Month: April 2025

The enshittification of the Internet and the successful gaming of Google are progressing smoothly.

I have noticed that on my Google Alert settings for “Japanese-to-English translation,” the hits returned recently have been heavily peppered with links to porn sites. In the list of hits, the titles of the hits look like they are related to Japanese-to-English translation, but that could be faked or, I think, even dynamically generated.

The sites have nothing to do with translation, and many of them ask if I am a minor before proceeding. I am not a minor, but I’ve never “proceeded,” so I am not able to give you a blow-by-blow, so to speak, description of the sites.

It looks like the perps have been able to successfully game the Google search engine. This lowers the value of Google for searching, and there are other reasons why Google value should be considered deprecated, but that’s not the topic of this post.

The Internet continues its move away from what was imagined for it years ago, moving closer and closer to just the real world, with cyberspace imitating life as we know it outside of our computer or mobile display screens.

Would you like some AI help writing that note? No, I’m good.

There is a great deal of discussion these days about silicon-based AI helping carbon-based individuals write. I do not use any of the many available online writing assistants.

While I wasn’t looking, however, Apple installed just such an AI feature right on my iPhone. Now, when I write a note off-line, I am presented with the option of having it rewritten, including selecting one of a few styles, and even giving the writing tool my own instructions on how to rewrite what I have written.

As a test, for one note, although it was not a plea for assistance, I told it to “make this sound like a plea for assistance.” It worked, but the result was written in a style that is not mine and with expressions that I never use.

The availability of such functions on a device that almost everybody already owns raises the specter of a world in which many people are able to write things that, well, they not able to write, and in a way they are not able to write them (or write anything, perhaps), and this could suggest a persona that they cannot rightly claim as theirs. Essentially, it is AI-assisted persona authenticity spoofing.

This does not bode well for either people whose livelihoods depend upon writing or people who must judge others or make decisions based on what others write. Let the reader beware, and let the writer be real.

Dumbing Down of Manual Skills or Just a Lack of Resourcefulness?

The other night about ten translators in various stages of their careers—all of whom, however, are long-term residents here in Japan—got together for eating, drinking, and jaw-wagging at a yakitoriya. As often happens, at what would have been the end of our evening, there was a call to go to yet a second place, and five of us traipsed off to one, a place that could be characterized as an izakaya food court, consisting of eight different drinkeries housed in one large space, with very little demarcation between them. The average age of the clientele at all of them appeared to be no more than one-half—and probably closer to one-third—of our group. We stayed for perhaps less than an hour, and one thing that struck me, but only after I got home, was the chopstick envelopes.

It was of common design used by—and bearing the logos of—all eight places, but that was not the thing that stood out. Rather, it was the need that someone evidently felt to print on the envelope how to fold it into a chopstick rest. Were these instructions necessary?

I have been folding chopstick envelopes into rests for more than a half-century, and started doing that after I saw someone at a neighboring table do around 1967. I thought it was a minor skill and idea that sort of came with the territory when you are in Japan.

One side (at the bottom in the above image) of the envelopes we had, which are probably better described as sheaths, had instructions, adopting the terms yamaori and taniori that are used in origami paper folding, with circled numbers, no less, to indicate the sequence of making the folds. A bit of overkill, I think, but perhaps young’uns here are less in tune with folding things into useful, repurposed shapes.

To be fair, I vaguely recall seeing chopstick envelopes with such instructions in the past, but perhaps you need to go to rather low-end places to see them, as the higher-market places sometimes give you chopstick rests.

To give you some background on why I even took the envelope home, it was not to write this post, but rather because I collect chopstick envelopes. I also collect slide rules (no laughter, please), but I digress.

Bonus trivia: The text above the name Omnibus says “No spilling of sake or tears, and no kvetching about people.” The idiom for complaining about something also uses the verb to spill in Japanese, but that doesn’t work well in English.