maguay

And then you have Swatch, making cheaper versions of the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, as almost a licensed dupe (though since both are owned by the same parent company, it's almost more of an iPhone SE to an iPhone Pro comparison, in a way).

This ... means the page could render a QR code for humans while letting bots see the actual URL. That is incredibly cool.

Author here: That is true, and it's true in perhaps an even more nefarious way than Google's Instant Answers that showed direct quotes from your site. Both kill clickthroughs, but the former at least let you speak in your own voice without smoothing out an average answer from multiple sites.

It's an increasingly hard game to win, with diminishing returns in clickthroughs from "winning." Which makes it all the more crucial to write stuff your followers want to read, and to grow that following person by person, even if it's far slower to start than traditional SEO was.

I've always wanted a writing app built around experimentation, where you could write multiple takes on a paragraph then swap them in and out to see how each sounds in context. That, and I wanted a writing app that treated both Markdown and Rich Text as first class citizens, with side-by-side documents for notes alongside a draft, full keyboard control, and more.

And so I built it: https://reproof.app/

It's taken forever (never reinvent the text editor, they say, and they're right) but it's finally at the point where a handful of us are using it for daily writing, and it's just about ready to launch.

And yet, when the USPS did deliver email (via paper, no less, with their E-COM system), over half of the message volume was sent by one mass-mailer: https://buttondown.com/blog/the-e-com-story

Afraid the spammers will always be with us.

I definitely was channeling my feelings when yelling at Cursor/Claude for the umpteenth time to do what I asked it to do or so help me...

People love to work hard on goals they're excited about, when the work feels meaningful, when they know how to clearly make progress on the task, when there's a shape to the work and a clear criteria for completion, when some combination of the financial and psychological rewards of the work are better than they'd get doing something else in the same time.

People hate work that feels undervalued, that's not clearly defined, that feels like an endless churn with no end in sight, when harder work does not turn into better results for them.

AI it feels like is making the latter far more common than the former.

Absolutely hilarious that it's watching for frustration.

I'd discovered, perhaps mid-2025, that Cursor was noticeably better at fixing bugs if I started cursing at it. Better yet, after a while it would seem to break and start cursing itself ("Oh yes, I see the f*** problem now" and so on). Hilarity ensued.

What a world, where cursing at your machines can make them get their act together.

You've got a shot at building a new Sparrow here. This looks really nice. Unsure that every email message needs a tab on the top, too—I think you could almost just rely on the left sidebar and treating the emails there as tabs. That, and some j/k shortcuts to quickly flip through the emails in your inbox would be great.

My first computer was a hand-me-down Compaq LTE laptop, several times removed from the original owner, with a 700MB hard drive and Windows 95 a decade after those were leading-edge specs. It had only Word and Access, of all things, and little room for more.

But it was mine, I tinkered with it forever, learned databases enough to turn Access into a basic quasi-Excel for my needs, cataloged things that really didn't need to be tabulated, and generally learned as much as that little machine would let me.

That was a limited computer, one that couldn't possibly have let me do what I needed to do when I hit university. But it got me started, taught me to tinker, and I'm prety sure pushed me to learn more than a state-of-the-art for the time computer would have.

And so I do wonder, at times, if it's the nostalgic look back at early computing that makes people inclined to say "my god that would have been an amazing computer to start out with" when you look at an entry-level computer. I'm inclined, even, to say man that's going to be an epic $100 computer on the second-hand market in a half decade or less.

When at the same time, it's actually a solid machine for more of us than us geeks with our inflated expectations of computers have than we'd like to accept. That, too, is pretty cool.

Tudor says they'll pay around a third to a half for something pretty close made by the same parent company but with a different movement and branding.

Reminds me of Japanese Mundane Halloween costumes, dressed up as a person holding a tray in a food court trying to find a table to sit at or some other similarly common life scenario.

That is the point that cracked me up the most.

I have a longstanding suspicion that paying for internet service makes people feel like they've paid for everything on the web, and thus expect it to not cost more after that initial fee. That the companies who provide software and content online are, generally, not at all connected to their ISP isn't necessarily intuitive to the average person outside of tech.

