Author: William Lise

I am a long-term (50-plus years) resident of Japan, and former electrical engineer, and I have been translating and interpreting for over four decades here in Japan.

Content from carbon-based entities is losing out.

At an accelerating pace, AI-generated “content” is winning out over things written and created by humans. It accounts for a large amount of the content on many social media platforms, and a very large majority in places like the Reels section of the Facebook surveillance and manipulation platform. This even extends to LinkedIn, a platform that its owner, Microsoft, continues to purport is a business networking platform.

More troubling is the increasingly common sight of users engaging with AI slop as if it were real. I’m not referring to those sock puppet bots that make short comments or post reactions to such AI slop to fake up engagement, but rather accounts that look like actual human users.

Well, it doesn’t take much intelligence to purchase a smartphone, make a Facebook account, and retreat into a pseudo-life that avoids the real world.

People who prefer real life might consider escaping from the AI-centric confines of social media and venturing into—returning to, for many people—real life.

Some people might posit that a real life can coexist with an online life on social media. I would counter that people who spend hours making countless posts on social media and who go places and do things so that they can post those places and things on social media are missing out on a lot of what might be going on beyond the computer or smart phone screen.

Caller Non-ID

Because they can be spoofed, caller IDs are no longer meaningful.

We get some funny phone calls, none of which we actually pick up, but judging from the caller IDs and the voice mail, meaningful caller IDs are quickly becoming a thing of the past. 

“No ID” used to be the standard for thugs calling from places like Myanmar, but recently there have been incoming calls that are “openly Myanmar.” 

But then there are also countless calls purportedly from Docomo and other Japanese entities, but made from the US, Vietnam, and Pakistan.

But a phone call the other day from the Vatican put all those to shame. I should have pick it up, because I’m sure the pope had some very important things to discuss with me, probably involving crypto.

The outrageous Microsoft behavior continues.

Although it has come to be intermittent and unpredictable, Microsoft continues to prevent me from making comments on posts on LinkedIn, its social media platform masquerading as a professional networking platform.

They hint strongly that this is because of my verification status. This includes posts by people I’m connected with.

I, of course, am not verified and not going to “verify.”

What does Microsoft expect to gain from such behavior? Does it expect its user victims to submit to its suggestion to be “verified?”

The last time I looked at the verification process, it required the scanning of an IC-embedded government-issued document. Who in their right mind would submit to an entity like Microsoft scraping their government ID?

I think the answer to that is clearly that it is people who suffer from FONBOL, fear of not being on LinkedIn, some of whom surely believe that LinkedIn is where it all happens.

A case can be made that LinkedIn is a place where lots of phony things happen, and lots of delusional things happen. More and more, however, since so many things appear to be done online, there’s nothing special about being on LinkedIn or most anywhere else online. Getting a life in the real world outside of the Internet is the best approach, but getting a life anywhere doesn’t appear to be an option for a growing number of people. Freelance translators firmly ensconsed in the precariat are good examples.

On the contrary, there is an ever-increasing value to being out in the real world. This is particularly the case of freelancers who are in a captive labor pool that can’t break away from the service brokers they depend on for income.

That is a tough pill to swallow for people who have grown up staring at their computer or smartphone screens thinking that today’s the day it’s going to happen. That’s a highly optimistic dream from which people need to awaken as soon as possible if they are looking to survive.

Free email comes with a cost, and it’s more than data scraping.

There are numerous videos going around that warn of the not-surprising reality that Google is, as a default, scanning all your gmail content to train AI. The videos tell you how to turn that default setting off.

That’s fine, but a better solution that provides advantages other than just freedom from data scraping is not to use Gmail at all.

I have a Gmail account, but I never use it for email exchanges. I only send email using addresses associated with my own domain and use gmail just for subscriptions to newsletters and the like.

While it appears that billions of people use Gmail, it is not professional looking and shows that you didn’t care enough to pay just a little bit of money to get a real email address. This is particularly significant for people using email for business.

Gmail screams cheap and not seriously committed. People need to discard the ideas that everything that is useful must be free.