Personal blog, thoughts, stories, and discoveries. Writing since 2012 about technology, life, books, and everything in between.
Maybe you’re not overwhelmed. Or maybe you’re overwhelmed for a reason. – Matthew Dicks by If you are spending five hours per day — nearly a third of all waking hours — staring at screens large and small, perhaps you’re overwhelmed because you’ve committed a significant portion of your life to the mindless consumption of video content instead of the things that might make you feel less…
Temperature Zero for Culture The mode gets shown more, so it gets picked more, so the model grows more confident the mode is what people want, and the tails starve. Within a few dozen rounds, a catalogue that began almost perfectly even collapses onto one dominant option. But why does it collapse toward the mode rather than fan out across all that individual data? I read about this article in…
How I read and use technical books feels outdated and something that needs to be re-thought. Reading cover to cover seems useless. Not non-fiction books. I am experimenting with a mixed approach including video, hands on, and books to learn new stuff.
A Swarm of Blood Robots by Craig Mod LLMs are excellent at taking your messy spreadsheets, making them look great, and re-ordering them intuitively. I have some old financial spreadsheets that I’ve hacked together over the years, and Claude adeptly transformed them into something beautiful and sanely functional. It’s easy to cross-check to make sure all the important numbers are where they should…
Watched the solar eclipse indirectly (via the light on the opposite building). Though night mode makes it so that the images don’t look as dark as they were in real life.
Inside OpenAI’s Race to Reinvent Software Development for the Agent Era by Laura Entis A few interesting things in this article including the art and visualisation. The first line of defense is continuous integration (CI), the automated checkpoint that tests new code before it merges into a shared codebase. Farther along is continuous deployment (CD), which ships approved code into production.…
Barcelona is magic
On AI Coding and Its Discontents - Cal Newport “Writing your own code, slowly but surely, and using LLMs for narrow or particularly annoying tasks (say like writing tests or throw-away scripts), is the best way to produce the highest quality code, since it’s the only way to properly understand it.” […] This last year has been exhausting. The PR departments of the frontier labs have done an…
Give me one reason by Seth Godin The honest rejections would say something like, “my boss didn’t like you,” or “I was in a bad mood,” or “we realized that our spec wasn’t very clear and the person we liked didn’t fit it either,” or “we wanted someone who looked more like us,” or “your competence made us nervous,” or… Take what they wrote and replace it with “no.” It’s a short read. And I just…
How I use LLMs to learn complex topics · Laurentiu Raducu by Laurentiu Raducu While I was analyzing new AI bottlenecks that might slow down data center buildup, I realized there are many aspects of chip production that I do not know. Surfing the web, I asked myself what if there would be a game to get you through the process of building a chip at a fab? For sure learning this way will stick, since…
Defending my own brain against enshittification His days are punctuated by cups of coffee and tea at strict intervals, cigarettes, ironed sweater vests, empty time for deep thinking, placing a bench outside his office for passersby each day, and most notably, when he arrives at his office at 10 am alone, he opens all the windows in the building and says good morning to the ghosts who live there.…
Oooohhh Summer, How Much Risk Is a Useful Amount of Risk? by Craig Mod The world doesn’t need a park that bans rollerblading. It needs one that bans smartphones. Oh yes it does. The other takeaway from Matthew’s talk was people tend to “report” stories rather than tell them. So they report what happened and what was said, but they leave out what they a) thought, and b) felt. Add those two in and…
On building scalable control planes by Dr Werner Vogels One thing the team talked about constantly, almost to the point where it became a mantra, was that no matter what happens to the control plane, VMs that are already running need to keep working. We call this static stability, and it sounds obvious because of course running VMs should keep running. But at scale, obvious things are the hardest…
How I write by Murat Since writing is also a tool, the advice on honing your tools also applies to writing. The best way to get better at writing is by writing a lot. Write daily. By writing a lot of bad prose, you will eventually learn how to write better and get more comfortable with writing. Take every opportunity to write. Maintain a blog. Read a lot. All the while, be mindful of your writing.…
A day spent in Madrid
Watched it in Barcelona. Loved it. It was a quintessential Spider-Man movie. There was plenty of spectacle but also so much heart. Loved the montage of NYC at the end. I like also the act of watching something communally in a theatre. All of us sitting and waiting for the post credit scene. Nobody has moved.
