Links
Box Line Text: A minimal whiteboard app
This is a great implementation of an extremely minimal whiteboard app. There is no UI, and you can click to add text or click+drag to add boxes and lines. Zoom options in your browser will change the size, and you can save the HTML if you want to keep a copy.
It’s probably not enough for work meetings, but I thought it was a great, fun product.
Wag Buys Shares Back from SoftBank
Wag was looking to raise $75 million. It went to SoftBank and was like “will you give us $75 million?” SoftBank was like “no haha we’ll give you $300 million,” because that is SoftBank’s whole thing, it loves to give startups vastly more money than they want or need. And so Wag took the money. And then like a year and a half later Wag will get rid of SoftBank by giving back, I don’t know, but I am going to say some number less than $225 million (“well below” the valuation at which it invested). Wag got the $75 million it needed for free.
So under the right circumstances, you can make more money with a flop than you can with a hit!
Wag wasn’t exactly a flop, but SoftBank’s aggressive investment strategy does result in some pretty unusual situations.
Leather Sneakers by Spingle
Spingle is a company based in Hiroshima, Japan that makes hand-crafted leather shoes, and they also have an excellent sneaker lineup. Because the leather molds to your feet over time, the shoes become more comfortable the more you wear them.
They are a little pricey, but they should last a long time and the cost is completely reasonable considering the work that goes into them. And there are plenty of sneakers that cost even more.
An AI That Begins Novels
This neural network was trained to output unique opening lines to novels. Some of the results are surprisingly great:
I have just been informed, that the debate over the question ‘is it right or wrong to have immortal souls’ has been finally brought to a conclusion.
When I was a boy, I was fond of the story of the pirate god.
He had a strange name, and he was a very big boy indeed.
The village of Pembrokeshire, in the county of Mersey, lies on a wide, happy plain, which, in a few years, was to become known as the “Land of the Endless Mountains.”
I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.
How many times have I had the misfortune to die?
The first day I met my future self, I was aboard the old dirigible that lay in wait for me on the far side of the moon.
It’s hard to call these creative since the AI probably has no concept of what these words actually mean, but there are some really compelling ideas in here.
The last sentence in particular struck me as having so many interesting elements that could be explored more as the story progresses. At the very least, these serve as excellent starting places for ideas that a normal person wouldn’t have on their own.
NAVA Ora Unica Wristwatch
I happened upon this watch in the mall over the weekend and loved how unconventional it is. The inner end of the loop acts as the hour hand, and the outer end is the minute hand. The in-between part seems to move freely, so you have a watch face that looks pretty different each time you look at it.
I’d probably need to pause for a few seconds to decipher the time so it’s not exactly practical, but it would be a good conversation starter for sure.
Remove.bg - Remove the Background of Any Photo
Remove.bg is a great service that makes it easy for anyone to remove the background of a photo. You can use it with small images for free, and pricing for HD photos seems very fair: you can pay $2 per image, or get a subscription starting at $9 per month.
The World's Most Beautiful Data Center
The Torre Girona Chapel was deconsecrated in the 70s, and now houses the MareNostrum supercomputer.
“We were in need of hundreds of square meters without columns and the capacity to support 44.5 tons of weight,” Maspoch told me in an email. “At the time there was not much available space at the university and the only room that satisfied our requirements was the Torre Girona chapel. We did not doubt it for a moment and we installed a supercomputer in it.”
Automating Materials Science with Machine Learning
A robot arm dips a pipette into a dish and transfers a tiny amount of bright liquid into one of many receptacles sitting in front of another machine. When all the samples are ready, the second machine tests their optical properties, and the results are fed to a computer that controls the arm. Software analyzes the results of these experiments, formulates a few hypotheses, and then starts the process over again. Humans are barely required.
The setup, developed by a startup called Kebotix, hints at how machine learning and robotic automation may be poised to revolutionize materials science in coming years. The company believes it may find new compounds that could, among other things, absorb pollution, combat drug-resistant fungal infections, and serve as more efficient optoelectronic components.
This sounds like a perfect application for machine learning. It’s a great combination of smart design and brute force effort.
Picular - Google, but for Colors
Picular is a site that lets you search for words like “water” or “summer” and see a list of related colors. It seems to work by running a Google image search and extracting the primary color of that image.
This is the kind of project I love. It’s simple and easy to understand, but fun to play with.
Perils of Eroded Civic Knowledge Forewarned by Former Justice Souter
This is extremely important.
