Strangely I think it's why I like roadtrips so much. Sitting doing absolutely nothing for even 15 minutes is difficult for me, but I can drive for hours doing nothing but watching the world go by, even without music or podcasts on, and it's fine. And that feels good.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Building a new collaborative writing platform at reproof.app.
Formerly founding editor @Racket100 and @Capiche (acq. by Vendr), senior writer at @Zapier (YC S12).
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Twitter: @maguay
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