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#miscellanea — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #miscellanea, aggregated by home.social.

  1. 2026 Weeks 14, 15, & 16

    https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/04/17/w14-w15-w16/

    TL;DR: It's been a weird 3 weeks. We adopted a new cat, a void named Minnaloushe. I also got completely sucked into the Artemis II mission, watching the livestream like it was my favorite TV show. Also featured in this post: more random crap and miscellanea than usual, because it's been a little while.

    #weeknotes #cats #space #artemis2 #adhd #miscellanea

  2. 2026 Week 13

    https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/03/27/w13/

    TL;DR: Got ADHD meds for the first time ever and promptly disappeared into a productivity fugue state, bookmarked an alarming number of articles about whether AI is killing the craft of programming, and declared myself a software meat popsicle.

    #weeknotes #ai #adhd #codegen #retro #craft #miscellanea

  3. 2026 Week 12

    https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/03/20/w12/

    TL;DR: Built an entire AI agent from scratch in a week, wrote two blog posts about it, got worked up about San Francisco's AI billboard hellscape, and bookmarked way too many things (again) about whether AI is making us smarter or dumber.

    #weeknotes #ai #agents #openclaw #decafclaw #rss #sanfrancisco #miscellanea

  4. Miscellanea for 2026-03-13

    https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/03/13/miscellanea/

    • Hello world!
    • Occasionally I remember I can do these random daily posts.
    • Look: here's one now!
    • I think Anil Dash's " What do coders do after AI?" hits on the same thing I was getting at a couple days ago with " Grief and the AI split":
      • Your job changes into describing software. Now, if you're the kind of person who only ever wanted to have the end result, maybe this is a liberation. Sometimes, that's what mattered — we wanted to fast-forward to the end result, elegance be damned. But if you were one of those crafters? The people who wrote idiomatic code that made that programming language sing? There's a real grief here. It's not as serious as when we know a human language is dying out, but it's not entirely dissimilar, either.

    #miscellanea

  5. 2026 Weeks 9, 10, & 11

    https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/03/13/w11/

    TL;DR: Three weeks of weeknotes in one go. Wrote a blog post about AI grief that hit Hacker News (and got accused of being written by an LLM), fell deep into an Amiga 1200 rabbit hole, soldered the wrong potentiometer onto my Tempest PCB, survived a work trip to California, and spiraled into hardware-ownership doomsday thinking.

    #weeknotes #miscellanea #amiga #retrocomputing #ai #tempest #arcade #travel #portland #pdx

  6. 2026 Weeks 9, 10, & 11

    https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/03/13/w11/

    TL;DR: Three weeks of weeknotes in one go. Wrote a blog post about AI grief that hit Hacker News (and got accused of being written by an LLM), fell deep into an Amiga 1200 rabbit hole, soldered the wrong potentiometer onto my Tempest PCB, survived a work trip to California, and spiraled into hardware-ownership doomsday thinking.

    #weeknotes #miscellanea #amiga #retrocomputing #ai #tempest #arcade #travel #portland #pdx

  7. 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

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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

  11. 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

  12. 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

  13. 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."
      • 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

  14. 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

  15. peculiarmanicule.com/
    #1960s & #70s #Ephemera #Psychedelia #Typography #Opart #PopArt #Miscellanea #design
    "Step into the Day-Glo world of The Peculiar Manicule and explore an awe-inspiring archive of 1960s and ’70s #graphicdesign. Witness mind-blowing displays of ink on paper by #designers and #illustrators, both celebrated and unsung, across four main galleries, #Books & #Magazines, Ephemera, Typography and Paper Playthings. Learn more about #manicules and other peculiarities here. ☞"

  16. 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

  17. How Living Closer to Nature Can Improve Your Well-Being

    City noise. Never-ending screens. There’s a persistent hum from various sources, such as traffic, work emails, and the unrelenting artificial light. These days, “nature” means a few potted plants by the window or maybe a quick stroll through a city park crammed between meetings. What’s truly lost? Quite a lot is lost. Not only fresh air—though that is important—but also resilience, clarity, and well-being are all quietly eroded by the distance from green spaces. It isn’t nostalgia—it’s biology; human bodies remember what concrete forgets. Time among trees isn’t a luxury; it’s more like an essential vitamin most people leave out of their daily routine without even noticing.

     

    Rooted in Real Benefits

    People often follow wellness trends, but the advantages of nature are more than just marketing hype; they can be measured and proven. Does nature lead to a reduction in blood pressure? Written down. More focus? Yes, for sure. And now for the perfect case study.

