Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

That's me!

Links

  • 1 day 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.
  • 1 day 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.
  • 1 day 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.
  • 1 day 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.
  • 1 day 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.
  • 2 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).
  • 2 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.
  • 3 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.
  • 5 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.
  • 6 days 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
  • 6 days ago Hershey Noailles
    The Hershey fonts are a collection of vector fonts developed c. 1967 by Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey at the Naval Weapons Laboratory, and originally designed to be rendered using vectors on early cathode ray tube displays. Decomposing curves to connected straight lines allowed Hershey to produce complex typographic designs. In their original form the font data consists simply in a series of coordinates, meant to be connected by straight lines on the screen. We forked hersheytextjs and made it a program that defines strokes in css, then exports it as a font.
  • 1 week ago reg-viz/storycap: A Storybook Addon, Save the screenshot image of your stories via puppeteer.
    A Storybook Addon, Save the screenshot image of your stories 📷 via puppeteer.

@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town

  • 7 hours ago
    okay everybody shut the fuck up Technology Connections is on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KWdCqpXB7A
  • 8 hours 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
  • 8 hours 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.
  • 8 hours 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
  • 8 hours ago
    Content warning:mh-; cat aggression & injury An irony is that, after Catsby passed, i told my wife that i needed another cat as anxious as me to be my buddy 😅
  • 8 hours ago
    Content warning:mh-; cat aggression & injury An update on Minnaloushe: he's moved from a bedroom to my home office, he lives there for the next few weeks. He's very cozy and played with, having a bit of a vacation on gabapentin and starting on prozac. He's been much less stressed and we're hopeful to reintroduce him to the house. Vet is optimistic he'll ease back in better after this anxiety is addressed #cats
  • 10 hours ago
    Although, weirdly the last two attempts have this odd defect in the bow 🤔
  • 10 hours ago
    Third time (with a brim) is the ASA charm, apparently #3dprinting
  • 13 hours ago
    On the bright side, the filter + enclosure seems to be doing the job since I don't smell anything in the basement. Now, thanks to the replies, I have Styx stuck in my head https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5MAg_yWsq8
  • 14 hours ago
    Oh. Well, that's unfortunate 😅 #3dprinting
  • 14 hours ago
    I was tempted to try better sealing up the edges and holes of the enclosure with some aluminum tape. But, I got impatient once the filter was built and just said screw it let's print something. I've never tried ABS / ASA before - what whiff I got of it reminds me of when I used to burn things I shouldn't have as a kid.
  • 14 hours ago
    Printing my first Benchy with ASA after getting this BentoBox filter built. Here's hoping it works and I don't stink up the basement #3dprinting

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