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
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14 hours ago
Amiga A1200 Gotek Mount w/ "Floppy" Interface - Free 3D Print Model - MakerWorld
A unique Gotek Mount for the Amiga A1200 that moves the interface (OLED screen + rotary encoder) to a āfloppyā sticking out of the mount, simulating a real floppy.
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1 day ago
LiteAgent/liteagent: The Open Source Web Agent Evaluation Framework
The Open Source Web Agent Evaluation Framework
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1 day ago
Netrunner ā Convolution BBS
Finally, an online ācyberpunkā game that comes close to portraying computing as depicted in classic cyberpunk works like Neuromancer by William Gibson. In this game the player is a NetRunner, an arrogant and bold futuristic hacker. Armed with his cyberdeck and an arsenal of offensive, defensive and analysis software heās ready to invade corporate systems in the grid and raid their credits, for fame and fortune! Itās no cakewalk though! Waiting for the unwary are Intrusion Counter-measures (IC). Machine controlled defenses that can inflict damage to hardware and software, steal the players own credits and even cause⦠death.
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1 day ago
Lines of Code Are Back (And It's Worse Than Before)
The metric we killed is back, and AI made it worse
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1 day ago
crewAIInc/crewAI: Framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents. By fostering collaborative intelligence, CrewAI empowers agents to work together seamlessly, tackling complex tasks.
Framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents. By fostering collaborative intelligence, CrewAI empowers agents to work together seamlessly, tackling complex tasks.
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2 days ago
Add a Solid State Hard Drive to Your Amiga 600 or 1200 Using a Compact Flash Card with IDE Adapter (30-60 mins) ā Retro Projects
I recently purchased an Amiga 1200 which has hard drive support through an internal IDE connector. Adding a hard drive is appealing since booting from floppy disk or a Gotek floppy drive emulator can be quite tedious and slow. The good news is that there are solid state options using compact flash (CF) or secure digital (SD) card solutions through an IDE adapter. I went with a CF card adapter that I purchased for less than $30 from AmiKit on eBay. This is shown below inserted into the IDE slot on my 1200.
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3 days ago
We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design - METR
Based on conversations with study participants, we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now ā in early 2026 ā compared to our estimates from early 2025. However, because of the selection effects in our experiment, our data is only very weak evidence for the size of this increase. Our raw results show some evidence for speedup. Our early 2025 study found the use of AI causes tasks to take 19% longer, with a confidence interval between +2% and +39%. For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%. Among newly-recruited developers the estimated speedup is -4%, with a confidence interval between -15% and +9%.
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3 days ago
Times New Resistance ā Abby Haddican
Introducing Times New Resistance ā a Times New Roman impersonator that autocorrects the autocrats. Do you have access to the computer of an ICE apologist, white supremacist, Republican mouthpiece, right wing propagandist, or other morally bankrupt American? Install Times New Resistance and unleash some mischief.
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3 days ago
CCC vs GCC - Harshanu
For Anthropicās stated goal of demonstrating that Claude can build complex software, CCC is a genuine success. For anyone wanting to compile software to actually run efficiently, GCC (or Clang, or any production compiler) remains the only real option.
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4 days ago
A.I. Isn't People
Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesnāt work the same way as the first one.
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4 days ago
UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A - TI-99/4A Development - AtariAge Forums
Iāve been working on developing an operating system for the TI-99 for the last 18 months or so. I didnāt intend thisāmy original plan was to develop enough of the standard C libraries to help with writing cartridge-based and EA5 programs. But that trek led me quickly towards developing an OS. As Unix is by far my preferred OS, this OS is an approximation. Developing an OS within the resources available, particularly the RAM, has been challenging, but also surprisingly doable.
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4 days ago
We Are Not Going Back
I donāt think we will ever go back to how we used to program. And it happened so fast that I didnāt even notice when it happened. One day I was writing code. The next day I was⦠still writing code, but with AI. And then at some point it flipped. Now Iām mostly directing code. Reviewing. Prompting. Iterating. The AI writes most of it. It wasnāt a dramatic shift. It was subtle. A little bit more capable every week. And suddenly Iām here, doing the dishes, realizing that everything has changed and I donāt know exactly when.