    Companies like One Farm connect ecological living from the ground to the store. Since they grow their hemp in the open air of Colorado, they have control and transparency that big producers can only imagine. No trust falls needed; this is farm-to-face wellness that can be tracked at every step.

     

    The point here isn’t to just “feel better.” Studies continue to show that spending time outside lowers stress hormones and increases beneficial chemicals. For example, serotonin levels increase, and creativity levels also rise.

     

    A Cure for Distraction Fatigue

    Scroll long enough on any device and watch attention slip through fingers like water in a sieve. Screens break down concentration into small fragments, which are not particularly satisfying for the mind. Nature does the opposite; it stretches out time and lets overstimulated brains reboot themselves without reminders or notifications driving every moment. Have you considered problem-solving while observing clouds rather than focusing on spreadsheets? New solutions bubble up when left alone outside—the kind that never arrives hunched over another endless email chain.

     

    Immune Systems Get Stronger

    Consider dirt with seriousness—it’s not just something to ignore or dismiss before lunch; it’s a place where immune systems acquire survival skills. Outdoor bacteria provide vital data that vaccinations can only supplement, not replace. Outdoor children develop fewer allergies than those who spend time indoors, protected from potential threats with every gust of wind or blade of grass.

     

    Building Lasting Social Bonds

    Humans were not intended to live in isolation behind closed doors, nor to hide behind profile pictures and status updates that feign connection. Shared experiences, outside of digital interactions, do what digital interactions never will: build trust. Such connection is achieved through eye contact, laughter around real fires rather than glowing screens, and unplanned moments where true friendship emerges naturally, rather than being scheduled in thirty-minute blocks between appointments.

     

    Ignore nature at your peril—ignore well-being alongside it too often these days—but small steps back toward greenery offer outsized returns: clearer minds, stronger bodies, and richer relationships that no algorithm yet invented can replicate convincingly enough for those who remember how reality feels against skin instead of glass screens. To touch a tree’s rough bark is to connect with a history before our urgent notifications. We trade the sterile glare for dappled light through leaves, a living mosaic that changes with the wind. These exchanges reveal aspects of ourselves that we had forgotten we had given to the program.

     

    How to Use Relaxation Techniques for Better Health

     

    It’s Easy Being Green – How to Blend Nature Into Your Home’s Interiors

    Rate this:

    #CREAMMAGAZINE #health #LIFESTYLE #MISCELLANEA #nature #poppicsThePopShop #wellBeing #wellbeing
  18. peculiarmanicule.com/
    #1960s & #70s #Ephemera #Psychedelia #Typography #Opart #PopArt #Miscellanea #design
    "Step into the Day-Glo world of The Peculiar Manicule and explore an awe-inspiring archive of 1960s and ’70s #graphicdesign. Witness mind-blowing displays of ink on paper by #designers and #illustrators, both celebrated and unsung, across four main galleries, #Books & #Magazines, Ephemera, Typography and Paper Playthings. Learn more about #manicules and other peculiarities here. ☞"

  19. peculiarmanicule.com/
    #1960s & #70s #Ephemera #Psychedelia #Typography #Opart #PopArt #Miscellanea #design
    "Step into the Day-Glo world of The Peculiar Manicule and explore an awe-inspiring archive of 1960s and ’70s #graphicdesign. Witness mind-blowing displays of ink on paper by #designers and #illustrators, both celebrated and unsung, across four main galleries, #Books & #Magazines, Ephemera, Typography and Paper Playthings. Learn more about #manicules and other peculiarities here. ☞"

  20. peculiarmanicule.com/
    #1960s & #70s #Ephemera #Psychedelia #Typography #Opart #PopArt #Miscellanea #design
    "Step into the Day-Glo world of The Peculiar Manicule and explore an awe-inspiring archive of 1960s and ’70s #graphicdesign. Witness mind-blowing displays of ink on paper by #designers and #illustrators, both celebrated and unsung, across four main galleries, #Books & #Magazines, Ephemera, Typography and Paper Playthings. Learn more about #manicules and other peculiarities here. ☞"

  21. peculiarmanicule.com/
    #1960s & #70s #Ephemera #Psychedelia #Typography #Opart #PopArt #Miscellanea #design
    "Step into the Day-Glo world of The Peculiar Manicule and explore an awe-inspiring archive of 1960s and ’70s #graphicdesign. Witness mind-blowing displays of ink on paper by #designers and #illustrators, both celebrated and unsung, across four main galleries, #Books & #Magazines, Ephemera, Typography and Paper Playthings. Learn more about #manicules and other peculiarities here. ☞"

  22. 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

  23. 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