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

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.

Enter the design patent for a new capsule form. Apparently the Vertuo line was launched in the mid-2010s with a larger capsule design that (seemingly) serves two purposes:

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

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 is an exception for me. It communicates a lot of data quickly in a relatively obvious way, and with a clear narrative. Brilliant!

Climate change go "shwoosh shwoosh"

Kyle's Pick

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: there’s not a whiff of crypto bullshit.

That poor corn kid

Kyle's Pick

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 monetize the operation by selling prints of public domain images, among other things. Awesome! This greatly aligns with parts of my personal philosophy informed by the likes of Creative Commons, Cory Doctorow, and Kirby Ferguson.

Did you know really big elephants are actually buildings?

Kyle's Pick

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 will send humans back to the moon. If you’re a space nerd like me then you probably also know that the SLS rocket and capsule are a cobbled together Frankenstein’s monster of tech from the cancelled Constellation project and the Space Shuttle. My official pick is this video from the YouTube channel Real Engineering about the SLS, but this mostly an excuse to share this crazy fact: it’s not just Space Shuttle tech - The SLS for Artemis I is literally built with engines salvaged from decommissioned Space Shuttles.

These engines have already been to space

Kyle's Pick

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 speed of light. Here’s a new one for me: the “affectable universe”, or the areas of the universe that we can affect by way of sending light. BUT because the universe is expanding, the affectable universe is shrinking at the same rate that observable universe is expanding. As time goes on, we can see ever more of (the past of) the universe while our ability to impact the universe is ever more constrained.

Not pictured: Tony

Kyle's Pick

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 has several bangers. I’ll point you first to this one about smart grid if only because it provides a great overview of the US grid in general. If you have a good time with that, maybe check out this one on nuclear energy.

more like the alone star state, amirite

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

This tweet introduced me to the Flipper Zero. It’s described as a “Multi-tool Device for Geeks” but it’s much cooler than that. I have no need for it in my daily life, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting one in my bag.

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

Things are picking up steam in the CCS (carbon capture and store) space. I just learned about Noya, which is based on a clever premise. If you put DAC (direct air capture) tech in places where huge volumes of air are already moving, you get higher rates of capture and the cost to the move the air is already sunk. Their target: HVAC cooling towers. (I previously linked to Charm and Climeworks, which are great because you as an individual can pay for verifiable, durable carbon sequestration. )

You see, the air goes in and carbon comes out

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

Turns out people haven’t wanted to work for a long time.

Will someone please think of the editor?

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

This Slate article makes the case for the return of the residential hotel in the face of, and as a solution to, our growing affordable housing crisis. I never knew this was a thing outside of the old west, despite those episodes Season 2 of Mad Men when Don Draper lived in a hotel. I just thought it was an impossibly luxurious thing for a top ad executive to do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just chilling at home with my bud

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

I was recently introduced the STAR Voting system. It’s an interesting alternative voting mechanism that combines score-based voting with runoffs. For use in capital-D Democratic processes, I’m not sure this is more grokable to the average voter than Ranked Choice, but I like the innovation. Maybe give STAR a try for your next roadmap meeting or group dinner?

She's so lucky, she's a star...voter

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

As many of my past picks probably indicate, I’m very into the details of our built environment. One of my favorite cul-de-sacs in that information space is the fact that the Dutch build some of the best transportation infrastructure in the world. This twitter thread is a good light introduction, and basically any video from Not Just Bikes will give you a spicy deep dive (this older one about traffic calming is a good starting point.) I hope you find yourself radicalized about infrastructure!

Paradise is A Dutch Woonerf

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

I’ve recently developed a small passion for ultramarathons, or foot races longer than a marathon. If you didn’t know, ultras have aid stations at various points along the race and it’s very common for runners to have a crew to help them. Check out Hayden Hawkes, in second place at the time, come in to the 30 mile aid station at the Western States 100 this past weekend. This is next level, like a pit stop at an IndyCar race!

arms up, shirts off

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

You may or may not be familiar with the source material from this article (I wasn’t!), but it’s still fascinating to learn what was possible with creative use of clever technical knowledge in early film!

Real time image of Kyle giving feedback on pull request

Kyle's Pick

Tony's Pick

This week I’ve got another Apple TV+ show that’s past it’s cultural moment. For All Mankind is good! In case you didn’t know: it’s an alt-history show that posits a world where the Soviets beat the US to the moon. It’s bit of a juicy soap opera and certainly requires some suspension of disbelief as the seasons progress, but it’s also full of cool space stuff. Season 3 has just started, so you’ve got a back catalog to catch up on.

How do I get a jumpsuit?

Kyle's Pick

Sorry for the late send this week - it was all Kyle’s fault.

Tony's Pick

More content for the “neat hardware hacks” file. Charlie Gerard used inaudible sounds to send Stripe payment info as a kind of lo-fi wireless payment dubbed ultrasonic payments. I had no idea this tech was in widespread use already, mostly for creepy advertising stuff: