What has cyberspace turned into?

On “normal” social media platforms:

  • AI-generated videos of UK royalty dancing with their royal children.
  • Crotch shots of AI-generated female athletes with definition in the crotch area that would get them disqualified from whatever AI-generated event they were going to compete in.
  • AI-generated dogs saving the lives of AI-generated babies.
  • AI-generated aircraft crashing onto the decks of AI-generated aircraft carriers.
  • AI-generated cars crashing into AI-generated trailer trucks.
  • AI-generated animals having AI-generated foreign objects removed from their skin by AI-generated veterinarians, this becoming common recently, along with many more, even more-revolting fake videos involving animals.
  • A constant stream of AI text slop from places like India, Macedonia, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Vietnam, often accompanied by unlawfully published photos, the poster neither giving credit for the images nor citing sources, and the slopper certainly not having permission to use the images.
  • A constant stream of ads—mostly confirmable as coming from Vietnam—for WiFi connection equipment and services in Japan, clearly aimed at Asian laborers who have been brokered into Japan to work.
  • Loan-shark ads aimed at foreign laborers working in Japan.
  • AI-generated voices of well-known people on a video of two seconds of the person to establish “authenticity” and continuing for several minutes with the faked voice but without any image, because the lip movement would give it away instantly. There are countless fake Neil deGrasse Tyson videos like this. The voice is very close, but the cadence of the fake narration clearly is not his. He has recently called this out in a video of his own, pointing out the damage this does to trust. This theft of images and spoofing of voices is criminal, but will go unpunished, thanks to the guaranteed anonymity of social media and apathy of users, many of whom have been numbed to this behavior by a torrent of unlawful posts.
  • Inspirational stories that never happened, mostly from places like Macedonia.
  • Ads claiming to sell you the method of getting rich quickly using ChatGPT. One recent testimonial boasts of being able to buy a luxury car and a home after just two months of stock market investment using ChatGPT.
  • Ads for underground banks aimed at Asian laborers in Japan who want to repatriate money they earn in Japan.

On some platforms, video slop you didn’t ask for and don’t need will autoplay after you watch something that you have actually elected to watch, requiring you to escape to avoid seeing it.

From the LinkedIn social media platform in particular—and it is as social media platform:

  • Vapid AI slop posts with both text and graphics generated AI, the subject matter of which most often being totally unrelated to what the poster purports to do when they are not generating AI slop.
  • AI-smelling text posts that evoke many comments, with each comment being replied to by AI, the replies being within a word or two of each other in length.
  • Microsoft-suggested posts promoting AI or promoting AI promoters.
  • Ads promoting AI.
  • Posts from soon-to-be-out-of-work translators claiming that AI will not replace human translators because AI doesn’t understand culture.
  • Unwanted irrelevant connection requests, mostly from the Global South (although I have fixed that problem).
  • Ads for paid webinars run or promoted by translation organizations to teach translators how to succeed and be better at jobs, although those jobs are quickly disappearing.
  • Translators’ organizations announcing activities of little or no relevance to translators working in the high-demand mainstream domains that are rapidly shrinking because of AI-using agencies.
  • Constant non-productive and futile complaints from freelance translators about this or that agency, this preaching to the choir constituting a waste of attention and time that could be better spent thinking about what to do next (hint: for most, it’s not freelance translation or probably translation at all).
  • Investment scam ads (including investment in mango plantations).
  • Ads for homes in Dubai for USD 1 million.

There you have it. Who could ask for anything more? More importantly, who asked for any of this?

Coming to terms with the true nature of Microsoft’s LinkedIn business model

[Update: I trashed by LinkedIn account on October 28, 2025, after the post was uploaded]

Although I am still posting on LinkedIn, it is clear that the platform is not very useful, particularly because of Microsoft’s recent shadow-banning of posts that are not aligned with its business model of promoting AI, rewarding cheerleaders, and punishing people who have the temerity to be brutally honest.

I have recently deleted 130-plus recent pending connection requests. These were mostly from people I don’t know and don’t want to or need to know. Many are in the Global South, and probably a good number of these people mistakenly think that I outsource translation work to freelancers. I do not.

