Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

It's okay to be wrong, but it's not okay to keep being wrong once there's enough stuff in retrospect to know you were wrong and update. Which is to say if you come to me with an unfounded or over-fit argument or article about AI, I will politely hand it back and walk off shaking my head. Because it's not fair to hand me such a lopsided situation where I would need to spend 10x or more effort addressing all the ways it's wrong before trying to salvage a point from it to discuss.

Whether you played it in the back of your classroom or on your computer at home, if you were a kid in the last 30 years you almost certainly grew up playing The Oregon Trail.

Inverted Asteroids: you are not the ship. Place gravity wells and sling the rocks.

quality versus quantity does not have to be a winner-take-all proposition.

Of course, I'm a Linux user, and I have any number of options. I could have gone with a simple desktop or window manager and just not installed a browser, but I wanted something that really broke the desktop OS muscle memory and forced me into thinking about my words with intention. I opted for a tty-based setup, using Debian (Trixie at the time of writing). Console only- no x11 or Wayland, no desktop getting in my way.

New York added nearly 2,000 millionaire tax filers in a single year, according to newly released IRS data. The agency’s 2023 Statistics of Income (SOI) data show the number of New Yorkers reporting more than $1 million in income grew about 3%, shortly after the state raised its top tax rate on high earners. Far from triggering the millionaire exodus warned about, the new figures cut at the heart of one of the most persistent arguments against millionaire surtax proposals.

It looks like people are starting to come around about designing, planning and building houses by counting number of nails they used. It’s probably for the best; people sure went crazy about it for a year or two, though.

libvips is a demand-driven, horizontally threaded image processing library. Compared to similar libraries, libvips runs quickly and uses little memory. libvips is licensed under the LGPL-2.1-or-later.

An open-source, web-based viewer for high-resolution zoomable images, implemented in pure JavaScript, for desktop and mobile.

AI is driving a shift to more autonomous work within teams, which means opportunities to establish culture that used to be automatic – time spent pairing, organizing work around shared goals, planning and designing together – now require deliberate choices.

The more AI-generated code a team produces, the more review work lands on the engineers who care most about quality, often the most experienced people on the team. The volume of output rises while the nature of the work shifts from creation to inspection, and the engineers doing the hardest cognitive labor appear, by the metrics, to be less productive than the ones generating code with AI.