Coming to you LIVE from a third straight week of Japanese business hotels comes me, Justin, in his enduring quest to figure out how to exchange currency for real estate in the land of the rising fun.

[Programming note: apologies, as the audio quality at the beginning of the podcast suffered because I fucked up and left the hotel room's air conditioner on (I caught it and fixed it from the pun section onward)]

Had a few great e-mails to read through this week, but now I'm fresh out again! Before you listen, why not write in a review of this episode? podcast@searls.co and tell me about how amazing it will be before it lets you down like your best friend and/or workplace mentor and/or parent figure.

Href time:

• Craigmod's Kissa by Kissa book


• @koic works on RuboCop and inspired this issue of my Searls of Wisdom newsletter


• In Japan, you're not a BDFL, you're a 優しい終身の独裁者


• Speaking of newsletters, this month's took me way too damn long


• All the prefectures I've been to so far (36 as of v37)


• The US Embassy in Japan's 10" x 10" bag limit


• Aaron's puns, ranked


• CRISPR babies! (Archive)


• GTA 6's trailer


• SteamOS is one step closer to being real


• Fortnite is back on iOS


• CarPlay Ultra is nice, but will it scale?


• visionOS 3 will let us scroll with our eyeballs


• Apple is considering an AI-based search tool for iOS


• Rumor: iOS 19 will let developers invoke its on-board local models


• Sam + Jony, sitting in a tree / pile of cash


• ChatGPT Diminishes Idea Diversity in Brainstorming, Study Finds


• Microsoft Engineers forced to dig their own AI graves


• muscle-mem solves a huge issue with "agentic" programs


• Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational


• Chicago Sun-Times Prints Summer Reading List Full of Fake Books


• mid college towns are screwed (News+)


• The Quiet Collapse of Surveys: Fewer Humans (and More AI Agents) Are Answering Survey Questions


• The Nomad Universal Cable


• Junglia Okinawa opens in July and this ad is absolutely bonkers


• Saw the Yakult Swallows with Tatsuhiko Miyagawa from Rebuild.fm


• Loved World Order's new single until the guy got milkshake duck'd 5 minutes later


• This Workforce AI promo video is peak smug AI hustler shit


• The Bechdel Test (not to be confused with the Becky Test)