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
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1 hour ago
Psychology says the rarest mental strength today isn't resilience or grit - it's the ability to sit with uncertainty without immediately seeking distraction, explanation, or someone else's opinion about what you should feel
The research over the past two decades has made something clear that caught even specialists off guard: intolerance of uncertainty isn’t a feature of one disorder. It’s a transdiagnostic vulnerability — a shared foundation beneath anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, and a wide range of emotional disturbances
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3 hours ago
Are AI productivity gains fueled by delivery pressure? | Ruslan Osipov
The right way to leverage AI in workspace is as a license to work better and focus on the right things, not as a mandate to produce more things faster.
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1 day ago
Aminet - util/moni/SysInfo.lha
SysInfo is an application for Motorola 680x0 based Classic Amiga and is used for getting information about the system like OS and library versions, hardware revisions and stuff.
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1 day ago
It's Here (sort of)
LLMs aren't quite the Enterprise computer — you still have to give them the right interface and the right system guidance — but with that scaffolding in place, a surprising amount of the practical value is there. This is the thing I dreamed computers could do when I was a kid flipping through Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, poking around on the early internet, then the early web. Not just store and retrieve, but process — take your mess and give it back to you organized around your actual needs. It's here. Not perfectly, not without friction, but here.
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1 day ago
Commodore Amiga - Operating Systems - Workbench : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Commodore Amiga - Operating Systems - Workbench
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2 days ago
Amiga A1200 Gotek Mount w/ "Floppy" Interface - Free 3D Print Model - MakerWorld
A unique Gotek Mount for the Amiga A1200 that moves the interface (OLED screen + rotary encoder) to a “floppy” sticking out of the mount, simulating a real floppy.
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3 days ago
LiteAgent/liteagent: The Open Source Web Agent Evaluation Framework
The Open Source Web Agent Evaluation Framework
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3 days ago
Netrunner – Convolution BBS
Finally, an online ‘cyberpunk’ game that comes close to portraying computing as depicted in classic cyberpunk works like Neuromancer by William Gibson. In this game the player is a NetRunner, an arrogant and bold futuristic hacker. Armed with his cyberdeck and an arsenal of offensive, defensive and analysis software he’s ready to invade corporate systems in the grid and raid their credits, for fame and fortune! It’s no cakewalk though! Waiting for the unwary are Intrusion Counter-measures (IC). Machine controlled defenses that can inflict damage to hardware and software, steal the players own credits and even cause… death.
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3 days ago
Lines of Code Are Back (And It's Worse Than Before)
The metric we killed is back, and AI made it worse
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3 days ago
crewAIInc/crewAI: Framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents. By fostering collaborative intelligence, CrewAI empowers agents to work together seamlessly, tackling complex tasks.
Framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents. By fostering collaborative intelligence, CrewAI empowers agents to work together seamlessly, tackling complex tasks.
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4 days ago
Add a Solid State Hard Drive to Your Amiga 600 or 1200 Using a Compact Flash Card with IDE Adapter (30-60 mins) – Retro Projects
I recently purchased an Amiga 1200 which has hard drive support through an internal IDE connector. Adding a hard drive is appealing since booting from floppy disk or a Gotek floppy drive emulator can be quite tedious and slow. The good news is that there are solid state options using compact flash (CF) or secure digital (SD) card solutions through an IDE adapter. I went with a CF card adapter that I purchased for less than $30 from AmiKit on eBay. This is shown below inserted into the IDE slot on my 1200.
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5 days ago
We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design - METR
Based on conversations with study participants, we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now — in early 2026 — compared to our estimates from early 2025. However, because of the selection effects in our experiment, our data is only very weak evidence for the size of this increase. Our raw results show some evidence for speedup. Our early 2025 study found the use of AI causes tasks to take 19% longer, with a confidence interval between +2% and +39%. For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%. Among newly-recruited developers the estimated speedup is -4%, with a confidence interval between -15% and +9%.
@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town
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1 day ago
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS
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1 day ago
in other words, I totally thought I was going nuts but no FS-UAE was gaslighting me
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1 day ago
Today I learned: the Amiga emulator FS-UAE by default uses copy-on-write for floppy images. And you can only disable that with a writable_floppy_images=1 config option mentioned nowhere in the launcher. So if you're trying to prepare an ADF floppy image for an Amiga with a Gotek floppy emulator, and the disk keeps looking empty, it's because there's a copy-on-write overlay on the PC running the emulator and the ADF file never gets updated.
