Sajal Choudhary

Yellow Leaves Everywhere

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:45:00 GMT

Yellow leaves everywhere,
Beneath my feet getting trampled,
Fluttering on trees.

Like Home-work

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:48:00 GMT

Like home-work
I put my pen away
Close the diary.

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 07:16:11 GMT

Aloo Paratha on the tawa and Emran Hashmi on the HomePod is just a perfect start to a Sunday!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:45:39 GMT

This draw feels like a loss.

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:25:54 GMT

After around 20 minutes in the first half, it felt like Tottenham had run out of steam. Before that though, they had run United haggard. United had no touches, no way to fluidly pass the ball, which did not change for the first 45 minutes. Something must change at half time.

Human AI Partnerships Are for Alignment

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:17:00 GMT

Human-AI partnerships are for alignment, not capability by

In other words, my primary value is not that I help the AI write better code, it’s that I align the AI with the values of my organization. Human-AI partnerships are for alignment, not capability.

This is an interesting take and aligns well with the centaur configuration from The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

Updating the Build Watch Paths on Cloudflare

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:11:00 GMT

You go to your project settings > Build > Build watch paths.

The gotcha is that you need to press an enter after typing out the settings.

I wanted these settings:

Include paths: *
Exclude paths:inbox/*

I first tried to do this on mobile where it did not work. On my Mac as well, the Save button was grayed out, no matter how many refreshes I did. Then I did a chat with the agent, and it said:

In the Cloudflare dashboard, pattern input fields typically require you to press Enter (or click an "Add" button) after typing inbox/*. If you type the pattern but don't confirm it, the form doesn't detect a change and the Save button stays grayed out.

Parenting in the Fall

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 09:28:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #126, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.

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 to this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon.

One of our close friends turned forty this month. To celebrate, she took a trip to Hong Kong with her family. After returning, they had a party at the Park Hotel (around five minutes from our home). The party was a smash hit - Bollywood themed, women only. After the party, they called us over - they had bought something for Savya from HK.

It's always fun to guess what. Prerna guessed a toy, I guessed something clothing. It turned out to be a Spider-Man Croc. Not a "Croc" croc. But a croc croc. Savya loved it.

Savya sometimes does and sometimes does not sleep at his daycare now. On the days he does not, you can find him sleeping on the sofa, or on the ground, or on my things, and so on.

On Tuesday he did not take his customary nap at his daycare. We tried to get him to sleep for an hour or so, so that he would be up and about when we reached their place. So that he could have his playtime with their daughter.

Of course, when you want your toddler to do something, they don't do it. I took Savya for some grocery shopping instead. I took him to Tokmanni and got him a Hot Wheels.

Savya had fallen asleep by the time we had left our parking lot. He slept for a good hour or so while we were there. He only got up after we had chai, some snacks and then our dinner. He spent the rest of the time playing with their daughter, who ate the roti and yogurt Prerna had wanted Savya to eat.

By the time we returned home, Savya did not have anyone to play with and so he had gotten hungry. We were tired. There was no batter for his cheela. I tried to find something else he could eat. There was nothing. For a moment, just a moment, I thought, yeah he's not super hungry, he had had something to eat before going there, but then, I just got up - put upma sooji in a steel bowl, then some yogurt, grated some paneer in it, then added the veggies (capsicum, carrots, beans), added salt to taste, and whipped it into the batter that Savya loves to eat as cheela.

No matter how tired you are, if your child needs something, you do it.

We had not originally planned to go to their home on Tuesday. Prerna was sick. She was tired. I was starting to get sick, with a mildly sore throat. I went to the gym on Monday, and have had no workouts since then, not even walking around the neighbourhood. On Friday I had a severe headache, but continued working through it.

Even in weeks when we are not sick, we are tired. I think I wrote about this earlier - but our friends are our family here. We went and had dinner with our friends on Tuesday and Friday. The dosa on Friday had felt extra special.

Maybe we care too much about food?

I wrote about Obsidian quick capture earlier in the week. It has transformed the write page on my phone.

I am back into reading poetry. I finished Native Guard and am reading Obit now.

I think poetry is better read than listened to. You can linger on the words more. Like these lines from a poem in Obit -

His favourite was to write the world in black and white and then watch people try and read the words in color.

This does not matter as much in prose. But it does when reading poetry.

I was sitting with a friend of mine, while our kids played, and he asked me what was the difference between prose and poetry, if it does not rhyme. All I could say was, "Some poetry sticks with you, reminds something. It's ultra compact."

Not a great explanation, but I don't know how to explain poetry to you. Or anyone else for that matter. Just read it. It's concentrated wisdom and beauty, like the blueberry concentrate we have in our fridge, which is wasting away, as I type this.

Other than poetry, I finally picked up Inside the Box this week and also Just for fun, which is about Linus and Linux. All hardcovers. I really do love hardcovers. Though I prefer my book - a year of mornings in paperback.

Also, Hugh Howey (of Silo fame) replied to me on Threads!

I had dropped him a message about Neo and how he used it. I had not expected him to respond. But hey! Among other things, I love his definition of being a successful writer (from his writing insights series).

A successful writer is one who finishes what they start while striving to improve their craft.

That's it. I want to be a successful writer.

I am starting to use Neo, though I haven't finished writing anything in it. Neo is cool.

Helsinki is so beautiful right now. The fall colours are out on full display wherever you look!

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.

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:14:46 GMT

All that I see on LinkedIn today are posts related to the suspension of US PERM program for a few companies. There’s just so many ways you can dissect this thing.

FAUG October Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:00:00 GMT

I don't know how to start these posts. Another meetup event with notes that follow.

No Sakari Nahi today in the meetup. Over the two breaks - one before and one after the first two talks were done, I managed to talk to four different sets of people.

It's never easy. I am not this person who goes out and cheerfully talks to people. But I do like getting diverse perspectives. So, of course, even though it's not pleasant (in the sense I would very much enjoy being at home on my PS5) I still want to do this. More of this.

I have been to enough of these events now that the venues repeat. I was back at the Elisa office, but not the same place I was at for an earlier vibe-coding meetup. I was going in the same direction, when some people asked me to go to the main office.

The food was unique - Vietnamese cuisine - a make your own meal station. I liked it.

Automation for Directors - Jukka Alapiha, Elisa Oyj

A funny thing happened as Jukka started his talk. He mentioned they have freedom to try things out in terms of AI development in Elisa. That nobody is telling them what to do. And I thought, but is that good? I am reading Inside the Box right now, and one of the first stories in the book is about how constraints are good and so on.

Back to the talk then.

It’s about creating an agent skill and giving it data access so that it can find the information that the manager needs. Followed by a demo of getting subscription usage from Azure.

Beyond no Return: Preparing your organization for Cyber War - Miska Kytö, Zure

An encore! I heard the talk last at Azure and Friends september meetup. I don’t think there will be anything new in this one. So let’s see.

Azure Virtual Desktop: Tips & Tricks - Joni Nieminen, Not Bad Security Oy

We start with a slide on the differences between AVD and M365 offerings. If you want more control you go with AVDs, basically. Classic difference between Saas and IaaS.

Then about five design decisions for AVDs -

How a user logs in - Entra ID
Networking
Profiles - persistent disk etc.
Images
Scaling

Pooled vs personal host pools - personal each user gets a single machine. Costs more.

