2026 Weeks 7 & 8

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/02/20/w08/

TL;DR: Enjoyed a 4-day weekend and completely forgot about weeknotes, spent way too much time troubleshooting a Tempest arcade machine that's been broken for 6 years (might actually be making progress?), dealt with the sad news that our favorite Portland bar closed, got Cosmo back from the vet looking very spaced out, started planning a Catsby tattoo, and collected yet another pile of bookmarks about AI coding agents while the cats increasingly tolerate each other.

#weeknotes #miscellanea #arcade #cats #ai #retrocomputing #portland #pdx #atari

2026 Week 6

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/02/06/w06/

TL;DR: Hid 3D printed critters around the house for my wife to find, got late-night Skyrim modding working on Linux (with Dagoth Ur!), and deeply related to that LLM alarm clock burning $20 repeatedly asking "is it time yet?" - because that's exactly how afternoon meetings feel with ADHD.

#weeknotes #miscellanea #3dprinting #cats #reading #adhd #gaming #obsidian

Miscellanea for 2026-01-30

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/01/30/miscellanea/

• Hello world!

• Cory Doctorow says, AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage:

  AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of.

  • This post-bubble future is kind of what I'm looking most forward to, assuming the crash doesn't put me out on the street.

#miscellanea

2026 Week 5

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/01/30/w05/

TL;DR: Miss Biscuits is 90% fluff, 3D printed ghosts instead of guns, snarfed down three Adrian Tchaikovsky books at hyperfocus speed, shipped feedspool-go v0.2.0 with over-engineered lazy loading, learned about GitHub Actions cross-repo triggers, got obsessed with a TR/ST song on repeat, and caught up on Classic Doctor Who featuring cyborg Loch Ness monsters.

#weeknotes #miscellanea #3dprinting #feedspool #reading #books #rss #indieweb #golang

Miscellanea for 2026-01-29

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/01/29/miscellanea/

• Hello world!
• I keep meaning to do this style of post on a daily basis, but there are very few things I do on a consistent daily basis. So, enjoy this random occurrence.
• Isn't it super weird that back in 1997, Dave Winer was writing about " Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers" embedded in every device that matters.
  • This, when setting up a web server was still a huge ceremony.
  • Now, almost 30 years later, I can run a web server on a microcontroller smaller than my fingernail that cost me less than a buck.
  • In fact, I embedded one into a pumpkin for fun, about 8 years ago.
  • What if LLMs don't even improve radically, but gradually shed all the ceremony for running them on cheap personal devices?
• Apropos of that, Dave Winer mentions a thing about LLMs & AI in coding: "AI is going to be part of programming forever. There's no way to go back."
  • This, after reading " Don't fall into the anti-AI hype" from antirez
  • I keep thinking about this and I think it's true.
  • Specifically, two things can be true at the same time:
    • "AI" as it currently exists is a bubble and most of the high-flying companies pushing slop are going to die messily.
    • LLMs that generate code are going to be in the programming toolkit for a great many folks from here on, indefinitely, like calculators and compilers.
  • Remember the dot-com crash back in the 2000s? Well, neither the internet nor the web went away. We built Web 2.0 atop the dark fiber - and that could happen again for "AI". Maybe.
  • Look, I know technological inevitability is a myth - this stuff isn't self-executing, it still takes people to build it and carry it forward by choice.
    • But, like the internal combustion engine and jet aeroplanes, there are a lot of folks who find LLMs convenient & productively useful - even if there are measurable harms and perils in their use.
    • See also: smart phones, social media, same-day delivery, plastics, antibiotics, and eating meat.
    • While none of these are inevitable, I think more folks than not see more benefit than not. And, thus, it's unlikely we'll swear off them cold turkey anytime soon.
  • Like Dave says, "We get so mired in the question of should we do this -- well we're doing it, time to start looking at the next set of questions."
    • This is why, for example, I don't think it's entirely off-into-the-weeds for a company like Mozilla to aim at bending the trajectory of this stuff, rather than trying to halt or ignore it.
  • For what it's worth, I'm not trying to sell anyone on this stuff. I think, where it's genuinely useful, it sells itself.
    • To the extent that I talk about it is mainly me learning out loud.
    • And, honestly, being serially enthusiastic about a shiny object as is my wont.
  • But, still, I think "AI" is in a space of way higher value than some folks place it.
    • And yet, orders of magnitude lower than so many CEOs are hyping it.
    • I hope it someday settles down as normal technology, and I think many of us are hoping for that.
    • But, again, it's not going to just evaporate. Not even if the bubble pops.
  • Anyway. These are thoughts I've had and I felt like brain-dumping them today, like you do on a blog.

#miscellanea

Miscellanea for 2025-12-15

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2025/12/15/miscellanea/

• Hello world!

• Woke up from a dream where humans started metabolizing microplastics to become Lego people. Several people thought this sounded like one of the better outcomes of the whole microplastics mess.

