Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

I reject the dead Internet theory: I see a vibrant Internet full of humans sharing their experiences and seeking connection. Degradation of the engagement-driven web is well underway, accelerated by AI slop. But the independent web works on a different incentive structure and is resistant to this effect. Humans inherently create, connect, and share: we always have and we always will. If you choose software that works in your interest you’ll find that it’s possible to make meaningful online connections without mental hazard.

RSS has always worked quietly in the background. In a moment when the web is being reshaped by enclosure, consolidation, and algorithmic mediation, its reliability is exactly what we need. It offers a simple, durable way for publishers to keep control of their distribution and for readers to keep control of their attention, without permission, platform lock-in, or hidden agendas. If we treat RSS not as a relic of an earlier web but as the strategic infrastructure it already is, it can continue to anchor a more open, more resilient, and more humane internet for decades to come.

Bold. Brief. Beautiful. Fiction in Fewer Words.

Nowadays, I still enjoy looking at the old relics of sales past. They are wonderful historical artifacts and they take me right back to when I was a kid. So, I would like to share with you a Toys “R” Us circular from 1984. It was published right after December of that year. Like most of their sales offering during these years, it promised that their “prices will be no higher through Dec. 25th.” So no matter when you shop at the store this month, this is what you would have paid. Let’s jump in and look at some of the highlights on each page.

Love zines? You’re in the right place!

I found the problem and it's really bad. Looking at your log, here's the catastrophic command that was run: bash rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/ See that ~/ at the end? That's your entire home directory.

Our arcade games are wonderful examples of living traditions (to use Mansfield’s term), and so we approach their conservation in the same philosophical way. We haven’t replaced the CRT in our Pac-Man yet, and perhaps we never will, but the key principle is to preserve these incredible machines, as ethically as we can, as living traditions.

When I started working on AI at Mozilla two years ago, I was a Python developer with a background in web services and three months of machine learning experience from working on the Nuclia DB project. I was not someone who had trained models from scratch or built production ML infrastructure. Today, Firefox ships multiple AI features that run entirely on-device, and I helped build the infrastructure that makes that possible. This is a retrospective on what we accomplished and what I learned along the way.

I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past year, almost all of them written by LLMs. This article presents a collection of useful patterns I’ve discovered along the way.

Claude Code plugin that automatically evaluates whether Claude should continue working instead of stopping prematurely

So my question is this: Why vibe code with a language that has human convenience and ergonomics in view? Or to put that another way: Wouldn’t a language designed for vibe coding naturally dispense with much of what is convenient and ergonomic for humans in favor of what is convenient and ergonomic for machines? Why not have it just write C? Or hell, why not x86 assembly?