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The New York Times Company is reportedly negotiating exclusively to acquire film social network Letterboxd for around $330 million, up from an earlier $250 million valuation, according to anonymous sources cited by the New York Times. Letterboxd would reportedly keep operating as a standalone platform, though the Times could add its own ad technology to the site. The Times Company declined to confirm the reporting.
The New York Times Company is in exclusive negotiations to acquire Letterboxd, the film-focused social network, in a deal valued around $330 million. Sony Pictures and A24 had also been floated as potential buyers before talks with the Times advanced. Under the discussed terms, Letterboxd's co-founders would keep running the company but report to a Times Company executive, while adopting the Times' ad technology.
A new BASIC interpreter called Tiny Basic for Arduino has been released, designed to run on mid-range Arduino boards and microcontrollers. It lets users write, edit, and execute BASIC code directly on the hardware without an external compiler step.
A new app called Tiny Computers lets iPhone Duo owners transform their device's dual screens into emulations of classic computers. Options include four vintage Macs—the original 1984 Macintosh, iMac G3, iBook G3, and PowerBook G4—alongside non-Apple machines like the Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga 500, ThinkPad, and Windows 95/XP laptops. Each emulation includes limited functionality such as clickable keyboards, command lines, paint programs, and simple games, with hidden files and secrets to discover.
A robotics project has secured $9 million in funding to develop a small robot designed to survey sewage infrastructure. The device is intended to inspect pipes and detect problems in underground sewer systems without extensive excavation.
Tiny Little Office is a web-based office suite that encodes entire documents as shareable links rather than storing them on a server. It requires no accounts, saves nothing remotely unless a user chooses to keep a copy on their own device, and runs in the browser using JavaScript. The site also publishes an llms.txt file explaining how documents can be constructed as links and nested within one another using app-named fences.
Tiny Audio is a GitHub project that pairs a frozen pretrained speech encoder with a pretrained LLM through a small trainable projector, requiring only about 80 million trainable parameters. The released model reaches 1.8% word error rate on LibriSpeech test-clean and 7.4% across a pooled set of 12 benchmarks, and the codebase can reportedly be read in an afternoon or trained on a laptop in roughly five minutes. It also supports word-level timestamps and speaker diarization via a zero-shot port of NVIDIA's NeMo masked_asr recipe.
MicroLLM Lab is a browser-based tool that lets users load and run up to seven small language models, including ones as small as 135M parameters, directly in the browser. It runs objective test suites using regex and exact-token checks rather than judging writing quality, and measures metrics like peak speed, sustained decode speed across 256 tokens, and total benchmark wall time.
A blogger demonstrated that gzip, primed with a corpus of Shakespeare text, can 'continue' a prompt by finding byte sequences that compress most efficiently against its sliding window, producing text that is semi-coherent but clearly reflects patterns from the source material. The experiment was inspired by a paper arguing that prediction and compression are mathematically equivalent, since both rely on assigning probabilities to what comes next.
One Minute Park is an ongoing project by Elliott Cost that collects one-minute, unedited phone videos of parks from contributors around the world, aiming to eventually fill all 1,440 minutes of a day. Submissions are uploaded in .mp4 format to an Are.na channel, with contributors asked to note the date, time, park and location. The project won a Tiny Award for 2024 and has been covered by outlets including The Creative Independent, Swiss Miss and Laughing Squid.
A retro electronics builder documents connecting a Tiny TV Mark 2 video rasterizer board to a custom three-board CRT driver circuit designed by Eric Schlaepfer, aiming to display television images on a small 3JP7 radar display tube. The tube uses electrostatic deflection plates that require thousands of volts, so the driver boards step up low-voltage signals from Tiny TV into the high voltages needed to steer the electron beam. The setup includes a 60-volt bias board, a deflection and video driver board, and a 1,200-volt power supply, all synchronized with horizontal, vertical and video timing signals.
Austin Z. Henley, a Microsoft engineer, built a minimalist Python interpreter written in C that fits within 1024 bytes of code, after an initial attempt at 512 bytes proved too small. The interpreter supports a limited subset of Python syntax—including def, colons, indentation, and parenthesis-free if statements—enough to run a FizzBuzz program, but skips CPython's full tokenizing, AST, and bytecode pipeline in favor of global variables and a fixed-length array.