Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.

My 6502 project in a PC104 like formfactor

A 6502 based laptop design

TL;DR: In this post, I present five techniques related to vertical scrolling used in , a React component that can display billions of rows in a table while keeping good performance and accessibility.

That sort of quality variance is uncomfortable for me from a tooling perspective. Tooling should be highly consistent and this has a “works on my machine” vibe to it. I suppose all my discomfort goes away if I quit caring about the outputs. If I embrace the cognitive dissonance and switch to a “ZOMG the future is amazeballs” hype mode, my job becomes a lot easier. But my brain has been unsuccessful in doing that thus far. I like magic and mystery, but hope- or luck-based development has its challenges for me.

But the response to that skepticism is not to reject the category of technology, but rather to capture it and seize control over its direction, away from the Big AI companies. This shift to a new level of coding abstraction is exactly the kind of platform shift that presents that sort of opportunity. It’s potentially a chance for coders to be in control of some part of their destiny, at a time when a lot of bosses clearly want to get rid of as many coders as they can. At the very least, this is one area where the people who actually make things are ahead of the big platforms that want to cash in on it.

This post is about a found mural, a lost artist, and a conference talk. It’s the full story of Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Grab a beverage, sit back, relax, and thank you for joining me.

This should have all basic WebSerial functionality. This will be behind a pref dom.webserial.enabled.

We're past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet. It's about to.

The one thing the longevity-vampire community has not yet learned from Dracula is operational security. Dracula operated in silence for centuries. He didn’t have a podcast. He didn’t track his erection quality on a public dashboard. He didn’t appear on Netflix. He understood that the fundamental rule of being a vampire is: don’t talk about being a vampire.

There's definitely a perception I've heard from folks who haven't spent a lot of time with the tools that the output of coding agents is always going to be a classical big ball of mud -- a horrible monstrosity with no clear architecture...just a jumbled mess of code that kind of somehow does the thing. It's not true, but that's what many folks think. So why not lean into it? I find myself engaging in software Dorodango pretty much every day.