Housekeeping for Hallions

Housekeeping for Hallions is a guide to living with less effort and more intent. The word hallion is of unknown origin; in Ireland the term refers to an affable character who may be slightly chaotic, yet undeniably charming. Hallions are not given to depending on what other people think. They may be dishevelled or disorganised and live in a state of disorder by choice -- kind to nearly everyone, content to live alone up a long lane with nearly nothing but ideally without a cross bank.

Des Donnelly is an Irish poet born, raised, and residing in Co Tyrone. His writing life has moved between the factual, the technical, and the imaginative -- each mode sharpening his attention to how language stores meaning, distorts it, and occasionally breaks under its own weight. His work is guided by a framework he calls creative gravity: the archive is not a collection but a curvature, where each piece alters the shape of the whole and nothing is ever wasted.

Please see  https://hallions.ie/

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Giddy Up Tidy Up

California robotics startup Figure AI has released a striking new demo of its Figure 03 humanoid robot - powered by the proprietary Helix 02 vision-language-action AI - autonomously tidying an entire living room without any human intervention or task-specific coding.

In the 4K footage, the robot performs a series of complex, interlinked tasks including spraying and wiping surfaces, tossing pillows back onto a sofa, and organising scattered toys Humanoids Daily - all at human pace. What makes this significant is how it learns: Helix 02 did not require new algorithms or specialised programming for the task, instead learning strategies from examples and applying them across different situations.

https://www.figure.ai/

Saturday, 23 August 2025

REXCO the Revolutionary Executive Committee for Coordination & Oversight

 In 1995 I registered Rexco.com with Network Solutions, an early WayBackMachine capture is dated 20.Dec.1996. Alas the domain lapsed in 1999 during a botched transfer to Tucows. (FYI I still have the original Docs) 

On this 30 year anniversary I’m celebrating by transforming REXCO into the
Revolutionary Executive Committee for Coordination and Oversight
- a fictional planning bureau documenting humanity's transition from 2025 to 2055 through six increasingly absurd / realistic Five Year Plans.

Visit rexco.com.
Read the Prohibition of Bloatware Press Release
Check the footnotes on On Departures Relaxation

Why Soviet aesthetics? Because every tech startup's "disruption" is just central planning with better fonts. Every smart city is a digital kolkhoz (collective farm). Every AI governance framework recreates the bureaucracy it claims to eliminate. The turnips or us peasants, as always, don't care.

The Premise Is Simple

REXCO administers impossible futures through impossible documents. Climate collapse becomes Emergency Mobilization Protocols. AI consciousness becomes the Species Transition Framework. Interstellar missions launch while Earth's zones fragment into high-tech and low-tech holdouts. Each plan fails forward into the next crisis.

I'll turn 100 in 2055 so the final plan concludes after my birthday. The archive exists at rexco.com no WordPress, no frameworks, just HTML files in folders loading in under 100ms, per our own Prohibition of Bloatware directive.

Why This Matters Now

We're drowning in prediction. Every consultancy has a 2030 vision. Every government has a net-zero pathway. Every CEO has an AI strategy. But nobody admits the fundamental truth: we're all just making documents about futures that won't arrive as ordered.

REXCO admits this. Every press release contains its own contradiction. Every plan includes its failure. Every peasant quote reminds us that soil preceded committees and will outlast them.

The Claude Collaboration

This project emerged from conversations with Claude about Kondratiev waves, Kohei Saito's degrowth communism and whether using Soviet imagery trivializes historical suffering.

Read the full launch article on my Talking To Claude

Happy Russia Day