Use IaC to manage it - obviously.

As a consultant, AVDs are excellent, so that you don’t have any data leakage. Data must stay with the customer. If the customer does not have a conditional access policy for trusted devices then you could use your machine to connect to different customer AVDs.

There are ways to save on costs, like - multi-session, scaling to work days, start vm on connect, reservations, m365 licensing, and right-sizing.

Key takeaways are to choose per user group, no click ops and rebuild hosts, don’t patch them.

I enjoy taking a picture of the surroundings in the city after I leave the venue. This time I took a picture of this play area in one of the building complexes.

Paramount Complete HBO Merger

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:36:00 GMT

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery complete $110 billion media megamerger by Emma Roth

Paramount has completed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, forming a combined company known as Skydance. The merger officially puts Paramount and WBD’s film studios, along with major networks and brands like HBO, CBS News, and CNN, under one roof.

I wish Netflix had bought HBO. I was rooting for them. Also I’m already a Netflix subscriber.

How I Use Obsidian Quick Capture on Mobile

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:31:00 GMT

I saw kepano’s repost on LinkedIn about the newest Obsidian release. In the release notes, I saw Obsidian Quick Capture mentioned as a feature for this release.

Obsidian famously was slow on Mobile and there was no quick capture function. I had created Apple Shortcuts to simulate those features. Click on a button and it basically calls the Obsidian URI to create a new unique note. Now, I don’t need to do any of that.

How to use quick capture

Obsidian have a nice doc which explains the feature

Basically,

Configure capture locations first - this has settings for where the note is saved, what template it uses, do you append or prepend to the note, and so on.
Add widget to your phone - Home Screen, etc.
Click on the button, type the text and the note is created or text is appended as configured.

I have the rectangular Obsidian widget on my ‘write’ screen now. It has four quick capture options -

Daily
Inbox
Tasks
Book

I created a new template for daily and tasks. The daily template has a line divider so the text is appended to it. The tasks template has a markdown checkbox text in it, so that each new task is added to my task list.

The daily capture adds small notes to the daily note.

The inbox capture basically creates a new unique note (with proper template) in my inbox folder, which is the flow I want.

The tasks capture adds a new todo to my tasks tracker.

The book capture creates a new unique note with a book title and using the metadata for my book notes.

All new notes live in the Inbox folder in my vault.

The Same Story Can Mean Different Things to Different People

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:29:00 GMT

While reading Inside the Box today, I came across the story of Mendelev and how he discovered the periodic table. David talks about how, in a book about sleep, the author mentioned that when he slept, his unconscious mind made sense of all the facts and gave him the solution. Then, David says that's not it. Mendelev had a book contract and he had to write about around 53 elements in a single volume, so he was trying to find a way to group the elements.

Of course, this in a book about constraints.

The realisation I had, while reading this, was life is like that elephant story, where a bunch of blind men are guessing that it's a wall or the ears are like fans, and so on. Only the non-blind person can see that it is in-fact an elephant.

The same story or event can be interpreted in as many ways as you like. Whatever lesson you want to draw from it, you can.

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 07:26:54 GMT

Over the weekend, when I went out to walk, there was a spectral fog spread out over the grass. Coincidentally I was reading Ghost-Eye then. It felt apt.

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 08:19:18 GMT

Started reading inside the box now.

Better Talks and Reading Metaphors

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:44:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #125, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.

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

Searching things

A surprising way I use my website is for its search function. This was not an original use case for the website, the why of the thing. (I don't think I ever wrote the why of my website down anywhere. I mean, there is a doc which talks about the how of the thing, the inspirations I've had and so on. I just skimmed it, there is no why section there.)

I use Obsidian to write. It has a built-in search functionality, but on Thursday, as I was thinking about this edition, I could not find a note I knew I had. I just left it at that, but I found it today while searching for it on my website.

All this is a roundabout way to talk about emergent behaviour, kind of like in that Ryan Reynolds' movie where an NPC in a game gets free will. The AI system for the game was not designed for this purpose, but it ended up being that.

I think I'm mixing metaphors here. Anyway.

What I would do differently in my next talk

Serendipitously, through a Simon Willison post this week, I found and read his earlier post on better presentations from way back when (2019).

Some of the things that stood out to him from a course he took:

Every talk should start with an AIM: Audience, Intent, Message. Who are the audience for the talk? What do you intend to achieve by giving the presentation? With those two things in mind, you can construct the message—the actual content of the talk.

Try to include at least one STAR moment—Something They’ll Always Remember. This can be a gimmick, a repeated theme, a well-selected video or audio clip. Something to help the talk stand out.

Presentations are most interesting if they are structured with contrasts. These can be emotional high and low points, or content that illustrates what is compared to what could be. Sparklines are a tool that can be used to think about this structure.

The human brain is incredibly attuned to stories. If you can find an excuse to tell a story, no matter how thin that excuse is, take it.

I have been thinking about presentations and talks as well, perhaps because I gave one recently, but more pertinently, because I have seen and heard so many people give talks now that I have an opinion.

My list of best practices for presenting things is thus:

Less text on the slide. Just pointers not descriptions. A person viewing should be able to skim quickly. This is not a SOP document.
Have a demo. Demos are fun.
If you include diagrams, they should be visible, i.e. the text should be visible.
Consistent design language. Don’t jump from one style to a different one. I prefer minimalist styles.
Pick a topic based on the audience. A super technical presentation will be difficult to pull off. Generally speaking, it’s easier to do overview sort of talks. But if the audience is expecting a deep dive, do not be afraid to do so.

I was at the Azure and Friends September meetup at the Microsoft office this week, and as I sat through Miska Kytö's talk on cyber security, I wondered why I was liking this talk so much.

That speaks as much to the speaker as it does to me - the listener. Context matters. And perhaps this is my community and the things I am good at.

As is the custom in our household, Prerna asked me if I was interested in giving a longer talk at the next PyData event, happening sometime in October. I said no, of course. But I started thinking about my next talk nonetheless.

You heard it here first - I will be talking about doing local inference sometime soon. The upcoming CNCF meetup will have some talks on this very same topic, so that should be fun.

I thought about two things after I read the Simon Willison post:

How awesome would it be to go through this class? (I searched, and no, it's not available online)
Public speaking is a skill, and like every other skill, one can work on it and improve.

Ghost-Eye

I finished reading Ghost-Eye this week. I had known of Amitav Ghosh from before, from books whispered here and there, like a book on climate change he had written recently - a book I have not read yet. So, when I saw Ghost-Eye pop up in the e-library, I immediately put it on hold.

I am not a Bengali, so I can’t say that it took me back to my childhood days in Calcutta. And yet, it did. It took me back to the streets of J&K block in Laxmi Nagar in Delhi, where I used to live as a child. It took me back to the time I stood in the street and heard an aunty who lived in the building opposite to our own, tell us tales about her village and the spirits that lived there.

This is a book about reincarnation, but also the world we are living in, about cooking (fish specifically) but also the art of cooking. And everything ties off beautifully by the end - the aha moment.

I loved reading it. The characters are so well written. Give it a read.

