James Cham vibecoded a tool to visualize the appearance of concepts in Bits and Bobs over time.
James Cham vibecoded a tool to visualize the appearance of concepts in Bits and Bobs over time. I love it!
Topic: bobs
42 mentions · 26 chunks · 24 episodes
14.2× distinctiveness vs baseline
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How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- bobs appears in 26 chunks across 24 episodes, from 2023-11-13 to 2026-04-13.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 9/2/25 (2025-09-02), with 2 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with bits, Claude, and background context, while by chunk count it sits between wild west and bits; its yearly rank moved from #29 in 2023 to #78 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
My Bits and Bobs are bite size.
My Bits and Bobs are bite size. They stand on their own. Often with a top-level insight and then exposition or unpacking or wrinkling. But adjacent ones are in conver...
My friend Jad Esber has a new place to share reflections: Field Notes.
...e reflections: Field Notes. He was directly inspired for the format by Bits and Bobs!
Bits and Bobs is my own personal anti-Twitter.
Bits and Bobs is my own personal anti-Twitter. Instead of shouting into the void, I invite people into my cozy study where I navelgaze. Twitter is about hot takes ...
The synthesis pass is where leverage is created.
...leverage is created. That's why compounding engineering works. And why Bits and Bobs generate so much leverage for me. The synthesis pass is important but never urgent. This is the closest to my secret: I just give the synthesis pass ...
A recipe for powerful growth: action and reflection.
...ed both. I've found I need roughly 4:1 action:reflection by minute. My Bits and Bobs process is my weekly reflection, and I couldn't live without it. The tech industry today often does all action, no reflection. Academia does all refl...
Insights require both accumulation and synthesis.
...he reasons I religiously take the time to do a synthesis pass with the Bits and Bobs each week. I want to take the proto insights, the snippets of ideas, and synthesize them into a more stable and coherent form that will stand the tes...
Israel Shalom, commenting on last week's Bits and Bobs, reminds us about wheels on luggage.
Israel Shalom, commenting on last week's Bits and Bobs, reminds us about wheels on luggage. "Growing up, our luggage didn't have any wheels. We'd have to lug stuff around literally. Then someone added two...
The more that you've touched a component, the more you don't want it to change unexpectedly.
... want it to change unexpectedly. Each touch is an implied curation. My Bits and Bobs process each week is driven by multiple different touch points where I interact with the previous week's notes and refine and keep the ones that stil...
LLMs are like water.
...m juice concentrate, you can get unlimited glasses of orange juice. My Bits and Bobs are concentrated insight–hard to drink on their own, but delicious when you add water!
If you've gone through the effort of having high quality programmatic thinking LLMs can write infinite Op Eds for you, on demand.
...king LLMs can write infinite Op Eds for you, on demand. The backlog of Bits and Bobs feels exceptionally valuable to me in the age of AI.
MCP is the AI era's OLE.
... know how this movie ends. If you want to dig in more, I fed my recent Bits and Bobs into ChatGPT's Deep Research and it gave a more in depth report diving into the parallels.
Someone asked me why I publish Bits and Bobs each week.
Someone asked me why I publish Bits and Bobs each week. The weekly reflection is the load bearing part. The publishing is just the thing that makes me feel compelled to keep up the streak of spe...
I built a chatbot into my https://thecompendium.cards.
...otes cards in it, with hundreds added every week. I also re-import the Bits and Bobs into it every week. In the past I've found being able to pass the Bits and Bobs to Claude as background context made it a much more powerful brainsto...
Hyper concentrated insight is now more valuable than before because it can be diluted by LLMs.
... this particular consumer: liquid media. This is one of the reasons my Bits and Bobs export is such an effective background context[vv] for me to feed to LLMs when I'm brainstorming.[vw] My Bits and Bobs is like my own personal intell...
I've had a ton of fun playing with my Bits and Bobs to make liquid media.
I've had a ton of fun playing with my Bits and Bobs to make liquid media.[yj] I recently went through and extracted all of the Bits and Bobs related directly or indirectly to what I'm building in my da...
Next week's Bits and Bobs will come out on Tuesday due to the US holiday.
Next week's Bits and Bobs will come out on Tuesday due to the US holiday.
Jamie Katz described Bits and Bobs as "doodling with thoughts," which I think is spot on.
Jamie Katz described Bits and Bobs as "doodling with thoughts," which I think is spot on.
The next Bits and Bobs will be on Tuesday 1/21 due to the US holiday.
The next Bits and Bobs will be on Tuesday 1/21 due to the US holiday.
I'll skip Bits and Bobs next week due to the holiday.
I'll skip Bits and Bobs next week due to the holiday. They'll return on Monday, January 6th.