Wide streets and hot weathers
There’s a new mark above or below as read in NetNewsWire. It feels like it was designed for me. Some feeds that I subscribe to - mostly aggregator style feeds - have too many items in them. I don’t usually have the time to go through all the items in one go. In those cases, I was usually marking all as read without reading or doing nothing. This solves that feature.
Added a life calendar to my about page. Now to add entries to the system.
The hook, or the thing I was wondering was how would the hero - Sunny Deol be redeemed. He was fighting for the criminal. That question was answered by the end of the film. The other question that this film had was if you had to choose between your values and your child, what would you choose. This theme has been questioned already many times and also in The Last of Us, in that it is not a…
HBO Max is putting on vertical shorts by Jay Peters Warner Bros. Discovery is bringing a vertical video feed to HBO Max to help you find something new to watch. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney Plus, and Peacock already offer TikTok-like vertical video feeds to surface content that might be interesting to users, and now HBO Max will have a similar feed of its own. Much of the content I see…
I’m 38 and I Can’t Support Myself Anymore by vōx When you become chronically ill or disabled, you begin to understand how deeply this ideology has embedded itself into the psyche. The shame of no longer being able to work consistently feels personal. As though my body’s inability to keep pace with capitalism says something fundamental about who I am.
How the Role of Book Cover Design Has Changed in the Age of Social Media by Madelyn Johnson In the before times, a cover served primarily as an interpretation of the text: a visual invitation intended to both entice readers and help them understand the book’s content. When working on a new cover, designers would ask themselves: What is this novel? What emotional experience does it promise? These…
The AI giants’ new problem: open AI by Robert Hart “The question for American firms may increasingly become: How much capability do we need to release openly to prevent Chinese models from becoming the default platform for the open ecosystem?” Sharma said. A more plausible outcome could be a “portfolio strategy,” she said, with companies keeping “their very best model proprietary while releasing…
RSS in 2026 — the best distribution channel nobody uses · intrepidkarthi by Karthikeyan NG Creators want analytics. Email gives you opens and clicks. RSS gives you nothing — you cannot see who is reading. For creators who measure success in dashboards, RSS feels like flying blind. For creators who measure success in actual reading, RSS is fine. I agree. I use RSS feeds primarily to track and read…
Finished watching on 2026-07-24.
Finished watching on 2026-07-24.
Some times the weather calls for it.
Boox is taking on Xteink with its own tiny e-reader by Stevie Bonifield Boox’s new Tile lineup will take on Xteink’s popular e-readers that are small enough to stick on the back of an iPhone with MagSafe. As spotted by Good E-Reader, the first one is the Picco, which will feature a 3.97-inch front-lit, black-and-white e-paper display and expandable storage with an SD card slot. Boox confirmed to…
Made some mushroom kebabs today. Savya should have liked these, but didn’t. Oh well, we will try again.
A week of fasting, learning about learning and a new philosophy
There are no good odyssey tickets available this week for the IMAX shows in Helsinki. Maybe next week.
