Halfman-Newsletter.054-2025Feb
Why hello there. Please join me on another fun-filled instalment of the Halfman newsletter. Here you will lose approximately 5 minutes and 58 seconds of your life that you will never, ever recover. I’ll be your host Jim, disgruntled designer, closet hesher and otherwise nice guy who likes pints, mountains, sunsets, filling small notebooks with profusions of ideas that will never happen, assembling furniture, eggs sunny side up, nature documentaries, open protocols, the metric system, pre-black album Metallica and you.
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February
The February Top10 is about as lacking as the rest of this newsletter and the month in general. Let’s face it, January sucks, but February sucks so bad it can’t even muster 30 days.
Search history:
- Descartes interaction problem
- Eating pigeon squab
- Northern Irish slang
Thanks to global warming, winter here in central Europe lasted for about a minute and now we’re already hearing the signs of spring. The drunks are moving around more vibrantly on the city streets, sharing their joy to passersby and the birds are regaling in their song. More importantly, we’ll be welcoming spring with some nutty pagan festivities all throughout Slovenia and lots of booze. All the while we need to take heed, as we now have empirical evidence, drunk witnesses are less likely to remember a suspect’s face.
But spring is not quite yet here, but when it comes, it’s going to be hot and heavy as evidenced by Cleveland’s Finest, Dave Hill as he gets ready to get sexy for spring.
My family and I spent the past four months living next to some chickens on the outskirts of Ljubljana. Whilst it sounds quaint and bucolic in ways that we wished the internet could bring us and doesn’t, it wasn’t that amazing. I never held a live chicken until one day they got loose and in a move that would make Rocky’s trainer proud, I caught a chicken and tossed it back in the coop. But more importantly, chickens always order their numbers. Smallest to the left, largest to the right. Which is sort of messed up in ways I’m not really quite sure of. Even crazier, is that the living proof of the Universe’s sense of humour, the platypus is venomous. That’s right. Weirder still, but perfectly respectable in intent, is the concept of the vegan hunter. Oh and trees are all about solidarity. Nature makes little sense or we can make little sense of it more like.
“I remember walking past a well-known döner stand with my mother one evening. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” she asked me. Three years later, she was dead.” (Alex Cocotas, “Breaking Glass”)
Same thing happened to me. Minus the döner stand. And he was dead in less than a year after.
Then again, there is hope. There is always hope. Who knows, one day you might be there, innocently taking a stroll and sure enough, two righteous dudes with surfboards come up to you and start quoting Point Break in Public.
Brandolini’s Law, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
Hyper connectivity amplifies randomness
Our ability to predict the future is limited, and in an era of hyper-uncertainty, relying on ever-more precise past data only yields ever-more misguided certainty that the patterns of the past will be a reliable guide to our future.
(Brian Klass “The Red Queen Fallacy”)
If AI learns from the past but the world is changing quicker and quicker, this means we’re statistically dooming our reliance on it aren’t we? An AI’s model of the world is linear. Life is not and becoming even less so.
Destroy the machines
The main problem with this onslaught of capabilities, worries and large language models swallowing the earth is to know what is actually good. We’re in a weird epistemic crisis of sorts where what is an answer even. You type at it more and more and the picture of the cat on the bike sort of changes, you’re not positive why or how, and what is right.
I went to Lessons from Building AI Coding Assistants: Context and Evaluation and quite possibly the best takeaway from the guy who’s job is building AI coding assistants is that nobody knows really how to measure how good the responses to the chatbots actually were. The term “vibes driven development” was given.
This is what it’s coming to. Job ads for robots, not for humans. But it gets worse. “Indian or LLM?” This is what someone told me people in the tech industry are asking themselves in the race to the bottom of devaluing and demeaning humans. Speaking of India and nazis apparently there have been attempts to reconcile the swastika to it’s original meaning. Also, no surprise, Hitler was a massive tweaker.
Cultural stereotypes are best taken sitting or lying down
Up to a certain latitude, my guess is up to roughly central England where it reverses, many like to consider whoever lives to their south to be their inferior. This is no less true in ex-Yugoslavia where I live where the lovely and very tall people of Montenegro are thought to be lazy. There is some bit where they’re somehow always lying under a tree somehow. But in any case, bless them, Montenegro have done an amazing reverse and created a contest for the ‘laziest citizen’.
Way way back my dude Mike, who unfortunately for him was from Florida and lived in Cleveland, was studying for a masters in Stockholm. One dark, dark, late November weekend I went up to hang out with him. His flatmate was this pleasant and wide eyed guy named Mohammed from Egypt. Mike and I open tins of dramatically overpriced budget lager and start chatting about bands and that. Mohammed sat with us and shyly opens an offered beer then goes on to tell the most beautiful rock and roll story there was. Apparently he had never heard rock music until he was 13 or something. He was over his cousin’s house who said something to the extent of “hey you got to hear this Mohammed,” and sat him in front of the stereo and then played him some rock music. He then went on to describe how everything changed from that moment forward. We drank beer. Cultures were bridged and rock and roll saved another soul.
Ends
There was no need for mindfulness before.
That’s it. Done. Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth.
- Jim