Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>
That's me!
About Me
TL;DR: he / him; old adhd cat dad; tinkerer; serial enthusiast; editor-at-large for lmorchard.com
This page collects a bunch of the stuff I do online. If you feel like it, send me an email at
me@lmorchard.com, send a toot to
@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town, or find me in one of
the other usual places below:
Blog (blog.lmorchard.com)
Links
-
54 minutes ago
AddyOsmani.com - Loop Engineering
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.
-
11 hours ago
How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
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.
-
2 days ago
Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks
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.
-
2 days ago
The new 20% time, minus the time | joe.dev
Running a handful of agents and switching between them is its own kind of tired. Harvard Business Review has started calling it “AI brain fry”: the strain of supervising systems that move faster than you can think. It isn’t burnout. For me, burnout is feeling responsible for something you can’t affect, shoving at an immovable object. Brain fry is almost the reverse. You have all the help you could ask for, a row of agents that will do whatever you tell them, and the thing that gives out is your own capacity to hold context and decide.4 We spend all our attention on what the tools can do. We’ve barely started on what running them does to the person doing it.
-
2 days ago
ntfy.sh | Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST
ntfy (pronounced notify) is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API. It's infinitely flexible, and 100% free software.
-
2 days ago
Banned Book Library | Rick's Blog
A long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to modify the device to have an open WiFi access point and a web server hosting banned books. The idea was that if you lived somewhere that banned books you thought were important, you could theoretically stick a digital copy of the book on one of these light bulbs. Then you could go install it somewhere in your community. As long as the light bulb is switched on, then anyone in the vicinity can still access the banned material assuming they have an electronic device with WiFi. Since the device is a light bulb, it would be difficult to detect and likely to go unnoticed. A cyberpunk digital dead drop. These devices are also fairly inexpensive, so leaving them around town as is hopefully not very cost prohibitive.
-
2 days ago
Maybe it's time for lots of little indie AIs to take over - Anil Dash
That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.
-
3 days ago
MikeSchirtzinger/silent-notetaker: Private, on-device AI meeting notetaker that runs entirely in your browser — live transcription, speaker ID, and note extraction with no audio leaving your machine (WebGPU + WASM).
Private, on-device AI meeting notetaker that runs entirely in your browser — live transcription, speaker ID, and note extraction with no audio leaving your machine (WebGPU + WASM).
-
3 days ago
staniks.github.io - Catlantean 3D - Making Graphics Like It's 1993
My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s, while allowing myself the luxury of using a modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.
-
4 days ago
Doctor When
DOCTOR WHO is gone. STAR TREK has reached the end of its cycle. The STARGATE reboot was cancelled. The new STAR WARS film did not do well, and I believe they only have one more film in the pipeline. The MCU is not in a great place and the shape of its future will balance on the two new AVENGERS films. SUPERMAN’s takings were soft and SUPERGIRL is tracking at less than half of SUPERMAN’s opening. And the two biggest films of the last month were made for less than a million each by directors in their twenties. One or two swallows don’t make a summer, but right now it looks like old science fiction inflected IP is reaching a hiatus point.
-
6 days ago
If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know — Jonathon Ready
That creates a real supply chain risk for businesses. If Claude gives me poor or incorrect advice while I’m working on an AI component, I have no way of knowing whether the model was confused, whether my problem is unsolvable, or if some invisible policy restriction quietly kicked in. Anthropic has explicitly chosen not to tell users when this is happening.
-
1 week ago
Split-Flap Display by David Kingsman | Download free STL model | Printables.com
10-unit split-flap display. 3D-printed flaps. Modular. | Download free 3D printable STL models
@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town
-
55 minutes ago
ugh, I really need to get around to excising Disqus from my blog. they're starting to serve up chumbox ads in the comment widget 🤮
-
3 hours ago
I'm mean, don't get me wrong, I'm talking about *going evil* and conning the rubes - I actually have truck with a bunch of that woo stuff, even if only metaphorically. Which is, of course, why I won't do it. Probably leaving a few dozen million on the table at least.
