Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

LES ORCHARD IS IN THE WEIGHTS — Mozilla software developer

Sliders, pointer position, element visibility, viewport size, battery, network, sensors — JavaScript can read all of it; CSS can't. prop-for-that writes that runtime state into --live-* and --const-* custom properties — batched and diffed down to one setProperty per frame — so your CSS can compose and react to it with plain calc() and var().

A platform-agnostic specification of the technical features every decent website should have — from to /.well-known/security.txt, from WCAG contrast to llms.txt. Written for humans and agents.

Briefly, in Spire 1, the game used several distinct pseudorandom number generators, to prevent e.g. randomness within a combat from influencing future card rewards. However, they were all initialized to the same starting state, which meant they produced the same sequence of numbers. A crafty player could therefore pay attention to the results of past random events and gain information about future random events.

Portmaster put hundreds of free, community-ported games on Linux handhelds. Starboard brings huge swathes of that catalogue to the Android ones — the Odin, Retroid, RG and dual-screen Thor class of device — by running them in a real Linux environment under the bonnet. Phones are welcome too.

Build real-time multiplayer for Phaser, PixiJS, Three.js, or any browser game. Open-source Node.js framework — rooms, actors, typed binary protocol. Free for commercial use, forever.

Loop engineering is replacing yourself as the person who prompts the agent. You design the system that does it instead. A loop here can be thought of a recursive goal where you define a purpose and the AI iterates until complete. I believe this may be the future of how we work with coding agents. However, its still early, I’m skeptical and you absolutely have to be careful about token costs (usage patterns can vary wildly if you are token rich or poor), so I want to unpack what it is and what it means.

It is not acceptable to bounce users on old browsers, users with bad network connections, users using assistive technologies. Certainly not from a monopoly public service. A lot of hype and noise is pressing us to extend the cowboy, wild-west phase of the software industry’s expansion. We should set that aside, and take ourselves seriously as a mature industry. Build a web application that works on a playstation portable on a 3G connection - if you do, it will work for all your users, and it will still work 30 years from now.

In many jobs, employees must manage multiple projects or tasks at the same time. A typical workday often entails switching between several work activities, including projects, tasks, and meetings. This paper explores how such work design affects individual performance by focusing on the challenge of switching attention from one task to another. As revealed by two experiments, people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers. Being able to finish one task before switching to another is, however, not enough to enable effective task transitions. Time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and it contributes to higher performance on the next task.