Tony's Pick

I recently read through The Far Reaches. As a set of short stories on Kindle, it's a perfect fit for my life right now. It's also quite good! With Todd's recommendation and including the likes of Scalzi and James S. A. Corey, I couldn't pass it up. Worth your attention if you like the idea of bite-sized, thought provoking sci-fi.

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

Velja is a free macOS browser picker. You might think you don't need that, but let me tell you the killer feature: never again see or interact with those in-browser interstitial pages for Zoom, Pop, etc. (Sidenote: I thought I'd linked to this before, but it was a different app by Sindre. To make my life harder for future picks, I also use a love Dato, UTC Time, Shareful, Speediness, Plain Text Editor, and Lungo. I'm a Sindre superfan, I guess.)

Kyle's Pick

A few weeks ago I stumbled on Letibus, a tiny puzzle game shop in Slovenia. They have made a couple of cryptic puzzle books where you have to figure out the rules as you go, as well as a puzzle card game called All is Bomb. I received the latter for my birthday and am looking forward to playing it!

Joint Pick

Our first Playdate game, Doink!, was released on the official Playdate Catalog this week! We are really digging the vibe of the community and are excited to be one of the earlier adopters.

Doink! is also available on Itch if you would like to try it but do not have a Playdate.

Tony's Pick

While on leave, I'm slowly working through a very long list of things to read (and watch). Here's something I've been sitting on for a while: Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Externalities? (here's a video lecture version)

It is excellent, if very technical and maybe somewhat dry. In case you want to save time: the answer is no.

Tony's Pick

If you aren't familiar with the Barkley Marathons, this documentary on the 2023 race is a great intro - and there are many more similar docs on YouTube for previous years, if you go digging. I'll avoid listing all the idiosyncrasies and just say that it's an uncommon year when any of the 35 participants finishes. It's the hardest, craziest, endurance race in the world. (Sidenote: If you ever plan run it, lmk. I'll crew for you and make an epic documentary about your failure.)

Kyle's Pick

I stumbled on a new podcast this week called Open to Debate. They stage structured debates between two participants on contentious topics, such as "Should Prosecutors Pursue Minor Crimes?" and "Does Color Blindness Perpetuate Racism?" (The latter popped up on a few of my socials this week, and as expected the debate was more nuanced and respectful than the dunk takes from either side.)

Tony's Pick

I'm back, baby! With a baby! It's awesome, she's perfect, and also, I forget, what's sleep? Anyway, here's a fun animation I came across at some point over the last month. The planets have faces, lol :)

Kyle's Pick

I've been sitting on this recommendation for almost a year, but I was listening to the soundtrack for the game Betrayal at Club Low this week and figured it was time. Betrayal at Club Low is basically a one-shot tabletop RPG about extracting a secret agent from a nightclub while posing as a pizza delivery man. You roll a mix of standard and custom dice to pass skill checks around deception, confidence, cooking, music, and more. The creator, Cosmo D, was a musician before getting into game development, and all of his games blend music, mysteries, surrealism, and pizza in strange and fascinating ways.

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 writing and editing, try morning pages to overcome writer's block, focus on delivery over perfection — but it's interesting to see those tips reinforced once again. I also enjoyed some less-standard takes, like:

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 celebrity tech-bro physician would be all about cryogenics and blood boys. But it was a surprisingly grounded take on extending healthspan (how long you are healthy and active) vs lifespan (how long you live).

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 baby's head photoshopped onto an octopus costume, or else just some bold choices in image processing:

Kyle's Pick

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 breaker, or the obstacles in a platformer. I think you could make an entire game studio based on this theme. Love it! (h/t @stublag)

Kyle's Pick

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 project. Neat!

Kyle's Pick

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 understand that McDonald's swag might sound dumb, but just take a second and look the vintage Food Buddies, Nuggets, and Grimace shirts. At the very least, this is good goof fodder.

Kyle's Pick

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 up with is trite, so…this is cool, go check it out. It’s good art.

Kyle’s Pick

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 them together to create images with a surreal perspective (more in this tweet). Cool images, and an interestingly heavily monetized project.

Kyle’s Pick

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 announcements at WWDC over the last couple of days. As someone who has worked remotely for the better part of a decade, I’m more interested in AR/XR/VR as a tool for improving remote work than as a consumer device beyond gaming applications.

