Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Before the internet, people could already chat. It is a topic that has always intrigued me: how was it possible? As a kid I had already heard about a command called talk, and the most impressive part is that you can still use it today, with no sign-ups and straight from the terminal, even in workplaces where I work over a VPN. It is not dead: it is just that few people know its potential.

A minimal, single-person Finger daemon written in Python with asyncio. It serves the plan of one personal account, nothing more, and follows RFC 1288.

Being angry at work feels good. It feels like proof that you’re working on something that matters, and that you’re personally having an impact. If you’re angry, nobody can call you a coaster. But anger is only a local maximum. If you can find your way to a different style of working, you’ll not only be more effective, but you’ll be in a far better place to have impact on problems that actually matter.

My writing is now ~95% organic. The remaining ~5% is English mistakes that an LLM fixed or a few small suggestions here and there. But a year from now, will this 5% grow? Will my personal satisfaction of doing it myself vanish in favour of supervised writing? What skill will I develop further: writing or prompting? If writing is thinking and I outsource it, am I still thinking?

Ultimately my point is, no matter how much I'm certain something is AI, I would not say it out loud, because I always have a capacity to hurt a real artist in doing so. I just want people to stop going "uuhhh guys I think this is AI look at the tells" because it only hurts real people and is simply just really annoying.

It’s nothing short of an indictment of our society at large that Aaron Swartz, one of the co-creators of the RSS protocol (among many other things) was effectively assasinated by our legal system for “illegally” downloading about 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR - charged so excessively to be made an example of (we're talking 35 years in prison, $1million USD fine, and asset forfeiture) to the point where he felt the need to take his own life rather than deal with the court circus and impending financial ruin - while Facebook (oh I’m sorry Meta) has torrented 80 TERABYTES of books to train their AI models with virtually no consequences other than a court case they will most likely get some sort of financial slap on the wrist for while their AI models continue to print them money.

A beautiful, powerful, self-hosted rom manager and player.

small, native web tricks worth remembering

Vibecoding is like being an executive of a large company that is barely under your control. You never feel like you really know what’s going on, and there’s always the suspicion of sabotage and loafing. Things appear fully formed, but not quite how you imagined. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it, other than pouring more money into the black box, and yelling louder. So that’s what you do.

This is the kind of solution that most AI critics are not allowing for right now when they only picture a shame-based corrective to individual people’s use of AI. It is possible to build human-centric, empowering tools and platforms that are owned by the people instead of by billionaire tycoons, that are responsible about the environment and with people’s data and privacy, that are accountable to the communities that they serve. If we engaged every person who made some AI slop and said, “would you rather have tools that help you make something amazing, and brought you into a community of creators?” I don’t think anybody would say no.