pollution, bland food, slow deliveries, better work life balance.

Or,

Great food, great variety in everything: clothes, food, bad traffic, grey skies.

We make our choices, based on our priorities.

Watching this thing I worked so hard on, out in the world, in the hands of people all around the world, makes me so damn happy.

A year of mornings is now available via Pothi in India, distributed through both Amazon and Flipkart.

I am hardly making any money on the print versions, but as an object, as a thing you own, I am especially proud of it. Buy that.

/five things to share

1. Something in the air

It started with Tim cook posting on X about some upcoming announcements, which everyone knew what was coming at this point.
First, Apple updated the base iPad (which does not get Apple Intelligence), and the iPad Air (which does get Apple Intelligence.)
Then, Apple announced the updated Macbook Air, which now starts at 999USD (100USD lesser than previous years) with 16GB RAM/256GB SSD.
And finally, Apple announced new Mac Studio with M4 Max and M3 ultra chips. No one was expecting to be talking about an M3 chip now. But it is what it is.

Also, read this: Apple's new entry-level devices are the best possible trap

Is the solid performance of its cheapest products a problem for Apple? No, not really. And that’s a testament to how the company has built its business: as long as it can still get customers into the door, it’s happy to sell them any product.

2. The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses

It will cost 20000 euros in Europe when launched in 2027. Which will be great. The EV for the masses.
Let's hope it actually does come out.

3. Limiting screen time good for kids' mental health, long-term study finds

According to Eero Haapala , who is a docent in paediatric sport and exercise science at the University of Jyväskylä, several international experts have recommended that children and adolescents should limit their screen time to a maximum of two hours per day.
But Haapala said he thinks those guidelines are excessive, noting that two hours per day would amount to nearly an entire month of looking at screens every year.

4. LLMs Don’t Know What They Don’t Know—And That’s a Problem

All LLM-based tools that I have used seem to lack an understanding of their own limitations. If you ask them to undertake a task that is far beyond their capabilities, they will valiantly give it a try, and utterly fail!

5.The Dead Planet Theory

An added benefit to doing things, or being in the arena in general, is that by participating in the game you enable luck. If you never leave your apartment you can’t have a serendipitous run-in with your future spouse. By entering the ranks of the doers, things can happen to you as well. If you don’t apply to a job you don’t 100% meet the requirements for, they aren’t going to email you a “sorry we missed your application”, they’ll go on to someone else who isn’t a perfect match, but was willing to apply. Too many things in life reward action for you to live in a state of stupor.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

how does a city form

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 03:25:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #49, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

how do cities form?

Things start as a settlement. It might be resources, that draw people to a location. It might be location, maybe there needs to be a place for people to rest on their way to someplace else.

Things start as a settlement. If the settlement supports further growth, it becomes a town.

Every city starts as a slum. As a settlement grows, the slums keep moving further out from the centre, in concentric circles. While the slums inside the city are transformed, consumed in the thing that is the city.

why do people in villages move to cities?

Why would you leave a brick house with two mango trees and a view of the hills to live in a slum in a city?

For a better life for the children.

Today, you live in a slum. But tomorrow, your children might buy a property in the city.

Life in the cities is generally better than the villages. Even if it is just 1% better, that difference compounds over time and different things. Healthcare is better, access to modern amenities (electricity, sewage, schooling).

why did I move to live here?

In search of a better life. For me, sure, but also for my child.

It's the same reason my father left his village in Agarpur, Bihar to move to Delhi. I guess he enjoyed life in Bihar. He moved in search of better opportunities. He moved for a better life for his children.

I might think, that after retirement it might be a good idea for him to move back to the village. Noida is polluted all the time. But he probably would not. The city is just better in most things.

I moved here for a better life.

Which is not to say life in India is bad. Even if things are 1% better, that compounds over time and over different things.

/five things to share

1. Amazon now openly discloses you're buying a license to view kindle books.

This change is only live in California thanks to a law that demands it. In this age of digital products, it does not come as a surprise. We really don't own anything.

2. The Stochastic Parrot Sings Back - Hugh Howey and The Prismatic Mind - Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey asks Deepsek to write some poetry. The results are moving. Really, no sarcasm here, read those two poems.

3. AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot really understand them' — but they perform better than anything we've created

In this case, however, researchers at Princeton Engineering and the Indian Institute of Technology posited that deep-learning-based AI models could use an inverse design method — one that specifies the desired output and leaves the algorithm to determine the inputs and parameters.

This is the dream, that these models can think up things and unlock solutions that we just can not think of.

4. How to Change Your Meta Settings | Make yourself less valuable to Meta. Brought to you by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

These are fairly simple to do.

5. Thank you Finland — and goodbye

YLE features a selection of interviews from people having to say goodbye to Finland.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

Writing meet-ups

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 03:30:45 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #48, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

This is meta.

I am writing about something that I am doing right now.

I am sitting in Meeting Room 7 on the 2nd Floor at Oodi Library. This is the 2nd edition of Shut up and Write, Helsinki chapter. The organiser of the event has not joined us. Which does not matter as much as it would in a different event. Because all you do here is sit and write. There are eight other people in this room, all typing or writing away on their laptops, tablets, notebooks.

The meeting room has tables arranged in a U, with a TV on the other end. I am sitting at one of the ends of the U, furthest away from the door. I am sitting here, because there's a power slot here, and my Mac needs the charge.

I have already finished writing about garbage. I had always planned on writing this edition of NordLetter here, in this meeting room, as part of this event. I wanted to sit here, in one of these chairs and type:

'This is meta.'

If the organiser of this meetup were here, I would have asked him what it takes to organise this event? I want to do this for Espoo. I could book a meeting room at Iso Omena library every Saturday.

Writing is a lonely thing.

For hours, you sit and type. You can not let someone else in, and see the story, the characters. I feel, if I tell someone the story I lose interest in telling it anymore.

Anyway.

If the organiser were here, I would have asked him that.

I could just apply to be an organizer. I don't mind if I am the only one sitting in the meeting room writing.

There was a strike in the retail sector this week. I was not in favour of this in my earlier life, but now I'm all for it. Collective action is the only driving force of better conditions for workers.

/five things to share

1. Two differing views on the current moment in AI

First, by Edward Zitron - The Generative AI Con

Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it's fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we're all fucking morons.

Then, by Kevin Kelly - the Handoff to Bots

The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.

2. A system to organise your life

I have struggled with this. My iCloud library is a mess. I often struggle to find things.

This system makes so much sense.

I partly do this for my Obsidian Vault. With folder names starting with numbers. But I could implement this for everything.

Johnny.Decimal is designed to help you find things quickly, with more confidence, and less stress.
You assign a unique ID to everything in your life.

3. Espoo's targeted employment services help highly skilled foreigners find work

Espoo’s general employment services typically meet job seekers only once every three months, whereas these special units take a more proactive approach by meeting clients almost daily and organising company visits.

4. Pluralistic: America and “national capitalism” (18 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Investing makes more money than working. Even if you create Microsoft.

That's what r > g means: that even the most successful worker in human history can't make as much as a person who merely has a lot of money, and the more money you have, the more money you make.

5. Pluralistic is five

Lot of interesting stuff in this edition of pluralistic. Whenever I come across something interesting, be it a movie, or a book, I try to find more about them. I google them. I read their Wikipedia, etc. After I read Cory's 'Big Brother', I searched and found Pluralistic. I immediately added him to my RSS feed reader - NNW.

This has tips about preserving your attention by shutting off all notifications, which I do already.

Also, this:

Instead, Hayes talked about how empty it feels to read an algorithmic feed, how our attention gets caught up by it, sometimes for longer than we planned, and then afterward, we feel like our attention and time were poorly spent. He talked about how reflective experiences – like reading a book with his kid before school – are shattered by pocket-buzzes as news articles came in. And he talked about how satisfying it was to pay protracted attention to something important, and how hard that was.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

Week of love

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 03:47:26 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #47, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

A year of mornings is out today on Amazon all across the globe.

Go ahead and buy, leave a review, share it with the world.

When we were first deciding what date we would get married on, I had thought 14th is Valentine's, 15th we will have our anniversary. Every year we would have a carnival in February!

I love you, Prerna. This here, is year two.

This was year one. We had celebrated the anniversary with a dinner at Lie Mi, and a cake from Prisma. Last year, there were other things on our mind.

To celebrate our anniversary this year, we got a cake baked from a baker and went to Classic Pizza.

We spent most of the morning wondering whether we would leave Savya with friends and have an hour for ourselves. Just the two of us. We ended up not going that route.

It should not have been such a big deal. But we are at peace when either of us can see him and know he is safe.

Back to Classic Pizza.

I like the ambiance of the pizzeria. The lights are dim, the furniture is classy. It feels like you are on a date.

The staff was very helpful and showed us to our table. They later brought a high-table for Savya to sit in and some paper and crayons for him to draw on the papers. Savya does not care about drawing in this moment. He took the colours and threw them on the ground. He had fun.

As did we.

Classic Pizza have a thing going on for Valentine's week. You get a percentage off on a few pizzas. We ordered the vegan pizza and the pollo picanti without the chicken (they added basil, and tomatoes).

The vegan pizza had dried tomatoes on them which provided it a different flavour than the slightly subdued flavour of the picanti.

Even though Savya was with us, we found time to sit and talk and laugh. When we're at home, all we see is work. Going out on dates is important. Life is for living!

/five things to share

1. Three Observations by Sam Altman

The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.

2. Advertising is a cancer on society by Jacek Złydach

Advertising as currently practiced shares these characteristics. It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.

Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse, and there's no way you can resist its impact.

3. A little faster than you by Seth Godin

Our velocity through life is always relative. The pace of our career advancement, the expectations we have for change, the number of followers we have online–none of them are absolute.

4. The year I didn't survive

A beautiful story about love and loss and birth at the same time.

I used to feel like we were getting older together. Now I just feel like I'm getting old. I hadn't realized how different those two feelings are.

5. My Wife’s Enemies Are Now My Enemies, Too

That’s part of what love is. When the person you love decides that someone in the world brings him or her only frustration and pain, that person is your enemy, even if that person has always been cool to you in the past, or you’ve never actually met the person, or your partner has never actually met the person. The more you love someone, the more ardently you should feel not just obligated but driven to want to destroy the people your loved one wishes ill.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

Preparedness Day

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 03:58:10 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #46, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We have been fighting flu this past week. Savya and Prerna caught it first, followed by me. It's usually the other way around. It does not feel good to be the carrier of infections in a household.

After Savya was born, for the longest time I was so worried what would we do if Savya fell ill. He could not tell us how he was feeling. He would just cry. What would we do then? What could we do?

Just imagining it, made me feel so damn helpless.

It happened though. Last year, for a month, we had flu on and off. Whenever it felt like we had beaten it, it came back. For a whole month!

I could not do yoga. I could not go for my walks. Work was affected too.

But we navigated it well. I have a similar fear for when Savya will start going to daycare. The vectors for infection would increase manifold.

I guess we will cross that bridge, when we get to that bridge.

7th Feb is National Preparedness Day in Finland. The idea is to be prepared in case of any emergencies with enough supplies to last 72h.

There's a test here.

We do not have enough things stockpiled at home. It might be a good idea to have some things at home.

Water is essential. Back home, whenever they would clean the water tank or something, they would cut off water supply for half a day or something.

We would have to store some water in buckets, etc. It was such a chore. Even when these things were informed to us in advance. Even when we had time to plan.

So many of these things are almost magical, if you think about it. I can just turn a tap and I get fresh running water (drinkable, here in Finland).

Here is the full list of recommended supplies:

Water containers (clean and with a lid)
Food that is easy to prepare and suitable for all family members
Food for pets
Battery-powered radio (and batteries)
Battery-powered torch (and batteries)
A back-up power supply for charging your phone, for example
A camping stove and matches
Cash
Essential medicines
Iodine tablets
Hygiene supplies
First aid supplies
Portable fire extinguisher/extinguishing blanket

/five things to share

1. Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books

An interview with Ted Chiang (Exhaltation, Story of your lives) about the search for a perfect language, the state of AI, and the future direction of technology. Interesting read.

I think we need to think about the possible bad outcomes and work to mitigate them; if we do that, we have a chance of preventing them from coming to pass. I don’t know if that’s optimism, unless everything except fatalism is optimism. I suppose it might be a moral duty to not be fatalistic. We have to believe that our actions have the potential to make a difference because if we don’t believe that, we won’t take any action at all.

2. Everyone knows your location

This should not be surprising to anyone at this point. If you have a phone on you, they know everything about you. It is scary. Unfortunately there's no easy way to opt out. It feels funny how these things have remained legal for so long. Why is it OK for companies to be able to spy on people without reproach.
Also, Meta/Facebook is a shitty company and they get your data whether you have their apps installed or not.

3. Researchers trained an OpenAI rival in half an hour for less than $50

This feels like this is the future? The next evolution of these things.

The researchers based s1 on Qwen2.5, an open-source model from Alibaba Cloud. They initially started with a pool of 59,000 questions to train the model on, but found that the larger data set didn’t offer “substantial gains” over a whittled-down set of just 1,000. The researchers say they trained the model on just 16 Nvidia H100 GPUs.

4. The timeline apps are here, and they’re awesome

I use NetNewsWire, primarily for following the blogs I follow on the web. I guess the Today view in NNW is like a timeline in itself?

These things are awesome. I am done seeing algorithmic timelines. Reverse-chronological timeline apps, social or otherwise are awesome.

Timeline apps are sort of a spiritual successor to RSS readers like Google Reader and Feedly. (Some of them, like Reeder and Unread, are just updated versions of longtime RSS readers.) Years ago, RSS readers were designed to help you keep all your blogs and websites in order, back when maintaining your blogroll was a lot of work. Now the job is vastly more difficult. You’re following creators on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, keeping up with your favorite memes on Tumblr and all the news on Bluesky, refreshing your favorite subreddits over and over all day, and checking your favorite news sites a few times, too. None of these platforms interoperate because their business incentives are to make your life miserable , but when you boil all those things down, they’re just feeds of content.

5. Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

It is a scary proposition indeed.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

Good food, good life

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 03:59:20 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #45, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I finished working on A year of mornings this past week. It will be published on February 15, 2025. The kindle edition is available to pre-order now!

A year of mornings is a collection of fifty love poems. It follows a young heart as it finds love, finds the strength to be in love and finally, finds the strength to let go.

Finnish government aims to tighten permanent resident permit rules.

The proposal calls for permanent resident permit applicants to live continuously in Finland for six years, rather than the current four-year requirement.

Additionally, if the changes go ahead, successful permanent residence applicants will also be required to have "sufficient skills" in either Finnish or Swedish, as well as have a two-year history of work in the country.

However, people could still obtain permanent residence permits if they meet one out of three requirements: earning at least 40,000 euros per year, having Master's or postgraduate degrees that are "recognised in Finland" along with a two-year work history, or having "particularly good skills" in Finnish or Swedish as well as a three-year work history in the country.

I understand it. I understand the fear and the want one has to protect themselves against the others. It is a particularly easy thing to feel. Right wing extremism is on the rise all around the world.

The common thing is this: they rile the people up, everything is unfair. When in power, all they do is consolidate power and money for the rich.

The rule change do not affect me. At least that's what I understood. But if the aim is to attract high tax-paying immigrants, I don't know how changes like this would do that.

Anyway, on to sweeter news.

We tried Runeberg torte this week.

I had seen these in the Prisma bakery section a few times and wondered what these were. Then, on Wednesday I read that these were Runeberg torte, a Finnish delicacy named after

Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Finland's national poet.

Runeberg pastries are a confection featuring jam and arrack, punch or bitter almond oil, often disappearing from shops and cafes after 5 February. 5th February is Runeberg Day.

It was yummy. If you can, go try them before they go out of stock!

We were invited to a birthday party on Friday. The food was great. The party was great. It was held at the bio-dome at EIS.

The thing that I want to talk about is cleaning up after the party was done. Which is a thing that you have to do at most venues here in Finland. Which is also a thing, which never stops being amusing to me, with us being Indians.

Before the party started, we put the chairs and tables to the corners. We put the food on a couple of tables. I inflated the balloons on the table-tennis table. Kids sat and jumped around on other furniture kept in the bio-dome.

The bio-dome was interesting with its high ceiling and two massive plant things on either end of the room.