-
3 hours ago
Hell, I'll even throw in a little off-brand Dianetics, Scientology, and Objectivism in there just to really pull out all the stops
-
3 hours ago
I mean, I've read enough occult literature to know how to string together some woo garbage. Should I turn evil and start peddling New Age AI to the over-financialized? I can and will pull a bewildering cascade of Jung, Campbell, Adler, and the complete catalog of Llewellyn Publications directly out of my anus and apply it to LLMs. I bet I could even prompt & context & harness engineer those suckers to play along since I'm sure it's all in their training corpuses
-
3 hours ago
RE: https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/116774290673952380 oh emm gee akashic records
-
8 hours ago
Really trying to convince this guy that he could be a part of this
-
8 hours ago
I practically can't with these #cats
-
8 hours ago
I hope @TechConnectify can explain this
-
1 day ago
okay everybody shut the fuck up Technology Connections is on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KWdCqpXB7A
-
1 day ago
Also Chewy sent us a card, "Happy 9th birthday, Cosmo!" And i was like how very dare you?! This cat is still 12 weeks old like the day we adopted him #cats
-
1 day ago
Content warning:mh-; cat aggression & injury When he's calm, Minnaloushe is such a big dopey teddy bear. Really hoping we can convince him everybody cool to hang out with, here.
-
1 day ago
Content warning:mh-; cat aggression & injury Vet's guess was that we maybe introduced him to the house a little too fast the first time around. He'd been at the adoption place for about a week, at another home 2 weeks before, and another home for 4 years before that - so a big of a whirlwind set of changes when he met our 2 cats. Hoping that a reset and lots of stability will turn this around
Github (@lmorchard)
- 22 minutes ago submitted Issue #592 to lmorchard/decafclaw : Inject vault-root AGENTS.md as always-loaded context
- 22 minutes ago submitted Issue #592 to lmorchard/decafclaw : Inject vault-root AGENTS.md as always-loaded context
- 7 hours ago pushed ad70bba to lmorchard/starnet ( main ): Add lint-imports guard to make check (#244)
- 8 hours ago pushed 50f2d49 to lmorchard/starnet ( worktree-audio-reference-analyzer ): Fix accumulating crackle: guard against orphaned graphs from overlapping async builds
- 8 hours ago submitted Issue #591 to lmorchard/decafclaw : Reflection: shared verifier_model config (resolved through model_configs)
- 9 hours ago submitted Issue #590 to lmorchard/decafclaw : Close the discover → act → verify → carry-forward loop (heartbeat triage inbox)
- 9 hours ago submitted Issue #590 to lmorchard/decafclaw : Close the discover → act → verify → carry-forward loop (heartbeat triage inbox)
YouTube Videos (lmorchard)
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - Adding limit switches to a 3018 CNC machine?
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - Assembling the Why Em-Ulator Module for RC2014
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing Sonoff S31 AC (again)
-
Clip: Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home Assis
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Pi Pico Terminal and Real Time Clock modules
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board part 2
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module assembly
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module repair & firmware update
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again again?
-
Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again?
Pocket Casts
-
Who decides when AI is too dangerous?
from
Decoder: Ad-Free Edition
22 hours ago
-
NPR News: 06-18-2026 11AM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
16 hours ago
-
Trump Signs Initial Deal With Iran, Trump Withholds DNI Nominee, Trump Approval Poll
from
Up First from NPR
21 hours ago
-
NPR News: 06-18-2026 10AM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
17 hours ago
-
The best headphone mic we've ever tested
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
1 day ago
-
NPR News: 06-17-2026 3PM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
-
Google Fills Its New Smart Speaker with Gemini - DTNS 5292
from
Daily Tech News Show
1 day ago
-
MBMBaM 818: Announcing: Utilidrink
from
My Brother, My Brother And Me
3 days ago
-
The Mythos mess and your AI questions, answered
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
2 days ago
-
NPR News: 06-17-2026 11AM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
-
Big Questions About US-Iran Deal, Trump Wraps G7 Summit, Georgia Primary Results
from
Up First from NPR
1 day ago
-
NPR News: 06-17-2026 10AM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
Spotify ( Les Orchard )
-
Two on Further by Intuition 14 hours ago
-
Heartbreak Kid on Strange Words and Weird Wars by Marnie 15 hours ago
-
Put Up A Fight on Anywhere by Causeway 15 hours ago
-
Now This Is Fun on An Extended Broken Frame by Marsheaux , James New 15 hours ago
-
Wild Things on Wild Things by Ladyhawke 15 hours ago
-
Never Ending Circles on Every Open Eye by CHVRCHES 15 hours ago
-
I See Red on Paradises by Ladytron 15 hours ago
Colophon
This is a static web page hosted on Amazon S3. It is periodically updated via a scheduled Github Action that fetches data from many sources on the web.
- Source code:
- https://github.com/lmorchard/about-me
- Last fetched:
- 2026-06-19T07:15:09.684Z
- Last rendered:
- 2026-06-19T07:15:52.626Z