Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

That's me!

Links

  • 2 days ago The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome
    If you’re a nerd comfortable with the idea of rolling your own software, everything is now programmable, not merely in a technical sense but a practical one. And that gets to a feeling I think a lot of people have when creating software with agents: what does it mean to say you’re “building” it? “Building” implies more effort than you’re expending. What you’re doing feels a lot more like configuring, on a platform that has suddenly become vastly more configurable. A platform that feels a lot more like Emacs.
  • 4 days ago Save For Web claws – Unsung
    For context, Save For Web was a popular export function in Photoshop at the peak of its use for web design, but assigned a rather unpleasant ⌘⌄⇧S shortcut. Using it often turned your hand into a
 claw of sorts.
  • 4 days ago Secret Handshake Installs Arcade Games In D.C. To Criticize Trump’s Iran Policies | HuffPost Latest News
    See scenes from Secret Handshake's games depicting FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the pope and others.
  • 4 days ago ESP32 Life
    As I continue to try to unbundle my hobbies from the iphone, these ESP32 devices have played a really big role. An open product like this promises a tinkerer like me much more than a useful gadget - it can become MY gadget, something modified and tuned to my specific needs and aesthetic quirks. There is no corpo telemetry tracker sneaking onto my gadget, only the stupid shit I put there!! And when I get tired of that thing, I can always flash it with something else. I can't say that about my phone.
  • 4 days ago The Boring Internet (text) | Terry Godier
    Some things need to become enormous to survive. Other things survive because they never needed to become enormous.
  • 4 days ago The Adventure Family Tree
    An incomplete chronicle of Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure, the "fons et origo of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed artifacts" of computer gaming history.
  • 4 days ago The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon
    This machinery of niceness reaches points of fracture, but only occasionally. The most infamous was back in September 2016, when Fallon hosted Donald Trump. He sat with the then-candidate, not to interrogate or even lampoon him, but to perform a brief, cozy skit culminating in Fallon mussing Trump’s hair. The moment was not just a lapse in judgment; it was the ultimate, logical end point of the show’s ideological structure.
  • 4 days ago Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
    If AI does turn out to make you dumber, why can’t we just keep writing code by hand? You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools. If the models are good enough, you will simply get outcompeted by engineers willing to trade their long-term cognitive ability for a short-term lucrative career3.
  • 1 week ago I built a 200 line AI router in TypeScript. My monthly bill dropped 41%. - DEV Community
    Wrappers exist because routing AI calls is annoying. It is also the highest leverage thing you can own in your own code. The 200 lines above are not a moat. They are a Tuesday afternoon. The reason to write them is that you cannot improve a bill you cannot see.
  • 1 week ago The Bean is here! – The Ploopy Blog
    Today, we’re releasing a brand new, open-source mouse design: the Bean, which is a pointing stick mouse (also called a nub mouse). Nub mice are commonly found in laptops in the center of the keyboard. The Bean takes that concept and pushes it farther than anybody’s ever pushed it.
  • 1 week ago Raising of Chicago - Wikipedia
    During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the grade of central Chicago to lift the city out of its low-lying swampy ground. Buildings and sidewalks were raised on jackscrews. The work was funded by both private property owners and public funds.
  • 1 week ago Stripe Projects | Provision and Manage Services from the CLI
    Stripe Projects lets you or your agents provision multiple services, generate and store credentials, and manage usage and billing from the CLI. Set up hosting, databases, auth, AI, analytics, and more in a few commands.

@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town

  • 12 hours ago
    Welp, I had a good run of a bunch of years enjoying #eurovision - kinda sad but not going to bother with it this time around
  • 1 day ago
    I accidentally used some hand sanitizer today that was scented. I cannot remove the scent from my hands. It is incorrect. My calm is damaged immeasurably.
  • 3 days ago
    Holy crap, lightning and thunder! #pdx #pdxtst
  • 3 days ago
    Feel like I really need to get around to learning French now
  • 3 days ago
    I also just learned that I had a French Canadian great-great-grandfather named Percival? That's pretty cool
  • 3 days ago
    Hadn't gotten around to listening to anything but "Disease" and "Abracadabra" from her new album Mayhem - but I'm halfway through and dang it's all bangers so far. Also I could have almost sworn I heard IAMX on "Perfect Celebrity", but I don't think that's correct
  • 3 days ago
    Lady Gaga came up on streaming shuffle and I'm reminded that, holy crap, I really like Lady Gaga - at least her pop stuff.
  • 3 days ago
    On my Dad's Dad's side, my great-grandfather was born in Quebec, great-grandmother in Ontario, and I guess they paired up and left for Detroit so he could work in the auto industry. Now I'm like, okay cool, that was a good run, can I go back though?
  • 3 days ago
    I'm not usually one for genealogy, but I think I might have just discovered that I have Canadian great-grandparents on my Dad's side? This is... kind of exciting? Never met my great-grandfather on that side - he passed a few years before I was born - but apparently I'm named after him. And maybe possibly if we get the right documents together, I'll have inherited Canadian citizenship through him. That would be rad, because I love Canada!
  • 4 days ago
    Also, I think I need to point a trail camera or something at this new pond. I couldn't attract crows to the backyard with peanuts, but they're digging the water. And, every morning, I get up to find something's been messed with - fountain knocked over, power cords dragged around. Once, something had pulled the filter pump entirely out of the water. I suspect raccoons and I suspect they're cute as heck
  • 4 days ago
    Ekekekek #cats
  • 1 week ago
    Like, "Sir, I am a happily married man, only my wife gets to vibrate upon me these days."

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