Review: Xteink X3 is the little e-reader the world’s not quite ready for If there’s one thing that’s holding back the X3 and the X4 and, frankly, all the other wacky readers out there, it’s the market. The e-reader space is still unquestionably dominated by Amazon purveying its razors-and-blades strategy: buy the Kindle for cheap5 and the company earns it all back when you buy your books or sign…
In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus, memorised a bunch of nonsense words, and mapped how much he forgot over time. He discovered what is now called the forgetting curve . This basically means you forget most of what you learnt within 24h, then if you don’t practice recall, your remaining memories decay exponentially. How fast the decay happens depends on the person and the memory, but in general the rate…
Online shopping and rising living costs driving young Finns into debt "People have the need or desire to consume, but their purchasing power is no longer enough to match their spending habits," Nors said. He said the biggest underlying factor was the decline in purchasing power. "If wages are low and living costs continue to rise, it puts young people's finances in a vulnerable situation," he…
food and other things
Apple’s rumored ‘Upgrade’ program brings lease-to-own pricing for iPhones, Macs, and iPads by Stevie Bonifield As component and RAM shortages drive prices higher, Apple is reportedly launching an “Apple Upgrade” program for leasing new devices. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, it will work similar to a car lease, with options to upgrade to a new device early, or keep or return the device at…
OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system by Emma Roth As part of efforts to complete the evaluation, the AI models gained access to the internet by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the sandboxed environment. From there, OpenAI says its models “inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym,” and then “searched for and…
Review I picked this book up because someone at the TCS Bibliography Group had mentioned that this was a life-changing book. And I thought, if that does not make it a worthy recommendation, what else can. On the first day, when I started reading it, I realised the assertion that this is a life changing book was correct, and it would be a life-changing book for me as well. There are not that many…
England won. You don't usually get free scoring games like this in the World Cup. Teams set up more defensive usually. I knew after that first half everyone will say the same thing - why did Tuchel not start Rashford and Saka in that game against Argentina? Who knows? I think in games that matter, coaches are happy winning 1-0.
From The Complete Guide to Fasting . We have a bunch of conditioned responses to triggers like a thought of watching a movie, or a football match. The sizzling of veggies (or steak) on the pan. Time of day, and so on. We have done this same thing so many times. Even though we are not hungry at night, we would still make some food or eat, lest we get hungry at night. Hunger is ok. It feels like the…
The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired If you're feeling like your work is simultaneously more productive and less satisfying, you're not broken. The feedback loop is broken. And I think we need to start treating that as an engineering problem in its own right, not a personal failure. The people who are finding their footing right now seem to share a few traits: they have strong opinions earned through…
Nature and Renewal
A thing I’ve been doing for a long time is add any books I wanted to read in Reminders app. The problem was I read in a different place, created notes in a different place and so on. Today, I solved some of it, by adding a to-be-read queue to my website. Mostly for tracking books, but also movies, shows and games.
I’m considering getting a shorter domain name, maybe sajalc.net instead of the current longer name. I wonder if there is a point to it. Do people type urls in the search bar? Or do we just copy paste stuff? I have liked cool domains - ma.tt, sive.rs and so on. Mine would be saj.al, which is available, but would be costly to own and renew.
A little sad about the match yesterday. England had started well, as had Argentina to be honest. But then England went full on defensive. It was only a matter of time once that happened. Reminded me of how ManU used to play.
The PS6 sure sounds like a handheld by Sean Hollister Here’s what I think: Sony is making a handheld PS6, as has been reported for some time, but it’s no longer a side dish — it might even be the main course. The Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, respectively the company’s best-selling and fastest-selling game consoles, have cemented that a do-it-all console-handheld hybrid is the most popular and…
Review This book served as an extension to The Diabetes Code . I was interested in knowing more about the fasting regimen, and if I could implement it in my day-to-day life. The first part of the book talks about the theory of energy storage in our body and how and why the modern diet messes up our body. From chapter to chapter, the book touts fasting as the solution. The second part goes into…
Finland remains one of Europe's coolest countries as heavy rain looms Finland will enjoy another spell of warm and sunny weather over the coming days, but temperatures remain well below those seen across much of Europe, where many regions continue to experience heat of around 30 degrees Celsius or more. Another reason to love Finland! We had gone to Zurich and Paris in August a couple of years ago…
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #114, 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 .…