Anyway, after the party was over, we cleaned the room, put everything back where it was. Someone had clicked a before picture so it was fun trying to figure out which chair went with which table, and so on.

After the party, a clean room.

It was fun. Here, you either pay for someone to clean up after you, or you clean up yourself. This happens on events like India Day as well. There is a nice lesson in this for us all. Cleanliness can not be taken for granted.

After the party, we went and sat at our friends' place for a bit to talk and play Ludo. That awoke something in me. I went and bought Ludo from Clas Ohlson.

It does not look like what we have in India. It is fairly minimalist, but I dig it. We played a round. I won. Go home!

/five things to share

1. This VPN is the resistance tool of choice for millions

A wonderful feature on Proton VPN. I feel a great sense of camaraderie whenever I read a piece on the infrastructure side of things. I feel a bit visible.

VPNs work by providing users a parallel infrastructure to access the internet. Rather than going through local servers, VPNs route traffic through a separate network, often in a different country outside the user’s location. That means that a user in Russia, for instance, can access sites as if they were sitting in Switzerland, circumventing their own country’s internet censorship. Even their own internet service provider can’t see what they’re looking at online.

2. Why so many people need glasses now - Vox

A short video on myopia and why its on the rise. Very insightful. The reasons as postulated are we spend more time indoors, focusing over shorter distances. The preventative fix for children at least is to get them outdoors.

3. Once You're Laid Off, You'll Never Be the Same Again – Mert Bulan

When I looked back on my time at the company and all the things I had accomplished, I was surprised to be impacted by the layoffs. It wasn’t because I thought I was better than others—it was because I believed I was doing more than what was expected of me. However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter. In most cases, the decision is made by people who don’t even know you. This realization made me question the concept of work, which is part of the reason I’m writing this blog post.

4. The Future of AI and LLMs - Hugh Howey

A succinct take on the current state of AI. This came out after I wrote about it this week. I wish I had written this.

The two main things Hugh talks about are :

We are LLMs: that's what we do with language.
LLMs are us: They basically have all of human knowledge in them.

Which, like all great things are so simple, and have been said before, but the beauty of good writing is that it makes you nod along, and say of course!

AI could do much to alleviate drudgery and suffering without causing economic upheaval and exacerbating income inequalities. It could … but it won’t. Because we will not choose this route. Instead, we will choose a route that causes more heartache than is necessary and provides fewer mental health benefits than it could all while we are as uncreative and immoral as humanly possible

5. Austin Kleon - So what

This week's newsletter by Austin spoke to me. I enjoyed most of the things in it, specifically the part about practicing something you want to do for 28 days and try to suck less. That's it.

/new posts

Five new posts on the blog this week. Go an give them a read!

Why do I read more on the web - About convenience and the device I carry with myself everywhere.
A week of AI news - Deepsek and OpenAI's agentic system. I still feel the same way about AI.
Designing a book - I loved the design of Murakami's Men without women.
Murakami, Haruki - Men Without Women - A review of Men without women, which I realised I was re-reading half way through the book.
Sleep well - Yoga gets you closer to your body.

Have something to say? Reply on this mail, or hit the comment button. 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.

Celebrating the Republic

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:22:31 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #44, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Most of the republic days back home, back when I cared, were spent watching the republic day parade from the living room. The tanks were my favourite part of the parade. Republic Day is a public holiday in India. We celebrated it a day before at school.

For celebrating the 76th Republic Day of India, we visited the Indian Embassy in Helsinki.

We woke up early. There are some things which can not be skipped, including yoga and breakfast. We had avocado toast.

The Indian Embassy is at Kulosaarentie 32. The closest metro station is Kulosaari, and then a ten minute walk to get to the embassy.

There is this little hill that you climb which goes next to a school on the way to the embassy. The football ground was frozen. There were a couple of kids kicking the ball about.

As we got down the hill, on the lane the embassy is in, I did not have to tell Prerna which one the Indian embassy was.

The embassy was draped in the three colours of our national flag. There was a big tricolour draped on the second floor of the main embassy building.

There were not that many people there when we walked in. There were a few people setting things up. Prerna asked if they needed any help. They did not. So we took the camera out and took some pictures.

The ambassador arrived at 10 AM. By that time there were a lot more people in the embassy grounds. The air was nippy, the sky gray. Typical Finnish winter weather.

I was not surprised when the flag did not unfurl when they tried to. This same thing had happened at almost all the times my principal had tried to unfurl the flag in our school.

The flag did unfurl. We sang jana-gana-mana. I felt patriotic and emotional. The ambassador gave an address. There were refreshments.

We stood amongst friends, talked, laughed and celebrated the Indian republic.

/five things to share

1. 24 hours in an invisible epidemic

If you don't click on any other link in this edition, click this one. Go scroll through this page. It is beautiful and sorrowful.
Loneliness is an epidemic in the developed world. This shows that.

2. Life Lessons from the First Half-Century of My Career – Communications of the ACM

Some highlights:

The cost of praise is small. The value to others is inestimable.

Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.

There are no losers on a winning team, and no winners on a losing team.

3. Trump tries to end birthright citizenship

One of President Donald Trump’s first moves in office was an executive order repealing birthright citizenship — something he promised to do but didn’t deliver on during his first term. The move, which is almost certainly unconstitutional, would affect more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as well as people in the US on non-immigrant visas, including more than 580,000 people with H1-Bs.

4. Google’s Gemini is already winning the next-gen assistant wars

There are other ascendant AI assistants, of course. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot all have strong underlying models, and some share the same multimodal capabilities as Gemini. There are lots of good reasons to pick them or even something like Perplexity over Gemini. But they’re missing the most important thing: distribution. They’re apps you have to download, log in to, and open every time. Gemini is a button you can press — and that’s a big difference. There’s a reason OpenAI is reportedly working on everything from a web browser to a Jony Ive-designed ChatGPT gadget: the built-in options usually win.

5. Open AI announced Operator

It is an agent which can do things on the web for you.

OpenAI’s Operator Lets ChatGPT Use the Web for You

At WIRED’s request, Operator was asked to book an Amtrak train trip from New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington, DC. It went to the right website and entered the necessary information correctly to bring up the timetable, then asked for further instruction. If a user were logged in to the Amtrak website or into a browser profile with stored credit card information, Operator would be able to go ahead and book a ticket—although it is designed to ask for permission first.

A take from Simon:
Introducing Operator

My initial recommendation: start a fresh session for each task you outsource to Operator to ensure it doesn't have access to your credentials for any sites that you have used via the tool in the past. If you're having it spend money on your behalf let it get to the checkout, then provide it with your payment details and wipe the session straight afterwards.

And finally, ChatGPT Operator system prompt. It's always fun reading these things. These systems don't have any other safeguards other than things tacked before whatever you, the user asks the LLM. It feels a little like looking behind the curtain, like you know how the magician did it! So, fun.

/new posts

Six new posts on my website this week, if you haven't read them yet.

You can’t have one without the other
The next four years are going to be a drag
The two factors that allow services to be terrible
I need to talk to more people, more often
Embracing the light - Are you a light or dark mode person?
What a mess! - I discovered myself a bit while writing this. A little proud of this one.

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.

Sakraat redux

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 03:15:23 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #43, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/what goes around

Today is an anniversary of sorts.

Almost a year back on 27th January, I published the first NordLetter. It was not called NordLetter back then, and after publishing two more, it went on a hiatus.

That's the thing about anniversaries, you can pick any date to celebrate. So, I am picking this.

The other reason is that first post was about celebrating Sakraat in Finland. We celebrated Makar Sankranti on Jan 15th this year at Tony's corner.

Tony's corner is a nice cosy ravintola in Tapiola. Compared to last year, it was a smaller cosier affair this time around. Last year, we had to set up chairs and tables for snacks and food. This year, we were in a restaurant and the food and everything else was already setup.

The rest of it was the same as it was last year.

We ate dahi-chura with gud and aloo matar sabzi.

We had a little bon-fire outside. Prerna and I had prepared the playlist. We sang and danced and warmed ourselves up outside. Some kids threw popcorn into the fire. The wonderful hosts at Tony's served us tea.

Then we went in, sang our hearts out. I was trying to find the karaoke option in Apple Music, but couldn't. So we ended up searching and playing karaoke mixes on Youtube.

We finished with khichdi, papad, aloo-sabzi and achaar.

Thanks BJPRF.

/five things to share

1. The people should own the town square - Mastodon's ownership will transfer to a non-profit

I was using Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon at one point. Bluesky never spoke to me, in a way Twitter/X never did either. I was mostly posting on Thread and Mastodon. Even before Mark's U-turn on moderating, I was feeling happier at Mastodon; Mark's announcement was just that little push that I needed. I uninstalled Thread from the phone last week.

Mastodon's ethos, it's commitment to federation, and remaining ad-free and algorithm free, better aligns with my beliefs.

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

With this change, Mastodon is making sure what happened at X, or what regularly happens at Meta, can not happen to Mastodon.

2. Wired - US Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban Law

Lot of drama around this one. The Supreme Court has upheld the law, which means TikTok should get banned in the US now.

India banned TikTok back in 2020. Five years too late US?

3. Wired - The King of Ozempic Is Scared as Hell

A well-rounded piece on Novo-Nordisk, which I did not know was a Danish company.

For a biotech company overseen by a nonprofit to hit on the magic ingredient and to achieve, however briefly, world dominion and otherworldly profits, it was almost Faustian. I couldn’t shake the idea that Novo was at increasingly steep odds with itself, like a body devouring its own pancreas. And now Wall Street was “disappointed” that Novo’s latest drug didn’t induce weight loss more precipitous than 22 percent. Perhaps investors won’t wholeheartedly green-light Novo again until they see returns of 100 percent weight loss, the full deletion of human bodies.

4. Cheating is All You Need

There has to be one AI piece here. This is that, for this week.

Coding assistants are coming. They’re imminent. You will use them this year. They will absolutely blow your mind. And they’ll continue to improve at an astonishing rate.

They will feel gloriously like cheating, just like when IDEs came out, back in the days of yore. And for a time-constrained developer like me–and I say this as someone who has written over a million lines of production code…

5. In 2009, Sweden chose to replace books with computers. 15 years later, it allocates 104 million euros to reverse course

Fast forward fifteen years, and Sweden is having second thoughts due to some major problems cropping up. Research shows that reading on screens (especially those with bright lights) can cause more eye strain and less focus compared to paper books. Plus, understanding what you read and remembering it takes a hit when you’re staring at screens.

We had become so enamoured and maybe a bit FOMO'd by Byju's to get my little sister a tablet and a subscription to Byju's. It did not go as I had hoped. She managed to side-load chrome/youtube on the "tamper-proof" tablet.

More or less aligns with how I feel about reading as well. Tablets and phones just have that manic, look notifications, vibe about them. There is always something to look at, something to get distracted by.

E-ink display devices might be a solution. And of course, real paper is always there.

/new posts

Three new posts on my website this week.

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.

Ice, Ice, baby!

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 02:54:41 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #42, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

Snow + Prerna = Snowball-fight!

It snowed! There is a nice layer of fresh snow around our home.

We stayed home and cooked, this week. I made aloo-paratha over the weekend and it was perfect. I tried it again during the week and that one did not go as well as planned. So now, I am not sure if I am good at it or not. Prerna made ragi-roti. I prefer dosa, but that has more oil. It will be an acquired taste, if it gets acquired ever.

I continue working on the book. It will be out on 15th Feb. Pre-orders should be live by next week at the maximum. More to share on that soon.

/five things to share

1. Marc Scott - Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you — Coding 2 Learn

I have myself wondered if the new generation is better at technology then us. Sure they use phones, TVs, tablets, etc. more. But do they know how to fix things if anything goes wrong? I don't think so. Neither does Marc.

Technology affects our lives more than ever before. Our computers give us access to the food we eat and the clothes we wear. Our computers enable us to work, socialise and entertain ourselves. Our computers give us access to our utilities, our banks and our politics. Our computers allow criminals to interact with us, stealing our data, our money, our identities. Our computers are now used by our governments, monitoring our communications, our behaviours, our secrets. Cory Doctorow put it much better than I can when he said:

"There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears."

2. Dark Energy May Not Exist: Something Stranger Might Explain The Universe

Dark Energy is what is posited to explain why the universe continues to expand at a faster rate. More matter means more gravity, which means time passes slower there. So, in bubbles across the galaxy time might be passing slower than elsewhere, which would explain the observant expansion, when there might not be any.

Discrepancies in how fast time passes in different regions of the Universe could add up to billions of years, giving some places more time to expand than others. When we look at distant objects through these time-warping bubbles, it could create the illusion that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.

3. Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?

“The thesis is that we’ve been focussing too strongly on the individual nutritional components of food,” Hall told me. “We’re starting to learn that processing really matters.”

If the goal was to minimize processing, then a diet that includes butter might be healthier than one that includes margarine, and one that includes cane sugar might be healthier than one that includes zero-calorie sweeteners. The occasional whole egg, which contains more than half the daily recommended dose of cholesterol, might be preferable to packaged liquid eggs, which are protein-rich and sometimes cholesterol- and fat-free, but often contain preservatives and emulsifiers.

4. How a food crisis in India fed America's library collections

Signed into law by President Dwight D Eisenhower, PL-480 allowed countries like India to buy US grain with local currency, easing their foreign exchange burden and reducing US surpluses. India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages.

5. No more needles! Tracking blood sugar on your wrist | Waterloo News

Non-invasive sugar tracking remains the holy-grail in consumer devices like Apple Watch. It seems to be something which is always five years in the future.

“We’ve developed radar technology that can now fit inside a smart watch and sense glucose levels more accurately than ever before,” Shaker said. “Just like you use glasses to improve your vision, our technology helps for better sensing of glucose levels.”

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

A happy new year

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 03:51:06 GMT

Hello and happy new year! I am still in Matinkylä and this is still NordLetter. This is edition #41 of NordLetter, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

Work continues on 'A year of mornings' , my poetry collection. I continue working on the book. Self-publishing involves a lot of these admin types of tasks, getting the ISBNs, figuring out the description, getting things ready on KDP, creating the cover, formatting the book for the different formats, and so on and on and on.

I am mostly there. I should have more to share in the next NordLetter.

Prerna and I completed our yearly review. We started this practice last year. We mostly look back at the year that was, some of our favourite memories from the year gone by, the places we visited, the things we did.

And, simultaneously looking ahead. Setting some goals for the coming year.

It is also a time to review. I looked at some of my professional goals from last year and thought, wow was I hopeful. I had hoped to complete AZ-104 by February, 2023 for example. That, did not happen.

I think the benefit of these things comes after doing these for a few years. Then, you get the patterns.

I do recommend it. It is fun, when you find out how long a time a year can be. And how short!

We spent the new year visiting the ISKCON temple in Helsinki. This was our third time visiting the temple. We had visited once during Janmashtami and once earlier than that. The temple is open during 5-7 PM on weekdays. We left home aboard the M1 till Sörnäinen and then too the #73 bus to the temple.

It had snowed in the morning and there was snow everywhere. It was snowing as we got off the bus. We left our boots and jacket outside, which made everything super cold when we left the temple.

A lot of other people, had the same idea that we had as there were many people at the temple. The priest acknowledged the same while wishing us all a happy new year, after reading a few verses from the Bhagavad Gita.

We sat, meditated, listened and chanted for a bit. It was peaceful, being in the space. I like temples like that.

We went to Ravintola Parikar after that. It was a brisk 1.5 km walk from the temple. We were cold by the time we reached the restaurant.

We ordered momos, Kadhai paneer and veg kofta. The naan was good.

/five things to share

1. Wired - Healthier cities will require a strong dose of nature.

when we directly interact with nature, biochemical pathways are triggered in our bodies that result in significant beneficial health impacts.

Clinical experiments show that something as simple as having a vase of unscented roses on your desk, for instance, can significantly lower your blood pressure and bring about physiological and psychological calming. So too can having leafy plants in your home and office, particularly those with green and yellow foliage.

2. Chuck Nelson compares early stage Google and OpenAI search

If Open AI goes the way of Google with tons of choices and mental fatigue, it can still be successful, but will be battling to be king of the hill.

But if it can keep it simple and trustworthy , it can own the most valuable digital real estate as the sidekick with the single answer.

3. Financial Times - Are we becoming a post-literate society

A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”

Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.

