Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

But of course I won’t buy a new Kindle, when this one is perfectly functional. I’ll just pirate the book that I have already paid for. I will find somewhere that I can download a non-DRM-crippled copy of the book, and put it on my device that I have also already paid for.

webmentions feed

The sneakerweb CLI lets you browse and maintain a local collection of sneakerwebsites. You can export your collection to a .snk file, you can import .snk files into your collection, and you can create new websites.

Magpie is a visual livecoding tool made in Picotron. You can play with it online in the browser right here, download a binary to run on your computer, or load it up inside your Picotron OS via the BBS. You can use Magpie to make interesting visual effects, and then instantly execute it and show the results on the screen.

A recreation and modest modernization of WIT (W3 Interactive Talk), the original web forum, dating to June of 1994.

a repairable, compact, and robust printer designed to last. Fully repairable and equipped with a refillable ink system, it adapts to your needs while reducing your printing costs. Easy to maintain, it offers a sustainable, economical, and eco-friendly alternative to traditional printers.

I’d say getting fired by Meta is like catching the last plane out of Vietnam, even in this ruthless job market.

So: Lots of work is easier because of LLMs, and Lots of heuristics we used to gauge effort are broken because of LLMs, so Conveying effort to others is harder because of LLMs And: “Someone spent time on this” is a proxy for “this is worth engaging with” and I appreciate projects that take a lot of effort and I like it when people appreciate that I spent effort on something But also: Making a good thing still requires making lots of decisions, and Making lots of decisions is still very hard, despite LLMs, so Making good things is still very hard As a creative technologist I’ve found this paralyzing. And as someone who loves novel internet projects I’ve found it frustrating. I’ve heard similar things from many of my friends.

Two decades, forty-four meters of build tools, and one very confused later, here's the whole story. Spare twenty minutes; I'll get you up to speed.

Ego-driven management also relies on the old factory mentality that holds that the best workers are the ones who arrive early, work late, and are seen hustling by the bosses. Putting in 80-hour workweeks may be necessary at a startup, but in most businesses, that's as stupid as measuring programmers' productivity by lines of code or, more recently, by how many AI tokens they use.

You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript. This needs a browser built by thousands of engineers just to show you a paragraph. Machines get the clean version.