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: requires a touch screen, so play on a tablet or phone.

Kyle’s Pick

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 has been YA. I appreciate that Red Team Blues is more of a return to form. It’s a fast, easy, read set squarely in modern Silicon Valley/San Francisco/Tech culture with all the criticism of same you’d expect from Doctorow.

Kyle’s Pick

I had fun playing with Rooms.xyz this week. It’s a fun mix of little worlds, micro-platformers, etc where you can easily share and remix assets. And it uses Lua under the hood for scripting — same as Playdate — so I might try my hand at building something in the next few weeks.

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 Kottke recently linked to this one about precision machining. Check it out!

Kyle’s Pick

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. Doing math in a game probably doesn’t sound fun (unless you’re Kyle), but it’s really quite good!

Kyle’s Pick

I found this interesting analysis of the Street Fighter II sprite system. Apparently the character poses and movements were broken down into a series of smaller tiles that were composed on the fly. But they were incredibly memory constrained, so they represented the available memory as a series of spreadsheets.

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 are good, most are fine, but Taika Waititi reading a letter about a speeding ticket is great. Fun letter, fun performance.

Kyle’s Pick

I have a secret that I’ve been hiding from all of you — I love interesting mixes of retro gaming and modern tech. (What are you talking about? I’ve never heard of Awesome Controller.)

Tony’s Pick

Hot new tech alert: now you can automatically turn drawings, especially kids drawings, into fun animations. Here’s some background with instructions to run the code, but you can use this web UI too. We need more of this is the kind of fun, whimsical, stuff from technology.

Kyle’s Pick

Some footage was making the rounds over the last week from a game called Unrecord. It’s too early to say whether the game will be any good, but Unreal Engine 5 looks like a significant technical leap, at least on a high-end graphics card with ray tracing support.

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, novel, and cool! If you like this, check out the rest of his body of work.

Kyle’s Pick

I’ve been tracking some of the back-and-forth on a possible link between teen social media usage and rising rates of depression and suicide, especially among teen girls. I particularly liked a few things about the most recent post from Jonathan Haight:

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 interested in some CLI tools, I wanted something lower effort to improve my workflow. So I’ve been using MacGPT recently. I don’t have API access yet, so I use it as a simple menu bar flyout container for the ChatGPT web interface.

Kyle’s Pick

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 the next day or so, as the price goes up by $20 on April 7. The massive behemoth that is the Mostly Bits corporate enterprise is hard at work on our second playdate game, which is surely to get game of the year on every list. You might as well get the required device now so you can experience maximum joy in real time.

Kyle’s Pick

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 like something that would otherwise be way more difficult to implement. I imagine we’ll see lots more tools like this - and probably sooner than we think with embedded LLMs rather than external APIs. Bonus pick: scrapeghost is licensed under the new-to-me and very interesting Hippocratic License.

Kyle’s Pick

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 dioramas of problematic celebrities in infamous moments, then buries those dioramas somewhere in the world for you to find. If that sounds bad, it’s better than it sounds. If that sounds awesome - well, it’s better than it sounds. There are only 3 so far, and I’d recommend starting at the beginning, with Mel Gibson.

Kyle’s Pick

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 Machine Inferences”).

Kyle’s Pick

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 work at a mental health startup.

Tony’s Pick

Check out this cool clock.

Kyle’s Pick

(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 vanity projects, but this announcement by Blue Origin is pretty stellar, pun intended. Solar panels made from only lunar regolith with no water and no carbon emissions (assuming carbon free electricity) is some pretty incredible sci-fi shit.

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 even Bing gaslighting. But have you heard Colin Meloy play a song written for him, nominally in his signature style, by ChatGPT?

Kyle’s Pick

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 favorite in my corner of the fediverse, and there are many many others to check out. By far my favorite is IceCubes. I prefer the look and feel, it’s nicely customizable without being a too focused on configuration, and it’s open source!

Kyle’s Pick

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 surprisingly fun to play with!

Kyle’s Pick

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 searchable. An awesome resource and a fun opportunity. Check it out!