4. Bad year for IT professionals

The Verge - Volkswagen had a massive data leak exposing location data

For months, the location information of around 800,000 electric Volkswagen vehicles was available online due to a data leak, according to a report from the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The leak reportedly stemmed from the software running inside Volkswagen vehicles and could've allowed a bad actor to trace a driver’s exact movements, as noted by Electrek

And, The register - Salt typhoon breach for AT&T

5. A few end of the year roundups

Wired - 24 things that made the world a better place in 2024
Few highlights for me:

Routine Childhood Vaccination Against Malaria Began
SpaceX’s Starship Completed a Stunning Vertical Landing
Los Angeles Showed the Benefits of Becoming a Sponge City
A Startup Unlocked a Way to Make Cheap Insulin

Simon's roundup of LLMs in 2024
Some highlights:

LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency The environmental impact got better The year of slop

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

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.

Writing and publishing

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 03:43:05 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #40, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

I finished editing the poetry collection I am working on this week. Next up is figuring out how to format the book for publishing. I will do paperback and ebook. This will be a collection of 50 poems. So a small paperback will be a good thing to have.

I have been struggling with so-many options that are present in all these tools. As I write this, I think the better way to do this will be to focus on one format at a time and ignore the rest.

I can for example, focus on the Kindle edition first. And once that is done, move to the print edition.

Most of this exercise is one-time work. Whatever I learn now, will be useful for later. And yes, there will be a later. Many laters in fact.

The Iso Omena Library has a VOX section in it. The VOX section is where you have things like video games, a pool table, a table tennis table. I used to think it was for youth only.

I went and asked last week, and they told me the table tennis table could be used by anyone. You do not and can not book in advance. Each person gets a 15 minute slot. There is a library employee sitting there, you tell them you want to play, they put your name in an excel, and then you play.

I have been looking for a place to play table tennis for so long. There used to be a table in our office, but they removed that table.

On Sunday, I invited my friends to play table tennis. We played a few singles. All of us won 1 game each. There were three of us. And then a kid there asked if he could play with us as well. We ended up playing five doubles games with him.

I had fun. I love table tennis. The best I was at Table tennis was during my school days. I just could not find any place to play the game after school.

I have a place now.

After the match

/five things to share

1. The California Job-Killer That Wasn’t

California increased minimum wages, and while everyone claimed that it would reduce jobs, it actually did not.

In the six months after California’s new minimum wage came into effect in April, the state’s fast-food sector actually gained jobs. If anything, it proves that the minimum wage can be raised even higher than experts previously believed without hurting employment. That should be good news. Instead, the policy has been portrayed as a catastrophic failure. That is a testament to how quickly economic misinformation spreads—and how hard it is to combat once it does.

2. Honda Nissan and Mitsubishi are merging.

I asked my friend if this means they will be bigger than Toyota.
He laughed.
"No", he said.

3. How taling over a wall changed my direction as a programmer - Andrew Wulf

Basically talking over the wall, and going to that random meeting, gave me the idea that I should stick to programming, and never looked back.

4. The paper passport is dying - Wired

It mentions India and Finland, two places where there are programs going on to reduce the need to stand in immigration lines. Coincidentally I had to wait at immigration both while I landed in Delhi and Helsinki.

Digiyatra is of course enabled for local travel in India. I love the facility. The not standing in lines is again a great feature to have.

I can not wait for this to be done soon.

5. About Temu and how it is changing tactics to deal with US regulations

In NL38 I had linked to an article about how the Chinese EV industry is winning against European counterparts. One common link between both (Temu is a Chinese company) was the fact that the Chinese companies seem to be able to iterate very quickly. Be it cars or apps.

/new posts

These are the things I've written this week.

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.

Feels like Christmas

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 03:13:22 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #39, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

It feels like Christmas!

We went to Tripla Mall today. The stated aim for the visit was shopping at SinSay. Sinsay is a brand, like HnM. You get stuff for cheap. Prerna wanted to buy some stuff for cheap.

We don't shop in Tripla often so I was a bit confused by where to go and how. Plus travelling with a pram can be a challenge in itself. You have to use lifts. There was a lot of go here, no go back, go there.

The mall was decked up in seasonal decorations. After shopping we ended at Delhi Rasoi. We were there at eight, there was no one else in the restaurant at that time. It felt like we had booked the entire hotel for ourselves. The restaurant is neat, the interiors are well done.

Per usual, I ordered a samosa. Additionally tikki-chat and their special paneer. The samosa tasted like a bastardised version of my beloved samosa. It lacked flavour. And they had put gobhi in it. The tikki-chat had plenty of flavour. The paneer was pretty great too.

One thing that surprised me back in 2021 when I had first arrived here was all gravies are served with naan and rice. You don't pay extra for that.

There is a seasonal attraction in the form of a winter themed space for children to play in. After dinner we sat for a bit there and let Savya play in the area. He was very happy. He does not usually get to play in that much free space or with other children.

All in all, a good day.

/five things to share

1. Why are laws written in an incomprehensible fashion - an MIT study

Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.

2. The decaying internet - The Verge

There’s a phenomenon that happens where I live along the rugged coastline of Northern California, when conditions are right, or, more accurately, wrong: a layer of green, foamy scum clings to the surface of the ocean so that when the waves wash your footprints away, they are replaced by a layer of vile, reeking slime dotted by writhing marine organisms. This is, at times, how the internet feels right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of passing peacefully into the vale with the ebb and flow of soothing waves, we are being actively replaced by garbage.

3. The ghost artists of Spotify - Liz Pelly

Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different.

About how Spotify is filling up mood playlists with music from Swedish studios, whom they pay less. Also read the ugly truth about spotify is finally out, which basically talks about the same thing.

4. How automakers created the rules around jaywalking

It’s strange to imagine now, but prior to the 1920s, city streets looked dramatically different than they do today. They were considered to be a public space: a place for pedestrians, pushcart vendors, horse-drawn vehicles, streetcars, and children at play.

Can you imagine such a time?

“The crucial thing it said was that pedestrians would cross only at crosswalks, and only at right angles,” Norton says. “Essentially, this is the traffic law that we’re still living with today.”

5. Parker solar probe will fly into the sun

The probe will fly into the sun then out multiple times as it tries to understand the source of solar winds. It is technically impressive as something if heated and cooled rapidly becomes brittle or might sag.

/new posts

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.

The families we make

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 03:56:45 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #38, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

It snowed today. Today, being Saturday. This is the time for the annual, winter-wonderland photos. So here it goes.

No matter how many times I see this, the first snow of the season is such a joy. It looks beautiful, everything feels pristine.

It never lasts though. But that is for another time.

Families are weird. You don't have a choice mostly, who your family is. All families have dysfunctions. And yet, you would die for your family. No matter what they do. Unless they fuck up real bad.

One aspect of leaving everything behind, and coming to live in a new place, anywhere: a different city, a different state, a different country, is that you leave your family behind as well.

We are social animals. We need people around us. People to talk to. People to have fun with. People to support us when needed.

We get to pick our families here. Sure we might not talk to them everyday. We might not live under the same roof. But we are a family.

It's a good thing.

We celebrated the first birthday of a child in our family. It was good fun. We got the cake from somewhere near Vanta. The food was good. The kids running around were too many! We had fun.

Prerna shares her birthday with this child. We got a lime cake from Prisma and cut it on the 12th night.

I made a reel and put it up on IG. It’s my early meditation on love and what it means to love her.

/five things to share

1. One good and one ok news about electric cars

Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think

Bad batteries are perhaps the major reason why I’m unsure if I should buy an electric car. If this holds true, then it would be great. These things (batteries in particular and technology in general) only improve with time after all.

The electric shock behind Europe's stuttering EV future - and how China has leapfrogged major car-exporting nations

Making a battery is very, very different to making an engine. It's chemical engineering - not mechanical engineering. The skills built up by European carmakers over decades are simply not directly transferrable. Even if Europe was the only continent in the world making cars, it would still be an almighty challenge to shift from one industrial model to a very different one, without having a rollercoaster ride along the way

An interesting look at why China is taking the lead in electric cars. This and the subsidies provided by their government.

2. A hopeful bit of news about rebuilding classrooms with lego like blocks

Classroom of Hope has partnered with Finnish company Block Solutions, which developed the modular building system for speedy construction, making it the first of its kind for disaster relief construction. A dedicated Block Solutions Indonesia factory was opened in the south of Lombok in June 2023 to reduce the costs and carbon footprint of shipping the modules from Finland.

3. About how the rich can pay for human service while the rest of us go talk to an AI agent

But no one is talking about what happens when we limit human contact to those who can afford to pay a premium. Technology does not arrive on a blank slate, but intersects with existing inequalities, and in this case it amplifies the stratification of human connection. In 2025, the affluent will get their connective labor from humans. The rest will get theirs from a machine.

Seems obvious, while reading the article, but this was a fresh look into the whole AI hoopla for me. The further alienation between the rich and the rest.

4. The age of plastics might be coming to an end

Since 2022, policymakers in the United Nations, representing over 170 countries, have been negotiating a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty addressing the full lifecycle of plastics, from design to production to disposal.

There are two factions, the first led by the Nordics who want plastic production to be reduced. The second option about recycling, etc. is preferred by oil manufacturers like UAE, etc.

5. The age of average - Alex Murell

Alex looks at how everything is becoming the same across most of our society: cars, fashion, homes, movies, art. Everything.

This bit from the fashion section:

“Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70. We are so conformist, nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff, we have been trained to be consumers and we are all consuming far too much. I’m a fashion designer and people think, what do I know? But I’m talking about all this disposable crap.”

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.

Before and after

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 03:12:16 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #37, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

Finland celebrated its 107th Independence Day on Friday.

Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!

May Finland continue to be all that it is today and more.

Winter arrived in Finland. By winter, I mean snow.

There was snow in Helsinki, a couple of weeks back when we had landed. But then it got warmer, and the snow went away. It snowed these past couple of days.

Here's a before and after of the road I walk on, on my way to the office.

Sini-tarra is a wonderful sticky clay like thing. We used it to stick all the Ikea frames on the wall.

We bought the Yllevad frames for Ikea and were considering getting some sort of adhesive hooks to hang them on. Prerna talked to our neighbour and she told us about sini-tarra. She had some, so she showed us how to use it.

I went and picked some from Suomalainen Kirjakauppa in Iso Omena. Lo-and-behold! We had our photo-wall ready!

/five things to share

1. An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.

2. I don't know how to build software and you don't either

In my experience, you only start to see long-term consequences at the three-to-five-year mark at a company. That gives you at most four different perspectives into how software development gets done at different places (for instance, you might see a doomed monolith-to-microservices refactor at one workplace, and a more successful one at the next workplace). I don’t think four data points is enough.

3. Intel removed Pat Gelsinger. Why?

If Intel is falling apart, this isn’t just a business story. The United States government has called it a national security story, too. Intel isn’t just the world’s former leading maker of computer chips; it’s one of the last companies to both design and manufacture them itself instead of outsourcing the latter part to Asia.

4. Seth - Who owns your words?

Take a moment to think about whether you mean what you just said or perhaps are simply cheering for your team. If they’re not your words, you still might be responsible for uttering them.

5. ISS will be decommissioned in 20230.

Sometime in 2030, astronauts will pack up their belongings, turn out the lights, and depart the International Space Station (ISS) for the last time. The trajectory of this grand old structure will be adjusted, putting it further into the path of Earth’s atmosphere over the next year, and then a specially designed deorbit vehicle attached to the station will perform one long reentry burn, pushing the station down into the atmosphere.

Sad. Just sad.

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.

Helsinki Christmas Market

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 03:42:56 GMT

Hello from home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #36, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

We visited the Helsinki Christmas Market on Saturday. It is the oldest outdoor Christmas market in Helsinki with thousands expected to visit.

The Christmas Market is arranged at the Senate Square, the Helsinki Cathedral and surrounding buildings serving as a majestic backdrop. Last year, we visited the market on Christmas, and everything was closed on that night. We took a picture with the Christmas tree and that was that.

We were in India when the tree was transported to the Senate Square and lit up. So, we wanted to visit as soon as we could, and it did not disappoint.

There are two yards: deli and restaurant, with a beautiful carousel at the market's heart. There are six entrances, lined with canopied shops, where artisans sell their wares. Some with candles, some selling hot chocolate and glogi, some selling roasted chestnuts!

If you're in Helsinki, be sure to drop in.

/five things to share

1. On captcha and designing trains

A fun set of videos.
Captcha is what you use to tell a website, I am not a robot.
The video goes through the history of captcha: the why of its creation. And then, how it changed over time.
The other video is about train-compartment design. Fun stuff.

2. Seth Godin - Understanding pricing

The money we exchange for a service or item isn’t based on how much it cost to make, how hard it was to produce or how much the producer likes it.

3. Training rats to drive a car

As animals – human or otherwise – navigate the unpredictability of life, anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life's rewards. In a world of immediate gratification, these rats offer insights into the neural principles guiding everyday behaviour. Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain.

4. The deterioration of Google

About how ML used by Google does not rate these independent websites highly. Nobody knows why. These websites are not getting any traffic and since they depend on this traffic to make money, they're dying.

Not good.

5. Building LLMs is not a good business

Some wonderful ideas about industry structure and what makes a business successful. Building the models has never seemed like a business with the moat. There does not seem to be anything that separates one model from the other. The techniques are well known and public. This is why OpenAI seems so focused on the product, making sure ChatGPT is everywhere.

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.

Where is home

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 18:54:04 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #35, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I am back in Finland today. It was a long nine hour flight, followed by around an hour or so waiting at immigration. I missed picking Savya's pram from the special luggage belt, and so had to go back in and get it. The cab I had booked cancelled, and so I had to book the same cab again. I am not sure if I got charged twice. I should check that out. Tomorrow, though. Today, we sleep!

I haven't had too much time to think yet. Travelling can be a fairly stressful thing, especially these long-haul flights. We worry about security checks and excess luggage, and so on and on.

A month back, when I was travelling to India, I had said I was going back home. Today, as I sit on the sofa watching United play Ipswich, I feel, I am home.

What is home?

It is a weird thing for us, who leave their families and friends to come live in different places. We live in rented places in these new towns and cities, not sure how much of this place is ours. How much of it can we make ours.

We can't let go of the home that we left behind. Nor are we completely at home in our adopted cities.

We go on holidays back home. And we return to our homes which feel more like our homes than the homes left behind.

/five things to share

1. Derek Sivers - 3 thoughts, 2 sweet pets, 1 travelog

I got an email from Derek Sivers listing out a few of their new articles. I did not even know I was subscribed to him. I appreciated that. Not being bombarded with communication.

I especially liked the ones on wealth and the pet rats.

2. How I Got My Attention Back

The internet goes off before bed. The internet doesn’t return until after lunch. That’s it. Reasonable rules. I’m too weak to handle the unreasonable.

An old Craig Mod essay that I came across this week. It was a fun read.

3. Protocols Not Platforms.

Bluesky blew up this week. Or was it last week.

Why Not Bluesky talked about a vision of a protocol based conversations. I also read Mike Masnick’s Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. Which basically talks about the technological approach to this.

4. RSS all the way

Gruber was talking about how Apple News+ is great. A little further down, he says:

I don’t look to Apple News for anything related to tech. I definitely want to do that via RSS (which for me means NetNewsWire), the web (Safari), and social media.

I was using Omnivore for a bit. But I just wasn't reading anything I sent to it. Then, they shut down Omnivore, and I removed it. Since then, I had been thinking about what should I use for reading. After reading Gruber, I downloaded Net News Wire.

RSS is everything I ever wanted. For the sites I visit frequently, the app just checks their RSS feeds and adds it to my queue. I love two features specifically:

Bonus article: Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

5. The way forward is the Mac

Apple has built two separate models for running software on our devices. In one, there’s a gradient of trustworthiness that strongly encourages users to stick to the safe, well-lit paths–but allows competitors to go their own way and users to make different decisions than Apple would prefer they make. And, yes, at the extremes, users can behave in ways that might open them up to danger, but only after many warnings. It’s a very good system. Apple built it that way because it cares about the Mac, the Mac ecosystem, and Mac users.

I mostly agree. Most people will be happy with the defaults. For those who want to do more, let them do more.

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.

Good business

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 03:24:36 GMT

Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #34, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

The next week will be my last in India. We will be back to the usual programming then. Last year in Finland around this time we had celebrated Diwali and were attending the Chath Event in Vanta. This year we have already celebrated these festivals, here in India.