• This short story about AI and creative writing is great and angry and captures something important:

  It chose 'stone' because statistically, in the petabytes of training data scraped without consent from the internet, the word 'stone' appears in proximity to 'lump in throat' with a probability of 0.04 percent. It isn't a choice. It's a math problem. It is predicting the next token based on mediocrity.

• Mark Damon Hughes posted the OMNI Complete Catalog of Computer Software from 1984 and I'm hit with nostalgia.

  Goddamn I loved OMNI. And the techno-optimism that software was the way into The Science Fiction Future and not, you know, the Torment Nexus that it actually became.
  There's a whole archive.org copy to browse through.

• Millie's take on software completion:

  We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date.

• Joan Westenberg on Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life:

  You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away.
  This resonates with the whole "declare software finished" sentiment above.

• Polyglot AI Agents: WebAssembly Meets the JVM - Mozilla.ai exploring how to combine WASM's performance benefits with Java's ecosystem maturity for agentic frameworks.

• Been seeing this 1987 gaming setup making the rounds - NES on a CRT with Rambo and Nintendo posters. I've totally been in this room.

• The Mr. Bean ADVENT calendar art from Mistigris continues to delight. Also doesn't hurt that I got it running on my own neglected bbs.decafbad.com. :)

#miscellanea

Miscellanea for 2025-10-25

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2025/10/25/miscellanea/

• Hello world!
• I've been on a roll lately with ginning up little utilities with golang:
  • feedspool-go: A CLI tool for managing RSS/Atom feeds with SQLite storage and static website generation.
  • linkding-to-opml: Quick & dirty tool to turn Linkding bookmarks into an OPML file of feed subscriptions
  • feed-to-mastodon: A command-line tool that fetches RSS/Atom feeds and posts new entries to Mastodon with customizable templates.
• These each follow a similar pattern:
  • They're each written in go, distributed as a standalone CLI binary with YAML configuration and a SQLite database.
  • I'm using GitHub Actions to run lint, test, and build rolling releases across Linux, macOS, and Windows.
  • I'm leaning on Claude Code to do boring boilerplate work and draft unit tests
• If I keep this up, I'm thinking I might need to throw together something like tools.simonwillison.net to inventory these things as I accumulate them.
  • It's kind of addicting to throw a boilerplate spec doc at Claude Code, go make coffee while it spews out all the usual code for one of these tools, then come back and sort of not-quite-vibe all the desired features into existence.
  • I'm feeling the mental dread cost of little ideas go way, way down.
  • Like, I went from thinking "something like feed-to-mastodon would be nice to have" to having a first version of feed-to-mastodon in the span of 45 minutes.
  • That first-version hump and all the initial startup ceremony is usually what stops me from starting.
• Also, for some reason, I've been avoiding golang for my side-projects.
  • I'm not sure why? I think maybe I thought Rust was more solid for this stuff and turned my nose up at golang?
  • Though Rust is definitely solid, I'm finding golang to be way less ceremonial for these quick and dirty little tools.
  • The ceremony in Rust is also a frequent bouncer for me, especially when the stakes are so low.
  • I'm also finding the self-contained binary delivered by golang to be a lot easier to manage than node.js or Python scripts that pull in so many dependencies just to get running on a new server.
  • I'm also really appreciating the built-in stuff like text/template, to the point that I'm now even eyeing up my Easy-Blog Oven and considering rewriting my blog's static site generator, currently implemented in node.js. (uh oh)

#miscellanea #golang #claude #rust

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#1960s & #70s #Ephemera #Psychedelia #Typography #Opart #PopArt #Miscellanea #design
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History of Mass Transportation: The FS ALn 668 Autorail, https://etidiohnew.blogspot.com/2025/05/history-of-mass-transportation-fs-aln.html

#trains #autorail #miscellanea

EMT Miscellanea #1 – Fuel Stops https://advmoto.ca/2023/11/emt-miscellanea-1/ #miscellanea #motorcycle #motorcycling #RoadTrip

Please #boost, please visit the page, #comment on the post, and #follow my #blog!

Hello and welcome to my #introduction 👋I am a mid-thirties, late diagnosed #ADHDer, with an #autistic partner. Coming up to my diagnosis 1-year anniversary 🥳 and learning lots every day, having regular “aha” moments. I work PT #burnout in a library and spend my free time trying to coral my unruly curiosity fairly unsuccessfully.

A snippet of my many waxing and waning interests include: #cacti #succulents #cats #dogs #budgies #astronomy #zoology #economics #tech #psychology #neurodiversity #spoontheory #streetart #modernart #arthistory #sculpture #crafts #museums #artgalleries #urbanspaces #heritage #architecture #snailmail #books #libraries #archives #forteana #documentaries #podcasts #zooniverse #googlecrowdsource #miscellanea

New blog post: How I get my news, these days

https://blog.jws.app/2023/how-i-get-my-news-these-days/

#Miscellanea #Inoreader #News #PressReader #Services

deadlybrain.org
Toki Pona miscellanea

http://archive.is/HutJJ

toot ! 🐘

#TokiPona #miscellanea #ijo
#lipu