To Don’t Lists

Although I have often been fond of making “to do” lists with items I check off as I do them, I have recently come to see the value in making “to don’t” lists.

You simply make a list of things, including things that you should do, but that you know in your heart you will not do. Then you proceed not to do them. You can check them off as you don’t do them, but that is optional.

It is best to keep a record of your to undone to don’t items, because you will need to include these in your next to don’t list, thereby avoiding accidentally doing some of them. Consistency is a virtue.

This is an elegant solution to a longstanding problem. You enjoy a sense of achievement without having to expend any effort or spend any time.

Publishing of Intellectual Property without Permission: It’s unlawful in most places.

Publicly sharing a stolen image in a social media post that consists almost entirely of the stolen image is unlawful in most legal jurisdictions.

Adding credit to or citing the originator doesn’t make it lawful without first getting permission to publish, and many such “credits” just name (often by a meaningless pseudonym or platform name) the immediately previous thief who unlawfully published the image elsewhere.

All of this is a win for platform owners like Mark Zuckerberg and a loss for the universe of people still purporting to know right from wrong. Zuckerberg is guilty of countless violations of ethical common sense and doesn’t live in that universe. And his sucking up to and funding Mango Mussolini is another indication of a problem that needs fixing and is a reason I left his platform recently.

The Approaching Authentipause

The heliopause is the point in space, outside of our solar system, beyond which the solar wind from our heliosphere can no longer counteract the incoming flow of interstellar wind.

We can imagine an “authentipause”—somewhat similar to the concept of the heliopause—which is the point beyond which the flow of reality and facts flowing outward from our real world of carbon-based sentient beings—I will call it the “authentisphere”—can no longer successfully counteract the force of fake things flowing in from the outer sphere (the illusionosphere or fake-osphere), which is populated by AI and AI-generated illusions, essentially a world of fake nonsense generated by computer code running in silicon-based entities, but still, as of this writing, under the nominal control of their carbon-based owners. That might change sometime.

The authentipause is clearly moving inward at an accelerating pace, effectively shrinking the authentisphere we have become used to inhabiting and enveloping us in an environment in which fake overtakes real. That is already becoming the case in numerous online venues, and social media, a great promoter of fake AI-generated nonsense, is helping that happen.

The authentisphere. Enjoy while you can. Not too far in the future, we may look back on it fondly in the rear-view mirror.

Mixed Kanji/Katakana Feelings

At one time many years ago, because my surname was sometimes misheard by Japanese speakers on the phone, I made a habit of orally glossing my name with “利益のリに是非のゼ. It apparently usually worked, perhaps because most people realized I was not a Japanese native and was giving them the pronunciation as rendered in katakana. It backfired one day, however, perhaps in a way that might give me confidence in my Japanese speaking ability.

After phoning someone and being told that a person I needed to speak with would be returning to the office in a while and would return my call, I left a message, giving my name in the above manner.

About two hours later, I received a phone call from someone asking for Toshikore-san. The person on the other end of the call could not see me figuratively slapping my forehead in recognition of what caused the problem of him thinking he was phoned by this person Toshikore. What had happened was that the person taking my message wrote down not the phonetics associated with two kanji characters, but rather the kanji characters themselves, thereby rendering what could look like—at least to an older reader—the name Toshikore (利是). It was sort of like a dog owner pointing to a stick they had thrown to have their dog fetch it and having the dog instead fetch the owner’s hand. But it was nonetheless my fault; I was pointing to the wrong stick.

I bade farewell to that flawed phonetic device and switched to explaining explicitly that my name was written with two katakana glyphs.