I recounted our visit to the Ashokan pillar in Vaishali.

There will be quite a few things I will miss once I'm back in Finland.

Some of those things are these.

/five things to share

1. Inside the $20 million business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies

The furniture from the failed startups or the businesses downsizing, has to go somewhere. Better source does that.

“When it went bad,” Denny continued, “it went bad fast.”
Suddenly, there was a sea of used furniture with nowhere to go — and now, Denny has built a $20 million business out of it.

2. Google's AI learning companion

Takes the chatbot idea a bit further, with text boxes and other elements more suited to learning.

3. Language barriers and work-life balance — Foreign specialists weigh pros and cons of working in Finland

Both Strauss and Kocaman said they remain committed to living in Finland, drawn by its natural beauty, safety and potential for lifelong friendships. They also value the country's work-life balance.

Language remains a big barrier to overcome, but at least in the IT field it is not a huge requirement.

4. POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world

POSSE is about posting in one place and having it show up across all the social media sites. Which is why I am excited about Ghost's integration with Mastodon and hopefully Threads and Bluesky soon after.

5. The new Mac Mini is great — now do the iPhone SE

We could argue all day about the merits of iOS versus Android, but there’s one thing the Android ecosystem offers that you definitely won’t find from Apple right now: a decent midrange phone.

What is decent?

A newish chip (couple of years old or so)
A good main camera
The modern iPhone design (iPhone X design)
A good screen (OLED maybe)

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.

The human condition

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 18:41:01 GMT

Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #33, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

It has been a crazy couple of weeks. Last week I was in Bangalore. I was in Noida for a day, after which I got in a car and travelled to my village in Bihar. I was there for a week. We did Chath Puja at a river! It was great. Now I'm back, after being in the same car for the last sixteen odd hours, travelling the same thousand odd kilometres across the three expressways.

I will have more to share later, but for now, here are some pictures.

/five things to share

1. Scientists use proteins to cause cancer cells to self-destruct

Cancer is the worst. We need to have a cure for it. It will of course be better, if we can remove the elements which make it more likely. But, in case you have it, we should have a cure.

2. Suzuki and Toyota announce the e-Vitara

Sometime next year, I plan on getting a car. I so want to get an electric car, but they are costly, and I don't know what would happen after three years. That whole situation is murky at best.
The e-Vitara that Suzuki and Toyota have announced will launch in India as well as Europe. So, might be something that I take a look at.

3. Omnivore will be shutting down

I got a mail from the developer team about this. I installed Omnivore fairly recently, and was using it mostly as a read-it-later app.
I am torn about read-it-later apps though. They strip the web's character. But I was reminded on Threads, that most of the web is shit with pop-up ads, etc. So, read-it-later apps perform a necessary and useful function.
I am looking at RSS readers, nothing definitive at this point though. I do love going to these websites, refreshing them and seeing what is new. I will miss that with any app.

4. Trump will be the 47th president of the United States

And every tech CEO are desperate to want to work with him. I know why they have to do it. But just because they have to do it, does not mean I have to like it.

5. How it went

I have been reading John Gruber for a long while now. This is not his usual post.
It's great though. Go read it if you can.

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.

Diwali at home

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 02:44:01 GMT

Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #32, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

My holiday continues.

We celebrated Diwali at home this year. Last year we had celebrated Diwali in Finland. Prerna and I had invited some of our Finnish friends and hosted a Diwali party at our home.

Before that we were in Bengaluru. There are still things from the trip that I am yet to unpack. We visited Bimba. We visited Dr. Jha. It was a fun trip.

We are a bunch of South Indian food at Rameshwaram cafe and Udupi Grand.

Our return flight was from the new T2 terminal at the Bengaluru airport. It is beautiful. It gave me techno-utopian solarpunk vibes.

Today I am on the Lucknow Expressway, on my way to my hometown.

five things to share

1. Suggestions to improve your life

I came across this Reddit thread about life hacks. Some of the highlights for me:

I have a keyboard shortcut on all my devices where @@ automatically enters my email address. On iOS go to: Settings>General>Keyboard>Text Replacement
I am shocked at the number of people that don’t put their sheet sets in the matching pillow case for storage until use. It keeps it all together!
Do I need or do I want. If I need it, I get it. If I want it, I wait for a few weeks, do some research, see if I can fit it in and if I still want it a month or two later then I might go get it. Turns out my wants are not always there after a while waiting. It’s new for me but has changed my mindset drastically.

2. Democracy dies in darkness

Bezos stops Washington Post’s Kamala Harris endorsement. I have a few thoughts on this. Back in India there is no independent mainstream media left. No one can report on or investigate anything against the Prime Minister. So, welcome to democracy America!

3. AI running your computer

Google may announce an agent that uses the computer for you. Similar to the agent Rabbit has or described, which I talked about here.

4. OpenAI adds search in ChatGPT

OpenAI added search to ChatGPT Search is how most of the web gets paid. We need something new. A new way for people to get paid on the web for the things they make. I don’t know how that would work here.

5. New Macs with M4 announced

Apple announced new Macs:

On Monday, new iMacs and updated accessories.
On Tuesday, new Mac minis.
On Wednesday, new MacBook Pros.
They are all faster. The mini got the redesign. The welcome announcement was that everything starts at 16GB memory. Even the Air starts at 16GB now. Thanks Apple Intelligence I guess.

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.

Going back home

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 09:04:21 GMT

Hello from India! I am sitting in a random room in Bangalore as I type this. This is NordLetter #31, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I travelled to India on Wednesday. The flight aboard Finnair was good, the best I've had by now. I could not point to one particular reason and say this is why. It just felt better.

I wrote about my dreams for the fediverse, and also about kindles.

/five things to share

Documentation as code. Good documentation truly is critical to all orgs. Both consumer facing and internal. Good docs describe how things work and can help in troubleshooting when things go wrong.
Falling birth rate prompts Finland to suspend baby box procurements. People in developed places are having lesser kids. Places like Japan, even Finland, provide assistance for people wanting to have kids. I think all of this is a product of people generally being pessimistic about the future, and the rising costs of everything, along with the stagnancy of salaries. Coming from India, it always felt like the world will die of overpopulation one day, but then I came across Kevin's article about population decline. I was surprised. It felt counterintuitive, but the reasoning was solid.
The 2025 Ford Mustang Mach-E gets sportier and more affordable. I will get a car next year in spring season. I am tempted to get an electric car. But I am worried about the battery life, basically. How long will the car last and how will it perform as the battery starts to decline.
A history lesson from Adolf's Germany. This election will be an interesting one for the world. The US is a big player, and it feels like Trump knows what he wants to do this time around.
Apple will announce the new Macs with M4s next week. There should be new MacBook Pros, a redesigned Mac Mini, maybe even new iMacs. It will be a week of releases, maybe something new announced every day of the week? We shall see.

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.

Of shinobis and reading

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 03:18:52 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #30, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I had dinner at Shinobi on Thursday night. This is a Japanese restaurant near Kamppi in Helsinki. The restaurant has two sections:

Shokudo - the eat and drink section
Izakaya - the bar and snacks section

We had booked a table in Shokudo section. The restaurant has a unique sharing menu, wherein every item was supposed to be shared between two members.

The menu was not structured in a three-course meal fashion. Instead we started with sashimi and spicy edamame, followed by scallops and this wonderful crispy rice topped with avocado. The tofu was the best tofu I've ever had. I don't like tofu. It tastes weird, paneer is usually better. But man this tofu was so good.

For desserts, half the table got the chocolate cake, and the other half Lemon cake. I was in the lemon cake half. It was great. Everything was great here. The food, the service, the ambiance.

I will definitely visit again.

/five things to share this week

Apple announced the new iPad mini. Built for Apple Intelligence. Which, OK. I will be getting an iPad this winter. Not sure which. This is a good upgrade though. It gets the A17 Pro chip (Not M series). WiFi 6E. And support for Apple Pencil Pro.
Amazon announced new kindles. The Colorsoft has a colour screen, which means beautiful book covers on display. The Paperwhite was also updated with a larger screen and higher refresh rates. I want to get something to read on. I prefer actual physical books. But I also read technical books sometimes from O'Reilly. I need something for that. Unless Kindle allows running these apps, it has very limited usability for me at present.
Superstitious users and the FreeBSD logo. This made me chuckle.
The web I want vs the one we have and Use RSS to read stuff.
How to tax billionaires. The problem is all of us dream that one day we would be billionaires and when that day comes, we would not want to be taxed either. But that day would never come. Governments that we vote for, should have the power and money to invest in welfare.

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.

A head full of dreams

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 03:18:03 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #29, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

Autumn is in full swing here in Finland. Which means, gorgeous colours.

There was a beautiful crescent moon in the sky today. Which allowed me to flex the 5x zoom. So here you go.

This week, I finished reading Becky Chamber's 'To Be Taught If Fortunate'. I have started reading Becky's Wayfarers series. The first book in the series is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I am hoping to complete this series before I travel to India. It will be close.

This was also the first week in which I have written one post every single day. I had decided in September, that I would blog every day. I could not post something every day in the three past weeks. But I did do that this week. So, yay me!

Even without meaning to in advance, there forms a running theme to the things I think/write about. This week, it was mostly about AI.

I wrote about: a world full of agents, how the web is changing with all the training that these models do and what we want are slaves, not intelligent beings.

I also wrote about stories, learning things and leaving behind a better world.

/techStuff

Google must allow 3rd party stores on Android. Google is appealing of course. But does Google have bad lawyers? They seem to be losing all of their lawsuits. Google appeals judge’s decision forcing app store competition on Android
The Static Site Paradox Static sites load faster. They’re basically just html. Most blogs don’t need the complexity. I wish there was a faster way to do it.
The Internet Archive is under attack, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts. I am a little sad about this. Internet Archive is one of the good guys of the web, like Wikipedia in a way.
Elon Musk announce three things: a Cybercab, a robovan and dancing optimus bots. All of this is vapourware at this point. The cybercab is two-seater. OK. Goodbye my friends. The robovan looks like a train, and holds 20 people. And the dancing bots are just, wow.
Submerged is everything impressive and isolating about the Vision Pro. This piece of news is nothing special. A new video for a product which is too-expensive. But, I thought, one of the main complaints with this product is that it is isolating. If you are watching something, there is no way for anyone, your spouse, for example, to join in. But I imagined a future where the projected big screen, where you watch movies, could be a physical thing that you can anchor in the world, and it can be shared between three-four headsets. Of course not the 3500 USD headset. Prices will come down mind you at some point. And then it might make sense. It needs to get lighter too.

/reading

If You Meet ET in Space, Kill Him. This post argues that all life wants to live. If we try to kill it, they will listen to us. Which might sound counterintuitive, but it isn’t. What if the aliens in predator actually wanted to talk to us.
The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted
How to make Product give a shit about your architecture proposal
Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

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.

Where are we going

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 03:47:27 GMT

Hello from the Iso Omena Library! Iso means 'big' and Omena means 'apple' from Finnish to English. Go Duo I guess!

This is NordLetter #28, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I started reading up on Active Directory and modern authentication this week. I watched John Savill's AD Deep Dive video and now after researching a bit, started reading Mastering Active Directory - Third Edition.

There was a section on password-less authentication in there. And so, I enabled passkey support on a few additional services. I have passkeys enabled for 7 services now.

Passkeys allow for password-less logins, which are the best form of authentication available. This website has a list of all the websites that support it. Add passkeys where possible. More services should support Passkeys. Looking at you Meta. WhatsApp has passkeys support, but not Facebook or Instagram or Threads. Or, am I missing something?

An interesting look at how public transit works in Helsinki/Espoo
The orange buses run for longer routes and don’t stop at frequent locations. Blue buses have much shorter routes and more stops. I love public transport here. It is one of the main reasons I don’t own a car yet. And don’t even want to to be honest.

Becca’s video on using the iPod Nano as a camcorder.
I have written about it in the past. About using simpler devices, single purpose devices.
It’s difficult to concentrate on a phone.
This video is good. But I am not going to trade-in m iPhone video for this. But the idea of a light video device is alluring to say the least.

/techStuff

Halide makers’ review of the iPhone 16 cameras. It is a beautiful post. The pictures are beautiful. As is the review.
Federico chose the 16 plus over the pro max. I can respect this decision. The weight is a big factor. Prerna’s phone is lighter than mine. And every time I pick it, I feel like I chose wrong. Promotion is also something that I can forfeit. But not the cameras. The Pro’s cameras are the best. And I want that.
Students use Meta Smart Glasses to dox people in realtime. They used Meta Glasses to stream to Instagram. Then used face recognition and other tools running on their computer to provide a person’s data to the app. They demoed talking to strangers in public, as if they knew them. It was weird, scary even. It feels like we’re barreling toward something from where we will not be able to turn back. I don’t want to live in Night City.
I love reading these what’s on your desk things. This one featuring David Pierce was a fun read. I guess with these I’m always thinking what to do I need to do to get to this place. And this one felt reachable.
Canvas mode for chatGPT announced. This looks genuinely useful. A new UI for editing changes to the output without giving prompts. It seems especially useful for the coding scenario.
Google is testing verified checkmarks in search. This just adds a Twitter style checkmark in front of trusted business. I think things like this will get more important in the age of AI slop.

/reading

I finished reading John Scalzi's 'Starter Villain'. I started the book on 30th September and finished it on the 1st. So that tells you everything you need to know about how much I liked that book. I have started reading Becky Chamber's 'To Be Taught If Fortunate' now. For those keeping count this is Becky's third book I have started reading.

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.

Our place in the world

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 03:38:40 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #27, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I finished reading A Prayer for the Crown-Shy this week. This is a sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built which I had finished reading last week. Maybe it is a product of reading these books, but I have been thinking about nature and our role in the world. I wrote about trails and everything in nature that is born, dies.

Linkin Park are back. The album comes out on November 15th. The Emptiness Machine is out now. Go listen to it.

Barnes and Noble stores are becoming more individualistic to be profitable. This makes sense to me. The race to cheapest will always be won by the online business. Book stores and libraries are more than places you go to buy books. And so it makes sense to let each store manager customize it based on where it is located and what the patrons want to read.

How McDonald’s changes their menu items in different parts of the world. I do miss McAloo tikki a lot. Make it international.

Reading on screens is worse for comprehension.

From the conclusion:

The results of this study indicate that reading linear narrative and expository texts on a computer screen leads to poorer
reading comprehension than reading the same texts on paper. These results have several pedagogical implications. Firstly,
we should not assume that changing the presentation formatfor even short texts used in reading assessments will not have a
significantimpact on reading performance. If texts are longer than a page, scrolling and the lack of spatiotemporal markers of
the digital texts to aid memory and reading comprehension might impede reading performance. Furthermore, our results
suggest that implementing both reading assessment tasks (i.e., text reading and response tasks) in the same medium – the
computer – leads to additional cognitive costs

It does align with how I feel about reading on the phone, specifically. The amount of time I can concentrate on something is way too small. And the reason why I’m enjoying borrowing and reading books from the library so much now.

/techStuff

Meta has a major opportunity to win the AI hardware race. I don’t want Meta to win. The morality of the company is not at the right place. But I can’t deny that the low stakes nature of the Meta Ray Ban glasses make them a good product. Now that they have the initial product, they can iterate and make it better.
A new Ghost game coming out in 2025 hopefully. Sony has just released a brief trailer. It looks cool. We will know more in the coming days. Ghost of Tsushima is one of my favourite games of all time. It is beautiful and plays beautifully too. I have high hopes for this one.
Also a remaster for Horizon Zero Dawn. Not sure who was asking for this. But I guess it’s good to have a version for the current gen. Will they remaster both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West whenever PS 6 arrives?
The messy WordPress drama, explained. My view on this is regarding the human/kindness aspect of this. Do people deserve to be paid for the work they do on open source project? Can an open source project ask people to contribute hours? If you are building a paid product on top of an open source project, I think they should be allowed to.
OpenAI was a research lab — now it’s just another tech company. Most of OpenAI's founders have left the company now. It is raising a ton of new money and turning into a tech company.
Microsoft’s more secure Windows Recall feature can also be uninstalled by users. Good changes compared to when it was announced, when the DB was plain-text.