Kyle’s Pick

Tony’s Pick

Here’s a fun project that includes an interesting exploration of generative art for blog post graphics and some automation of same. Pretty cool! (h/t to the dastardly Matt Swanson for the link)

Kyle’s Pick

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 reverse engineered it 40 years later, for fun. I’m a little too young to have first hand experience with Atari’s consoles, so Pitfall wasn’t known to me, but it’s still a fun read!

Kyle’s Pick

Tony’s Pick

Kyle’s Pick

We have a friend staying with us over the holidays and decided to play through a throwback 16-bit RPG called Chained Echoes. I saw it described somewhere as “the game you remember loving on the Super Nintendo,” in that it streamlines a lot of the tedium of classic RPGs that you’ve suppressed in your mind. Plus you get to fly around in “Sky Armor,” which is pretty sweet.

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, where patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) deconstructs various esoterica about the financial system. Sometimes it's nuts-and-bolts stuff like How Credit Cards Make Money, sometimes it's counter intuitive like this one on fraud or this one on Siting Bank Branches - but it's always interesting.

Kyle's Pick

I recently bought my wife a Nespresso Vertuo Plus to replace her aging Keurig and was surprised to see that there were no third-party pods available. Nespresso machines have been around in some form since the 1980s, so it was surprising to me that a patent would not have expired by now.

This newsletter issue might look a bit different. We’ve (hastily) changed newsletter providers this week. Revue, our previous provider, is the latest victim in Elon Musk’s continued immolation of Twitter.

Tony’s Pick

My personal fediverse feed is getting more interesting as I’ve started following more people. Here’s one of my first finds: screenshots of 90s era Nintendo internal game dev tools.

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 from fusion.

Kyle's Pick

Does scientific peer review work? The answer seems to be no - or at least not enough to justify the cost of 15,000-reviewer-years of time each year to review papers where only a fraction of errors are caught and rejected papers can be shopped around.

His analysis around number of errors caught felt a little weak to me. Although only 25-30% of major errors were detected, the obviously flawed papers were recommended for rejection most of the time (about 60-70% according to the linked studies). I see some parallels to code review, where I might recommend changes on a Pull Request early if I notice glaring structural issues.

I liked his analysis of “weak-link” vs “strong-link” and why peer review is fundamentally flawed. In a “weak-link” domain, progress depends on the worst work, and peer review makes sense - we should try to weed out bad science. But I’m inclined to agree with him that science is a “strong-link” domain, where bad ideas will eventually flame out while good ideas move us forward.

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 elsewhere for now, so we’re hedging our bets. If you’re already riding the masto, you can follow us @shipstar and @tonydewan.

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 other pieces are good too.

As a wine lover, turquoise wine is my favorite

Kyle's Pick

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 first review, it’s pretty fun!

Yes, that's THE ericbn

Tony's Pick

Floor796 is a fun and weird internet art project. Give it 5 minutes of exploration!

Tag yourself

Kyle's Pick

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 history of dubious ethics and an insatiable need for growth. On the other hand, doorbell cameras are just so useful! I recently opted for one from Ubiquiti because I own the footage and it’s stored on my local network (additional network appliance required). I’ve since gotten a few other products from UI and am pretty happy so far. It’s pricey stuff, but delivers excellent hardware and software quality.

Hands off my package, Kyle!

Kyle's Pick

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 Apollo 13 launch checklist. They also have cool posters. Check them out!

(It seems like most or all of the content is in the public domain, which makes for a clever business model and harkens back to an earlier pick. Public domain publisher of space-themed stuff? This might be my most on-brand pick yet.)

Don't forget to stir the tanks!

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 to that. We are very sorry and we have taken steps to address the problem so that it never happens again.

As atonement, enjoy this week’s special Halloween-themed issue.

Tony's Eerie Pick

(In the end, the Halloween theme was inside you all alon

Tony's Pick

Teenage Engineering makes really beautiful hardware. (They made Playdate with Panic, icymi). The recently released PO-80 record factory is a lovely little device. Make your own records!

Kyle's Pick

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 design. I first learned about Emergent Tokyo (which is on the way!), but many of the other books look great too!

good luck coming up with a joke caption for this, Kyle

Kyle's joke sub-caption

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 into the future. That’s probably why I loved this tweet thread about The Tripitaka Koreana. “52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss.” How can you not love that?

Giancarlo Esposito enjoys a novelty-sized book

Kyle's Pick