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

18 hours ago Rice Theory: Why Eastern Cultures Are More Cooperative : The Salt : NPR
The idea is simple. Growing rice tends to foster cultures that are more cooperative and interconnected, Talhelm and his colleagues explain Thursday in the journal Science. Why? Because farming rice paddies requires collaboration with your neighbors, Talhelm tells The Salt. Self-reliance is dangerous.
18 hours ago Discovering Negative-Days with LLM Workflows | Spaceraccoon's Blog
With this little experiment, I validated a critical threat intelligence workflow - we need to be monitoring for open-source vulnerabilities before (or if ever) a CVE is published. Threat actors are 100% already doing this in some form to quickly weaponise and exploit open-source issues. To emphasise the point: This is already happening.
18 hours ago Power Prompts in Claude Code ・ Hardik Pandya
The thing that surprised me most is that Claude Code doesn’t need you to be precise. You can describe what you want the way you’d explain it to a colleague, and it figures out how to make it happen.
18 hours ago I miss thinking hard.
“Vibe coding” satisfies the Builder. It feels great to see to pass from idea to reality in a fraction of a time that would take otherwise. But it has drastically cut the times I need to came up with creative solutions for technical problems. I know many people who are purely Builders, for them this era is the best thing that ever happened. But for me, something is missing.
18 hours ago Code has always been the easy part | Kellan Elliott-McCrea: Blog
The cost of code is going to zero. That’s genuinely neat, and mind blowing, and going to require reinventing so many things. It was still never the hard part.
1 day ago gradient.horse
Honestly I just wanted to play around with gradients. But gradients without anything on the horizon lack something, so I added horses. Since I can't draw horses, now you can draw them. And watch them parade across the screen alongside horses drawn by people you probably wouldn't like. Or maybe you would, how should I know?!
1 day ago A friend has commissioned me to make a wood Commodore 64 case. Here is a progress shot of a test fit. : r/c64
1 day ago jim11662418/ESP8266_WiFi_Analog_Clock: Uses an ESP8266 module and an Arduino sketch to display the local time on a inexpensive analog quartz clock.
Uses an ESP8266 module and an Arduino sketch to display the local time on a inexpensive analog quartz clock.
1 day ago AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
I think we've just disrupted decades of existing intuition about sustainable working practices. It's going to take a while and some discipline to find a good new balance.
3 days ago joshuanwalker/Raiders2600: Reverse Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600
Reverse Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600
4 days ago sohzm/jasonisnthappy: simple, embeddable document database with acid guarantees
A lightweight, embedded document database written in Rust with ACID transactions and MVCC support.
4 days ago Programming is Dead
I’ve heard so many engineers say “Oh, I dabble but I just don’t think AI can do it well” are just in absolute denial at this point. Yes, AI can do a terrible job right now if you don’t wield it properly. The loom can make a mess of things if it’s improperly used. But, this is the worst these tools will ever be. They will only get better.

@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town

11 hours ago
omg, the "Use AI to get real answers about real food" bot on realfood.gov really is just Grok Like, it isn't even loaded up with realfood.gov content in even the vaguest wave toward context.
11 hours ago
Also: I feel like this has meme & sticker potential
11 hours ago
Oh noooo: "Ah, a proud assitarian. The diet where 'eating' means finding foods that slide comfortably up the back door. Bold choice. I respect the commitment to this... unique nutritional philosophy." https://www.404media.co/rfk-jrs-nutrition-chatbot-recommends-best-foods-to-insert-into-your-rectum/
12 hours ago
"Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability" That's it: I'm going back to AppleWorks, on my Apple IIe. https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841
1 day ago
Imagine if Discord and PostHog got together on a unique form of user verification?
1 day ago
I can't believe there's a serious product data company called PostHog. On most boards, that's frowned upon https://posthog.com/
1 day ago
Then again, it might be kinda neat to fit a touch screen behind the button grid of the case and just treat it as a mask for whatever gets shown on the display
1 day ago
At some point, I want to actually get down to some tinkery projects replacing the guts of a Parker Brothers' Merlin handheld. Ideally without actually destroying the case, but maybe some literal Dremel hackery would be worth it to fit a better display or RGB LED matrix?
1 day ago
hello fellow teens how do you do
3 days ago
Miss Biscuits and Cosmo wish you a happy #caturday
4 days ago
Also, oddly enough, the script that commits changes to git was one of the files that got deleted. So, the deletions themselves didn't end up getting committed to git
4 days ago
Also, weirdly, woke up to all my notes in Obsidian deleted across all my devices. Luckily, I've got scripts that commit changes to a private git repo every 5 minutes, so things seem recoverable. Trying to figure out if syncthing had a spasm or something and nuked the files

Github (@lmorchard)

5 days ago watched letientai299/md2cb
1 week ago pushed 6e5fff0 to lmorchard/feedspool-go ( main ): Fix future-dated items: clamp to first_seen instead of now()
1 week ago submitted Pull Request #35 to lmorchard/feedspool-go :
1 week ago pushed 6e5fff0 to lmorchard/feedspool-go ( moar-future-published-item-fixes ): Fix future-dated items: clamp to first_seen instead of now()
1 week ago submitted Pull Request #35 to lmorchard/feedspool-go :
1 week ago created branch moar-future-published-item-fixes on lmorchard/feedspool-go
1 week ago pushed 8e43dbe to lmorchard/feedspool-go ( main ): Fix feed sorting to use published_date instead of first_seen

YouTube Videos (lmorchard)

Pocket Casts

Were Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Books the First interactive Novels? from Secret Histories of Nerd Mysteries 22 hours ago
Could the Trump Phone be a good phone? from The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition 1 day ago
NPR News: 02-10-2026 6PM EST from Unknown Podcast 13 hours ago
NPR News: 02-10-2026 3PM EST from Unknown Podcast 16 hours ago
NPR News: 02-10-2026 11AM EST from Unknown Podcast 20 hours ago
DHS Funding Negotiations, UK Epstein Fallout, Latest On Guthrie Investigation from Up First from NPR 1 day ago
NPR News: 02-10-2026 10AM EST from Unknown Podcast 21 hours ago
NPR News: 02-10-2026 9AM EST from Unknown Podcast 22 hours ago
Anthropic Releases Opus 4.6, Software Stocks Tumble Again - DTNS 5201 from Daily Tech News Show 4 days ago
RSA February 9th 2026 from RSAudio 3 days ago
NPR News: 02-09-2026 11AM EST from Unknown Podcast 1 day ago
Guthrie Investigation, Ghislaine Maxwell Deposition, Seahawks Win Super Bowl LX from Up First from NPR 2 days ago

Spotify ( Les Orchard )

Aliens on The Awakening of a Mutant Girl by Echoberyl 20 hours ago
A Shot in the Dark on A Shot in the Dark by Ghost Cop 20 hours ago
Solar Flare on Linea Aspera LP II by Linea Aspera 20 hours ago
Take the World on Valleyheart by She Wants Revenge 20 hours ago
We Don't Have to Dance on It Will Come to You by ACTORS 20 hours ago
Slug on TR/ST EP by TR/ST 20 hours ago
The Rhythm on V by Kite 20 hours ago

Colophon

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