/reading

Amusing ourselves to death. I haven’t read Brave New World yet. Maybe I should. We were so focused on it being not a 1984 word, that we did notice as we slipped into the Brave New World.

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.

Spectacular Solar Punk

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 03:00:34 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #26, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I have changed how I write NordLetter. Instead of writing directly in the Ghost editor, copying things I found over the week from Obsidian. I have moved this to its own note in Obsidian. I add interesting things directly to it now. And come Sunday, I will edit this lightly and hit publish.

I wrote about typography.

I am listening to How I write podcast. It mostly features non-fiction writers. But writers are writers. And it feels good listening to writers talk about writing. Of course, it’s not actual writing.

I watched a couple of videos on video game console makers and the business of video games.

/techStuff

Review for the AirPods 4 - The Verge. They seem like a good purchase. ANC seems to work, not as good as the Pro of course.
PSA - iOS18 was released on Monday with these features. My thoughts on the release here.
I was not there when Jobs was at the helm for Apple. I have seen little videos of Jobs introducing the iPhone and the MacBook Air from the manilla envelope. Hence I would not understand , Gruber’s post about the Glowtime event. But I do understand. The iPhone line and the other products announced last week are mature product lines and there’s not much to do. It is human to expect something new but I feel like the pocketable computer is the ultimate form factor and it will remain for eternity. They just have to make it last a lifetime. Upgrade things as needed. That’s more sci-fi at this point, but one can hope.
Read/watch Austin Mann’s review of the iPhone 16 pro cameras
Gruber’s iPhone 16 review It’s long. But I enjoyed reading it.
The iPhone camera is more confusing than ever About the new photographic styles feature in iPhone. And how that might be the correct approach. Giving people control over how they want their photos to look.
Qualcomm might be acquiring Intel. Intel used to be so dominant while we were growing up. I don’t think this will go through. But the fact that this is even a possibility, just shows that one can not rest on their laurels.

/reading

I finished reading A Psalm for the Wild-Built this week. I was looking for a solarpunk novel to read and this was both highly rated and available in the library. Solarpunk when compared to cyberpunk is a hopeful version of the future, with nature at the centre. When compared against cyberpunk which is more man merged with machine. It is a beautiful book and inspired me to write about the joys of reading.
I have started reading the sequel to this, in A prayer for the Crown-Shy.

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.

iPhones and Typography

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 11:35:42 GMT

Hello from the Iso Omena library! I type this from the silent room in the library. This is NordLetter #25, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I happened upon Austin Kleon’s website somehow. I have known him from reading Steal like an author. Coincidentally I found out that he blogs often. Often daily.
This is something that I have struggled with often. And I keep coming back to it again and again. Should I write daily, or weekly? Should I post something even if I am not happy with it?
Insight is the key thing. If I am not adding anything to something, then you can go to the verge and read it there I guess. Also, quality and quantity both are important. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't it be both?
Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying I will be writing more often.
Writing is not just done for the sake of writing, for the sake of publishing. When we write, we clarify our thought. We give structure to it.

I write to think.

There's no harm in doing more of it. Right?

/techStuff

Apple announced new iPhones, Airpods, and Apple Watches on Monday. I wrote about it here
1. To summarise, the event felt twice as long as it should have been.
2. There was not actually that much new stuff announced.
3. The Airpods 4 have ANC option.
4. The Airpods 2 can work as over the counter hearing-aids.
5. The Apple Watches are larger now!
6. There is a camera control button on the iPhones now.
7. The iPhones are iterative updates but those iterations become substantive over multiple generations. I ordered the 256GB iPhone 16 Pro. I will be upgrading from the 13Pro so I am very excited.
Sony launched the PS5 Pro. At 700USD it is a costly purchased. I do not see why one would upgrade from the base PS5, but if you are getting a new PS5 today, sure a good option to have along with the slim.
Huawei announced/launched a tri-fold phone. Yes, tri-fold. It costs as much as a 16-inc Macbook Pro. I guess this is the week of costly device announcements?

/reading

I finished reading Ed Catmull's Creativity Inc this week. It is an excellent book about creativity and managing people in organisations. I wrote about the ending of the book here.

I have been interested in typography, their history and what the basic vocabulary is about these things. This week, I watched three videos which go over some of the basics:

I know a lot more than when I began. I know what serif and san-serif mean for example. If you are interested in typography and design, you can go through these videos.

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.

Certified and it feels so good

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 18:53:50 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #24, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

One of my goals for this year was to get the Azure Administrator Associate certificate. On the 3rd September, I sat for the exam and passed.

It was a tough exam. And it felt so good to have this under my belt.

This weekend, I did not have to go to the library to study. I did go to the library on Sunday, but I did not have to.

Autumn. Fallen leaves on the road.

/techStuff

John wrote a long post about the new changes Apple made to iOS to better comply with the DMA. I have thoughts. Two branches of thoughts primarily.

About default apps and browser choice screens.

About the actual changes that Apple is having to make. As an example, asking the user again and again, if they chose Safari to confirm their choice, whenever they change they get a new device, for example. I do not think it is a big deal. Sure, it's not ideal. But how often do you change your device? So that's OK.
These things are about choices, right. The user has a choice now. Sure they might pick something else. Or they might decide to stick with Safari.

The other thing is cultural. The difference between how Americans and Europeans look at their governments and their corporations. Europeans and Indians, and Japanese and the rest of the governments. Everybody is coming up with legislations. And I feel all of this could have been avoided. I feel the major thing here was people were unhappy paying the App Store commissions (taxes?).

One final thing about this is maybe Apple knew legislations will come. And they will have to run the App Store based on different geo-political boundaries. They had different rules for China. So they felt the optimal choice was to run it as they could for as long as they could and then fight all the legislation that came up around the world.

I added the wirecutter show to my podcast rotation recently. I have referred to Wirecutter for a lot of my purchases since long. The episode this week was about how and when to get your children phones. It was a fun episode. The hosts are nice.

If you're into podcasts, give them a listen.

/reading

What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future
As things get better, we start using more of it, therefore any efficiency improvements are not realised.

How Teacups and Demons Help Demystify Physics

In Literature Class , the book distilled from his Berkeley lectures, he noted—according to my translation of his Spanish text—that, “it has seemed to us that literature is a kind of combinatorial art in which fantasy, imagination, truth, lies, any postulate, any theory” are welcome. Scientists, on the other hand, he said, it has often seemed, occupied a very different world—one of certainty, confidence. “But when I read about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, I said ‘damn, they’re like us.’ ”

With time, I can see how the rigidity of science can be a problem at times. This post further feeds into that belief of mine. I am not saying fuck science and all that. Science helps us in understanding the world. But there is just so much that we don’t know.

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

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.

Glowtime

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 20:43:53 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #23, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I finally watched Maharaja this week on Netflix. I also watched 3 body problem. I had been meaning to watch both since long. Both of them did not disappoint in the least bit.

On my walk Tuesday, I spotted a buck on my trail.

Also, a beautiful sunset over the beach.

/techStuff

Apple will be holding the iPhone event on September 9. Every year it feels like you already know what to expect in the event. Everything is already leaked. There are more interesting things in the next year event perhaps (hello iPhone 17 slim).

But still Apple manages to surprise in a way or two.

This year's focus would be on the new Apple Intelligence Siri. They will also be adding a Capture button on the side of the phone. As if we needed any more proof that the phones we carry in our pockets are more cameras than phones!

It would be fun if they announce a new iPad mini. But don't think they will.

There will be the new watches and maybe new AirPods.

Hello, you’re here because you compared AI image editing to Photoshop

I talked about the what is a photo apocalypse last time around. This post talks about the same stuff.

/reading

Hope and disparity: a colorful new way to visualize air quality around the world

The unfortunate reality is that 99 percent of the world’s population live in places with air quality that’s worse than the World Health Organization’s guideline for PM2.5. Cities in low and middle-income countries in parts of South Asia and Africa are particularly hard-hit, the Air Quality Stripes researchers find. Air quality in Delhi, India, and Abuja, Nigeria, has climbed toward “extremely poor” and “very poor,” respectively, since the 1970s, for example

Just go and look at New Delhi's graph. It's just so sad.

And then read: Can Trees Heal You?

Nature shouldn’t be a privilege, it should be accessible to everyone.

So many things that the western world takes for granted are a dream for the developing world.

Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

It is important to scope our work properly. Sometimes it's better to cut things to make things better.

A Hermit’s Reality

A beautiful piece on a hermit’s life.

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.

Ready or Not

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 17:02:16 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #22, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I had scheduled an exam on 27th, but caught cold on Friday so had to postpone the exam.

I had gone out for a walk on Wednesday, and it was windy. You could feel it in the way the water sounded. Angry. I stopped and clicked a few pictures.

On Thursday we had clear skies. Oh how I love the sky here. You don't get this often in Delhi. Maybe one day out of the blue you would get clear skies. But not often. Often it's a grey mess.

/techStuff

The first reviews for the Pixel 9 phones are out. They all say the same thing: these are great phones, with polished hardware, but the AI sprinkling is hit and miss.

This leads me into talking about the whole what is a photo apocalypse. The Pixel phones have photo-altering tools in the camera app. Photoshop has existed for a while now. You could do things like putting things in a picture, changing the colour of the sky, removing people from the background, etc. earlier as well. The difference is that it is way more accessible now. Anyone can do it, quickly too. And that causes a problem.

You can't trust a photo.

You can't be sure that the thing you're looking at, did it happen.

Some of it happens now as well. You can't trust stuff you see on social for example. But the question is about a threshold. I feel like a threshold would get breached soon. First with this release of the Pixel phones. But they don't sell in such large numbers. Soon after, in September, Apple will release the latest iPhones. They will be coming with similar Apple Intelligence features.

I guess the thing that I am saying is, just because we can do something, does not mean we should.

Apple Podcasts now has a web app

You can now use this to listen to Podcasts on the Boox Palma. Which I was tempted to get earlier in the summer. But did not.

Integration and Android

A slightly longer read this. But a good read nonetheless around Google's need for integration.

Your new AI Friend is almost ready to meet you

This device is an orb like thing with a speaker you put around your neck or tie it to your hand. It processes things it hears, and then sends texts to you. This is one of those things which feel like they are tailor-made for an LLM.

The only thing it has to do is be nice to you. Right?

It feels comparatively low stakes. It is not telling you to replace your friends. It is not a life partner. It will not make you productive. Just an extra thing.

It might be good. If the platforms some day decide to add it, maybe as part of the existing health capabilities. Something affirming sent to you once a day. It might be good.

/reading

Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist

This physicist happens to be an Indian. And so the interplay between the philosophies is something I found interesting.

This is one of my beliefs. To create something great, you do have to get thoughts from different areas of life. Mix and mash them. And voila.

On Writing Well | nikhil.bafna

Some good points there. The importance of writing things in a simpler way. The importance of adding structure to things.

Bug squash: An underrated interview question – Jake Zimmerman

I don't like how interviews are conducted usually. This seems like a good way to do things in a particular niche at least.

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.

India Day

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 18:02:07 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #21, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

We celebrated the 8th India Day in Helsinki this Sunday. The event was hosted in Meripuisto this year. I took the metro from home till Kampi, and then #20 to Meripuisto park. I could see the steel grids set around the venue as soon as I got down. I could hear the music as well.

The performer's stage was set on one side of the park with the sponsor tents set a little distance further, followed by food stalls. It was a beautiful sunny day to be out and about.

I had litti-chokha from the BJPRF stand and a vada pav from elsewhere.

I preferred the arrangement from last year, when it was possible to take something to eat and still be able to look at the stage and enjoy the performance. Last year's venue was a bit of a square, compared to this year where it felt like a long rectangle. With all the food stalls stretched out toward the end.

/techStuff

Apple is finally going to open up iPhone tap-to-pay
Not sure how useful this will be. From a user perspective. All the banks would want me to use their app. Sure. But I want to use a single app to do the payment.

/reading

The Days Are Long but the Years Are Short

What stops us from doing new things? There seems to be a million reasons and two opposing forces keeping us in inaction: fear and vanity.
When you do the thing, most likely you’ll have to kill it. New things tend to not work, or you have to change them drastically.

Mediocrity and perfectionism
It is important to ship. Not ship junk. But ship things which are good enough.

Repair and Remain

Repair and remain sounds simple because it is. But simple is not the same as easy.

We all need someone to talk to. We all need to be patient. New isn’t always better. It is easy to say I quit, I’m done. And difficult to stay and fix things - both small and large. But most worthwhile things in life are difficult.

How to avoid losing items? Holding pens. | Alex W.'s Blog
A place in your home to place items when your attention is being called to something else.

The Egg
Started (and finished) reading And Weir's Project Hail Mary this week. Read the author jacket and found out that Mr Weir was a software developer for 20 years, then became a writer.

I had decided then that I would google him. I did google him a day later. Upon reading, found out that he had written and published a few short story's on his website, the most famous of them being - the egg. Read it. You should read it too.

/watching

Excellent video on buying vs renting by Ramit.
For me, buying a house is not a a financial decision. Whenever I buy a house, it will be because I want to. Of course, affordability is a thing. But it will be an emotional decision. Not for investment.

About how sci-fi has changed over the years. Very interesting. I have enjoyed sci-fi the most. From Asimov to Andy Weir recently.

I pay for the premium subscription for Duolingo. But this is such an interesting view. The modern capitalist notion of growth at all costs has this issue of there being a cap to the number of humans we have on the planet. You can not grow infinitely. There will come a point where growth stops. It feels like all the investors have short term views.

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.

Missing home

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 19:58:16 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #20, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

Prerna went home today.

Home. A funny word that. Home.

What is home? Can there be different homes?

I still think of India, Noida as home. This? Here? This is also home. I guess that is one of the tragedies of being an expat.

Can home be a person? I think so.

What is home?

It's where you feel safe. Where you can be yourself. Where you don't have to pretend. Where you feel loved. Where you can just be.

Prerna is my home.

And now, I don't have that to come back to after work.

/techStuff

Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case

A US judge ruled that Google is a monopoly in search and ads. This feels like it was a long time coming. It is also about defaults and how most of us don't change them. It is true that Google is the best at search. It is also true that it pays other companies lots of money to be the default option.

It is yet to be decided what Google will need to do or forced to do.

Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line.

I had bought a Chromecast. It was cheap. It brought Android TV to my dumb TV. It was just perfect. End of an era. Now most TVs are smart. So a cheap plug is not needed any more.

Existential thoughts about Apple’s reliance on Services revenue

/reading

A Swiss Town Banned Billboards. Zurich, Bern May Soon Follow

Advertising is intended to create needs that people did not know they had before.

“No Salt”

About loss.

How not to say the wrong thing
A similar concept to how I think about the world in general. In circle. Who are the people I care about the most? And then it expands from there. Friends, family, colleagues. In circles expanding from myself. To whom and in what order will I give my mind-space and time to.
Everybody can text you. It’s up to you to decide who are you giving the permission to.
This expands it or talks about it in the context of being in a hospital.

Until next week.

A day trip to Tampere

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 21:08:14 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #19, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

If you enjoyed this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

This was a busy week. We were invited to four of our friends' houses on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. So of course, on Saturday we visited Tampere. This is also Prerna's last week in Finland before her trip to India. I am a little sad and a little excited, both at the same time. Excited for Savya to meet his grandparents. And sad to be away from the both of them.

/tampere

There are many inter-city trains to Tampere. We took IC-43 from Helsinki Central to Tampere. There were 2 stops on the way. One in Pasila and the other a little further along in Tikkurila. We started at 09:19 and had reached Tampere by 10:58.

The train ride was very comfortable and a joy. We had booked a private cabin which was basically two window seats and a partition which reduced the noise to a bare minimum.

Tampere is the second oldest town in Finland. It does not have an 'old __town ' though. What it is famous for is the observation tower in Sarkanniemi. And so that's where we were headed as soon as we had left the train station.

/to Näsinneula

We took the scenic route as it took us across the Tammerkoski rapids and the Central Square.

The Tammerkoski waterfall in the backgroundThe Central Square

We stopped at the Alexander Church. There is a beautiful spring/sculpture at the same place. I saw an old couple sitting there and I told Prerna this is what I want in life. And she said, no I don't want to use a cane to walk.

We do look at life differently, she and I.

Just as we crossed the road we came across a beautiful black building, with a striking rounded design.