@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town
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2 days ago
And that's just one of the smallest SD cards I have on hand. I'd melt my teen brain if I went back in time and showed him a storage device over 7800x times bigger than his 128mb hard drive yet small enough that I accidentally dropped it between the floorboards (which is a thing i did)
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2 days ago
Turns out Amigas don't like big hard drives. And by big I mean 125x bigger than the 128mb hard drive I bought with my allowance, back in the day
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2 days ago
No, YOU just spent the last couple of nights screwing around setting up an SD card with Amiga software in an emulator, planning to plug it into a real Amiga 1200. (er wait, no, you probably didn't. but i did)
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2 days ago
I looked at my iPhone and it didn't unlock. I flipped it off and it did unlock.
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3 days ago
PAKIDGE INTENSIFIES
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4 days ago
This image makes me think it's the lovely neighbor couple at my door with a tupperware bowl of guacamole for the superb owl party https://www.therundown.ai/p/what-openai-and-jony-ive-are-building
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4 days ago
Playing some Unreal Tournament 99 and remembered that the first time I heard System of a Down was because some kid had embedded a WAV of "Toxicity" in a giant level of a bedroom & bathroom where everyone was mouse-sized. #gaming #unreal #ut99
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4 days ago
Installed a doorbell camera a couple months ago, because we are furtive creatures here. It's not a Ring. Tempted to hang a sign that reads "camera not connected to internet"
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5 days ago
This is almost, but not nearly enough, to tempt me to interact on x-dot-com again
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6 days ago
Maybe if the oligarchs send us back to the 1970s in personal computing technology, we can start a new fork of history where RGB vector CRT displays never went out of style
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6 days ago
Pew pew pew pew pew #tempest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK7vRzwG4WI
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6 days ago
Screw language, it's time to train AI on Tempest #atari #tempest #ai #gaming #retro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsa2VokvPuI
Github (@lmorchard)
- 16 hours ago pushed 0a26267 to lmorchard/starnet ( main ): Pause timers on tab hide; add pause button; refresh backlog
- 20 hours ago pushed 7be857f to lmorchard/starnet ( main ): Add .node-version pin (test CI) (#2)
- 20 hours ago submitted Pull Request #2 to lmorchard/starnet :
- 20 hours ago pushed 1f4d168 to lmorchard/starnet ( test-ci-workflow ): Add typescript devDependency; use npm ci in CI workflow
- 20 hours ago submitted Pull Request #2 to lmorchard/starnet :
- 20 hours ago created branch test-ci-workflow on lmorchard/starnet
- 20 hours ago pushed f4cd2e2 to lmorchard/starnet ( main ): Add CI and GitHub Pages workflows
YouTube Videos (lmorchard)
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Adding limit switches to a 3018 CNC machine?
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Assembling the Why Em-Ulator Module for RC2014
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing Sonoff S31 AC (again)
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Clip: Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home Assis
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Pi Pico Terminal and Real Time Clock modules
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board part 2
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module assembly
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module repair & firmware update
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again again?
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again?
Pocket Casts
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The Galaxy S26 is a photography nightmare
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
1 day ago
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US-Iran Tension, Clinton Deposition, Paramount Wins Warner Bros. Bid
from
Up First from NPR
1 day ago
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NPR News: 02-27-2026 10AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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Claude Code for Finance + The Global Memory Shortage: Doug O'Laughlin, SemiAnalysis
from
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
3 days ago
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How Claude Code Claude Codes
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
4 days ago
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š¬Searching the Space of All Possible Materials ā Prof. Max Welling, CuspAI
from
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
3 days ago
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NPR News: 02-27-2026 1AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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MBMBaM 802: Assassinating the Moon Queen
from
My Brother, My Brother And Me
5 days ago
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NPR News: 02-27-2026 12AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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Samsungās New Galaxy S26 Phones - DTNS 5213
from
Daily Tech News Show
2 days ago
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Why NVIDIAās Awesome Earnings Tanked the Market
from
Daily Tech News Show
2 days ago
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Oklahomaās governor on Trump, immigration and tribal lands
from
Up First from NPR
2 days ago
Spotify ( Les Orchard )
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Capitol on Joyland by TR/ST 21 hours ago
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Bury Me on It Will Come to You by ACTORS 1 day ago
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So Typical on Now That I'm Real by Fragrance 1 day ago
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Empires on Creatures by Ari Mason 1 day ago
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BĆŖte Noire on BĆŖte Noire by Black Nail Cabaret 1 day ago
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Oblivion (My Obsession) on NITE by Nite 1 day ago
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Aliens on The Awakening of a Mutant Girl by Echoberyl 1 day 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:
- 2026-02-28T20:12:31.010Z
- Last rendered:
- 2026-02-28T20:12:37.098Z