That's increasingly changed, thanks to some combination of Netflix and other consumer-facing subscriptions, the App Store's easy payment mechanisms, and in-app purcahses for digital goods in games spilling over into the real world. There's still more mental friction to paying for things online and more expectation of free by default, for most people, in tech than in the real world.

Agreed. I've used the em dash for well over a decade and love it, but am having to train myself to not use it simply to not appear as though my text is written by AI.

At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!

And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of an item. The officially published rate of X matters little when the assessed value is up to an overworked official (in the most generous of readings of the situation). Nothing's exempt; somehow gifts from family and used items always seem most likely to trigger the tripwire.

Ship something through DHL or a similar service, and they follow the letter of the law so you'll both end up paying the official duty (at least there, it's almost guaranteed to follow the declared value) plus their processing fee, storage fee, and whatever else they include. I've easily paid double the price of a product for all of those fees together.

And worst, it's all unpredictable. At least if there's a 10% sales tax you can calculate that into if you want to buy an item. But once you get hit enough times, you start just not feeling like it's worth the mental load, time, and random financial hit to order stuff.

America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.

Smart for OpenAI to launch, from a product lock-in perspective, since most similar chat sidebars in apps tend to let one choose the AI model from a list that always seems to include Claude as well....

But for that same reason, not sure I'd want to implement this into products since it does lock you into OpenAI, only.

Curious if anyone here is using Luna Display full-time to turn an Intel iMac into a monitor for a MacBook or Mac Mini. How has it worked for you?

Less arduous than gutting an iMac to turn it into a standalone monitor but seems highly likely the latency would feel annoying.

Would love to hear more about your experience! Any chance you'd be up for an interview on the Buttondown blog?

I thought they were down to a single branch; TIL!

No, absolutely, just the concentration in Asia generally and Thailand/Japan specifically makes it a far bigger deal. That was a bad example to include versus Toys R Us.

That it is, though recently with a Canadian company trying to acquire a controlling interest.

Fun fact: The Asian arm of Toys 'R' Us never shut down, and while it's far from the most popular retailer (and, IMHO, broadly overpriced), it's maintained a retail presence in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and more.

There's an interesting tradition of dead American brands getting a second life in Asia. Swenson's, Sizzler, Dean & Deluca, and Mr. Donut in Southeast Asia, Tower Records and Kinko's in Japan, even 7-11's outsized popularity in Asia versus its more moderate presence in the States. Yahoo! Japan almost counts as well.

Recommendation since I haven't seen it mentioned here yet:

Annie Jacobsen's _Nuclear War: A Scenario_

A second by, at times, millisecond, tale of what could and would happen after a nuclear attack on the US is detected. Been a long time since I read a book in just over two days.

Sad that a keyboard even needs to say that it's "privacy-conscious." What a world we've built, where one might reasonably worry that their keyboard _isn't_ private.

Comedy Central landed on that solution six years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwQRXSvgm5o

Yes, an actual clicky button on the right side of the steering wheel: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3....

Works well enough though ... you wouldn't have to press it that often if auto-wipers just worked. Unfortunately, that may be the worst Tesla feature right now since their autowipers love activating for no reason on a dry day, or over-activating in rain.

Far from an expert, but two favorites from last time I was there:

- Uneo Park and the Tokyo National Museum. - Tokyo Metropolitan Edo-Tokyo Museum (and I've heard great things about the open-air take on this museum in the suburbs ... which could be a better option since the former I just saw is being renovated).

And on the other side of the country, don't miss Kyoto. Just came back from there, and I'm not sure I've ever fallen in love with a city faster.

But above all, I adore just walking around any city, aimlessly, and exploring whatever I stumble upon. Turn into a temple, walk through a random neighborhood grocery store, delight in the ordinary-for-here that's not-so-ordinary for elsewhere.

The absolutely best thing about being in Japan is realizing that games so often are recreating Japan ... and you don't realize it until you're there. You hike and exit the path at a small shrine and feel like you're in Zelda. You go through a tunnel and come out in a different (snowy, in my case) environment, and feel like you went through a Mario pipe. You drive on expressways in Tokyo with office buildings nearly right up to the road, with pillars between lanes and (in one spot) a highway going through a building and suddenly racing games don't seem so far fetched.

It's a trip, in the best of ways.

Seconded. Use it as the full CMS for one blog, as a headless CMS for a company site for another. Great either way.