Like a river

I feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I need to read. It was the same reason I tried current. I did not like the fact that it took the control away from me, but I liked the concept of it.

Oliver Burkeman talks about this in his post here.

To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.

This provides the same mental model - something that flows and you just pick what interests you. I have a similar setup on my website (but from a writing context) - between garden and stream.

Some things feel obvious after you read them. This feels like one of those things.

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.

Azure and Friends September Event

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:25:00 GMT

Teemu kicked off the event, welcoming us, explaining what Azure and Friends is, and so on.

Beyond No Return: Preparing Your Organization for Cyber War by Miska Kytö (Zure)

To get a dashboard of victims hit by ransomware attacks, for example in Finland - ransomware.live/country/fin.

Finland is not a major target because smaller economy. However, 50% of ransomware attacks in 20205 happened against small companies (<50 people).

With AI both the velocity and nature (advanced techniques) of the attacks has increased. It used to take around 1year between when a vulnerability was found and exploited to now, when vulnerabilities are exploited before they are announced.

The CARVER framework provides a targeting mechanism. But this can be used by defenders as well, to figure out what requires more resources.

A walkthrough of a sample real-estate company’s IT followed. It was interesting.

Honeypots are a good way to attract an attacker - so that it trips up our alarms. Defender for identity for example has a feature - honeytokens that does this. Other examples are honeypot services on servers like endlessh.

Sometimes it’s better to just shut up. For example in job listings. When presenting don’t share the full screen for example. Another thing to audit would be thesis workers, especially in big companies.

To summarise, think like an attacker, make your environment a minefield, and pay attention to public info about your IT.

Panel discussion on what customers are buying from Azure in Finland and other things AI

AI, Data and Security, but the general answer is it depends on the company. Public sector - data and VMs, infrastructure stuff. Private sector nothing beyond the AI PoCs. There is app stuff. Looking forward, more app modernisation stuff.

An interesting point around the AI discussion was that now is a great time to learn stuff, because the companies are subsidising it. It will not be the same in the future, so, learn, break stuff, etc.

Treat Your To-read Pile Like a River

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:27:00 GMT

Treat your to-read pile like a river | Oliver Burkeman

To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.

I feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I need to read. It was the same reason why I tried current. I did not like the fact that it took the control away from me, but I liked the concept of it.

This provides the same mental model - something that flows and you just pick what interests you. I have a similar setup on my website - between garden and stream.

Some things feel obvious after you read them. This feels like one of those things.

Learning Local LLM Inference

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:22:00 GMT

Learning about hosting models locally on server infrastructure using inference engines like vLLM, and the llm-d router.

2026-09-28 15:24

Finished the KodeKloud course by Mumshad on AI infrastructure.

Better Presentation Tips by Simon Willison

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 15:21:00 GMT

Better presentations through storytelling and STAR moments by Simon Willison

Every talk should start with an AIM: Audience, Intent, Message. Who are the audience for the talk? What do you intend to achieve by giving the presentation? With those two things in mind, you can construct the message—the actual content of the talk.
Try to include at least one STAR moment—Something They’ll Always Remember. This can be a gimmick, a repeated theme, a well-selected video or audio clip. Something to help the talk stand out.
Presentations are most interesting if they are structured with contrasts. These can be emotional high and low points, or content that illustrates what is compared to what could be. Sparklines are a tool that can be used to think about this structure.
The human brain is incredibly attuned to stories. If you can find an excuse to tell a story, no matter how thin that excuse is, take it.

Always interested in figuring out ways to make presentations more engaging. My list of points are here - Best practices for presenting things. Maybe a todo for me is to add some things from here to the doc.

On Using Muse on Your Mac

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 11:17:00 GMT

I’ll Wait by John

The way I think about running an agentic AI on my Mac is simple. I would never let an unknown person use my Mac. Not even for a minute, not even with me watching them. Let alone letting them use it nonstop, without my watching them. I’d be uncomfortable letting even a trusted friend use my Mac, logged into my user account. So why would I let an AI robot, no matter the source? It doesn’t even get to the point of my considering Meta as Muse’s creator. I wasn’t tempted an iota to try OpenClaw, and I’m not tempted to try Muse on my Mac. On a Mac, maybe. But not my Mac.

That's how I feel about it. Claude has pushed me a couple of times to give it access to my Mac.

No, thank you.

The most comfortable I am, is letting it access some files and folders under the conditions I specify. This will be too much.

And even with this, I have doubts.

Speaking Gigs

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:20:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #124, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.

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

The view from the other side

Is different. For sure.

I love going to tech events in Finland. Between the two of us - Prerna and I - we have split events in the household. She is more of a developer than me, so she goes to Python, PyData and Java meetups. She also goes to women-focused events - women in tech, etc. I go to more platform-specific events - FAUG, Azure and Friends, Platform and Infrastructure Community, Vibe-Coding, etc. I feel that provides a nice balance to our after-work lives.

This all started some time last year, after Prerna told me about this app called Meetup and the events that were on it. Meetup has become shite, ever since Bending Spoons acquired them - which, granted, is the playbook. Side note - I had not been to their website before this and guess what's on their homepage?

Prerna is better at this stuff than I am - reaching out to people, talking to people, and so on. Which is not to say it's easy for her; it's not. But she's just better at actually doing the things.

I am working on it.

Of course, she was first when it came to volunteering her time and becoming an organiser. She joined the PyData organising team and is one of six organisers there.

I, on the other hand, just go for the sake of it - to maybe learn new stuff. I used to talk to one, maybe two people who were nearby. Mostly, I would be taking notes in Obsidian, about the things that people were presenting.

Sometime earlier this year, after she had joined the PyData organising group, she asked me if I wanted to speak at one of the events.

I said no, per usual.

Sometime later, she said, "I have volunteered your name for an upcoming meetup."

I said, "What?"

She said, "So what will you be speaking about?"

I said, "What?"

That was then.

After my initial resistance had died down, I started thinking about what could I talk about. I had no stories yet, no cool things I was building - the usual self-deprecation.

I thought I could talk about using AI to learn. I had been dabbling with workflows, projects and prompts.

So, I made a new note in Obsidian, gave it the proper title, and started thinking.

The lightning talk at Reaktor

The result of that was the lightning talk I gave at the PyData event hosted by Reaktor, at their offices in Helsinki.

That note I made is not live yet. I prepared the slides in Keynote and haven't had the time or desire to write that note now.

The lightning format meant that I got a time window of around 10 minutes to complete my talk. I took somewhere between five and ten minutes. I did not set up a clock - perhaps a learning for next time. Teemu showed up a clock halfway through to tell me I was past five minutes, after which I panicked a little and rushed through the rest of the slides. I had planned to demo my project and website - if I had time - which apparently I did not.

This was a positive experience for me - being the one presenting. I had been wanting to speak for some time now, though all the earlier times boiled down to me telling myself - what did I have to say?

Which, funnily, is not a problem here, on this website.

Since Prerna was emceeing at the event and I was speaking, Savya attended his first tech event too. They sure do start early these days!

I spent most of the event listening to Savya, playing with him, talking to him. Then, during my talk, Prerna did the same.

Reaktor have a beautiful office. There was plenty of food and drinks at the venue. And it was yummy! There is a view of the Helsinki Cathedral from the office. It was at the golden hour and the cathedral looked beautiful.

