Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

That's me!

Links

  • 23 hours ago Saying goodbye to asm.js | SpiderMonkey JavaScript/WebAssembly Engine
    asm.js was Mozilla’s response to the question posed by NaCl and PNaCl: how can the web run code at native speeds? The idea was clever: pick a strict, statically-typed subset of JavaScript that an engine could recognize on the fly and compile down to native code. We could get performance similar to NaCl/PNaCl and still have code live inside web content and use web API’s (no separate sandbox, IPC, or alternative API’s). asm.js shipped in Firefox 22 back in 2013 and was a success. It let projects like Unity and Unreal ship C/C++ codebases to the web for the first time, using just standard web technologies. The Epic Citadel demo was ported to the web in just four days. It was a landmark achievement, and a fond memory for the original asm.js team.
  • 1 day ago The Visible Zorker Project
    But it also lets you see the game running as you play. Every time you type a command, you’ll see the source code of the functions that executed it. You can also browse the game’s variables and the state of every object. Track your progress on an interactive map. So you can see exactly what the game does and how it does it.
  • 1 day ago The good times in tech are over
    If I had to choose, I’d definitely choose to return to the job market of the 2010s, so I can be paid more to work less and have more job security. I’m not an idiot. But the silver lining to actually having to ship is that you’re no longer living in a dream. If you’re realistic about how things work, the job of software engineering becomes much easier to understand: Providing value to the company gets you rewarded Not providing value to the company gets you punished “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives
  • 1 day ago The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
    Some senior and staff engineers operate as gatekeepers, slowing down development and saying no to most things This was a critical role during ZIRP, because: Tech companies had thousands of engineers who were empowered to do basically whatever they wanted, so without gatekeeping the systems would have fallen apart Tech companies didn’t care that much if they got anything done When ZIRP ended, the environment for this kind of engineer became much worse, since tech companies were now actually focused on accomplishing things and the “do whatever you want” era was over Like with layoffs, this shift is often blamed on AI, but it would have happened even if powerful LLMs had not emerged at all. It’s an end-of-ZIRP phenomenon
  • 1 week ago The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome
    If you’re a nerd comfortable with the idea of rolling your own software, everything is now programmable, not merely in a technical sense but a practical one. And that gets to a feeling I think a lot of people have when creating software with agents: what does it mean to say you’re “building” it? “Building” implies more effort than you’re expending. What you’re doing feels a lot more like configuring, on a platform that has suddenly become vastly more configurable. A platform that feels a lot more like Emacs.
  • 1 week ago Save For Web claws – Unsung
    For context, Save For Web was a popular export function in Photoshop at the peak of its use for web design, but assigned a rather unpleasant ⌘⌄⇧S shortcut. Using it often turned your hand into a
 claw of sorts.
  • 1 week ago Secret Handshake Installs Arcade Games In D.C. To Criticize Trump’s Iran Policies | HuffPost Latest News
    See scenes from Secret Handshake's games depicting FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the pope and others.
  • 1 week ago ESP32 Life
    As I continue to try to unbundle my hobbies from the iphone, these ESP32 devices have played a really big role. An open product like this promises a tinkerer like me much more than a useful gadget - it can become MY gadget, something modified and tuned to my specific needs and aesthetic quirks. There is no corpo telemetry tracker sneaking onto my gadget, only the stupid shit I put there!! And when I get tired of that thing, I can always flash it with something else. I can't say that about my phone.
  • 1 week ago The Boring Internet (text) | Terry Godier
    Some things need to become enormous to survive. Other things survive because they never needed to become enormous.
  • 1 week ago The Adventure Family Tree
    An incomplete chronicle of Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure, the "fons et origo of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed artifacts" of computer gaming history.
  • 1 week ago The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon
    This machinery of niceness reaches points of fracture, but only occasionally. The most infamous was back in September 2016, when Fallon hosted Donald Trump. He sat with the then-candidate, not to interrogate or even lampoon him, but to perform a brief, cozy skit culminating in Fallon mussing Trump’s hair. The moment was not just a lapse in judgment; it was the ultimate, logical end point of the show’s ideological structure.
  • 1 week ago Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
    If AI does turn out to make you dumber, why can’t we just keep writing code by hand? You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools. If the models are good enough, you will simply get outcompeted by engineers willing to trade their long-term cognitive ability for a short-term lucrative career3.

@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town

  • 2 days ago
    I don't care what they say: this does not look like "glass"
  • 2 days ago
    I've been dragging my heels so hard to stay on Sonoma but an IT-mandated upgrade finally pushed me to Tahoe . #liquidass #apple
  • 2 days ago
    RE: https://mastodon.art/@weirdsatellite/116597554801674863 is this a black hole consisting of peanut butter, or a black hole that only affects peanut butter with its gravity?
  • 5 days ago
    Welp, I had a good run of a bunch of years enjoying #eurovision - kinda sad but not going to bother with it this time around
  • 6 days ago
    I accidentally used some hand sanitizer today that was scented. I cannot remove the scent from my hands. It is incorrect. My calm is damaged immeasurably.
  • 1 week ago
    Holy crap, lightning and thunder! #pdx #pdxtst
  • 1 week ago
    Feel like I really need to get around to learning French now
  • 1 week ago
    I also just learned that I had a French Canadian great-great-grandfather named Percival? That's pretty cool
  • 1 week ago
    Hadn't gotten around to listening to anything but "Disease" and "Abracadabra" from her new album Mayhem - but I'm halfway through and dang it's all bangers so far. Also I could have almost sworn I heard IAMX on "Perfect Celebrity", but I don't think that's correct
  • 1 week ago
    Lady Gaga came up on streaming shuffle and I'm reminded that, holy crap, I really like Lady Gaga - at least her pop stuff.
  • 1 week ago
    On my Dad's Dad's side, my great-grandfather was born in Quebec, great-grandmother in Ontario, and I guess they paired up and left for Detroit so he could work in the auto industry. Now I'm like, okay cool, that was a good run, can I go back though?
  • 1 week ago
    I'm not usually one for genealogy, but I think I might have just discovered that I have Canadian great-grandparents on my Dad's side? This is... kind of exciting? Never met my great-grandfather on that side - he passed a few years before I was born - but apparently I'm named after him. And maybe possibly if we get the right documents together, I'll have inherited Canadian citizenship through him. That would be rad, because I love Canada!

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