Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #69
Tony's Pick Kyle's Pick I enjoyed this interview with Scott Dikkers, founder of The Onion, about writing comedy. Some of his advice is common — separate...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #68
Tony's Pick Kyle's Pick This week I finished Peter Attia's new book, Outlive. I was a little skeptical going in, thinking that a book about longevity from a...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #67
Tony's Pick Tony is at the hospital waiting for a baby to be born, so there is no pick from him this week. Instead, here is a picture of what looks to be a...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #66
Tony's Pick This video showcases 20 games made in a weekend all on the theme "Roles Reversed." Play as the shopkeeper in an RPG, the bricks in a brick...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #65
Tony's Pick The internet now includes a full neuron-by-neuron map of a fruit fly brain, plus a tool to interact with that map. Here's a video overview of the...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #64
Tony's Pick For those of you that like weird t-shirts, here's a PSA: you can buy official McDonald's swag without any credentials at all. Listen, I...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #63
Tony's Pick 24 hours of Earth's rotation is a video by Bartosz Wojczyński that fixes the camera on the sky instead of the horizon. All the commentary I come...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #62
Tony's Pick Here's a cool project: Highrises by Chris Hypha (and team). They take a bunch of high res photos of art deco highrises with a drone, then stitch...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #61
Tony's Pick Here's a fun use of stable diffusion: making QR codes that look like art. Kyle's Pick Been reading a decent amount about Apple's Vision Pro...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #60
Tony's Pick Slide to Unlock by Craig Kaplan is a fun little game focused on dexterity spatial reasoning. Definitely worth a few minutes of your time! Note:...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #59
Tony's Pick I recently finished Cory Doctorow's latest novel, Red Team Blues. His early writing was hugely influential for me, but most of his recent work...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #58
Tony's Pick If you're not familiar with Steve Mould's YouTube Channel is worth a few minutes of your time. I like this one about "the portal illusion", and...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #57
Tony's Pick SineRider is a free, web-based, open source game made by a group of teens. In it you modify math equations direct the path of the characters....
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #56
Tony's Pick I've only ever heard of Letters Live via YouTube's recommendation algorithm, but it seems like it might be a bigger deal in England? Anyway, many...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #55
Tony's Pick Hot new tech alert: now you can automatically turn drawings, especially kids drawings, into fun animations. Here's some background with...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #54
Tony's Pick Check out this mathematical art by Henry Sagerman. It's a "screw/screw" mechanism, the meaning of which is explained in the video. Interesting,...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #53
Tony's Pick I've recently been playing with GPT-4 via the ChatGPT interface, but it's relatively cumbersome to interact with via a web browser. While I'm...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #52
Tony's Pick Happy 1 year of Mostly Bits newsletter picks! To celebrate, here's a lazy Tony pick: If you don't have a playdate yet, you should order one in...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #51
Tony’s Pick scrapeghost is the first tool I’ve seen based on the ChatGPT API with a specific goal and standard developer ergonomics. It seems both useful and...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #50
Tony’s Pick This one’s a bit weird, so prepare yourself. Bobby Fingers is my favorite tiny YouTube channel. He meticulously creates incredibly detailed...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #49
Tony’s Pick Let’s make fetch happen: tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion aren’t AI, they’re SALAMI (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #48
Tony’s Pick Here’s an interesting visualization: Which Generation Controls the Senate? Kyle’s Pick I’m going with two podcasts this week, both related to my...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #47
Tony’s Pick Check out this cool clock. Kyle’s Pick A friend of mine re-introduced me to CV Dazzle, a tech/art project about evading facial detection...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #46
(You did not miss an issue - we just accidentally sent two #43s. We’re correcting the numbering here.) Tony’s Pick I’m loath to do free PR for billionaire...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #45
Tony’s Pick LLM commentary is reaching a fever pitch in my corners of the internet. You’ve probably seen the blurry jpeg article, the Tom Scott video, maybe...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #44
Tony’s Pick The tiny world of mastodon/fediverse clients on iOS is really quite rich. The official Mastodon app is good, Ivory from Tapbots is a clear...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #43
Tony’s Pick I am not particularly interested in origami as such, but I kind of love Origami Simulator. It’s a very cool use of web technology that’s...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #42
Tony’s Pick The Smithsonian has made 4 million digital items public domain with the CC0 license (no attribution required, no copyright, etc), and it’s easily...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #41
Special note for all the Tru Tilers™ out there: in these trying economic times, the team at Mostly Bits HQ has made the difficult decision to shut down the...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #40
Tony’s Pick If you have a relatively modern Mac with the latest OS, Amazing AI by Sindre Sorhus is a slick way to try AI image generation without signing up...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #39
Tony’s Pick This article about the Atari game Pitfall is interesting on 2 levels: first is the technical feat in the original game, second is that someone...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #38
Tony's Pick As the year comes to a close, I'm cleaning out various inboxes, feeds, and lists. In doing so I realized I've never linked to Bits About Money,...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #37
This newsletter issue might look a bit different. We’ve (hastily) changed newsletter providers this week. Revue, our previous provider, is the latest victim...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #36
Tony's Pick Fusion has been in the news recently. Here’s a not-super-technical assessment of the practicalities of various methods of generation electricity...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #35
Our Pick We started a Mastodon server over at nofun.social. However Twitter turns out, many interesting people that we follow have decided to migrate...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #34
Tony's Pick Asterisk Magazine is a new online publication worth a gander. Is Wine Fake? was my entry point (despite the dumb title, a smart analysis), but...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #33
Our Pick We launched our first Playdate game on Itch.io yesterday, called Doink! It’s a mini-roguelike paddle game that changes as you play. According to our...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #32
Tony's Pick Floor796 is a fun and weird internet art project. Give it 5 minutes of exploration! Tag yourself Kyle's Pick Currently categorized as “frivolous...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #31
Tony's Pick I am generally against the development of pervasive surveillance in modern society, doubly so when it’s controlled by giant tech companies with a...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #30
Tony's Pick I’m back with another tiny, independent publisher. KroneckerWellis offers esoterica like a book of Nikola Tesla’s patents and a reprint of the...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #29
Between moving and traveling, we missed last week’s newsletter. We at Mostly Bits have set an extremely high standard for ourselves and we failed to live up...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #28
Tony's Pick Teenage Engineering makes really beautiful hardware. (They made Playdate with Panic, icymi). The recently released PO-80 record factory is a...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #27
Tony's Pick Continuing a trend with a previous pick, Oro is another small publisher with tons of beautiful books, mostly focused on architecture and urban...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #26
Tony's Pick I’ve long supported the Long Now foundation’s clock project and the Rosetta Project. I deeply appreciate the focus on communicating millennia...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #25
Tony's Pick A lot of the datavis content that gets attention on the internet is more about looking cool than about improving understand of the data. This one...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #24
Tony's Pick This demo is a real banger because it combines several newish technologies to create a valuable product that otherwise could not exist. Bonus:...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #23
Tony's Pick Check out the Public Domain Review. It’s a contemporary web publication that plumbs the depths of content in the public domain. They cleverly...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #22
Tony's Pick More space stuff from me this week. You may have heard that the Artemis I mission is set to launch this week as a trial run for the systems that...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #21
Tony's Pick You’ve probably heard of the “observable universe”, or all places in the universe we can currently observe, which is essentially defined by the...
Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #20
Tony's Pick I’m a sucker for a minimal-nonsense deep dive into technical topics unrelated to my areas of expertise - especially infrastructure. Austin Vernon...