It is awash with phoniness, including that of coaches preying on desperate LinkedIn users searching for “LinkedIn” success.
And I’m tired of the delusions that in general proliferate on LinkedIn.
I am tired of people who are addicted to LinkedIn and are believers in the myth that posting on LinkedIn will somehow bring them something good. Only their own efforts will bring them good, and they need to make those efforts in places other than LinkedIn.
LinkedIn itself is a delusion, and the disturbing reality is that the delusion called LinkedIn has been bought into by a frightening number of people.
I guess they want to “believe” in something. LinkedIn is sort of a religion that gives them something to believe in without having to ask for evidence. If you need that, go for it. I prefer the evidence-based real world beyond my computer screen.
I encountered a conversation on LinkedIn yesterday where the original post was clearly written in ChatGPTese or a dialect thereof, and every single comment was responded to in the same ChatGPTese.
When I asked whether the original post and the responses to numerous apparently human-created comments were being written by a carbon-based entity or something else, I received a quick response, also in ChatGPTese. It didn’t at all read like there was a human behind it.
Authenticity is becoming rare, both on LinkedIn and on other social media platforms. The only input needed from a carbon-based participant is a prompt to a silicon-based assistant, then you just post the result.
Who could tell the difference? Well, just about anyone more intelligent than a starfish and who has not been blinded by the AI hype.
And now, a moment of silence in memory of our dear departed friend, Authenticity.
It was a lazy Sunday yesterday, and we decided to take a short trip to the Honmoku Fishing Pier, just a few minutes by bus from our place, walkable with a bit of effort, but I didn’t have that bit in me yesterday.
We weren’t going to fish. I haven’t been fishing since I was about 16, and all of my fishing trips were on fishing boats in the Long Island Sound or off the South shore of Long Island with my dad. I have never fished from a pier.
The fishing pier was packed, including couples out on a fishing date, so to speak, and parents with children. We spent about two hours watching people catch fish of various sizes, mostly disappointingly small and probably requiring their release.
While we were relaxing watching other people fish, we got to see a number of largish cargo ships pass to the East from Yokohama. None were close enough to be identified, but technology came to the rescue, in the form of the Vessel Finder website.
This website provides a map with all ships with the required equipment turned on. Ships involved in arms shipments to and fuel shipments from a certain aggressor state apparently switch off that equipment. But I digress.
One of the ships was the Oberon, a vehicle carrier headed to Kobe (as indicated by the Vessel Finder website).
The availability of this information on ships reminds me of the time some years ago when I was left with not much to do on an interpreting assignment in Evansville, Indiana. The witness in a patent case I was supposed to be interpreting for was never called, and I spent a week there with not much to do (during the daytime, anyway) but look out my hotel window at the barges moving slowly up and down the Ohio River, on which the hotel was situated.
I was fully paid for all days, and, while I was cooling my heels in my hotel room waiting for the call that never came, I discovered a service similar to Vessel Finder that indicated the departure times, destinations and arrival times of barges carrying exciting things like coal up and down the Ohio River. Such is the exciting life of a litigation interpreter. But I digress.
