Halfman-Newsletter.056-2025Apr
Hello friends, welcome to the Halfman newsletter. This is safe space of wonder, perfunctory philosophy and a lot of random reckons.
This is a blog/newsletter/whatever in broad strokes about life and our collective stumbling through it as a species. If you’re looking for some serious design work and thinking, you should probably go to jimkosem.com . If you’re in need of any product and service design or strategy, I’m your guy. Any job consideration, moral support, jokes or random chats are greatly appreciated and will earn you a place in heaven.
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April
Here are some things you need to read immediately. Drop whatever you’re doing. Seriously, whatever it is, CPR, discovering that cure for cancer. Doesn’t matter. They are not long. It till take minutes, and probably save more lives.
This month’s Top10-Apr2025 will change things forever. Imagine a top 10 list that stabilises the world economy instantly. It’s that.
Finally got back writing some fiction and the Story Explosion with The Hot Dentist which is sort of okay.
Will AI just look budget? Maybe. Hopefully?
I managed to end up in another place that brought such terrible, deeply inexplicable anger frothing forth from every orifice. Yes, it’s true, I have an unrequited hatred for caricatures on walls in restaurants.
Search history
- How exactly are birds dinosaurs again?
- Building a music aggregator app
- Origin of the word “bre” in serbian and the greek “vre”
Iron Swan
I actually made a thing. Well, I argued with three different Large Language Models to try and make a thing for another thing. Friends, I present to you, the bestest Markdown-based, web book platform this week, or maybe ever: Iron Swan.
So let’s say you want to write a book and put it on the Internet, and you don’t want to put it on Wattpad or some other app thing and you sure as hell aren’t going to spin up Ruby and configure a server thing so you can run Writebook. And what if you were so inspired by the number one siege comedy of 2017 The Gates of Vienna that you just had to make your own?
If you’re like me and like to make internet books for no one in particular and are working on a comedy about a black metal band who inadvertently summon a troll, and just so happen to be a designer in software, and are inundated with all this hype about AI, you go and make your own way to make internet books.
You can get it and learn more at the Github repo.
You might think that with an amazing graphic like the above (requirement for v1) it would be enough, but I spent hours and hours arguing with robots so you don’t have to and made a thing you should be able to download/fork/copy, chuck some Markdown files, tweak the names of some stuff and should just work and you go put it on the Internet somewhere.
Because I’m a designer, I’m clearly also into making my life harder than it needs to be due to a combination of DIY subculture youth, overthinking, perfectionism and way too many years of art-school over-education. So I need to do things myself. Like you, I saw all the videos of all the bros making their cool AI things at the press of a button and thought to myself, well, you can guess.
I hate calling it “vibe coding,” not just because it is an utter shit name, but in reality should be prompt coding but it’s probably too late. Anyhow, easily the best part is getting to make the cover or whatever you want to call it where I used AI to help with the swan mesh and the space background.
Names I was originally considering:
- Steel Dominion
- Celestial Warlord
But obviously its named after The Sword’s opus “Iron Swan” off of their 2006 debut studio album “Age of Winters.” Now imagine the acoustic, dare I say troubador-esque intro, lulling you into a place where you can’t handle the pummelling riff that melts your face off seconds later. Its going to totally be like that.
Things not to do in Slovenia: Never ask how you are doing
Don’t do it. Just don’t. This isn’t Milwaukee. This isn’t Bristol or wherever. This is central Europe and not only does nobody care, but they will answer the question with something just about all Brits and Americans can’t handle which is brutal honesty. In the US or UK you would get some gloss-over bullshit like “fine” or “busy.” Here you will get, “Oh you know my son, he has such problems,” or “I don’t know, not great, my mother has cancer, so it’s hard,” or “Well, not good, my wife left me and just realised that Schoppenhauer was right that there is largely no point to anything.” People will tell you how they are actually doing, which you don’t actually want to know.
I’m here to give the low down on how you can avoid the trials and tribulations of not being from here. I qualify as a half-insider or half being from here or half something like the name of this newsletter, so take it from me. You’re welcome.
I knew I couldn’t have thought of this myself
Any business related to optimisation is a race to the bottom.
I thought of that myself, so went looking. "Dear AI who else said that so I know I’m not that original?
(Claude) This quote, “Any business related to optimisation is a race to the bottom,” is often attributed to Thorsten Heins, the former CEO of BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion).
Blendering
Amongst the big-wow videos clogging your screens these days, there are now loads and loads of MCP demos. The biggest wow of these is of course the Blender-MCP, which lets you do 3d wizardry through the magic of asking the robot to do it for you.
This is frigging fantastic as you can see by me being able to have the robot put the “ornate war hammer” in “dramatic lighting” with “fire.” Granted, fire, as always, AI never wants to make cool, if at all for me, but that’s a different issue.
MCPs are good for doing complicated things you don’t want to learn or can never remember, especially in this case. It does settings but exactly what we need really because there is no way to know all of this. However, Blender MCP does not do modelling, and modelling is the main thing of 3d.
Affinity MCP? Why not?
The thing that is cool about MCPs is the level of abstraction and the ability to be out of the app and not tied to whatever they’re chucking into it, like you they’re doing with Figma for instance.
Shook
Ever since I heard Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Pt II” for the first time I can’t forget it. It’s a beat you can not un-hear. Like a DJ or something, I’ve been digging and digging for background on the song, how it came to be, what the effect of the East Coast 90’s AKA the best hip hop ever and Queensbridge and all that had. Where did that sound come from, etc. Fortunately there is not just a Song Exploder episode about it, but also in the Netflix series Rapture, Just Blaze breaks it down (14:59).
Lingua before the Franca
Many people think that I’m good at languages. Maybe a smidgen above average on a good day, but I am more interested in languages than good at them. This most likely has something to do with growing up in a bilingual household where I could hold a conversation with my mom and each of us would be speaking a different language at the same time which would do people’s heads in. Funnily enough this is how my own family’s lives work. Anyhow, there is of course sabir which was the original lingua franca, but apparently there were others.
The new era also saw the emergence of a Turco-Persianate Islamic ‘high culture’ as Persian became the lingua franca of Turkic dynasties across the vast expanse that Shahab Ahmed termed the ‘Balkans-to-Bengal complex’, equivalent to the use of French in early modern Europe. The use of Persian as a lingua franca would not be superseded by any other language until English became the global lingua franca in the 19th century.
The Pigeonhole Principle
It’s easy to sum up in one short sentence: If six pigeons nestle into five pigeonholes, at least two of them must share a hole. That’s it — that’s the whole thing.
How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory
Truth
Or, as my friend Alison Fensterstock, who lives down the road, texted me: “‘You’re so resilient’ is just code for ‘You’re on your own, sorry.’”
Links, etc.
This deodorant is based on The Iliad.
Ends
I tried, so should you.
Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth.