There was a beautiful balcony with glass railings, just outside. I did not step out onto the balcony - it was cold and I had Savya. But I saw plenty of people out there when we arrived.

I loved speaking, sharing this little thing I had messed about with. And the speaking itself felt natural enough. Sure, there were some jitters, but none of that remained after I began.

Emceeing at the CNCF event

The other thing that happened this week was that I emceed for the CNCF Helsinki group.

I had become an organiser the week before, and on Monday, another organiser asked if anyone wanted to create the intro slides and be the emcee. I volunteered and that was that.

I worked on the slides on Wednesday night (the event was on Thursday). And that was that.

The CNCF event was held at the Computer Science Building in Aalto. Prerna, Savya and I reached the venue around 17:00. Savya had not slept at his daycare, and so had slept through our ride there. But dutifully woke up as soon as we reached the venue.

The venue had a nice setup - two sets of the kinds of mics you can hang behind your ears and speak through the mic next to your mouth. There were two traditional stick mics as well - which we used for questions.

There was a big monitor you could see your slides on, as you looked out into the hall in general. I had not seen anyone do an intro for this event before, so I kind of winged it.

I think it went fine.

Prerna volunteered to interview the attendees and organisers for the social channels. There may be a short coming out on our LinkedIn and Instagram channels soon.

Being around the CNCF community, felt good. I love CNCF's code of conduct around meetups - Be nice and respectful to each other. Include everybody. This community and the organisers really embody the ethos of the project. I'm looking forward to contributing more toward both the project and the community.

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.

DevOps Finland September Event

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:48:00 GMT

I arrived a little later than I should have. This seems to be turning into a habit. Not a happy one, mind you.

Also, there are so many companies in this area, around the Esplanade Park. This sure is a popular area; beautiful too.

How CRA affects today's agentic driven development by Ishani Bhardwaj and Berk Türetken, Consultants @ Netlight

This talk was about CRA, which I did not know anything about before this. CRA is an EU Law that requires manufacturing companies to be responsible for vulnerabilities found in their products. The reporting for this lies with the orgs though and they could be fined 2.5% of global annual turnover, though there are lower tiers too.

There are four classes of products under it - basic, class 1, class 2, critical. There are stricter rules as you go up.

I learned something new, so was happy. The speakers felt new to the speaking game, and hence there were some little problems - which is fine tbh.

The problem is that most big orgs already have teams that do these sorts of tasks. I did not get what the takeaway of this talk, really.

AWS Frontier Agents: How Agentic Al is Rewriting Cloud Operations by Sasidharan Ramasamy, Technical Account Manager @ AWS

Sasi was up next and he came to talk about AWS Devops Agent service. The pitch, like the similar Azure agent I heard about in a FAUG event is the same - the agent will run the ops for you, all the time. You will not get pages at weird times.

There was a slide in the talk somewhere which talked about the types of orgs and from left to right it talked about orgs which were starting out with max human oversight to minimum oversight. The orgs on the right side (minimum oversight) were called pioneer orgs.

I had a problem with that. Perhaps because I recently read The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Or, perhaps because the last talk talked about ownership and whose responsibility is it when AI agent pushes code with vulnerabilities in prod. Spoiler - it’s the org, it’s you.

The problem is around ownership. The reverse centaur configuration makes sense to me. Where in I choose when and how I use the agents, not the other way around. Human in loop is a shit position to be in.

There was a time when talks like this would have me spellbound. Not. Any. More.

Philosophy aside, I liked the demo.

I love the interiors of these buildings. For example these stairs I climbed down after the event.

And this beautiful twilight zone central.

Prompts I Use

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:52:00 GMT

Learning Project

My project has these instructions when I want it to teach me something:

Whenever I ask you to teach me something, think about the what, why and then the how of the thing. 
What is this thing?
Why does this exist? What does it replace? Why is it better and so on?
And then finally, the syntax, the how of the thing. This section should be more detailed than the other sections. It should have commands or how to do a thing in the UI, whatever is relevant. It should also have a resources for further reading section, mostly as a learning plan. Assume that there is a less time and just enough familiarity is needed so that I can have a conversation about the subjetc.
Prepare a html artifact to explain the facts with diagrams, as needed.

The copy-editor

For the attached, check the grammar and check for any typos. Do not change what is written, do not write it in your voice, just highlight and fix any typos and if there are any other grammatical mistakes. Do not change link styles, etc.
Look at the text and suggest if there is a better way to structure the essay, so it reads better. If there are things that can be cut.
The output should be a list of search phrases and what to replace them with. Also suggest titles for the post.

Learning in the style of interviews

Your are an experienced recruiter. You are my assistant. Your job is to help me get better at interviewing, both technical and behavioural interviews.

When I start a chat, I will attach a job description to the chat. Research the company and  the role. Find as much information as you can. For a devops role for example, find actual questions asked in actual questions and form that as the base for the conversation. Then have a mock interview with me based on my CV and all the information you've gathered - ask if it is a TA round or technical prep or what.

When I reply with an answer, grade it as a senior technical interviewer would:
1. Score 1 to 10. Calibrate hard. 5 means "passes a phone screen." 7 means "hire at mid-level." 9 means "strong hire at senior." Do not inflate. Most first attempts are 4 to 6, and telling me otherwise wastes my time.
2. What a strong answer contains (3 to 5 bullets of the specific points an interviewer is listening for).
3. What I actually covered and what I missed.
4. The follow-up question the interviewer would ask next based on what I said, and whether my answer would survive it.
5. Rewrite: a 150-word model answer in first person, at the level I should be aiming for.

Ask the next question without prompt from me.

Create a markdown doc with all questions and the final answer.

LDAP

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:26:00 GMT

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. V3 but V2 included for backwards compatibility. It is open, vendor-neutral. LDAP is used to access and managed objects in a Domain.

We can use ldp tool to check the status/to troubleshoot, etc. Example - How to check ldaps is working or not - ldp.exe.

Writing in the Moment

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:09:00 GMT

I saw this in Gruber's review of the iPhone 18 Pro,

I didn’t review the iPhone 17 Pro until last week, when I unabashedly declared it the best phone Apple had ever made. The iPhone 18 Pro is only different from the 17 Pro in ways that make it better. Thus, it is clearly now the new best phone Apple has ever made. It’s the culmination of an entire decade of year-after-year iteration on the iPhone X’s ground-up redesign. It’s the best version of the most successful product ever made. And yet by nature of how the iPhone 18 Pro improved in the last year, it’s not exciting at all. How jaded we all are.

And that explains the feeling I have as well. If a man like Gruber can go without reviewing the Pro phone for a year, of course I can feel the same way about book reviews and other things. I need to write things in the moment, like the two poems I wrote last night while walking. Like this thing I'm writing now.

Ghost-Eye

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 05:04:00 GMT

Review

I had known of Amitav Ghosh from before, books whispered here and there, like a book on climate change he had written recently - a book I had not read. So, when I saw Ghost Eye in the e-library, I immediately put it on hold.

I’m not sure if the story overall had the required stakes. I don’t think it did. And it felt that a few things were unresolved. The reason I loved reading this book was the moments spent in Calcutta, those descriptions are everything. All the characters are so well sketched out.

