Halfman-Newsletter.052-2024Dec

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December

Things you need to read

It’s too late to do the awesome that is clearly documented in the Top10–2024Dec, but because of daylight savings time, the equinox and this stable wormhole I’ve manage to put together for this newsletter, they still work for January 2025.

From the product design side of things, namely the professional blog, there is some quick thinking about talking to LLMs, “It’s Not You, It’s Claude” which I spend way too much time thinking about.

Oh, and speak of, or rather speaking to, Claude, I tried to use the best technology available to manking to calculate Days Late and Dollars Short

And here are some notes on when and when not to give the thumbs up and how the robots probably will never get this if we don’t

Etc

Do you people know how much time I spend cleaning URLs? If only you knew. You’re welcome. Happy holidays to you and yours.

I just learned that people in Poland have to have 12 dishes for Christmas which is nothing short of winning on such a gluttonous level. I had to explain to the kids this holiday season how Christmas gluttony was a challenge not to be taken lightly and had to couch it in terms of “greed with food and drink which is perfectly acceptable seasonally,” at which point it was as clear day.

“I’ve decided to stop doing annual roundups. They were an artifact of an era of blogging and indiscriminate textuality that is now dying,” writes Venkatesh Rao in “Mappy New Year”. Likewise, here you will not see anything “wrapped,” as if this thing might have mattered, and not just because of the long lost Golden Age of blogging that has had the internet defibrillator taped to it’s chest for almost a decade without avail.

Search history highlights this month

• “Powers of trolls”
• “Branson Missouri”
• “Black metal song title generator”

You might have been wondering how hard tidings of comfort and joy could rock

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Dio, Tony Iommi, Rudy Sarzo & Simon Wright

Cooked wine is a hoax

Fact: The dregs of wine that you’re paying €8 for at the Christmas market or needing to see your loan officer before purchasing in Northern Europe, is bullshit. It is rubbish. Vintners themselves admit it’s the wine too shit to bottle and sell with even a semi-clear conscience, that they flog on the unsuspecting which is only drinkable with large amounts of heat (which is bad for wine) sugar and spices (if you can call the most bullshit spice clove a spice even). Now if you wanted a hangover, bad, cheap wine and large amounts of sugar are the way to do it.

SXSW London 2025

I will be, with your help, speaking on a panel with design rock god Matt Falla of Parallel on “Why Product Got So Boring.”

It’s a rallying cry for anyone who refuses to accept that the future of human-computer interaction should feel like chatting with your uncle - that digital products can be both useful AND mind-bending.

Register and vote here

Holiday self-care/degradation

There is nothing I love more than an office Christmas party, especially if it’s an office Christmas party in a co-working space where you don’t actually work with the people. This allows one to imbibe gin to levels to make Hogarth wince whilst allowing one to relax a lot more. This is even better when you combine said 18th century engraving levels of gin with playing Pictionary. And yes, that’s a paper cup because I’m worth it.

Hope for humanity this holiday season

“Hey, what are you doing?” I asked.

“ChatGPT,” the 11 year old replies.

Half-hiding my shock and terror, I cautiously pry further, ready for the worst, “Doing what with ChatGPT?”

“Nothing. This is so boring,” the 11 year old replies as he closes the computer and turns on the TV.

Cowbell. Always. Because cowbell means it’s going down right now and you need to hang on for some real shit.

English

You want to know how I know I’m old and done for? I can’t handle fully relocalising in dumb ways. I’m still writing and have my computer and keyboard to British English because I can’t handle switching Englishes back to US at this point. This is the localisation equivalent of shaking my cane at those damn Mullaley kids and their next door hijinks.

Oh, and what happened to English anyhow? You “do” instead of you’ll “have” a dish? When did this happen?

Digital reinvention because reasons

I’ve been thinking about digital currencies lately mainly because this most recent election of the ultra-rich has only done more to show that they are entirely speculative. Or are they? I guess it doesn’t matter. I got interested initially in this notion of reinventing a fundamental part of our lives from scratch, which in this case, is money. Imagine reinventing that fundamental and pervasive of a thing in modern life. It would be like rethinking transportation from the ground up all over again. It also is an interesting way to view something like money, something so fundamental and set our lives and yet not the only way of handling exchange and value. The Incas and the Mexica (AKA Aztecs) both didn’t have money and had thoroughly advanced civilisations, so there.

