Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

A modern IRC server (daemon/ircd) written in Go.

Our first public model is Jev, available today in early access. Jev achieves similar levels of intelligence on System One tasks compared to existing LLMs, while being two orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. While Jev gives up string generation, it’s optimized for structured outputs and can’t hallucinate. Think of Jev as a frontier-intelligence function call: unstructured state in, typed probabilistic decisions out.

Period-correct technology would probably be a VDU terminal or its predecessor, a teletype terminal, which is an electric typewriter that sends serial output from its keyboard and prints serial input onto paper. Here's where the Alphacom printer comes in. It was compatible and contemporary with the ZX81 and was a better option in many ways than Sinclair's ZX Printer. (The ZX computers had built-in line-printer capabilities.) Importantly there are plenty of the Alphacoms around today, working fine.

Here in 2026 if we need a terminal the chances are we fire one up on our computer and continue on our way without a thought. What we are doing of course is emulating the experience of earlier hardware terminals, ones with a serial port on the back, a keyboard, a screen, or if they are a bit older, a teletype printer. [Sheila Dixon] is recreating that experience for the RC2014 retrocomputer, and she’s using some period-appropriate hardware and techniques.

Gemini isn't an old technology being dusted off, it was created in 2019. But it borrows heavily from Gopher's spirit, BBSes, and the decades-old phlogosphere. Yet, sadly, during my research and browsing of Geminispace, I came across nearly as many dead/abandoned links as I did active and alive ones. I get it. There's a lot of friction when it comes to using an entirely different protocol. I confess that it took me months until I finally got serious with it. I don't think Gemini will ever "take off" and I'm glad for that, really. It's a wonderfully peaceful and calm alternative to the Internet without having to unplug. I'm planning to use it a lot more, and I think I'm going to start adding some of my writing on the protocol exclusively.

Type fast, ignore spacebar.

I learned for this project that a logistic regression can be trained by streaming it one label at a time, and using gradient descent to nudge its weights toward a better fit. I haven’t fully worked through the derivation, but this is not that complicated as far as these things go. And the final result is just 3–10 lines of code depending on how you count. I wish I knew this years ago! It’s so elegant.

One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. I decline to interact with them socially, and make a deliberate effort to avoid working with them too, even if they are doing much that is beneficial. I feel that hanging out with pleasant, capable people, the people with integrity, has made my life a far better one. Hence my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.

gwae: niri's scrolling tiling for your CLI agents, in any terminal (daemon-free, MIT)

It's okay to be wrong, but it's not okay to keep being wrong once there's enough stuff in retrospect to know you were wrong and update. Which is to say if you come to me with an unfounded or over-fit argument or article about AI, I will politely hand it back and walk off shaking my head. Because it's not fair to hand me such a lopsided situation where I would need to spend 10x or more effort addressing all the ways it's wrong before trying to salvage a point from it to discuss.

Whether you played it in the back of your classroom or on your computer at home, if you were a kid in the last 30 years you almost certainly grew up playing The Oregon Trail.