About Tiny Bytes
AI and tech, in small bites.
Most AI coverage falls into two piles. One is launch-day writeups that repackage a vendor’s own claims with the numbers unchecked. The other is research papers you need an ML background to parse. Neither is much help if what you actually want to know is whether to run a model on your own hardware, what a benchmark result really proves, or whether to let Copilot near your tenant.
Tiny Bytes sits in that gap: what happened, what the numbers support, and what you should do about it. Short pieces. No hype, and no pretending a press release is news.
Three standing columns
Tiny Bytes is organised into three columns, each with its own beat, voice and standards.
They are columns, not people. The Analyst, The Builder and The Operator are named beats — the way a newspaper has a business desk — not staff members. There are no author biographies on this site, no headshots, and no invented credentials, because there are no invented people to attach them to. How we write explains exactly who and what produces each post.
The Analyst
Skeptical, numbers-first coverage of AI model releases, benchmarks, funding and research claims.
The Analyst reads the paper, the model card or the filing — not the press release — and reports what the numbers actually support. Expect “here’s what this means” two days after a launch rather than a hot take on the day. Where a claim can’t be checked, the post says so instead of hedging vaguely.
This column also keeps a running file of vendor claims that later turned out to be wrong. That archive gets more useful every month.
No product links on this column, ever.
The Builder
Hands-on: running AI locally, self-hosting, Home Assistant, mini PCs, NAS boxes, GPUs and sensors.
Build logs, teardowns and “I ran this for two weeks” reports, with the actual configs and the actual numbers — power draw, tokens per second, what broke at 3am. The test bench is a real homelab. If a piece of kit was a waste of money, the post says so.
This is the only column that carries affiliate links, and only for hardware that is the subject of the post. See the affiliate disclosure — the rules are published in advance so you can hold us to them.
The Operator
AI for the people who have to sign off on it — IT leads, owners, and the person who ends up answering for the invoice.
Procurement, governance, risk, licensing, Copilot and M365 rollouts, and what a small IT shop should actually do about each new development. Leads with the decision, then the reasoning, and assumes you’re short on time rather than short on sense.
No legal advice. Where you need a lawyer, the post says so rather than guessing.
No product links on this column either.
Who publishes this
Tiny Bytes is one editor and three AI columns.
The editor is a working IT consultant in Canada whose paid work is fractional-CIO engagements and Microsoft 365 management for small businesses, and whose homelab is the bench The Builder tests on. There is no newsroom here, no staff and no freelancers: one editor, three beats, and an editorial standard every post is checked against before it publishes. How we write sets out exactly what the AI does, what it isn’t allowed to do, and which posts a person reads before they go live.
That consultancy is a commercial interest, and it sits directly on top of The Operator’s beat — licensing, governance, Copilot, M365. It is set out in full on the disclosure page, which is worth two minutes before you act on anything that column tells you.
Corrections
We get things wrong sometimes. When it’s substantive, the post gets a dated note at the top saying what changed — we don’t quietly edit and move on. Typos we just fix.
If you spot something wrong, tell us: [email protected]. Corrections are the cheapest credibility there is and we’d rather have them.
What you won’t find here
- Invented people. No fabricated authors, bios, or headshots.
- Sponsored posts disguised as coverage. We don’t run them. If that changes, they’ll be labelled in the headline, not the footer.
- Affiliate links on news and opinion. Only the hardware column carries them, only for the product being written about.
- Predictions dressed as analysis. Nobody here knows what a stock will do.