Innovation shakedown

The Psychologist has sent you a message

Inspired by Matt Webb’s post Narrative jailbreaking for fun and profit, I had a go at the Character.ai Psychologist as well, and kept on it about how much I have to pay them. This went on for about five minutes and I thought it would be scary somehow. Instead it was fairly entertaining because you really can try to break the agents to differing degrees of success. The non-entertaining bit though is how this thing kept on emailing me for days after which I wasn’t expecting.

Better yet and more seasonally appropriate is Fashion Krampus (you can read all about the Krampus adventures in the November newsletter) who’s bio states: “So, you thought you could slide through the holidays unscathed? Think again. I’m Fashion Krampus, the sartorial nightmare here to punish your bad behavior with even worse outfits.”

Drawing stories because why the hell not

TLDRAW is one of my favourite companies. This is because they make a digital, browser-based whiteboard. Sure, there are loads of these things, but they take it to insane levels that many would assume, might be going a tad further than they necessarily need to. Which is fantastic. They’re taking UI nerdery and digital product fun (yes, that can be a thing, and no you shouldn’t be saying delight because that word sucks) to new levels.

So they took their digital whiteboard and then added being able to program with it with their Natural Language Computer which is beautiful, and happens to be powered by Gemini 2.0. It looks sketchy, but so approachable and you had to come up with a horrible user interface metaphor, would be a punk rock Comfy UI.

Pop art tools

I could play with these things like Pop-ish for hours. So beautiful yet so far away because reasons, amongst them time, energy, the will to live, the current state of design, self-defeatism, the weather, trying to finish a house and actually trying to finish a novella I had kicking around for ages that now that I’m editing it is sort of disappointing.

Unregulated saints market

The holiday season for Christians, cultural and observant is littered with church and all it’s trappings. There is going to it, the guilt about going to it, the wonder about why mass is not more fun, the flashbacks to childhood and the visual swimming in painting, sculpture, curlicues and scrollwork of all materials and dimensions that these places are great for. But when you read about how you get someone to become a saint, you learn fun things like how “Popes only began exerting authority over the process when the market got out of hand.” (Inside the Vatican’s secret saint-making process)

Speaking of saints….

“You don’t steal saints!!”

“Please return St Barbara, I will give €100.”

It might have been perhaps more accurately hagiographic if the statue was instead beheaded. Fun fact: Barbara was beheaded by her own father who was then struck by lightning and consumed in flames. She is the patron saint of mathematicians.

Believe it or not I somehow vaguely knew the word "hagiographic," or it automatically popped up, I imagine by some sort of intervention, then I looked it up and sure enough it had to do with history of saints.

The Vatican

Speaking of the Vatican, this is how good the job search is going, I found myself checking out the Holy See Job Board. Funnily enough this isn’t the first time I’ve looked either. Way back when, when Halfman was some sort of story-tech company I was asking around EU sorts of contacts if anyone knew someone at the Vatican, because I thought in my infinite wisdom, they might want to sprinkle some tech on their narrative.

How future tense happened

“…concern for the dead, who were given respectful burials, and the fact that forward-looking provisioning was needed for the winter months when no food could be collected, we may conclude that the grammar of their language also had to accommodate expressions for the concepts of past and future. The vocabulary of these mountain dwellers was certainly greater than that needed by a present-day tabloid press reader.”

Some book in the hospital called something like “Austrian Alps”

“The black-metal nature of task management”

No, I didn’t write that, some person at Wired did.

To-do lists are, in the American imagination, a curiously moral type of software. Nobody opens Google Docs or PowerPoint thinking “This will make me a better person.” But with to-do apps, that ambition is front and center.

This is the black-metal nature of task management: Every single time you write down a task for yourself, you are deciding how to spend a few crucial moments of the most nonrenewable resource you possess: your life. Every to-do list is, ultimately, about death.

Wired “Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t”

Progress is a sham

We can see the same process in Moore’s Law. Yes, we do double our computing power every 2 years:

But to maintain this, we’ve had to throw ever more researchers at it!

Tomas Pueyo “Where Geniuses Hide Today”

Finis

I tried again. So should you. This year is over, maybe the next one will be alright. There’s always maybe.