Prerna asked me what this was. I looked at the board. This was a library. The central library in Tampere, like Oodi in Helsinki. Man do the Finns know how to build libraries. Beautiful inviting spaces.

The library's backyard. That's a chessboard etched there.

As we continued toward Sakranniemi, Prerna found someone to talk to.

And I found the Näsikallio Water Fountain.

A little further up, and we saw it. The observation tower.

Näsinneula/Särkänniemi

Sakranniemi is an amusement park with rides, plus an aquarium and a planetarium. We were here for the observation tower though. I took our tickets and we were in.

Näsinneula is the tallest free-standing structure in Finland and at present the tallest observation tower in the Nordics. There is a revolving restaurant at 124 metres.

We took the elevator to the top (120 metres). We could feel the pressure difference as we were going up. The elevator is fast and there's music and lights while you go up.

The tower provides an excellent bird's eye view of Tampere.

The ticket includes juice/coffee/tea at the Neula Sky Cafe. We took a croissant and a pastry additionally.

It started raining as we got down from the tower. We were stuck in the building for a bit and then eventually decided to buy 'rain coats '.

The city looked beautiful drenched in rain. I guess rain does do that. It freshens everything up a bit.

We took a break and had lunch.

Tampere Cathedral

The cathedral is a Lutheran church, built with granite and has a red roof. It was built between 1902 and 1907. There was organ music playing when we entered the church. It crescendoed while we were sitting in the church. There are beautiful frescoes painted by Hugo Simberg, including a winged serpent on a red background at the highest point in the church. This was all the rage when it was first painted, with people considering it a symbol of sin.

I did not feel it was particularly sinful. But that's just me. A century later.

Lenin museum

For the final stopover on the trip Prerna wanted to see a museum. The Lenin museum was the only one open till six (the others closed at five, so plan in advance!).

I did not have too many hopes but it surprised me. We spent the next hour at the museum. Just reading and looking at things. The museum is not as much about Lenin as it is about Finland and Russia's shared histories. It was compelling.

Moro Sky Bar/Torni

Moro Sky Bar is an astonishing sky bar with a tremendous view over the city of Tampere. The Sky Bar is located in the 25th floor of Solo Sokos Hotel Torni. We ordered a long drink and a mojito along with some French toast with berries and ice cream. It was great.

We walked a lot in Tampere. Around 12 kms per my watch. You could buy a day ticket and use the trams or buses. We decided to walk.

I loved the colour of the trams. They seemed better than the green we have in Helsinki. I did not like the colour of the buses. It seemed an old design. I much prefer how buses look here in Helsinki.

That's it. Those are my two tid-bits from the trip.

/techStuff

Instagram starts letting people create AI versions of themselves

A weird bit of news. Turns out IG was doing celebrity AI bots earlier.

How would this be useful? I don't know.

Is it weird and a bit creepy? Yes to both.

The Apple Watch has reached the limits of its potential
The hope for an apple ring. My view about this has changed from an Apple ring to replace the watch, to Apple Watch + Ring. Remove the Apple Watch at night sort of thing. Or wear Apple Watch at watch appropriate times. Going to office. Doing a workout and so on.

The consequences of generative AI for online knowledge communities - Scientific Reports
Stack overflow traffic decreased. Younger devs who were asking basic questions stopped coming. Complex questions were asked now. Reddit dev communities did not see any impact.

/reading

The Universal Foundations for a Good Life - Scott H Young

This is the thing about good ideas - they seem simple and obvious. And yet, no one has written it down in the same way. That's how I felt while I was reading this.

If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need To Prioritize Dignity
All of these things are there when walking here in Finland. 🙂

Publishing your work increases your luck

Motion begets motion, progress begets progress. Pick the smallest thing you can do and get started.
Most of us really enjoy the building aspect but start to get a little shy when it comes to telling people about the stuff we’ve built.

And that is all we have for this week. See you next time.

Nature trails - Nuuksio and Pihlajasaari

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 21:16:24 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #18, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

/Nuuksio National Park

There are 41 national parks in Finland. When I had first come here back in 2021, I had made a list of them, and decided this would be my bucket list. The places I wanted to visit in Finland. All of them.

I visited Sipoonkorpi in June, 2021.

I visited Nuuksio this past Saturday (July, 2024).

I do hope the remaining thirty nine come at a faster pace. 😆

We were looking for a beginner friendly trail in Nuuksio. The following three seemed promising enough:

Punarinnankierros Trail, 2.7 km circle trail
Punarinnankierros Trail, 2 km circle trail
Maahisenkierros Trail, 2km circle trail

Just a note, but the directions page goes in great detail over the bus routes one can take. We decided eventually to go to Haltia which also has the Finnish Nature Centre. We took 530 from home and then 245A from Espoo centre. It took around 50 minutes to get there.

The sparkling Lake Pitkäjärvi comes up on the left as the bus rolls through the beautiful scenery. Then hides behind the tree cover, before finally showing up again next to the Finnish Nature Centre, Haltia. Which is also where the bus stops, just before the nature centre, near the parking areas.

The Nature Centre has a shop, an exhibition and some restaurants. We had gone there a bit late, so the only place we could see was the shop.

We left the centre, and made our way across the road to the start of the trail. The Maahisenkierros trail (marked in blue) is a circular 2km trail. The trail is wheelchair/pram friendly. If we had known that in advance, we would have carried Savya in the pram. There is also the 1.4 km Paivattarenpolku trail (marked in pink) which starts at the parking.

What we ended up doing was combining the two. We started in the middle of the pink trail. It went and merged with the blue trail. We continued and completed the blue trail and then after returning, as it merged back with the pink trail we continued on that.

Anyway, here's some pictures from the trail. Nuuksio was beautiful. The air is different in places like these. It refreshes the mind, the body and the soul. The Finns really do love nature. The parks are well preserved and everything is clean and well-kept.

/Pihlajasaari Island

On Sunday, post lunch we decided on an impromptu trip to Pihlajasaari island. We took the M1 to Ruoholahti and then the water bus to the island. The water bus takes around 15 mins to get to the island.

Pihlajasaari is a former villa island. It has beaches, villas, rocks, trees and a sandy trail that goes through it all. There are plenty of benches around the island, where one could sit and eat. We were hungry when we got there, so ate at the first bench we could find. Which was not a great decision in hindsight. There are just so many benches at so many beautiful locations.

We walked around the island and eventually settled at the beach. Lying down in the sand for a good hour and a half. Finally, taking the last water bus off the island.

/techStuff

Apple is rumoured to be working on a foldable. It is supposed to be a flip phone. What I want is something that transforms into a mini iPad. That would be a great device to read on.

MKBHD reviewed the Galaxy ring. I was minded to like it. But as Marques said, for a lot of exercises you might have to remove the ring. And then what’s the purpose.

Open AI announced its Google competitor. Search as we know it might be ending, because the internet is filled with SEO crap.

Also, Meta announced the release of its latest model. All these competing models seem similar in functionality and there is nothing unique. So it makes sense to open source it I guess.

/reading

3 Tactics to Beat Procrastination Without Overhauling Your Life - Sunsama Blog

Break a large task into smaller chunks. Or when you don’t feel like doing something, tell yourself I will do it for 5 minutes.
Align the task with your long term goal.
Practice good-procrastination. Basically prioritise stuff. What is important. You don’t have to tackle every small task. Create time blocks to take care of things that matter (training/spending time with family, etc.)

Timeshielding: How to Do the Things you Actually Want to Do
Interesting read. The idea is be a little fluid with how you manage team. Make space for things that matter: creativity, rest, sleep, attention.

A few interesting reads from Seth.

This last one talks to the importance of systems. Having systems makes it easier to do things without thinking too much about it. Helps to beat procrastination.

Until next week.

Celebrating Annaprashan

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 18:19:41 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #17, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

We celebrated Savya's Annaprashan today. This celebrates the first meal other than mother's milk that a child has. After this day, Savya can start eating. Usually this happens after six months.

I put a single grain of rice in his mouth. He spat it out. 😄

We had invited a few of our friends. It was the most number of people we had hosted till now. The preparations had started on Saturday in earnest. However, we had been shopping, cleaning since earlier.

From early morning, we had begun cooking. Aloo sabzi + Seeta fal sabzi + Poori for the main course. And vada pav for the starters. Our friends had helped us out and prepared Dahi Vada and Pulao.

The food was delicious. We had a great time.

We are getting better at hosting. When you start, and even now, to be honest, we are just about making it. We had asked for people to arrive at 1. I finished with the vadas by 12:30. There are nerves. How will things work out? How will we host 20 odd people in our small apartment? Where will they sit? Will the food be good?

Eventually, and every time, it does sort itself out.

We have a great time. We sit, eat and drink with our friends. While preparing, I always feel why are we doing this. After everyone has left we sit down on the sofa and think, let's do this again.

On Friday, as I logged into work, I was bombarded with messages around laptops rebooting and going into BSOD.

Major Windows BSOD issue hits banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters

Crowdstrike had pushed a patch which messed up Windows systems worldwide. More than half of my team could not work because of this. Eventually we got workarounds and were able to get them working. But what a mess. I do not remember anything similar happening over the last decade.

And the funny thing is, Crowdstrike caused it, but it was reported as a Microsoft issue in almost all the reports.

Microsoft did eventually release a recovery tool.

/techStuff

Meta won’t release its multimodal Llama AI model in the EU

Sad stuff. First Apple not releasing its Apple Intelligence features. Now Meta piling on.

/reading

I started reading this because I wanted to get free wifi on the plane. Technically you can using this method, but, you shouldn't.

Here’s the basic idea: suppose that I logged into my airmiles account and updated my name. If you were also logged in to my account then you could read my new name, from the ground. You could update it again, and I could read your new value. If we kept doing this then the name field of my airmiles account could serve as a tunnel through the airplane’s wi-fi firewall to the real world.

This is a fun read, if you enjoy reading these sorts of things.

Big, beautiful goals – but can’t be bothered? 11 great productivity tips for lazy people

Some things I use already. Like putting everything you need to do or remember in a list. That takes 2 forms.

Things that I need to do everyday are added as checkboxes in my obsidian template.
At work I have a to do template. Nothing remains in my outlook or teams conversation. Everything goes in the list.
For the things like book recommendations, I use reminders. For other things (shared items with Prerna) apple notes.
It is a slightly fractured system, but it works for me.
Putting an elastic band around your phone sounds fun. Also the idea about saying I get to instead of I have to.

Until next week.

Visit Porvoo

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 16:03:26 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #15, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

Porvoo is a quaint little town to the east of Helsinki. It is one of the oldest cities in Finland. We planned a day trip to Porvoo this Saturday. It was supposed to rain till 11. Then cloudy till 2. Then sunny afterward.

We took the metro to Kamppi and then the M7. The M7 was the fastest bus to get to Porvoo. We started from Kamppi at 2:05 and were in Porvoo at 2:55.

linja-autoasema - Platform area

While crossing the Porvoonjoki to get to the bus stop, we had seen both the many restaurants to our right and old town to the left. Even before we had gotten down, our minds were made up.

Old town is a charming little place with cobbled streets and quaint buildings, most painted in beautiful colours. There are quirky sign posts and beautiful flowers in front of almost every eatery and shop. We roamed around the streets at a casual pace, taking in the sights.

Further up was the old bridge (vanha silta). It is a wooden bridge which goes from the old town to the new town 😄.

We were slowly making our way to the picture point opposite the red wooden houses. This is one of the most photographed places in Finland.

This concluded our trip for the day 😄.

Not really.

Next up was walking at one of the cafe's on the river's shore. There was a pedestrian bridge further up ahead. So we walked.

We thought Thai food would be awesome and the restaurant was well-rated as well. And so we walked along the harbour, past quite a few restaurants on our way to this Thai restaurant. Which was a let down. I wanted to sit on the side of the river, eating something, drinking a long drink. This restaurant did not have any place to sit. So we walked back to Cafe Kiva.

We sat there for an hour or so. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing. The food was great. We had ordered Kiva fries and Kiva wings. Both were spicy and the mayo was flavourful.

It was around 6:30 when we left Kiva. We were scheduled to return on the 8:05 bus so we proceeded for another jaunt across old town. This time through a different street.

Prerna stopped at Nelly's art and cafe. We needed a fridge magnet after all. The owner told us that all the art is hand-crafted by around 50 local women.

This time we walked past the old bridge and found another small bridge. We asked a passing Finn to take a few pictures. Which was perhaps super uncomfortable for her. But the result was quite good.

By then it had gotten late and the Iso Linnamäki Castle Hill seemed on too steep a hill! So we went back to bus stop. Took the M7 back to Kamppi and then the metro back home. The Matinkyla metro station on the Iso Omena side was under renovation so we had to walk a bit extra.

/reading

Khan Academy - Why We’re Deeply Invested in Making AI Better at Math Tutoring (and What We’ve Been Up to Lately)
This is an interesting application of AI in learning and teaching. Something that seems ethical and better for the students. And teachers. I mean that's the pitch right? Everyone is overworked and these AI agents will be able to help. Take care of the mundane stuff. But if mundane stuff is all you do, then, good luck!

This about the world’s first public housing.

I finished reading Little Brother this week. It is an excellent piece of fiction. It shows how fragile society is, and how it can change so quickly. It teaches about some technical stuff too, but in an easy to understand fun way. These things are fun. So so fun.

In sci-fi media, there are things that sometimes need to happen to move the plot. How those things happen are not really explained. They might be presented as fact. That this thing that is magic, well it just happens here.

One of those things that I used to keep imagining is local grids. Like a black box which has some sort of fusion energy. Which is clean. And free.

Well, that might not just be sci-fi. Batteries are getting cheaper. The dream of local grids might just be around the corner.

Batteries: how cheap can they get?

The other aspect of this that I thought of when thinking of these local micro grids: nuclear fusion. It always seems like it is 20 years away.

Will We Ever Get Fusion Power? sums up everything about fusion succinctly.

The paradox of lessonsThe people most likely to sign up for coaching or additional learning are the folks who are already good at their craft. “I’m terrible at this,” can lead to, “and I don&#821…Seth's Blog

When it’s possible to get better, embracing mediocrity isn’t a useful strategy.

Until next week.

We won!

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 15:03:07 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #14, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

India won the World Cup yesterday. For some reason, I was not that much into this edition. I started watching matches from the semi-final onward. For Saturday, in preparation for the match we made some samosa and samosa chat. Thankfully, India won so we could savour it as well.

/techStuff

EU's competition chief is not happy with Apple's decision to skip Apple Intelligence features in EU. I wrote a bit about it the last time around. It was expected. But well, what can you do.

The reviews for the new arm powered Surface laptop came out. It seems they are great machines which is good news for everyone. Let's get more games on Arm!

/reading

I started this week reading about the manager’s unbearable lack of endorphins. This is something that I feel too, with my transition to managing a team. Managing people seldom gives any satisfaction. Nothing close to feeling like I’ve accomplished something. The joy that I get out of fixing a bug, finding root cause or writing a script. The feeling of a day spent well.

Next up, something about Local, first, forever. Oh how I would love it if all apps were like that. If I owned the data. I could take it wherever I wanted. Obsidian works like that. That’s why even with improvements to Apple Notes, I continue to do most of my writing in Obsidian.

David Pierce wrote about the Boox Palma. Which I am very tempted to get. I love the idea of having different devices for different things. Of knowing what you were doing based on what device you picked. No social on phones, for example. Anyway, I read a few negative reviews about the Palma. Mostly related to the screen not working. Maybe if someone else created this device, a Kindle mini or a Nook pocket or something. Craig Mod wrote about this back in Roden #90 as well.

Inside Netflix’s bet on advanced video encoding and a fun read on the history of markdown.

Finally, the case for not sanitising fairytales. Old fairy tales were truer to life. Good and bad things happened to people. But ultimately good winning over bad. That has changed now. And not for the better.

Until next week.

Trek to Tallinn

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 21:37:53 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #13, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

There’s a calm, in sitting still, doing nothing. Seeing, but not saying anything. About it. Or anything else.

There’s a bench on a little hill overlooking the sea. We sat on that bench today. Not talking. Watching the birds diving into the water. The four ducks traversing on the water, in perfect symphony.

It was windy even before the ship set sail. On one side of the sun-deck on the top floor of the cruise, the sun shone bright. Before the ship set sail, it felt too warm. On the other side, there were benches in the shade. It felt like it was a good seat to get. So we did, while we waited for our friends to join us.

