Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

An archive of monoline vector fonts, and p5.js code to render them.

On May 4, 1984, Milton Bradley, a leading producer of board games for 124 years, agreed to sell itself to Hasbro. Changes in the way people played games in the 80s, especially kids, put pressure on the company. In this blog post, I’ll explain how changing times led Milton Bradley to make a transformational bet at the worst possible time that ultimately sunk the maker of the game Battleship, and what happened to what was left of Milton Bradley.

asm.js was Mozilla’s response to the question posed by NaCl and PNaCl: how can the web run code at native speeds? The idea was clever: pick a strict, statically-typed subset of JavaScript that an engine could recognize on the fly and compile down to native code. We could get performance similar to NaCl/PNaCl and still have code live inside web content and use web API’s (no separate sandbox, IPC, or alternative API’s). asm.js shipped in Firefox 22 back in 2013 and was a success. It let projects like Unity and Unreal ship C/C++ codebases to the web for the first time, using just standard web technologies. The Epic Citadel demo was ported to the web in just four days. It was a landmark achievement, and a fond memory for the original asm.js team.

But it also lets you see the game running as you play. Every time you type a command, you’ll see the source code of the functions that executed it. You can also browse the game’s variables and the state of every object. Track your progress on an interactive map. So you can see exactly what the game does and how it does it.

If I had to choose, I’d definitely choose to return to the job market of the 2010s, so I can be paid more to work less and have more job security. I’m not an idiot. But the silver lining to actually having to ship is that you’re no longer living in a dream. If you’re realistic about how things work, the job of software engineering becomes much easier to understand: Providing value to the company gets you rewarded Not providing value to the company gets you punished “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives

Some senior and staff engineers operate as gatekeepers, slowing down development and saying no to most things This was a critical role during ZIRP, because: Tech companies had thousands of engineers who were empowered to do basically whatever they wanted, so without gatekeeping the systems would have fallen apart Tech companies didn’t care that much if they got anything done When ZIRP ended, the environment for this kind of engineer became much worse, since tech companies were now actually focused on accomplishing things and the “do whatever you want” era was over Like with layoffs, this shift is often blamed on AI, but it would have happened even if powerful LLMs had not emerged at all. It’s an end-of-ZIRP phenomenon

If you’re a nerd comfortable with the idea of rolling your own software, everything is now programmable, not merely in a technical sense but a practical one. And that gets to a feeling I think a lot of people have when creating software with agents: what does it mean to say you’re “building” it? “Building” implies more effort than you’re expending. What you’re doing feels a lot more like configuring, on a platform that has suddenly become vastly more configurable. A platform that feels a lot more like Emacs.

For context, Save For Web was a popular export function in Photoshop at the peak of its use for web design, but assigned a rather unpleasant ⌘⌥⇧S shortcut. Using it often turned your hand into a… claw of sorts.

See scenes from Secret Handshake's games depicting FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the pope and others.

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.