maguay

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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

But to your point, the value for the Robovan is minuscular unless it's as far-ranging as any other vehicle. And even if the FSD tech and regulations are there for it, the actual vehicle—at least the wheelbase and body covering said wheels—will need to be rethought for real-world conditions.

We went from trusting computing output to having to second-guess everything. And it's tiring.

- UX surely played a part in it, especially for the oldest of forums that collapsed the thread by default. Then again, Dpreview still has that layout, and while it clearly wasn't successful enough for Amazon to want to keep it on, it still has a loyal following.

- Hiding content—or rather, only showing low-quality image previews to logged-out users—makes the "drive-by" experience less nice. HN—and Reddit, to a lesser extent—avoided that enough by not allowing images in comments, leading to users creating their own workarounds.

- Profit, or the lack thereof, likely was a larger problem. Banner ads just don't make enough profit, especially compared to Facebook et al's in-feed ads.

- Maybe the collective internet just isn't content with the smaller crowds that would have seemed great in the forum heyday that, today, pale in contrast to the traffic from one viral post on social media.

And yet. There's something to the idea. Something very "art project"-esque where certain web pages were only available when you're physically in a specific area could be fun, at first. Could also be incredibly restrictive.

"I'm feeling lucky" will find its way back, somehow, as Google tries to one-up LLM-generated answers. Traditional Google Search is already increasingly aiming to supply as much info as possible—and It feels likely an increasing number of Google Search results will be Gemini neé Bard answers (same for Bing, with GPT).

Teaching an LLM to talk about your product will be the new SEO.

Which, should be bullish for Kagi and DuckDuckGo (not affiliated with or an active user of either), as the utility of real search is still so high if done well, something it's hard to shake the feeling that Google has gotten worse at. Perhaps it's time to take it for a serious spin.

Then Apple stopped automatically downloading podcast episodes for people who aren't actively listening, and Spotify presumably counts actual plays rather than downloads, and now we know which half is wasted.

When you are what you measure, measuring more accurately isn't always a fun exercise.

Inconsistently updated, but it's been the one constant across my career. An early article hitting Hacker News' homepage (https://techinch.com/blog/ipad-the-microwave-oven-of-computi...) was the early spark to keep me writing.

Not directly a textbook per se, but was a deeply educational book for me about designing digital spaces and thinking about interface metaphors from a real-world, architecture-driven perspective.

And yet. The blog posts that have been my breakout successes, when measured by pageviews or cold outreach or opportunities, are always about incredibly niche things. How to fix one specific thing on an obscure printer. My rambling ideas about a broader topic. If anything, the more niche, eccentric stuff that only matters to you helps you find your people, and that's where the magical connections happen. And the traffic, weirdly, as no one else is catering to your people as well as you can.

This is obviously easiest with Slack, Google Docs comments, pull request feedback, Hacker News comments, etc. In person feedback might require a poker face and later reflection.

I find, most of the time, that feedback feels a lot less reasonable (and more personal) the first time I see it, but that it feels more reasonable and actionable when I come back to it with a bit of distance. And then there's something to accepting part of their feedback, holding back on some less significant part, for a sort of win/win where you don't have to feel like you gave in on everything.

Easy to say, much harder to do though!

The only problem is, once you embrace limitations, you realize your phone is also limited and the incentive to cary the camera drops. That is, until you open your phone and camera photos side by side on a big screen, for all the HDR you lose, the camera inevitably takes a photo with much more feeling, something that feels like it'll last.

patio11, on the other hand, "would be happy living on a small pension and investment income. You want to avoid the social security trap, so you don't want to be employed after retirement. You want to stay in touch with the world, so you don't want to be isolated from society. You would probably like to spend time on hobbies. You could be happy in a semi-rural setting. You want to be able to afford to travel, and be able to live in a large city if that's where you want to be."

One specifically designed for phones with a very limited feature set, though? That could be very handy.

Fadell’s writing the press release before building the Nest and Raskin writing The Book of Macintosh to kick off the original Mac, though, both are directly documented so we can be certain there.

At any rate, appreciate the push back—definitely want to have the story straight! Will dig a bit more on VisiCalc and see if I can find more confirmation.