Anyway, here are just a few of the salient and mostly annoying characteristics of Microsoft’s LinkedIn that I have observed:

  • LinkedIn promotes AI and promoters of AI.
  • LinkedIn has lately been flooded with slop posts written by AI.
  • The Microsoft LinkedIn algorithm does not work in the interest of its users, but rather (of course, and understandably) to maximize engagement, which turns into income for Microsoft.
  • LinkedIn fills my feed with many posts from people with no noticeable substance, and who breathtaking overestimate the credulity of people who might see their posts.
  • LinkedIn fills my feed with posts about Japan from people who seem to know nothing about Japan, many of these people being in places and in situations from which they will never be able to come to Japan.
  • LinkedIn has many accounts of translators who are in serious denial and delusion, thinking that they won’t be replaced by AI. They are wrong and cannot be reasoned with, this being the reason for my deleting large amounts of writings for translators, as noted elsewhere.
  • LinkedIn throws much more annoying things at me, including ads and suggested posts from LinkedIn coaches working the aisles of desperate LinkedIn users struggling to survive and, even more abhorrently, posts from translators engaged in the business of selling coaching to other translators, thereby furthering the misconception that freelance translation is going to survive. It’s not.
  • LinkedIn rewards phony narcissistic fluff with visibility, but punishes straight-talk posts by shadow-banning them.

There you have it. It is not a pretty picture, and it shows that, on LinkedIn, there’s much less than meets the eye.

Japanese Government-mandated Orthography Chaos

Japan was considerably later than numerous other civilizations in acquiring a written language. When it did, it was basically by adopting Chinese characters to the task of writing Japanese. Those characters are still used, and promoters of schemes to replace them totally with phonetic writing have universally failed. They’re here to stay.

Before the early 20th century, the use of kanji logograms (not ideograms, a long-standing misconception I will write about shortly) in Japan was without much government interference or guidance. It was a lawless land of kanji logograms.

Then came the kanjicrats, with numerous well-meaning attempts to regulate or guide use of kanji, most of which did not reflect—and was ineffective in controlling—the way kanji were used in real life. Some of the highlights of the kanji evolution in Japan are as follows.

1923Joyo Kanji Table May 9
1962 characters, 154 abbreviated characters
1931147 characters removed from and 45 characters added to the Joyo Kanji Table, making it 1858 characters.
November 16, 1946Toyo Kanji Table established by cabinet order (Cabinet Notification/Order)
(1) 1850 characters for use in statutes, public documents, newspapers, and general society)
(2) Proper nouns such as personal names and place names are exceptions, considered separately because of legal and other reasons.
February 16 1948Toyo Kanji onyomi and kunyomi Tables and Toyo Kanji Separate Table established (Cabinet Notification/Order)
(1) Generated to indicate the onyomi and kunyomi to be used going forward for each of the characters in the Toyo Kanji table.
(2) 881 characters (so-called educational characters) of the Toyo Kanji table listed as necessary in education during compulsory education to enable reading and writing.
April 28, 1949Toyo Kanji Character Form Table (Cabinet Notification/Order)
(1) Created to show the standard form of kanji in the Toyo Kanji table
(2) To facilitate and make accurate the reading and writing of characters in the table, organization of simplified characters and unification as much as possible in accordance with printed character forms.
May 25, 1961Personal Name Character Table (Cabinet Notification/Order)
92 Kanji characters indicated for use in proper nouns.
July 30, 1976Added Personal Name Character Table (Cabinet Notification/Order)
28 Characters added for use in personal names.
October 1, 1981Joyo Kanji Table (Cabinet Notification/Order)
(1) 95 Characters added to the Toyo Kanji table for use in statutes, public documents, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting, and daily life in writing Japanese, making the character count 1945
(2) Place names and personal names are treated as exceptions.
(3) The Joyo Kanji list of characters should be used as a reference in selecting names for children.
December 8, 2000(Response from the National Language Council)
Non-listed character list of characters for printing established (1022 characters) as standard printing character forms. JIS standard JIS X 0213 modified accordingly.
Subsequent Addition of Characters for Personal Names
198154 characters added.
February 2004Several characters added, making the total number of characters for personal names became 290.
September 27, 2004-9-27488 characters added + 205 characters added (*) Of the 205 characters, 195 are old forms of Joyo Kanji, 10 are the old forms of characters for personal names.
This makes the current number of personal name kanji is 290 + 488 + 205, for a total of 983.
As of 2010, the list of Joyo Kanji includes 2136 characters.

All of that said, while the print and broadcast media (particularly NHK) are careful not to use unlisted characters, there are numerous instances of Japanese writers ignoring the above guidelines. Even Japanese patent specifications—arguably public documents—provide numerous examples of characters not included in the current Joyo Kanji list of 2136 characters. And, of course, most literate Japanese, which includes a higher portion of the population than in cultures with ostensibly “easier” languages, are able to read and use many characters beyond the official lists.

Another aspect of kanji that I have noticed is that, while many anglophones comment that kanji are so difficult that young students are unduly burdened, I have almost never heard such comments from native Japanese speakers, outside of educators. Kanji are just accepted by the general public, like the air around us, with no complaints heard or reforms demanded, except perhaps from lingering kanjicrats in government agencies.