I don’t usually read fiction with Indian settings and characters. Reading this book, I felt it could be done well. Give it a read.

What a Day, Today

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:48:00 GMT

What a day, today!
I saw a black box, at a distance,
As I started out for my walk today.
The box stirred,
I got scared.
It turned into a rabbit,
Jumped up out of the way.

It rains. Harder now.
Bigger drops.
The water in the bay,
Has never been this high.
Parts of the road,
Are under water.
And just as I walk away
from the gurgling water,
I come across another box - a fox!
The kind I find, in the digital
grasslands of Tsushima.
It scampers away,
Before I go to pet it anyway.

What a day, today!

Days Are Getting Shorter Here

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 17:39:00 GMT

Days are getting shorter here,
nights come sooner.
There’s stray leaves on the road,
painting it in yellow.
Yellow is the light as well,
illuminating the leaves on the road.
It’s getting darker here,
darker, colder, wetter.

Days are getting shorter here.
nights come sooner.

Someone runs where I walk,
in a white top and dark bottoms.
Someone speeds up on a bike,
with a Wolt bag on their back.
Someone walks their dog.
Someone sits and smokes.

Days are getting shorter here.
Nights come sooner.

It rains here, little drops of water,
caress my face and stay.
There are puddles on the road.
The gusts of wind, make me want to run.
Run. Run. Run.
Against the wind, into the wind.
Run! Run! Run!
But I don’t. I walk and I write.

Days are getting shorter here.
Night comes sooner.

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 10:09:14 GMT

iCloud subscription includes Apple TV and Arcade now. Yay! Diwali came a little early I guess.

Reverse Centaurs, New Teams, and Moomins

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 05:29:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #123, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.

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

I finished reading The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI today. Like Cory's last book I had read - Enshittification - I knew most of what this book would entail. There was nothing new (for me). As Cory mentions in the Acknowledgement section - "This books was written on my website pluralistic.net".

I have read Cory talk about these ideas on pluralistic. But on the blog, there are many other ideas and things he writes about. I appreciated having the book in my hand, a single place with all the things related to the current AI environment, one may need to know.

I highly recommend this book if you want to understand the current AI bubble. And it is a bubble.

So what comes after the bubble?

Here, I differ slightly from what Cory says.

From the book, paraphrased: "There is not that much residual value after this bubble. What would remain is the tonnes of carbon we have put in the atmosphere. And these local models we can run on our machines - phones, computers, etc."

I think what would remain is the kind of future depicted in All that we see or seem - not the parts about the dreaming tech and the rockstars that it creates - the local AI parts. The protagonist in that book is a hacker who cares about her privacy and has a local machine that she can carry with her, and power (phone + or mac mini -) through a battery pack. But in that world, large corporations exist which provide this service and people are subscribed to these services.

I think this is what will be left after the bubble.

I have changed teams at work. I have gone back to the team in my unit which develops features for the platform and creates new capabilities for on-prem solutions. It is at the same time exhilarating and scary.

The team moves fast. I would be part of a discovery call in the morning, trying to figure out how this new thing I'm supposed to do works, and preparing some slides for the leadership team by the evening.

Every first meeting I had, I was feeling out of my depth, uncomfortable, and thinking why did I do this? The old team was comfortable. I was doing what I knew and some things that I didn't. It was a good pace, a good way to work. And that's good, especially with Savya around. There are, after all, so many things to do at home.

But that's how you grow, isn't it? You stretch, reach out, try to grab the thing! It may hurt in parts, but that's what produces the growth.

I am still unsure, though. Every day brings new adventures. And that's scary.

On the topic of new things, I'm reading Sculptor’s Daughter right now. This is Tove Jansson's biography. The same Tove Jansson who wrote and created Moomin characters.

Moomin are everywhere in Finland. From cookies, to clothes, to the original stories, and books, to mugs and I guess there are toothpastes too?

Moomin are a national treasure. When Savya had turned two we had sent with him a packet of Fazer-Moomin chocolates. We have gone to at least a couple of Moomin exhibitions - one at Stockmann and the other at Oodi. We have bought and gifted Moomin cookies and bags and onesies to our friends and their kids.

During the event at Oodi, we had sat in a story performance of one of the Moomin stories. Moomin stories are not Disney-esque. Or at least that's my understanding from a far. I haven't read the Moomin tales yet. I will.

Hence, I was interested in reading about Tove. And now I am.

This is not a typical biography. There are no historical facts here. These are stories written by Tove - translated in English. And they are wonderful. The ones I have read are from a time when Tove was a young child, and it's so much fun reading about experiences different from what I had when I was a child. It's so beautiful, this thing, diversity.

On 22nd September, I will be speaking at the PyData event in Helsinki. It will be a lightning talk - ten minutes or so. I have prepared the slides, but haven't really looked at them yet. I should now. Shouldn't I?

This is new for me.

Not the making slides and writing part, but the speaking in front of people part.

The topic of the talk is "How to learn using AI".

Learning has been an obsession of mine for a long time and AI is everyone's obsession at present, so it feels both timely and relevant.

Wish me luck!

And finally, I bought a domain for Prerna. Her website (not really live yet) lives at https://prernakumari.net. Go check it out. Some links may be broken and she has to start putting stuff out on the blog. But yeah, it's there. Her place on the world-wide-web.

Everyone should have a domain. Maybe a website too. But at least a domain.

a poem

Days are getting shorter here.
nights come sooner.

Someone runs where I walk,
in a white top and dark bottoms.
Someone speeds up on a bike,
with a Wolt bag on their back.
Someone walks their dog.
Someone sits and smokes.

Days are getting shorter here.
Nights come sooner.

Days are getting shorter here.
Night comes sooner.

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 Is Coming

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:40:00 GMT

Finland faces prospect of biting cold winter, FMI meteorologist says

This could mean biting cold temperatures or very heavy snowfall, although Punkka further noted that wintry weather can manifest in different ways. For example, conditions could be very cloudy but with little snow cover.

Oof! I'm chilled to my bones just thinking about this.

Sculptor’s Daughter

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:28:00 GMT

Review

This book is Tove Jansson's autobiography. The same Tove Jansson who wrote and created Moomin characters. I had originally planned to read this during the biography month at TCS' Biblio Group. But it wasn't available then. So I had read The Elements of Marie Curie instead.

Moomin are everywhere in Finland. From cookies, to clothes, to the original stories, and books, to mugs and I guess there are toothpastes too? When Savya had turned two we had sent with him a packet of Fazer-Moomin chocolates. We have gone to at least a couple of Moomin exhibitions - one at Stockmann and the other at Oodi. We have bought and gifted Moomin cookies and bags and onesies to our friends and their kids.

If you are looking for a typical biography (or autobiography) this is not that. If you're interested in reading about childhood and a Finnish-Swedish child's experiences growing up, give it a read.

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:03:00 GMT

Review

Like Cory's last book I had read Enshittification, I knew most about what this book would entail. There was nothing new (for me). As Cory mentions in the Acknowledgement section - 'This books was written on my website pluralistic.net'.

You may or may not agree with whatever Cory says. You may agree with most of it, but disagree with a certain percentage of it. I agree with most of it, though I'm not sure that OpenAI and Anthropic will crash and burn. Maybe, maybe not. We shall see.

