Rebecca Blood 🇺🇦

A photo of the book “Real Japanese Cooking” by Makiko Itoh

Ye olde bloggers will be thrilled to see this, Maki’s years-in-the-making Big Book, released today and now in my hands. @makiwi.bsky.social was one of the first food bloggers, and I still refer to her online recipes all the time. Go buy it!

Me, too!

This tracks.

📌

It is extremely frustrating to talk about something like a wealth cap tied to 100x the minimum wage over a lifetime career, and people’s kneejerk reaction is “but what if that affects me?” and I can promise you that you aren’t making $180million (to use California as an example)

The Case of the Terrifyingly Affordable Flashlight In this video, Maurice Moves highlights a pair of flashlights that are extremely useful & well-designed but also shockingly affordable. Most people never think about flashlights, but as someone who uses one daily for

The Case of the Terrifyingly Affordable Flashlight. “The tech, value, and products are proof that modern flashlights are absolutely insane and defy logic and manufacturing economics.” [kottke.org]

Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t.

people are bad at naming things, episode XX

this is a tax on people *making* over $1M a year, not people with over $1M of wealth. it does not impact a dentist making $200k a year who has saved up $1M over a lifetime of work.

messaging really matters for what people imagine they might be subject to

You're going to induce pyschosis, stop while you still have a grasp on reality.

Good God.

Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.

A barefoot, dark-skinned child bride.

Legend says they’re still looking for the ball... 😅🤣 #dog #dogday #bluesky

(I've been reading fiction this summer, and I'm honestly surprised at the mediocre writing in some highly recommended/reviewed books!)

I can see something like writing becoming more and more like tepid dishwater. Most people don't enjoy writing, and lots of people don't really discern the difference between good writing and bad.

I have heard it said that AI won't take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will.

I still worry that in a field like programming--complicated and binary (works or it doesn't)--turning to AI means losing people with the skills to fix bugs.

George Bernard Shaw wrote an article this week in 1914 urging both sides to shoot their officers and go home.

An arms race to spam the model trainers.

I wonder if or when this could happen at the nation state level.

(Arguably the major players already have more power and ability to act than nation states do, without invoking national security requirements to act)

A modest proposal: “Earned Citizenship,” like birthright citizenship but automatic for immigrants who live in the US for a certain number of years and have no serious legal issues.

Smart glasses malware designed to upload malicious video to the provider, racks upon racks of glasses in rooms in China sending hallucinations into the cloud.

So you’re telling me the Wizard of Oz presented itself as a towering force of overwhelming technology, only to be unmasked as just some guy, off-screen?

So apparently, it may turn out that The Wizard of Oz at the Las Vegas Sphere wasn’t entirely made in AI and Google threw the VFX crew under the bus by claiming it was all done by artificial intelligence.

If true, then fucking yikes.

Not Cush Gumbo. C'mon.

I honestly think about this a lot. How profit motives have ruined all the great Web (and other!) services over time. Phone trees. etc.

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

Cory Doctorow is coming out with a book on enshittification in the fall: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. [bookshop.org]

Curate your own newspaper with RSS Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Here’s how to use RSS.
www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

Harry Weatherill, a tailor who draws portraits on cloth using tailors chalk (1955)

Also and while I’m at it — if you don’t say tariffs are taxes on US importers and consumers when citing the revenue the government celebrates that hey’ve brought in, you’re not credible.

To be fair, this is all imaginary money. That foreign aid provided food, medicine, and concrete services.