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4 days ago
And that's just one of the smallest SD cards I have on hand. I'd melt my teen brain if I went back in time and showed him a storage device over 7800x times bigger than his 128mb hard drive yet small enough that I accidentally dropped it between the floorboards (which is a thing i did)
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4 days ago
Turns out Amigas don't like big hard drives. And by big I mean 125x bigger than the 128mb hard drive I bought with my allowance, back in the day
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4 days ago
No, YOU just spent the last couple of nights screwing around setting up an SD card with Amiga software in an emulator, planning to plug it into a real Amiga 1200. (er wait, no, you probably didn't. but i did)
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4 days ago
I looked at my iPhone and it didn't unlock. I flipped it off and it did unlock.
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5 days ago
PAKIDGE INTENSIFIES
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6 days ago
This image makes me think it's the lovely neighbor couple at my door with a tupperware bowl of guacamole for the superb owl party https://www.therundown.ai/p/what-openai-and-jony-ive-are-building
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6 days ago
Playing some Unreal Tournament 99 and remembered that the first time I heard System of a Down was because some kid had embedded a WAV of "Toxicity" in a giant level of a bedroom & bathroom where everyone was mouse-sized. #gaming #unreal #ut99
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6 days ago
Installed a doorbell camera a couple months ago, because we are furtive creatures here. It's not a Ring. Tempted to hang a sign that reads "camera not connected to internet"
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1 week ago
This is almost, but not nearly enough, to tempt me to interact on x-dot-com again
Github (@lmorchard)
- 2 hours ago pushed 65fe40d to lmorchard/starnet ( main ): Fix core→ui cross-boundary deps via dependency injection
- 2 hours ago submitted Pull Request #12 to lmorchard/starnet :
- 2 hours ago pushed 2097bad to lmorchard/starnet ( fix-core-ui-cross-deps ): Rename openStore param to openDarknetsStore for clarity
- 2 hours ago submitted Pull Request #12 to lmorchard/starnet :
- 2 hours ago created branch fix-core-ui-cross-deps on lmorchard/starnet
- 3 hours ago pushed 863947f to lmorchard/starnet ( main ): Reorganize js/ into js/core/ (pure JS) and js/ui/ (DOM/Cytoscape)
- 3 hours ago submitted Pull Request #11 to lmorchard/starnet :
YouTube Videos (lmorchard)
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Adding limit switches to a 3018 CNC machine?
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Assembling the Why Em-Ulator Module for RC2014
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing Sonoff S31 AC (again)
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Clip: Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home Assis
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Pi Pico Terminal and Real Time Clock modules
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board part 2
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module assembly
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module repair & firmware update
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again again?
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again?
Pocket Casts
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Skate of the Union
from
Lovett or Leave It
2 days ago
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NPR News: 03-02-2026 11AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
4 hours ago
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NPR News: 03-02-2026 10AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
5 hours ago
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US Israeli War With Iran, Trump's War Address, Gulf Countries Bear The Brunt
from
Up First from NPR
9 hours ago
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NPR News: 03-02-2026 9AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
6 hours ago
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NPR News: 03-01-2026 8PM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
19 hours ago
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U.S. and Israel strike Iran. Here's what we know
from
The NPR Politics Podcast
1 day ago
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NPR News: 03-01-2026 12PM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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Iranian supreme leader killed in airstrike, Trump says
from
Consider This from NPR
1 day ago
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US/Israeli Strikes Iran, Iran Retaliates on Israel and other Middle East Countries
from
Up First from NPR
2 days ago
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NPR News: 02-28-2026 8PM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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The Galaxy S26 is a photography nightmare
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
3 days ago
Spotify ( Les Orchard )
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Capitol on Joyland by TR/ST 2 days ago
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Bury Me on It Will Come to You by ACTORS 3 days ago
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So Typical on Now That I'm Real by Fragrance 3 days ago
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Empires on Creatures by Ari Mason 3 days ago
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Bête Noire on Bête Noire by Black Nail Cabaret 3 days ago
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Oblivion (My Obsession) on NITE by Nite 3 days ago
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Aliens on The Awakening of a Mutant Girl by Echoberyl 3 days ago
Colophon
This is a static web page hosted on Amazon S3. It is periodically updated via a scheduled Github Action that fetches data from many sources on the web.
- Source code:
- https://github.com/lmorchard/about-me
- Last fetched:
- 2026-03-02T20:21:56.859Z
- Last rendered:
- 2026-03-02T20:22:12.420Z