Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Shanzhai (Chinese: 山寨; pinyin: shānzhài; Cantonese Jyutping: saan1 zaai6; Vietnamese: sơn trại) is a Chinese term literally meaning "mountain fortress" or "mountain camp", whose contemporary use usually encompasses counterfeit, imitation, or parody products and events and the subculture surrounding them.[1] Shanzhai products can include counterfeit consumer and electronic goods, which can involve the imitation and trademark infringement of brands and companies.[2] The term's modern usage grew around 2008 when shanzhai smartphones reached their greatest domestic use.[3][4][5] Today, some relate the term with grassroots innovation and creativity rather than with falsehood or imitation.[6][7]

For what's the point of reading a pull request that's been generated by code? All I want is to read and understand the core idea. If it's a good idea, I might incorporate it back upstream, but there should be no expectation that I will. You see, open source software is open source by definition because the license says that it's as is, and that as is permits you to remix software.

If anyone can point an LLM at slow code and it automatically finds a hot loop and uses a trick it found somewhere on the 'net to vectorize it, there is little point in hiring someone with a focus on that. If an LLM can analyze the code and explain pointer provenance to you and babysit you until you get it, there is little value in expertise. I cannot use LLMs this way. I get almost physically ill when I work on a project with more source code files or at least general architecture than I can keep in my head, so I don’t get anything out of expanded scope.

For 40 years, writing code was a huge part of my life. Right up until October 9th, 2025. One year ago today. That was the last time I wrote a line of code.

But I think this discussion also opens up another, related question: Do we need to live in a world where every network is the biggest thing ever? Can you have a thriving community without your primary platform being a zeitgeist machine? Gruber’s framing on the issue seems to suggest that Twitter circa 2009 is the ideal. But what if that moment has genuinely passed? The Threads algorithm that Gruber points to specifically goes out of its way to discourage the very kinds of interactions that a 2009 Twitter once allowed. The fediverse’s server-oriented setup favors interactions in smaller communities even if, in practice, people still tend to favor the larger ones.

Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial IoT devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off - though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evals, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.

What the fuck are you doing?

Once he embarked on The Beagle, Darwin's penchant for bold food choices continued to evolve. He ate puma ("remarkably like veal in taste"), iguanas, armadillos. He not only ate giant tortoises, but tried drinking their bladder contents: "The fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste." He ate a 20-pound rodent (usually assumed to be an agouti) that provided "the very best meat I ever tasted." He even accidentally ate part of an ostrich-like bird called a lesser rhea, after spending months trying to catch it so that he could describe the species. (Don't worry: Once he realized what they were dining on, Darwin made everyone stop eating and sent a package of leftover bones, skin and feathers back to England.)

Fun fact: the klattsch app is built on a free, MIT-licensed speech synthesis engine. The klattsch npm package is the engine under the hood, meaning you can drop this voice directly into your own games. Here’s a quick guide on how to do it, complete with examples.

Now, the legal system is starting to show signs that the defense could be on thin ice. Last week, a US appeals court upheld a ruling that AI legal research company Ross Intelligence had broken copyright law by training its legal search engine on materials taken from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw legal research platform and database.

This turned out really well and was a cheap solution to my problems (it cost me about$16 but it currently shows me $21 for a screen). In the weeks since I set it up, it's been so useful for everyone else in the house that I'm considering buying one for the kitchen to control all the living room lights without anyone having to take their phones out, and another one in my barn to turn all the lights on whenever I walk in (currently I always fire up the Apple Home app and run a shortcut to turn on the 6 different light switches).