Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

That's me!

Links

  • 7 hours ago Resonant Computing Manifesto
    We suggest these five principles as a starting place: Private: In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. While data often involves multiple stakeholders, people must serve as primary stewards of their own context, determining how it's used. Dedicated: Software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests. Plural: No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Healthy ecosystems require distributed power, interoperability, and meaningful choice for participants. Adaptable: Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it. Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.
  • 7 hours ago Welcome to Quartz 4
    Quartz is a fast, batteries-included static-site generator that transforms Markdown content into fully functional websites. Thousands of students, developers, and teachers are already using Quartz to publish personal notes, websites, and digital gardens to the web.
  • 7 hours ago I built a tiny RSS generator for my Advent of Code solutions : Juha-Matti Santala
    This week, I started solving Advent of Code problems and this time I’m publishing my explanations as part of my Digital Garden and that doesn’t support separated RSS feeds for a subset of notes. Two IndieWeb principles that I love are Make what you need and Use what you make. In that spirit, I built a tiny tool today afterwork to enable people to follow my Advent of Code explanations via RSS.
  • 7 hours ago In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet - Ars Technica
    The 10-day creation story has become programming folklore, but even with that kernel of truth we mentioned, it tends to oversimplify the timeline. Eich’s sprint produced a working demo, not a finished language, and over the next year, Netscape continued tweaking the design. The rushed development left JavaScript with quirks and inconsistencies that developers still complain about today. So many changes were coming down the pipeline, in fact, that it began to annoy one of the industry’s most prominent figures at the time.
  • 7 hours ago Neil Peart's Ultimate Drum Solo | Letterman - YouTube
    The Rush drummer blows the roof off the dump during Drum Solo Week.
  • 7 hours ago Emulate ROMs At 12MHz With Pico2 PIO | Hackaday
    Nothing lasts forever, and that includes the ROMs required to make a retrocomputer run. Even worse, what if you’re rolling your own firmware? Period-appropriate EPROMs and their programmers aren’t always cheap or easy to get a hold of these days. [Kyo-ta04] had that problem, and thanks to them, we now all have a solution: Pico2ROMEmu, a ROM emulator based on, you guessed it, the Raspberry Pi Pico2.
  • 1 day ago Introducing Anthropic Interviewer \ Anthropic
    We built an interview tool called Anthropic Interviewer. Powered by Claude, Anthropic Interviewer runs detailed interviews automatically at unprecedented scale, feeding its results back to human researchers for analysis. This is a new step in understanding the wants and needs of our users, as well as gathering data for the analysis of AI’s societal and economic impacts.
  • 1 day ago Post by @did:plc:krowynl7cikgfdjemlv6dh4i — Bluesky
    HBOMax has started showing a 'remastered' 4K Mad Men and they’ve messed things up so during Roger’s oyster vomit scene you can now see the crew men with the vomit hose on the right
  • 1 day ago The Long Linguistic Journey to 'Dagnabbit' - Atlas Obscura
    “Taboo deformation is one possible way for a word to change its meaning,” says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky who specializes in Indo-European languages. Basically, we are scared of the true names of certain beings or concepts, because to use them might mean we summon them, which we don’t want, or anger them, which we definitely don’t want, or simply make other humans mad at us, which is slightly less bad but still not ideal. The true name is powerful, and we normal humans can’t handle that power. So we avoid using the true name, but sometimes we still need to communicate with each other about those beings or concepts. That means we have to figure out a way to talk about something without using the actual word for it.
  • 2 days ago Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer - Lalit Maganti
    The tech industry loves to tell you to move fast. But there is another path. It is a path where leverage comes from depth, patience, and the quiet satisfaction of building the foundation that others stand on. You don’t have to chase the spotlight to have a meaningful, high-impact career at a big company. Sometimes, the most ambitious thing you can do is stay put, dig in, and build something that lasts.
  • 2 days ago We can build precise, scalable things from imprecise parts.
    Since its early days, there is a lot of discussion and criticism of this idea - fair enough. But I think it misses the point. The thing to look at isn’t whether agentic coding can do all of the things we do with software today - that would be nice, but in neither of my examples above does the new system replace the old one entirely. There are still bespoke craftsmen, handmade objects, and mainframes. The point instead is that agentic coding is not about eliminating mistakes; it’s about engineering the substrate, so mistakes don’t matter. We can see the pattern, we think the models have gotten to a point of stability where they are usable4 for a system like this, and we can see first light.
  • 2 days ago Telepath: building a new kind of computer - unique hazards may exist
    That’s the mission of my new startup, Telepath. We’re building that metaphorical EV: the software stack for a new kind of computing experience, freed from decades of accrued assumptions, powered at its core by machine intelligence but employed in the service of individuals. We aren’t really an “AI company”, and we aren’t chasing AGI. We see AI as normal technology, but one that carries an unusual level of both promise and peril. Used wisely and responsibly, this technology has the potential to elevate our computers and unlock a revolution even greater and more exciting than the move from CLI to GUI forty years ago.

@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town

  • 9 hours ago
    When I finally get up, the #cats are like 🎶 i wanna know what food is 🎵 i want you to feed me 🎶 #caturday
  • 10 hours ago
    I need to get up, but alas it is illegal #cats #caturday
  • 1 day ago
    Couch is occupied again #cats
  • 1 day ago
    Hmm, I think I've angered GitHub Actions on my fossilizer project. CI for a PR has been waiting queued for about 6 hours now.
  • 1 day ago
    Drowning my sorrows in Canada Dry (this stuff is pretty good)
  • 1 day ago
    Just watched a squirrel run along the fiber line for our internet and I'm like hey there fella can I help ya 😬
  • 1 day ago
    Left over fried onion bits atop instant ramen is the same as furikake right?
  • 1 day ago
    Everybody loves salmon #cats
  • 1 day ago
    Content warning:mh-; bad cat news Got news that we may only have 6-8 weeks left with Catsby, and even that's uncertain. He's still having really pretty good days, so I'm trying to appreciate that and be as present as possible for him. I've got a trip for work next week and I'm trying not to too fully entertain a smorgasbord of negative feelings about having to be away for those days. Just really want to opt out of adulting for a good while, but it's not feasible.
  • 1 day ago
    RE: https://fox.nexus/@treats/115668759858609438 Working a bit on my Fossilizer toot archiver and it seems I've never posted a quote boost? So here's a quote boost
  • 1 day ago
    Self-advice I've been noodling on in journal entries for years: Follow your bliss. Do not stalk, kill, and sell your bliss.
  • 1 day ago
    Also, what's long frustrated me is that almost none of the advice I've gotten ends up working, with regard to making butt-in-seat happen. I don't want to be a melodramatic special little snowflake, but my brain doesn't seem to operate in expected ways. The executive function doesn't. The willpower circuit is burnt out. Body doubling just doubles social anxiety. I need to gently approach myself sideways, for fear of spooking me and sending me crashing off into the woods. But sometimes it works.

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