links.lmorchard.com - #tech

On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture - by Steve Huynh

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 07:31:43 +0000

AI should definitely be used for brainstorming, organizing your thoughts, research, making sure your documents are consistent, and grammar. But, as we would say at Amazon, the human should always take the pen.

Tags: #ai #aidr #amazon #tech #writing

Shanzhai - Wikipedia

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:02:22 +0000

Shanzhai (Chinese: 山寨; pinyin: shānzhài; Cantonese Jyutping: saan1 zaai6; Vietnamese: sơn trại) is a Chinese term literally meaning "mountain fortress" or "mountain camp", whose contemporary use usually encompasses counterfeit, imitation, or parody products and events and the subculture surrounding them.[1] Shanzhai products can include counterfeit consumer and electronic goods, which can involve the imitation and trademark infringement of brands and companies.[2] The term's modern usage grew around 2008 when shanzhai smartphones reached their greatest domestic use.[3][4][5] Today, some relate the term with grassroots innovation and creativity rather than with falsehood or imitation.[6][7]

Tags: #brands #china #shanzhai #tech

The Test Card Gallery

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:43:47 +0000

The BBC and ITV have over the years used a number of tuning signals, test cards and captions either for engineering purposes, or just to fill time in the days before breakfast and daytime TV. This page shows some of them, and some of the captions used in days past.

Tags: #history #tech #tv #video

Tiny Emulators

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:21:14 +0000

Tags: #emulation #nifty #tech #web

The Web We Know Is Going to Disappear - Minid.net

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:24:09 +0000

Every generation of computing believes the interface it loves will last forever. It never does. I saw information move from floppy disks to BBSs, from BBSs to the Web, from the Web to Flash, from Flash back to open standards, from websites to mobile apps, and now from search engines to AI chat interfaces. The Web will not vanish overnight, but the Web as we know it, the open place where people search, click, read, browse, publish, and discover, is already being replaced by something more convenient, more centralized, and much harder to escape.

Tags: #ai #bbses #history #tech #web

These tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too ⁄ Manual do Usuário

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:32:33 +0000

Since miniaturization hasn’t advanced far enough to hide chips and batteries inside normal-looking frames, all of them have those thick rims. They bring to mind the late Shelley Berman’s glasses as Larry David’s father in Curb your enthusiasm.

Tags: #gadgets #glasses #smartglasses #tech

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | The Verge

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:36:34 +0000

At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it. That’s why NFTs, the metaverse, and the Oculus and Vision Pro never really found their customer base. AI is, admittedly, more useful — it’s good for organizing large swaths of data, for instance. LLMs have had widespread consumer adoption, at least as long as they remain free. But there is only really one customer for LLMs that can justify the massive cash incineration process that was required to build them: the US government.

Tags: #agents #ai #llms #tech

500 applications, 0 callbacks

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:22:20 +0000

Once you accept that the front door is pointless, you get so much time back. Yeah, you still need a gig, we get it. But what if, instead of applying all your creativity and energy to the attempt to pass some invisible set of hurdles, or to writing exactly the right tone of follow up email when an interviewer ghosts you, what if instead of all that you just abandon the front door entirely and find another way? That other way, by the way, is human connection. OMG stop. Don't roll your eyes. You hate networking. It's so transactional and fake. It's all small talk and you hate small talk. Yes yes yes. We hate it, too. That's not what we mean. We mean that if the Applicant Tracking System Jello isn't where the hiring managers are any more, then you should start spending time elsewhere.

Tags: #career #future #jobs #tech

Cryptic tech billboards in San Francisco have a cultural impact : NPR

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:56:05 +0000

"The billboards here are actually something that makes me feel really pessimistic about the city," said Allie, a San Francisco resident who was among the dozen or so people to comment on current billboard trends on NPR member station KQED's Forum talk show last summer. (Forum typically doesn't give the full names of callers.) "They kind of give this feeling that like the rumors are true and tech has overrun the city, and that's the whole culture here now."

Tags: #advertising #ai #sanfrancisco #tech

Perhaps not Boring Technology after all

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:05:53 +0000

A recurring concern I’ve seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise.

Tags: #ai #codegen #llms #programming #tech

CCC vs GCC - Harshanu

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:10:31 +0000

For Anthropic’s stated goal of demonstrating that Claude can build complex software, CCC is a genuine success. For anyone wanting to compile software to actually run efficiently, GCC (or Clang, or any production compiler) remains the only real option.

Tags: #anthropic #ccc #claude #compilers #gcc #programming #tech

Why Vampires Live Forever | Machiel Reyneke

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:03:23 +0000

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.

Tags: #blood #health #tech #vampires

What, then, are we paying for? | Quinn Keast

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:53:23 +0000

Paying for software isn’t paying for a solution. It’s paying for someone else to own a problem.

Tags: #ai #codegen #llms #software #tech

Turns Out They Didn’t Really Want You To Bring Your Whole Self To Work | Techdirt

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:17:52 +0000

So no, they didn’t really want you to bring your whole self to work. They wanted you to bring the parts that were useful to them, for exactly as long as it was useful to them. The “whole self” thing was just the price of admission in a seller’s market. Now that it’s a buyer’s market, they’d prefer you just shut up and (use AI to write) code. The irony is that employees who actually believe in what they’re building tend to build better things. These executives may have just taught an entire generation of workers that the relationship is purely transactional. When the labor market tightens again—and it will—they might find that lesson stuck.

Tags: #career #labor #tech

The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory – Dan Shapiro's Blog

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:19:20 +0000

I’ve now seen dozens of companies struggling to put AI to work writing code, and each one has moved through five clear tiers of automation. That felt familiar, and I realized that the federal government had been there first – but for cars.

Tags: #ai #codegen #llms #tech