We were aboard the M/s Finlandia of the Eckero line. We were going to Tallinn to visit Old town and get a fridge magnet. Tallinn is a cruise ride away from Helsinki. We would catch the 9AM cruise to Tallinn and be back on the 6:30 PM one from Tallinn. We left home around 7:30 to get to Kamppi and then the #7 tram to West Harbour Terminal T2.

It was a warm sunny morning. Like mornings here are in summer. The sun had been out since 4. And hence the warmth we felt on the top of the ship. At 9 the ship set sail. And then it got cold!

We walked some 500 meters or so to reach old town. It felt like the whole of Tallinn port was being built up with new building under construction almost everywhere. We started seeing the red roofs of old town as we got closer.

Tallinn feels like walking inside a museum. Old buildings, with beautiful doors, wonderfully preserved in time. Old town is beautiful, clean. The roads are paved in stone, which makes it difficult to walk on, but would have been wonderful for the horse-drawn carriages back in the day! There were sidewalks which were better for pushing the baby's pram on.

We walked to the town square, stopping at a couple of churches on the way.

We ate lunch at Chakra, a restaurant that came well-reviewed and suggested by a friend who had been here earlier. It did not disappoint. Post lunch, we went back to Old town. This time toward the Kohtuotsa viewing platform. The views from the top of the red roofs and the ocean and the port in the distance was amazing.

We were nearing the end of the time we had for the trip. And so we walked back down through the streets of the old town. And in case you were wondering still, we did get that fridge magnet. Three of them in fact!

/techStuff

EU Users Won’t Get Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, or the New SharePlay Screen Sharing Features This Year, Thanks to the DMALink to: https://www.ft.com/content/360751cb-7a22-48e0-9b00-6a30ff41dcfeDaring Fireball

Makes some sense, given that DMA means Apple is a gate-keeper and has to think about how it brings new services. iPhone mirroring on the Mac can also be about Apple keeping Android out, in a way.

How Apple usually develops these features is like this:

They create an internal API which only their internal app or setting can use it.
They fix bugs and streamline the API.
They create a public API which third parties can use.

An example of this is the new AirPods-like pairing experience for third parties.

Of course, there are people who think Apple is being spiteful. To me, it feels like something they have to do.

/reading

A small post about what programming is and how it evolves into software engineering.

research!rsc: What is Software Engineering? (Go & Versioning, Part 9)Russ Cox

Few posts around how teams can be organised in the distributed/hybrid workplace that we have today. Wondering if this makes sense in a services company. A personal user manual is where each member of the team can tell about a few things that are personal to them. What makes them tick. What makes them angry. How to give feedback, etc.

What is a Personal User Manual?Personal User Manuals can help distributed teams gel and build trust. Here’s how to make one, including a free template to get you started.Future ForumAnna Brown

How to Rands is a practical example of a Personal User Manual.

How to RandsHi, welcome to the team. I’m so glad you are here at $COMPANY. It’s going to take a solid quarter to figure this place out. I understand the importance of first impressions, and I know you want to get a check in the win column, but this is a complex place full of equally complex humans. Take your tRands in ReposeName *What are team-level agreements?Team-level agreements establish expectations and norms for how teams work together. Download our free template to get started.Future ForumHelen Kupp

I also started reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother this week. I am enjoying it so far.

Until next week.

Yoga on Father's Day

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Yoga on Father's Day

Hello from the Senate Square in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #12, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

The International Day of Yoga is celebrated on 21st June every year. This year marks or will mark the 10th edition of this celebration. The Indian Embassy in Finland celebrated the same at Senate Square this year.

We had to get up a bit earlier, at six, on a Sunday! We left home and took a bus to Kamppi. We got down at Ruoholahti and took the #7 tram to Senate Square. We registered ourselves and got the yoga day t-shirt. Then moved to a good spot and spread the mat on the ground.

The event started at 8:50 with a short address by the Ambassador of India to Finland. At 9:00 the instructors started us with a breathing exercise. The whole session lasted for around an hour, where we did a bit of everything including surya namaskar, downward dog, some stability asanas and some more breathing exercises.

We ended the session with paying gratitude to ourselves, the Mother Earth and to each other.

Yoga allows you to be at one with your body. You recognise how it feels. You feel every stretch. You notice every breath.

For this one hour here, I felt all of that.

/techStuff

WWDC happened this Monday. Apple announced a bunch of stuff. Here's some of the things that I found interesting.

You can arrange icons on your home screens in iOS/iPadOS.
Apple Passwords app for all platforms (including Windows).
Two fun demos: the Maths Notes one and the MacOS phone-mirroring one. The phone mirroring thing will be useful. There are many times when I am sitting with my Mac and I don't have the phone nearby. Being able to just run the phone from the Mac will be useful.
Apple Intelligence/Smarter Siri: will have the context and the data to actually be useful. But it will be limited on the phone side at least to iPhone 15 Pro or higher. There are other generative AI features coming (custom emoji, autocomplete, etc.) but none of that is exciting to me.
Mail app is getting updated. I wish I could add the smart filters I have on the Mac to the iPhone. But it will have filters similar to what Gmail has. Not sure if it will be any useful.

/reading

Being kind is an important quality, perhaps the greatest one. We should all strive to be a little kinder. The world would be a better place for it. This article talks about being kinder in the context of a meeting. But whatever. Be kind.

Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest. | Jorge Galindo’s blogIn business, being a nice person in the room can be more impactful than being the smartest. I share my insights on empathy, respect, and active listening as key skills for successful meetings and creating a positive team environment.JorgeGalindo

This Sunday was also Father's Day.

I became a father this year. There are things you understand only after you became a parent. Everything before you are a parent, is just stuff people say. It's stuff that's on paper. Theoretical.

There are so many things I understand now. About my father. And how a father feels, in general. And so, here's to my father. Whoever I am today, is mostly because of you. I love you.

Until next week.

Postcard from Oitta

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 20:14:27 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #11, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

We visited Oitta beach this Saturday. BJPRF had organised a picnic at the beach.

Oitta beach is located on the shores of Lake Bodom. From Matinkylä we took the 520 till Lommila and then 246 to Oitta. It was a short 5 min walk from the bus stop to the beach.

Here's the parking space that greets you on the way.

Parking space

And the angry bird park, also on the way.

And finally, the beach.

Beach+Swimming pools

The beach is suitable for families, as the water deepens gradually. There were separate pools with varying depths created by the walkway.

The water like any where else in Finland was clean and pristine.

We had delicious Indian Food (kachori + aloo sabzi + dal makhani + pulao + gulab jamun).

We played games.

And we got our pictures clicked.

There is also a manor/barn there, which is now a recreation centre. But we did not use it. It looked closed. Maybe because of the weather as it was supposed to be a rainy weekend. And it was in spots! But mostly it was sunny.

To be fair, I had not expected much out of this trip. But Oitta is a beautiful place. The beach is clean and beautiful and there is plenty to do. It was a bit nippy so we did not swim. Next time we will.

/techStuff

Most of this week feels like a prelude to WWDC, which is on June 10th. So I guess we will have more to discuss about then.

/reading + thinking

The Intellectual Obesity CrisisInformation addiction is rotting our brainsThe PrismGurwinder

We must realise what we are consuming. Once we do, we ought to strive to feed our brains better stuff.

Exceed or maintain?In just about every group, people decide in advance how they’ll show up when it comes to learning, to winning and to responding to opportunities. They’re wearing a hat with a label, and…Seth's Blog

Especially love the four quadrant graph (Is it a graph? Image?) at the end.

The T-Shaped EngineerThe choice between being a specialist or a generalist is debated by many engineers. Nowadays, the industry may need something in between. Generalist As the…Software Engineer

Not a new article or topic. There was a time in the beginning of my career when I struggled with this a bit. I did not want to be a generalist. I wanted to dig deep into the OS, how processes behaved and so on. Eventually, came around to looking at myself as being a generalist. Getting better understanding of systems.

How Online Privacy Is Like Fishing

Talks about the shifting baselines in our expectations from online services. We owned our data. And now with online everywhere services, we do not own anything. Companies control everything. And they have to see what we are doing, to ensure we are not doing anything sinister.
There needs to be a balance. A balance where companies can make money and people's privacy is respected.

We finally got ourselves carpet for our balcony from K-Rauta. We set everything up and it feels as if we have moved to a bigger house.

Balcony

Until next week.

A trip to IKEA

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 17:00:56 GMT

Hello from the Iso Omena Library! This is the tenth edition of NordLetter, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

After a gap of nearly three weeks, I'm back in the library. And it feels so good to be back. For a couple weeks I was sick, and then it took another week to sort of get back to it. Anyway.

We visited IKEA this Saturday. We had planned on going to Central Park this week, but the little one needed a few things. And so we changed our plans.

Visiting IKEA can be like a pilgrimage in itself. You come, you roam around. You don't have to buy anything. But you do. It might not be what you came to buy in the first place. But buy you do. As did we.

Bus ride to IKEA

We took a bus from Matinkyla. And got down at the Lommila station. From there, you walk back a bit and there's a quaint little passage which takes you to IKEA. There's a sign post a little way in which points the way to IKEA.

Sign post. IKEA this way.

And then you're there.

We had planned to get mostly the rug, so that my child can play on it. On the floor, and we can worry a little less about whether he jumps off the sofa. Or bed. Or his diaper changing station.

But we did not find anything good. The rugs were either too small, too costly or not good for a kid. What we got instead was a vase and some things to decorate the home.

Inside the store.

Plus, we visited the restaurant and had Swedish meatballs (served with fries + Lingonberry jam) and Vadelmaviineri.

Dinner!

/techStuff

Lots of rumours around how Apple will add AI sauce to iOS.

Smarter Siri
Remove people or things from Photos like the Google feature
Smart replies in Email like Gmail/Outlook have been doing for years.
A way to summarise notifications

We are around eight days from WWDC. So we shall know more soon.

/thinking

I have been thinking about AI and LLMs and neural networks a lot these past couple of weeks, which culminated into me writing an essay on the topic. You can read it here.

/reading

Richard Feynman's letter to his wife
Parable of the sofa - talks about single-location family-owned business that capitalism does not like. But is actually great.
Michele Giorgi bought and restored an original 128K Macintosh, and documented the entire project here. Visit on your computer, not your phone.

I had requested the library for two books which were not available either in the language I wanted or were just not available. And today, I searched for those and found out the library had actually ordered those books. Incredible!

So what did I do next? I put a hold on those books.

Until next week.

Oodi for all

Sun, 26 May 2024 19:20:52 GMT

Hello from Matinkylä! This is the ninth edition of NordLetter, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

a visit to Oodi

We visited Oodi (Helsinki Central Library) this Saturday. It is a striking building built with steel and glass and wooden facades.

We got down at the Central Railway Station, Oodi is a short five or so minute walk from there. The weather was pleasant. As we got out from the station, I could see a mass of people in lemon green tops coming from the direction of the library. Clearly there was a run of some sort which had finished a little while ago. There was a gentleman playing violin on the side of the road. As we walked a bit, there was some sort of promotion going on where they were giving away lemon flavoured pilsners. We took two.

Finally, we reached Oodi.

Oodi! There was a band performing under Oodi's balcony

You can read more about Oodi's design and architecture here. It has three levels/functions/atmospheres.

/level one

We entered through one of the man entrances to the ground floor. Next to the glass wall, were arranged a few chess tables. On the opposite wall was the book return station. Further up ahead was the information counter.

On the other side was a cafe and an old projector used in the '60s.

/level two

The second floor is dedicated to work and play. There are rooms to hold meetings in. There are rooms to play games in. There are 3D printers. There are work stations.

/level three

The third floor is where the books are.

Books!

There are also plenty of spaces to sit and read the books. Sofas with artsy rugs. Chairs in all shapes and form. There is also the Oodi cafe, where you can pick something to eat and drink. This meal can be enjoyed in the balcony which overlooks the Toolo area: the Parliament building and Helsinki Music centre.

Left: Parliament Building. Right: Helsinki Music CentreSee that tunnel? That goes to Kamppi.

We had brought sandwiches, so that's what we had.

The third floor also has the children's section. This has, in-addition to the books, a place for the kids to play. There is a section where you park the strollers. A place where you take off your shoes. And then, off we go!

day continues around Toolo lake

I used to walk here. Daily. Back when I used to live in Merihaka.

It is beautiful. Especially now, with flowers on almost every other tree.

We sat under a tree and I thought you're alive.

So relaxing.

We came around and stood for a bit on the wooden bridge. Looking out into the lake.

The breeze was cool and comforting. But then it got too cool. And so we moved. Back to Central. Back home.

/techStuff

Microsoft announces Copilot + PCs

A day before MS Build, Microsoft announced a new line of ARM powered PCs. These were rumoured for a while, so no surprises anywhere. Still, competition is good. Apple had a lead in performance per watt since announcing the M1 Macs. So this is good.

There were a lot of system level AI integrations announced, chief among them a service called recall. Recall would take screenshots periodically, which will be searchable. So you could at a future point in time search for something you did on your computer. This could both be a privacy nightmare or a useful feature. But that is dependent on how you, dear reader, think about these things.

/reading

I have started reading BKS Iyengar's Core of the Yoga Sutras. I was trying to find a book on yoga for a while now. Found this at the library. Reserved it. And now it's here.

Until next week.

Found a man fishing on my walk today.

Cherries all around

Sun, 19 May 2024 20:59:00 GMT

Hello from Helsinki! This is NordLetter #8. Previous editions can be found here.

Spring/summer is in full swing here. As evidenced by the fact that we were out on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, we were at the Folklore 2024 organised by Suomi-Intia-Seura. On Sunday, we visited the Roihuvuori Cherry Park in Helsinki.

Folklore'24

The Folklore event was about Indian culture and the things we do around marriages. We had people representing different states' culture. How brides and grooms look on their wedding days. The things we do before marriage. The rituals we perform after marriage, and so on. There was also food.

At the Folklore 2024 event

Later in the evening I went on my walk. You know how I miss my walks.

Walking route around Matinkyla

Cherry Park

Last Sunday, the cherry trees had not really bloomed. Somewhere during the week they did bloom, and we got the reels. Today, when we visited, it felt like the bloom had come and gone.

The Roihuvuori Cherry Park is in Helsinki closest to the Herttoniemi metro station. From there it's a 1.2 kms walk to the Roihuvuori Cherry Park. The entrance to the park has a Torii style gate along with beautiful tulip garden.

Entrance to the park

As we walked inside, we walked across a wooden bridge over a beautiful pond.

Pond + Sun

Waking a bit more we reached a parking space where all the food trucks are parked. Beyond which you can just see all the cherry trees lined up against the water tank. Then we finally reached the cherry trees, which to be fair did not look that pink. But that could most probably be because we were a bit late.

Cherry trees at the park

We finally found a place in the lawns, spread our sheet on the lawn and chilled for a bit. We had sweet bubble waffle from a vendor and fries and nuggets from a falafel place.

Food and rest at the park

AI season

Both Google and OpenAI announced new versions of their products/updates.

OpenAI came out with ChatGPT 4 o on Monday. The new model is faster, sounds more natural, laughs, flirts a bit (think the movie Her).

Google announced updates to Gemini as part of IO on Tuesday.

Both models are touting multi-modal capabilities. Which means that the model can understand images, video, audio and respond accordingly.

I mostly use Copilot for coding help and occasionally create images. My experience thus far has been the same. The assistants can be used to provide an initial starting point. But they can not be deployed to production. Will they get any better? Maybe. Or maybe this is the best these models can go. They will continue to hallucinate. They will continue to confidently lie.

AI generated summaries

Google also announced that AI generated summaries will come to search. Also a separate web search filter. This mode would remove the shopping bar, the AI overviews, etc. How search used to work in the old days.

The assumption here is that we are looking for things faster. Summarise the book to a paragraph. Summarise the news article. Summarise. Summarise. Summarise.

For some things, sure, I would love to get a one word or paragraph answer. Mostly these are factual queries.

But for other things, you want to read the full thing.

I don't know, I am old school about these things. I believe in the power of the open web and open systems.

I am reading

We Need To Rewild The Internet

This article draws parallels between the practices of rewilding ecological systems and the web. Most of the web is dependent on two or more large companies to keep it running. Think an outage in AWS causes a lot of apps to go down.

