Washing dishes, strangely, hits that for me. One of the reasons I've never found dishwashers to be worth it.

I find washing dishes by hand meditative too. I also don't find dishwashers too appealing.

We just got a dishwasher after forty years without and I’m not sure it was a good idea.

There are dozens of us!

I'm living in Thailand, the self-declared Land of Smiles, and ... it's not very smiley.

I visit Japan, which social media seems to say is a terrible place to work and make friends, and it strikes me as much more friendly and outgoing. Same when I'm in the States, where I find it far easier to strike up a random conversation and enjoy the nods on the sidewalk.

Somehow I think the core differences is wherever you spend the most time, the gilding wears off and there's a core discontent underneath everything everywhere if you stay long enough.

I'm building a writing app for perfectionists: Reproof (https://reproof.app/)

I've been a writer for over a decade and a half. I'll often rewrite intros and other sections a half-dozen times, or cut quotes and bits that don't quite fit, only later to wonder if an earlier take was better.

I built Reproof to solve this. Every paragraph is versioned, so you can rewrite paragraphs and switch between the takes to see which sounds better. There's a clipping pane on the bottom, to cut things and save them just in case you find a spot to include them later. And there are a bunch of writer-focused features: Write and copy text in either rich text or Markdown, open two documents side-by-side and find/replace between both, selective find/replace to edit only some of the results, command palette to search across everything, daily versioned backups, and more. And lots more to come.

Nearly every other writing app is a digital piece of paper with linear paragraphs. Reproof instead lets you explore the best way to write what you're trying to say.

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.

Plane flights.

I hope the ‘free internet all the time’ era that airlines have been threatening us with for a decade now never arrives.

Unfortunately it's nearly here thanks to Starlink

Ahhh this too. Love flights without WiFi.

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.

Or with some tweaks to the font code they could see a different URL…

This could be used for good (diverting bots away from where you don't want them) or evil (different destinations for user and other readers of the page could be used to trick people going to undesirable locations, because the apparent URL checks out find according to automated scanners).

Conventional web technologies already can handle this kind of use case, either by wrapping an image in a link tag, or using an alt= value.

I think qr code is more readable by bots than humans and I would prefer to see actual url...

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.