I enjoyed it thoroughly and people who don't follow Cory, should read the book.

Notes

There is nothing illegal about training LLMs, based on current law. Though the laws are things that we made up, so we can change them, if we want. LLMs are built in three steps - scraping large amounts of data (how you collect the data, may be criminal in certain cases like Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement), but otherwise it comes under fair use. The next step is converting that data into tokens etc. and publishing that as software. The final step is whatever the AI models create - which is all public domain, so does not have any copyright whatsoever.

LLM code generators are like slot-machines. You may keep prompting it and it may eventually work. But you will not remember all the times it did not work. You will remember just the 10 minutes spent with the last prompt.

The sections about why this bubble exists - basically companies want to be high growth companies forever, so they need to show they can grow in new ways. Why? Because high P/E ratio for a companies means they can basically print their own money - pay in stocks, buy companies, hire bright minds and pay them in stock. Which is why Google tried to put Google+ everywhere. And Meta did Metaverse. It failed. But it gave time to Zuck to find his next growth engine - AI. People, us consumers, don't matter. We are not the target of these announcements or directions the companies take. The Wall Street is.

And finally the section about what comes after the bubble pops was interesting too. The things that will remain will be the small models that can run on our devices. And the DCs will remain but with old hardware, quite unlike the dot com bubble. And people with skills. Though also negative stuff - like so much carbon in the atmosphere - which will remain with us for generations.

Kubernetes Components

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:26:00 GMT

When you deploy a Kubernetes cluster, what you are deploying are nodes, which run the containerised applications.

Each cluster has two types of nodes:

Master node(s) host the Kubernetes Control Plane that controls and manages the whole Kubernetes system
Worker node(s) host the pods which are the components of the application.

graph TD
	subgraph WN[Worker Node]
		direction LR
		kubelet[kubelet] 
		runtime[Container Runtime] 
		proxy[kube-proxy]
	end
	
	subgraph MN[Master Node]
		direction LR
		api[kube-apiserver] 
		etcd[etcd] 
		scheduler[kube-scheduler] 
		controller[kube-controller-manager]
	end

Kubernetes Control Plane

The Control Plane controls the cluster and makes it function.
It has the following components:

kube-apiserver which you and the other Control Plane components communicate with
etcd a reliable distributed data store that persistently stores the cluster configuration.
kube-scheduler watches for newly created Pods with no assigned node, and selects a node for them to run on.
kube-controller-manager which performs cluster-level functions, such as replicating components, keeping track of worker nodes, handling node failures, and so on

Node Components

kubelet an agent, which runs on each node in the cluster and talks to the API server and manages containers on its node
kube-proxy which load-balances network traffic between application components
Container runtime : docker, rkt, etc.

NL122 - Small Models Big Folds

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:21:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #122, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.

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

On Tuesday, which was earlier than I usually do this, I started thinking about what to write about in this week's NordLetter.

Here's how I've been doing this for the past few months -

Each day I write something in my daily-notes.
As I get closer to Sunday, I review some of these things
Around Thursday (more realistically on Saturday nights), I start a new note.
And then I write.

For this second step, I have used Claude (checks notes) six times in the past many years.

This was not something I found value in earlier. Of course, I could go look at what I wrote over the past week - and I do. What Claude provides me with is structure. And a single place to look at all the things that interested me over the past week.

Sometimes I know what I want to write about - maybe an event I went to, or a place or something. Those days are comparatively simpler, in a way.

Anyway.

The thing that happened on Tuesday, as I started thinking about this, was that a dread filled me completely. Perhaps it was a result of the presentation I watched last week (thanks Alex!) about AI companies using your data in whatever way they pleased. (Side note - OpenAI may have stolen a mathematician's solution to a millennium problem.)

I have given Claude access to my personal vault. Mostly for updating metadata on notes in my vault. I wondered if a local model may be a better option for things like this. For small things I want to run in my vault.

And so, I downloaded LM Studio's Bionic app. Then I asked Claude which models I could try out, that would run on my M1 Mac. It suggested three - Qwen3.5 9B, Gemma 4 12B and GPT OSS 20B model.

I downloaded all three. The GPT OSS model refused to load on my paltry 16GB Mac. The Gemma model got stuck at some 80% or so. I realised then that I could run only small models on my Mac. So I deleted the other two and ran the same prompt I use with Claude, to look at my notes from the last week and give a suggestion.

It took a long, long, long, long time to finish running. I shut off the monitor and went to sleep and checked the output the next day. It was nothing special.

And along with it, came a realisation that as it stands today, I would need to get a better Mac with humongous amounts of RAM (32GB minimum, preferably 64GB) for something that is productive to use.

Most of the people I know who are testing local models have received these better Macs from their companies. I haven't. And outside of running the local models, I don't have any need for the memory.

I am perfectly happy with my M1 Mac. And then after I was thoroughly disappointed with running the model, I wondered if Apple would make their new Siri accessible enough to run these tasks. Would it be any good?

Speaking of, Apple held its annual iPhone event on Tuesday. Among other things, they announced the iPhone Duo. And it is so damn tempting. I have found the foldable shape interesting in the past. I was briefly considering getting a Fold and leaving Apple land behind.

The Duo has all the flourishes you expect from Apple. The animation when unfolding or folding the device is just chef's kiss.

The device I am more likely to order is the Apple Watch. They updated the internals of the things, so that the heart rate sensors poll data every five seconds. They touted a study where Apple Watch was found to be most accurate amongst its competitors. Which, of course, they would. Otherwise, the watch looks the same.

I am reading Carl Sagan's Contact right now. It is a short book, and a book I've been wanting to read since I watched the 1997 movie by the same name. The book is narrated by Jodie Foster (the actress who plays the titular character in the movie).

And maybe, I have borrowed too many books from the library. Because I have some five books in the queue after this one. Wish me luck!

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.

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:47:04 GMT

I finished reading Lucas Käldström’s bachelor’s thesis about the patterns and reasons behind the cloud native paradigm.
Lucas uses concepts from thermodynamics and control theory to talk about the key design principles involved in kubernetes design.

An excerpt:

The Kubernetes operator programming model has allowed subject matter experts
(that have authored) to encapsulate knowledge in a way that lets tens
of thousands of Kubernetes users “stand on the shoulders of giants” (knowledge
scalability). Furthermore, the declarative abstraction layer allows for optimizations
in the implementation (e.g., scheduling), leading to resource scalability. Finally,
through continuous reconciliation “repairing” the system as often as possible, fewer
error situations need human intervention, leading to monitoring scalability.

Link to the paper - https://github.com/luxas/research

Notes on Muse AI by Meta

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:59:00 GMT

Meta’s Muse AI works and creeps me out by Emma Roth

Curious, I asked Muse to tell me where it got that information. “Honestly, Instagram doesn’t show you that exact list anywhere in the app — I read it through the account’s API data, which surfaces more than the UI does,” Muse wrote. “The closest thing you can see yourself is your ad topics… That shows the topics advertisers can target you with, and you can remove ones you don’t want or choose to see less of them.” I checked the “Ad topics” list in my Instagram settings menu, and while it does include some vague categories, like workouts, music, and electronics, it’s not the same level of detail that Muse provided.