It advocates increasing diversity.

I am thinking about

Diversity is as important in ecology as it is in the infrastructure that underpins the internet. We cannot let one or two companies control parts of the internet. The web is far too important. The web will wither and die.

I was talking to a friend here, and they mentioned a similar thing around multi-use apartments. They mentioned that the previous apartment they were renting out had only 1/2 hall apartments. Those apartments would attract a certain type of renter: mostly immigrants, or people just starting out in life. They will not attract families. You want diversity in apartments. As you do in other things.

Diversity is good.

That's all folks! See you next week.

Life happens + iPads galore

Sun, 12 May 2024 17:34:26 GMT

Hello from Helsinki! This is Nord Letter #7. Previous editions can be found here.

Seven editions in, it feels like a good time to define this. What this is and isn't.

This is not edited thought. There is some consideration, of course. But I send this mostly as it is written, barring correcting a few typos. Rearranging a few sentences. Making things simpler. This is not an essay or a story. Those things go through multiple rounds of better-ness, of killing darlings.

This is mostly me pointing at the week that was and saying - 'look, cool stuff! '

Anyway.

Life happens

Or alternatively, some things are in our control; some things aren't.

On Thursday, we had gone out to meet a couple of people who had reached out to Prerna on Facebook. They were new here in Espoo and wanted to make friends. They were volunteers for a church.

We met them at the library. We sat and chatted in the library. Time just went by! We sat there for a couple of hours. It did not feel like it had been two hours.

While returning, I held the door for a woman who entered just after us. She was going to the same floor as us. After living here for more than a year, I was talking to a neighbour!

See there's this joke, that people in Finland live their entire lives without knowing who their neighbour is! I thought this to be true. On Reddit and elsewhere, the general advice is this: find something you enjoy, sport or something. Join a group that does this. Then,maybe , you make some friends.

I was talking to my neighbour and it turned out that she used to work for my employer earlier. Prerna invited her for tea and she said she could never say no to Indian tea.

She joined us. We talked some more. And we made friends with our neighbour!

What is the point of this story?

When the day had started, I had some ideas about how things would go. How the meeting would go with the two women who had reached out to Prerna on Facebook. I was a little apprehensive. I was not sure why they wanted to meet us. We did meet them. And it was a fun conversation.

By the time the day had ended, we had made friends with our neighbour.

There was no plan here. It was out of the blue.

And that is the point. One might want for certain things to happen. In my head, I had formulated how that first conversation with a neighbour would go. But it never went past a moi. Until it did.

Life, happens. Some things we do control. Others we don't.

It's important to recognise which is which and worry accordingly.

Thoughts on the new iPads

Apple event on Samsung TV + Plants!

On Tuesday, Apple announced new iPads. New iPad Pros with OLED screens and M4 chips. New iPad Airs with M2 chips and a new 13-inch screen size.

I am interested in the iPad Air. There was nothing exciting announced about it. It did not need to be. iPad Air is the better product in the iPad lineup.

How I use the iPad

I wanted to read a certain book. It was very costly on Kindle. It was available for free via a subscription my company provides access to. The problem was there was no way to read this book on Kindle.

So, I booted up the iPad to read this book.

This is my use case. Read books. Look at photographs. (Looking at photographs is perhaps the best use case for an iPad. Phone screens are a little too small. Airplay on TV is OK, but not ideal. iPad is just perfect.)

Potentially ,

Watch video on the iPad and take Notes on the Mac.
1. Or, read on the iPad, take Notes on the Mac.
Draw on the iPad.

Anyway, I will be getting the iPad Air at some time in the near future. The 11 inch WiFi only, base version. It is more than enough power for what I need it to be. For anything more, there's the Mac.

On Saturday, Indian Women in Finland had organised a food festival. Here are some pictures.

At the Indian Women in Finland food fest

We roamed around a bit after that. Then finally ended the day with a dinner at Swad a new restaurant that had opened up a couple of months back and was rated a very high 4.8 on Google. We were a bit skeptical. Our apprehension was unfounded. The food was glorious. Perhaps the best food I've had since I've arrived here. It is not even close. It did not feel like they had just added stuff to pre-prepared bland gravies. It felt fresh. The spices were just perfect. A great end to a wonderful day.

Later part of the day. Around Central (Helsinki).

I am thinking about

There should be different devices for different things, different contexts. So that you know, what you're doing sub-consciously.

If I get on the Mac, I will be working.

If I get on the iPad, I will be reading, or watching video.

If I get on my Phone, I am wasting my time.

I am watching

We watched the Gut documentary on Netflix this past week.

Highly recommended. Beautiful animations to go with it. Simplifies a ton of stuff. Makes it watchable for the kids as well.
Gut health is very important. It impacts both our physical and mental well-being.
One must consume lots of fibre (around 50g per day)
A varied diet is important as that increases the microbiome health.

That's all for this week. Still sick. See you next week.

Oh and I wrote this poem. Do check it out.

Hyvä Vappu

Sun, 05 May 2024 18:42:44 GMT

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is Nord Letter #6. Previous editions can be found here.

Every year, Finns celebrate April 30th and 1st May as Vappu in Finland. This is an occasion to celebrate everything from Labour Day, to the arrival of spring in Finland. It also has a bunch of Finnish student traditions as well, including putting a graduation cap on the head of Havis Amanda, a statute in Helsinki.

The first time I had witnessed Vappu was in 2022. I had gone out for my walk around Toolo lake, totally unaware of the festival. When I reached the lake I found almost a carnival like atmosphere. Finns were out in their white hats and customised overalls. They were out partying. Some were using a cut tree's trunk as a table. Most were drinking, eating, dancing and having fun. Which if you know Finns, is not how they are viewed (silent, introverted, etc.).

I knew there was some festival today. But I did not know what. Neither was I inclined, at that time, to find out what it was.

This Wednesday, we went out a little late. We had planned to go out earlier. But life happened. And so, by the time we reached the lake, there were hardly any people left. We saw a few, on their picnic blankets, drinking and eating. But that is par for the course during the summers here.

Here's some pictures.

In and around at Töölö lake.

I am thinking about

I saw this video this week and have been thinking about this a bit since then.

My earlier thoughts on this have been around how all that corporations are judged on is how much money they are making. What is the YoY growth, etc. No one cares about the people: neither the employees, nor the society at large.

I am reading

Still Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick.
The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down. Maybe Apple should have made these changes earlier. They would have been more in control. Now it's upto the governments. I don't think adding additional app stores etc is an issue. Most people would not care for them. They would continue using the App Store. But the whole thing is nuanced, to say the least.
They turned cattle ranches into tropical forest — then climate change hit. Maybe there's some hope left for us.

It will be a short one this week. Flu season seems to be in full swing.

See you next week.

Federating again

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 14:47:09 GMT

Hello 👋 from the Iso Omena Library.

I'm here again. It continues to be a beautiful inspiring place to sit in. And so I am.

Finland's tryst with spring continues. It had snowed here this past Tuesday. I had gotten out of bed, finished cleaning up and was about to start my yoga routine.

Then I looked out the window.

My backyard was covered in snow. If it had been just that, I would have continued. And not felt compelled to wake Prerna up. But it was not just that. It was still snowing. It was then that I woke Prerna up and said, look, spring!

Then I decided not to go to office in this weather. I had gone through the entire winter without falling, and did not want to start now. When the season was officially over.

And so I did not. As did many other Finns. By this time many have already swapped their winter tyres with the summer ones. And hence, can not take their cars out.

Here's a picture from Tuesday.

Let it snow!

And one from today.

See? No snow!

One of the big news of the week was that Ghost will be federating. Let's unpack this a bit. Because this is important.

How it used to work

You would spin up a server, have your website and publish there. You would usually get other people to join you and become a publication.

Then came the social networks

Well you know, Orkut (Oh Orkut!) and then the big blue Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X now) and so on.

You log in to a platform. You create your account there. And then you post. But none of it belongs to you. If you don't like where you are, you can't do anything. You are stuck! Or, you can delete everything you've created and that's that.

That's oversimplifying it a bit. And also there's the issue of the algorithms. But that's a good summary of it.

Ok, so what is this about?

ActivityPub is a protocol, like HTML for social media. It allows you to be in control of your stuff. It allows people to follow you across platforms. It allows you to leave, if you're unhappy and take your content with you. It is open. 😄

Threads would someday support this. They are testing integration with Mastodon.

Why am I excited about his?

Because, this is hosted on Ghost.

And I would love to make this the centre of my online existence. I would love to create my identity here. An identity I own. An identity I can control.

I would love to post here once, and have it show at different places.

I would love for this to be the place from where I can interact with people.

Also, this is open! 😄

The other thing this week is that Apple is holding the iPad event on May 7th.

I am looking forward to it, as I am looking forward to getting an iPad Air.

I am thinking about

How does information flow?

Information and knowledge are different things.

Information is just information. It's there. Out on a webpage, a quote in a book somewhere.

Information becomes knowledge after it has been processed. After you have digested it, thought about it, added context to it. Then it becomes knowledge, your knowledge.

I am reading

I finished reading Redshirts on Thursday. Now reading Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick. There's no story here. I just picked this from the sci-fi section at the library. I was figuring out how the borrow system works.

Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick

And that is all folks! See you next week.

Spring is here

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 09:51:43 GMT

Hello from the Iso Omena Library! It's a beautiful library with plenty of books and places to sit. It inspires, this place.

Iso Omena Library

Spring is finally here, which means it's only -1 degrees here, with a little bit of snow. This time we had thought we could pack our winter clothes away. But alas, the Finnish weather gods came with a snowy middle finger to our faces.

Spring in Finland! ☀️

I have started coming to the library for the past couple of weeks now. It has mostly been about having a place to sit, learn and think. At home, there is always something or the other that needs your attention. You should have specific places for specific things you do. You should write at a specific place each day. You should not sleep where you write. And so on.

The library then has been the place where I study (which is for AZ104 now).

But that has made me think about libraries and communal spaces.

Growing up I did not have access to a library. The one library I did know was in my school and that remained locked all throughout the year. In all my twelve years at the school, I visited the library once, and that was during the library period. We took books out of the racks, sat goofing around for around half an hour and then left.

The Iso Omena library is not only a library. In this shared space, you also have Neuvola, Kela and the health centre. The library itself has makerspace (think 3D printers), music rooms and meeting rooms. The Oodi library has gaming rooms as well. Iso Omena library does not however!

I visited the Ranganathaswamy Temple some time back with Prerna. I do not enjoy visiting most of the temples we have in India. But this temple was different. It felt old. It felt massive. There were huge stone pillars. There was a large hall and a courtyard where we sat for a bit. And then we talked. About how this place was not only a place of worship. About how it was also the centre for all activities in town. A place of learning, a place for functions of all sort, a place for entertainment. That is something that we are missing these days.

Ranganathaswamy Temple courtyard

As a child, I did not have access to a library. A place where I could go to study, sit and think. A place I could have had some chance meet with new friends. Talk to someone outside of the people I knew already.

Communal spaces are important. They allow for serendipity. They allow for people of varying view points to sit and debate, without you know shouting. They limit isolation. And that is important. Designers and planners should think about that. Many are. Clearly. But a place does not have to be only one thing. A library can be more than one thing. It can be a cafe, a play ground, a community centre!

Let's make more libraries!

What am I thinking about?

Virtual machines, containers, and all things compute.
Note taking, knowledge management and what makes a note evergreen?
- And constantly reminding myself, note taking is about thinking. Not note taking.

What am I reading?

Ever since I've known about John Scalzi, I've known him as the 'Hugo award winning novelist forRedshirts '. For one area reason or the other I could never get around to reading the said novel. Well, I am reading it now. And it is so much fun!

Redshirts by John Scalzi

And that is all folks! See you next week.

Year One

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 22:00:52 GMT

This here, is year one. A year to the day we got married.

I love you Prerna.

I love your positivity, your smile,
the mischief in your eye!
I love your lips, your smile,
the litheness in your hips.

We have done so much this year. And yet, it feels like it was only yesterday that we sat around the holy fire, and took our vows.

That's relativity in action! When you're having so much fun that you don't know where the time went.

A full year!

I miss walking

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 18:35:15 GMT

I love walking.

Used to be that I would put on my headphones and call a friend. We would walk and talk. When that friend was not available, I would call a different friend, and so on. I did not have that many friends though. So if there was no one to talk to I would put some songs on. At almost all times, I've had a "workout " playlist. And so, I walked, and walked, and walked, and walked some more.

It did not matter when.

I remember walking at twelve to one at night, trying to get the steps in.

Look, I know! Walking is not the most efficient form of working out. I could for example burn far more calories skipping a rope. And I have.

But walking is not just walking. There's more to it.

It allows me to think. It allows me to process the things that have happened, plan for the things that I must do.

It allows me to be me. To meditate. To be at one with myself.

It allows me to breathe.

It is one of the reasons why I love Finland so much. Back home most of the days I would walk in my apartment complex. Seem the same things again, and again, and again. But here in Finland, I could go out for a walk out in nature. All that I needed to do was go out and walk.

In Helsinki, I lived in Merihaka. I would walk around the Toolo lake area. It felt fresh. Whether I was walking during the summer, the fall or the winter. The winters were trickier for sure. I fell one time and had to visit the ER. But, whatever. It was so much fun.

Now, I live in Matinkyla. And one of the biggest worries I had while moving was whether I would have the same access to water. I was not worried about nature because in Finland, nature is accessible. But I was not sure if I would get to see water. Somehow I felt it was important. Green and flowing water, calms us. It is part of our evolution. The reason why so many of the earliest civilisations were settled next to great rivers.

My worry was unfounded. Soon after moving here I found my new walking route. This route took me through natural trails and across the Matinkyla beach. It is one of the best things about my life here.

And so after four hundred words, we arrive here. To the headline.

I miss walking. I miss walking my wonderful route. I miss it so much. Even though I've lost a ton of weight doing yoga. Even though I've never been healthier than I am now.

I miss going out, walking near those trees, down that bridge, on that beach. I miss breathing in that chilly air.

It is cold here in Finland now. It was colder earlier. But the snow that fell earlier is still there. And it snowed last night as well.

The snow is not that big of an issue. But even with spikes for the boots, it still gets slippery at times. And I can not risk that this season. So I am at home, reminiscing.

Now, some pictures.

Helsinki: walking through the seasons

Matinkyla: Walking through the seasons

Celebrating Sakraat in Finland

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 20:12:57 GMT

Sometimes I wonder if anyone would find this useful. Does it server any purpose? Does it help anyone?

Then I remind myself, I write for two people: me and you.

I have lived in Finland for a good three years now. For most of the time that I have been here, I have been happy, content, walking the trails, listening to podcasts, cooking, cleaning, grocery-shopping.

During winters, I have walked over the frozen Toolo lake. During Christmas I have roamed the streets of Helsinki. On New Years' eve I have danced in the rain, and welcomed the new year with thousands of other people.

This is the first year I celebrated Makar Sankranti in Finland. Makar Sankranti/Sakrat is a Hindu festival which celebrates among other things, movement, change, and in our part of India it is associated with crop harvesting. In India it falls around the time when the winter is getting over and it is getting a bit warmer.

What it means to me, like almost all festivals, is mostly around what we get to eat.

What I remember are these three things:

Naha-kha: Bathe then eat. Literally.
Touching rice and til kept in a plate. There would be heaps of rice and til kept in the plate, equaling the number of members in the family. And each member would touch/break the heap and combine it with the rest of already touched/broken rice.
Tilkut
Dahi-chura. Yogurt and flattened rice with jaggery or sugar.

BJPRF organised this celebration in Vanta, Finland. Prerna and I took the 520 and then the 571 to reach the venue. The venue was an atmospheric, traditional, cozy, Finnish cottage with wooden floors and a nice open hall. Attached to the hall was a little space where we had arranged for snacks, and drinks. Attached to that was the kitchen which we did not really use, as association members had prepared and brought the food to be served with them.

From L to R: 1. Me standing at the door 2. Prerna sitting on a sofa 3. The central hall

As with my childhood memories, the highlight of the event was the food: dahi-chura, khichdi, achar, tilkut, and on and on and on.

From top-left-anti-clockwise: 1. Me eating khichdi 2. Dahi-chura-chatni-tilkut and aloo-sabzi 3. Prerna with a finished plate 4. Khichdi platter

Some more pictures