Don’t expect any change.

It is seriously mistaken to think that even having to pay billions of dollars in fines because of harming children is going to substantially change Meta’s business model of surveillance, manipulation, and promotion of addiction.

What will happen is that it will look like Meta will do something, but they will do nothing effective to protect children—it’s difficult, workarounds are already available, Meta will resist and lie about it, and doing anything effective would trash their business model, and you can be assured that is not going to happen.

And since this legal action was with regard to what Meta does to children, it will act as an effective distraction from Meta’s harmful effects on billions of adults.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I don’t think there’s much chance of it effecting any real changed.

Diddlysquat

Some words mean nothing, others can mean anything, and some can mean either.

Comments I saw somewhere recently about double negatives—it was evidently aimed at people who don’t know nothing—made me think of some convenient words that can mean and replace both anything and nothing.

Some people might not know diddlysquat about such words, in which case they would also know diddlysquat about such words.

The function of diddlysquat can, of course, be performed by things such as jackshit (or just shit, without the jacking) and bubkis, both of which also being able to replace both anything and nothing, depending upon whether the sense of the expression is negative or positive, respectively.

Care is required in the extended application of such expressions, as knowing your ass from a hole in the ground is not the same as not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground.

And now back to our regular programming.

No holds barred, no assholes tolerated.

Here are some people who should be hit over the head 17 times with a heavy metal instrument and then locked in a porta potty and dropped into a polluted river.

  • Those trendy motherfuckers who post multicolor, absolutely text-packed AI-generated infographics several times each week. These typically have five to eight boxes with extremely tiny difficult-to-read text. Oh, and many of these infographics promote absolute nonsense.
  • The brain-dead turds who think it’s artistic to create webpages with gray font. They get extra credit (and extra strikes over the head) if each line of their text has more than 90 characters.

And last, but certainly not least:

  • The misguided assholes who think they’re being kind to visitors to their website by sniffing the language setting or IP address of a visitor and forcing the website into a language that might not be the one the visitor wants to read. They deserve extra hits over the head if they also don’t allow the visitor to change the language after it has been kindly changed for them, and special punishment is also needed for people who pretend that they’re giving their visitors a choice of language, but force them to make that choice on every single page they access, with each page causing a language setting or IP address sniff to cancel out the setting that was just made by the visitor on a previous page.

Technology and Human Skills

Does the advance of technology dull our human skills?

I’ve been keeping notebooks—these are mostly work-related journals—for almost a half century. For most of that time I printed my entries, but about a year ago, for no particular reason, I reverted to cursive writing.

After doing that, and having heard that they’ve stopped teaching cursive writing in some schools, I started wondering how many young people can read cursive.

Some studies show that as many as 60 to 70% of children and young adults—I’m not sure of the age group definitions—cannot read cursive writing.

If they’re no longer teaching cursive, that number will probably go up, and the ability of AI to decipher cursive writing is going to move the needle further in that direction.

Should this be something to be concerned about? Perhaps not, but the concern might be more warranted with regard to AI translation in terms of loss of human ability to translate without technology.

There is much talk these days about AI usage reducing our ability to do things we formerly could do without using such technology. Most of the discussions seem to focus on things like loss of reasoning ability and critical thinking, not specific skills such as translation.

That said, I am reminded of a translator on a long-defunct mailing list I was on years ago, way before the AI transformation, who defended his use of CAT tools because he “couldn’t be bothered to look up lots of kanji.”

He honestly said this on a mailing list populated by Japanese-to-English translators, for whom being able to read Japanese is (or at least still was at the time) part of the job.

Much more recently, I have encountered translators who say that using CAT tools is a given, and that they can’t imagine translating without them. That attitude is probably influenced by the knowledge that many freelancers need to agree to use CAT tools even to receive work, let alone do it, but it speaks also to the issue of human skills.

What would they do, I wonder, if they were sat down somewhere and told to translate without CAT?

Enter AI translation, and some translators who might be using AI to translate—I think it actually might be more than just a few—might someday (perhaps that someday was last month) find it difficult to translate without having AI to use.

Having never been forced to use and having never used CAT tools and not being a user of AI for translation—I use AI sometimes for other things—my take on this situation might be somewhat different from that of translators who have gone with the flow of technology in its various evolutionary stages, as it moved the translation workflow from one in which a translator looks at a Japanese source text and keyboards an English translation to one in which there is extensive and sometimes opaque involvement of technology in the translation process.

Could it be that the ability of “stand-alone” humans to translate is fading away? Does it matter?

My guess is that it doesn’t much matter to, and is welcomed by, translation resellers on tier one of the two-tier translation purchasing/reselling business that control the flow of the overwhelming portion of translation work.

But the obviating of human skills in the formerly most valuable (and most highly compensated) translation process step is not and should not be welcomed by translators, at least the ones who are able to resist the repackaging of AI repair work as a “high-value” task that will provide them a survival path.

Post-editing might arguably be a high-value task—it certainly is, because it enables the agency MTPE business model—but it is and will continue to be a low-paid task. That situation is assured by a continuing ample supply of former translators to do post-editing. It’s a nasty situation, and solutions are rare.

If you ask AI about this (I have), you will, not surprisingly, be told that translators need to switch to more high-value work. Don’t bother asking the AI what that might be that involves translation, because it knows what side of its algorithm is buttered with the hopes of the wonderful world of an AI-mediated life that awaits us.

Don’t Ever Misgender a Dragon or Its Rainbow

I have a constellation of diverse and only tenuously linked hobbies and interests that often take me down rabbit holes that are, for good reasons, seldom explored. One of my interests is the Imperial Japanese Navy, and particularly its ships.

One of the ships built for Japan by Yarrow in Scotland (at the time, I believe) just before the Russo-Japanese War was named Niji. People who know Japanese will correctly take this to mean rainbow, but there is a twist. It is not written with the commonly seen character used for rainbow, 虹), but rather with the character 霓, which cannot be read easily or at all by most people walking around these days.

You might wonder what the difference is, and I discovered down a rabbit hole that in China there was a distinction, not between rainbows, but between their imagined pre-carnations. The 霓 character represents a rainbow that is an incarnation (vaporization?) of a female dragon, and the more-common 虹 is the rainbow that represents a male dragon. Who knew? Certainly not me.

I won’t delve into the issue of a rainbow being either male or female, other than to state my minor disappointment at seeing the rainbow, an image I like, being hijacked as an emblem of the LGBTQ people. But I digress.