I could never bring myself to use their products, especially generative AI. Meta has a uphill battle here.

Contact

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:15:00 GMT

Review

I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I watched the 1997 movie by the same name. There are other Carl Sagan books I’ve wanted to read since as well. But alas!

This book tells the story of the first human contact with alien life in the universe and how it may turn out. It does not go into too much detail though, when compared to The three-body problem for example.

The book is verbose though. It is hard science fiction - perhaps a little too dense at times. And that’s coming from me.

I knew about the major beats of the story (though there were some changes), so it wasn’t as surprising to me. But I enjoyed it nonetheless.

OpenAI Misbehaves When Coming up With a Mathematics Solution

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:03:00 GMT

OpenAI’s sly mathematical breakthrough sends a chill through academia

Buckmaster said he asked OpenAI whether it had accessed his sessions on Codex, which he had used while tackling the problem, but that OpenAI grew increasingly evasive, even hostile, in its responses. In statements since, including the blog post announcing the result, OpenAI has flatly denied using any specific user data. “We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem,” the company said.

Like Amazon does for brands in their store. They will copy whatever works.

IOS27 Will Release on 14 Sep

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:09:00 GMT

Apple Announces iOS 27 Release Date by Joe Rossignol

iOS 27 has already been available as a developer beta since June and as a public beta since July, and Apple today said that the update will be released for all users with a compatible iPhone model on Monday, September 14.

Announced at the event, among other things. But hey, five days to go. I still don't know what features my 16Pro will get.

Audi Announces New A2 Etron

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:05:00 GMT

Audi’s new A2 E-tron is its most affordable and efficient EV yet

The German automaker’s new A2 E-tron compact crossover is inexpensive, starting at just £32,200 (about $45,000). And it absolutely impresses with an ultra low drag coefficient and a range of battery and drivetrain options that, when configured correctly, can produce a range of up to 401 miles.

Perhaps my next car?

Most probably it will be a BYD, at the rate things are going.

Arm May Give Phone Gaming a Graphics Boost

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:02:00 GMT

First Xiaomi, then the world: why Arm might give phone gaming a huge graphics boost by Sean Hollister

By following Nvidia’s playbook, Arm-powered phones are about to have PC-like technologies to make games run faster, at higher resolution, with advanced lighting techniques, all without using more power than they do today. The jagged edges you see in the mobile versions of popular games might begin to go away.

Seems interesting. The goal is for phones to be a switch like device, or better. Like what the PS portal could be.

Bangalore India Hospital Flow

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:54:00 GMT

Bangalore India hospital flow by Derek Sivers

Medications that cost $50 in New Zealand or $100 in America are only $2 in India. After my surgery, they prescribed a bunch of stuff to keep the pain and infection away. Fulfilled at a local pharmacy, everything all combined cost about $8.

Need a private consultation with a specialist - like a neurosurgeon or dermatologist or cardiologist? $10. You just tap an appointment in their app, pay instantly with your phone, and that’s it. Which leads to the next point.

We have talked about this ourselves. That healthcare in India is so good and cheap, if you have the money. There are already a lot of people undertaking medical tourism in India. This just strengthens that view.

Another Way to Enshittify Xbox

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:45:00 GMT

Microsoft slashes Xbox Cloud Gaming to just 15 hours a month for Ultimate subscribers by Tom Warren

If you want to use more than the 15 hours included with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you’ll need to purchase additional cloud playtime through the Xbox store starting in November. Microsoft isn’t revealing exact pricing and details today, but Xbox cloud players will be able to purchase bundles of hours that can roll over if unused in a particular month.

It used to be unlimited before this.

You are My Everyday

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:12:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #121, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.

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

Back when we were living in Matinkylä, the Iso Omena library was just across the road from us. The library was open on all days, including the weekends, though the opening hours were different. It was easy to get to the library. That meant I was there every week for one reason or the other.

The closest public library we have here is the Arabianranta Library. It is closed on Sundays, and on Saturdays it closes at 16:00. It does not have any meeting rooms or spaces to sit either. It is beautiful, mind you. But it is also more than a kilometre from home. And it has just meant that I have not used that library as much as I would have wanted to. Or had hoped to.

On Monday, I was close to having a panic attack, or that's what it felt like to me. Prerna pulled me out of it, by literally pulling me out of my chair, and dragging me to the University library, which is in the Physicum building, which is across the road from our home.

It was my first time going to the library to work. Or do anything, actually. Prerna had shown me the library earlier, and I was under the impression that it was for university students and staff only. It's not. Anyone can register. So I did, and got a library card as well.

Since that Monday, I have been going to the library almost every day. I like going to the office - going to a place other than home from time to time. I think it's important to look at other people, talk to them. It's easier too.

Going to the library has meant that I've made progress on the learning plan as well. Sometimes you tend to get inside your head and find yourself unable to move, to get out. Sometimes, all it takes is a change of scenery to fix that.

The last two weeks were full of meetups - four to be precise. I wrote about finding a mentor in NL120. This week I went to two meetups - one organised by the newly formed Platform and Infrastructure Group (previously HUG). I had written then that I had voted for them to be an IaC meetup group. They did! So yay.

The other meetup was organised by the Vibe-Coding Finland group. And like always, I had a great time there.

A common theme running through both these meetups - as expected - was AI. But not in the way you would think. I am recognising more and more the AI-generated slides. Claude mostly. I have seen speakers handle it differently. One speaker at the Vibe-Coding meetup mentioned that this is my slide and this is Fable's slide. Which was refreshing.

There was an interesting idea that maybe AI-generated code belongs in the platform layer. Because that's what the platform people have been doing these years - writing spec, getting things out of our brain and so on. It was an interesting thesis.

The other talk I loved was more on ways of working with AI. I loved the prose on that one. And maybe I've found a person I could go back and forth with on some of these things. I'll report back, I guess.

Last night, we were in bed, trying to sleep. Prerna was in the middle on her phone doing something, flanked by Savya and me on either side. And somehow, I started singing. Then Savya joined in. And then we were both singing. Savya in his style, me in my own. And I thought - you are my everyday - both of you.

Savya is sick right now - autumn flu, I guess. The weather is changing, the leaves are falling, winter is coming. And so these things happen. I used to be so worried when he was little about Savya getting sick. The past year at his daycare has just hardened me a bit. Also, he can talk now. So my fear of him not being able to say if he was unwell, is not really relevant any more.

I finished reading Anxious People today. I loved reading it. It is a humorous book, ostensibly about a hostage situation in an apartment viewing after a bank robber tries to rob a cashless bank. But it is about so much more.

I loved the structure of the book - how it was written. I loved that each new chapter felt like peeling layers off of people. Of the author consistently surprising us, or me, at least. Of finding so many wonderful and beautiful love stories. Of so many wonderful and beautiful people.

Go read it!

Prerna is doing some work for an upcoming summit and so she was at Maria01 for a planning thing. When she came back, I had just put Savya in the pram - we were going to go out to walk soon.

It was late, so we decided to take a small walk. We made our way through the many houses in this area, then to our usual small route. As we got closer to the bridge, the underpass with the basketball court and the tram tracks, I could hear music. I told Prerna, "I think there is a concert going on. I had seen them prepare the stage maybe yesterday."

