Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

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.

Some things need to become enormous to survive. Other things survive because they never needed to become enormous.

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.

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.

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.

Wrappers exist because routing AI calls is annoying. It is also the highest leverage thing you can own in your own code. The 200 lines above are not a moat. They are a Tuesday afternoon. The reason to write them is that you cannot improve a bill you cannot see.

Today, we’re releasing a brand new, open-source mouse design: the Bean, which is a pointing stick mouse (also called a nub mouse). Nub mice are commonly found in laptops in the center of the keyboard. The Bean takes that concept and pushes it farther than anybody’s ever pushed it.

During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the grade of central Chicago to lift the city out of its low-lying swampy ground. Buildings and sidewalks were raised on jackscrews. The work was funded by both private property owners and public funds.

Stripe Projects lets you or your agents provision multiple services, generate and store credentials, and manage usage and billing from the CLI. Set up hosting, databases, auth, AI, analytics, and more in a few commands.

There are lots of us out there who care. Even more if you count the ones currently pretending they don't, just to get through the day. We don't know how to tell you where to find the ones close to you, but if you already know a few, you've gotta spend more time with them. The weirdest thing about work right now is the way it seems like everyone sees this enshittification as inevitable. It isn't, and they don't. And part of how you find the energy — to care about your work, or find new work you can care about, or start a new org full of people who care — part of where that energy will come from is by fixing your inputs. The people who care are sometimes quieter than the hypebeasts, but there are lots of us and we should all hang out more.

We serve the cats and cat allies of Southeast Portland, providing local, timely, and mostly true stories collected from our neighbors. Our world is small, and you're invited in!