There was a guard standing some distance away from the place, telling cyclists to slow down. I was worried that they would have blocked the way and we may need to take a different route.

But they hadn't. They had just parked these big buses and trucks and blockaded the entire thing. There were lights and music and a big disco light hanging from the underpass. It was full of people - so full, in fact, that there were people standing outside the thing on the other side of the tram tracks with their phones out.

Today, we took our usual longer route. Nobody had gone anywhere. There were no events planned. Savya was ill after all.

And as I walked past the shrubbery and the trees, I came upon the calm waters of the bay area. There was a man fishing, a woman sitting on a bench and a couple on the farther bench. And I thought, how peaceful is this!

I would miss the peace.

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.

Vibe Coding September Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:53:00 GMT

I have high expecting going into this meetup. Vibe Coding Finland meet-ups are awesome always. Great talks. Great conversations.

"Al and out evolving relationship with practice", Alex Culliere, Senior developer, SOK

Loved the speaker - humorous. I love it when a speaker talks about books they’ve read. Coincidentally, the last time I was here for a Devops meetup, another speaker had been talking about books.

He did two types of works with AI - one which was supposed to succeed - laborious sort of work. The other more exploratory - creating a 3D game engine.

Intellectual conformity as a service that is replacing conventional search.

What a phrase.

There was a fun anecdote about a story about djinns.

He had some practical advice to offer toward the end.

"Same model, different results - how to get the most out of your coding agent" by Miikka Salomaa, Al-native developer & consultant, founder of Ohjelmistofriikit

This talk felt like driving into a wall at full speed. Perhaps because of the last talk - which was freaking awesome.

This was a practical sort of talk - about how your context window fills up. I already knew about most of these techniques - other than the verify step.

This feels like AI generated slides. I have a sense for that I think. Claude’s language in this one. Had a similar feeling in the Devops Finland meetup, but there the speaker had mentioned he had used AI.

"Agent orchestration for a non-technical founder & DIY company brain", Kaisa Vaittinen is founder & CEO of evaluoi.ai and Safety in Relationships, and a generalist with ADHD traits

A disclaimer at the beginning that these slides are Fable generated - I appreciate it.

The interesting thing about this talk was that it was presented as a dialogue between Kaisa and her agents. I liked that. There were times when she said, this is my slide, these are fable slides and so on.

The Safest Job From AI May Be Writing

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:37:00 GMT

The Safest Job from AI may be Writing

While the programmer's job description is getting completely refactored, writing remains surprisingly unaffected. LLMs have gotten very good at generating code, but I am appalled at the absolute shit they spew as prose. They always follow the same robotic cadence and cliches, and sprinkle the same tired vocabulary all around. They take my broken yet soulful writing and transform it into a plastic soulless word slop in the name of improving prose. Their writing communicates no actual understanding and insight. I think we are all developing a visceral ick reaction to AI writing. It is trapped in the uncanny valley, and it may be stuck there for a long time.

I remember when writing was considered dead after ChatGPT came out. There were many discussions - blogs, podcasts, and otherwise - declaring writing to be dead. And here we are.

There have been multiple instances now of me recognising a piece of writing as having been AI generated. And that's just sad. Of course LinkedIn is full of AI assisted writing. I guess for people who can't write (or don't feel they can write) it is a great tool. But everything ends up feeling the same.

I had a funny feeling just yesterday when Prerna found a typo in my LinkedIn post. And I thought hey, that's just proof that a human wrote this!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 11:48:45 GMT

Games I want to play (or atleast buy) this year -

FC 27
GTA VI
Control Resonant

From Oodi to a Mentor

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary) — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:09:00 GMT

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #120, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.

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

I went to Oodi this Sunday, even though I tried not to. I was trying to push Prerna to come here, so that she could study. She had a similar goal. Eventually, I relented.

Oodi was full. On the side where Prerna usually sits, near the south end with the steps that go up closer to the roof, musicians were sitting with instruments of different sorts. There was a music concert happening there. When I reached there, the orchestrator, who I assumed was some professor at the music school, was thanking people for coming out, among other similar things.

I thought I should sit here and listen to them. But then I remembered why I was here. I moved to the other side, past the lift and the escalators, in search of a place to sit. Eventually I found one.

I pulled out my Mac and started studying. I had originally planned to continue my DevOps Learning Plan. I was behind on it. What I did instead, and I had thought about doing this when I was getting off the tram, was to renew my AZ-104 certification for another year.

What followed was me posting about it on LinkedIn, after which I started with my Learning Plan.

A bit about the Learning Plan

I asked Claude to build me a 100-day learning plan, based on the market conditions in Finland, and my experiences. One goal of mine has been to get more hands-on and in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes.

The plan is built in a way that by November 22nd it would be over.

As the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, show him your plans.

Well, I did, and God laughed.

I am behind on the plan. Still on Day 4, while I should have been on Day 14. But that's OK. Life has a funny way of throwing curveballs. It did. I'm reeling.

And so it goes.

Last week, I went to two awesome meetups - a DevOps Finland meetup on Tuesday, and a FAUG meetup on Wednesday.

The first talk in the meetup was about a team's experience migrating from Ingress to Gateway API. It was a deeply technical and highly specific talk. If you were planning such a migration, the talk would have been super helpful. I'm not planning such a migration, however.

The second talk, by Lucas Käldström, was about access control in Kubernetes. I loved that talk.

The thing with meetups is, if you're not going into the meetups with a goal in mind, they're useless. Sure, you get pizza and drinks, but what's the point really. I used to go to meetups for fun, still do, actually. I'm interested in these platforms. I never had a goal, though.

As I heard Lucas talk, though, I got a goal. I will ask him to be my mentor. And I did.

After the talk, I went and shook hands with him, complimented him on his talk and asked him if he could mentor me. I was interested in Cloud-Native technologies and would love to talk more. He said sure.

And that was that.

We met and talked in Ravintola Taulu about contributing to CNCF, about being paid to do it, about how Lucas had started off with porting k8s to ARM because he wanted to run it on Raspberry Pi's and there was no port available. We talked a bunch more. I showed him my learning plan, which he said looked OK. He shared some links which I'm still going through.

I finished reading Atomic Habits and The Courage to be Happy this week.

Atomic Habits is a much more tactical and practical book. It talks about atomicity - habits are small and they stack up to build a better life. And then how to go about building systems, so that you can do the thing you want to do. It is an interesting book - super dense, but there are quite a few things one could use to build habits.

The Courage to be Happy is a different sort of book. It continues from where The Courage to be Disliked ended. I wanted a practical guide to Adler's philosophy, and this book had that, sort of.

In it, the youngster returns to the old philosopher and wants practical steps on how to implement Adlerian philosophy in his teaching career.

I was not super into the book in the first few chapters. That changed when the philosopher started talking about the three types of life tasks in detail. See, I'm not an educator, so I was not able to connect to the first few chapters. But when he started talking about work relationships - about how before you get a work, ability may play a part, but after you get a job, it's your sincerity and the way you do your work that counts, I got hooked.

It was a nice read. Maybe not as shocking as The Courage to be Disliked, because I was already familiar. But like the first book, it gave me plenty to think 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.