Good morning soothsayers and oracles, welcome to Day 105 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
Being real it feels weird to be saying “one hundred and” each time I start off a new review past day 100, I did not think I was going to be keeping up all this time. I guess it goes to show even when the schedule slips and I miss a day or two (or three), the passion & care for my craft still persists.
That said, there is actually a job search update. You know, that thing I said I would be doing a segment on during each review before it fell to the wayside and I found myself a role so itself became a redundant segment in an article series incited by redundancy?
There are just moments where a silly thought comes into my head, and writing it out makes it sound even sillier but I absolutely love how it came out. The above is one of them.
Anyway, back on track. Ended up applying for a manager position at the local CeX, which for the uninformed is a UK chain of technology exchange shops and it is pronounced exactly how you want to say it. For those of you who doubt the pronunciation or want to avoid saying it, the wi-fi networks in a shop are:
Protected CEX
Unprotected CEX
I do not think any picture could be clearer than that on how the company wants the name to be pronounced.
It is very unlikely I will get the position, considering whilst I have a wide raft of management skills along with generally transferable soft skills, I am an outsider applying to a retail environment, something which I genuinely have no experience in.
In a way I feel it is a rite of passage I have missed almost, in that I never did any sort of retail role before landing in my current field, and my return to the tech industry came before I would have been eligible for temporary Christmas roles around town, so, if this somehow goes somewhere it would be my first shot at retail.
But again, there are plenty more higher qualified candidates than I, so I doubt it will go many places.
On the plus side today, my mentor figure got back in touch with me today to both give a compliment on this blog and to reassure me we were still on good terms, hence the title of today’s edition.
That said… I am extremely exhausted for some reason, so I will do a short review for what I will now likely be calling “VTuber Tuesdays” for the foreseeable future because even though it will be predominantly Hololive, there will be days where the topic is just something VTuber related.
Today it is the fact I had the Vedal plushie arrive and the packaging it came in absolutely made me laugh.
Free him. Please.
In all honesty, this is such a high quality plushie. The shape is absolutely perfect to what I would want a Vedal plush to be, in that I can hold him like a burger and it feels right to do so.
But not only that:
He balances perfectly on the Neuro-sama plush I have.
It could not be more beautiful if I tried.
Anyway, that is me, I need to sleep. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to get some good sleep yourself, no matter the time of day.
Good morning programmers and developers, welcome to Day 79 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
It has been a while since I have talked about my feelings on Generative AI, and considering the last couple days have been dominated by my own personal stress, I have a feeling that getting some ranting out of my system will do me some good.
To reiterate, I am anti-Generative AI in a lot of different ways. I take a dim view of chatbots, an even dimmer view of using them for creative writing, and an extremely dim view of using AI for image generation.
But there is something I have always found fascinating when it comes to Generative AI discussions, and that is the topic of AI integration with everyday life being “inevitable” to some degree. From the soulless automaton Zuckerberg saying that anyone who does not wear AI-enabled glasses will be at a “cognitive disadvantage” to the universally unlovable Musk saying AI “superintelligence” is going to be here in 2030.
And whenever I see comments like that, or hear anecdotally from people saying AI is here to stay so you may as well embrace it, I always think of one thing specifically relating to my personal situation.
You want to preach inevitability to a fucking transgender woman?
I want to highlight Zuckerberg’s comment in particular, as it continues to stand out in my mind as a particularly out-of-touch remark. What the hell do you mean by “cognitive disadvantage” you worm? All the GenAI in the glasses is going to be able to do is look things up for you that you can do on your phone right now, or are you so disconnected from humanity you need the machine in your glasses to translate emotions for you?
This outlook does not even go in to the numerous studies coming out right now that are studying the effects of ChatGPT on cognitive function, or the utterly disturbing news around those who view AI chatbots as their friends and close confidants leading to heartbreaking suicides – all of these techbros are so devoid of ethics and so full of wanting to “change the world” that their contempt for the mass populace is showing even more than usual.
To bring… a semblance of balance to this rant, do I think mass uptake of GenAI in everyday life is inevitable? No.
But do I think it is here to stay regardless of how bad the bubble bursts? Unfortunately, yes.
As someone who works in the Extended Reality (XR) industry currently, a technology that had its own bubble period, I can see GenAI sticking around for the foreseeable future even after the massive funding bubble that sustains it bursts and the development of all these new models slows down immensely.
My hope is that it becomes like crypto and XR, where there is still enough of an ecosystem and demand for it that smaller companies can sustain themselves reasonably okay, but all of these giants like OpenAI, xAI, and most all of Meta collapse in on themselves…
…okay that last one is a little biased because I am asking for Meta as a whole to collapse rather than its AI division, but as someone who regrettably works very closely with Meta technologies on a daily basis there is a certain level of resentment I have for the company and Zuckerberg on a deeply personal level.
I use the term “Human-focused creative” for myself on LinkedIn as part of my banner, partially because I know advertising myself as a Luddite on that AI-infested website would attract all the wrong kinds of characters, and partially because that is my stake in this great war between people and machines.
It matters to me that humans create things.
It matters to me that I can read the stories and experiences of other humans.
I do not want to see machines telling stories, or machines trying to market products.
If you care about the quality of your overall image, hire a human. No amount of savings that AI can bring will outweigh the work a human can produce.
Does this put me at odds with like… 90% of the professional space who preach the gospel of using AI to streamline the job search in an effort to counter a broken market? Yes it does.
But I am going to stand by these principles, in this space AI does not stand for “artificial intelligence”; it stands for “artistic integrity” – yes I know that sounds cheesy as fuck, embrace being a little cringey, all the best art is!
Time for the review segment, and we are back to my favourite type of thing to review: food. That is right, we are back for:
Rosa Eats Her Way Around Shrewsbury!
And in this instance specifically, we are most definitely back as I am revisiting a place I talked about all the way back for Day 3 of the Redundancy Review, the lovely little sandwich shop known as Brambles.
Specifically on my lunch walk today I was very divided on what I wanted to eat, whether to indulge in something greasy to help absorb the emotions I have been experiencing over the last week, or go for something simple to save my money for a takeaway tomorrow. Eventually I decided on the latter, and wandered over to Brambles to get a nice & basic sandwich.
That is, until I noticed the specials board, and saw that for the hot special today they had Chicken, Chorizo, and Mozzarella available as either a toasted wrap or a panini.
So obviously I had to get myself set up with a panini because all three of those sandwich fillings are among my favourite ingredients in the world, and for the price point of £4.80 it serves as a very economical lunch to boot.
Brambles’ panini press is also one that comes with ridges which I especially appreciate, as sometimes when it comes to getting paninis from other places they tend to just be the panini loaf pressed down flat which gives it a crunchy exterior with the texture feeling just a little flat.
Outside of that, there is not much to say about it, which I think is its strength. When you use a simple selection of ingredients, the resulting sandwich turns out as greater than the sum of its parts, and there are very few sandwich ingredients that cannot be improved by the addition of fresh mozzarella.
But that was not all I picked up this time, as a lovely baked creation on the shelf above all the sandwich ingredients caught my eye and, being a lover of the sweets adorned atop it, I just had to try it.
This, is a chocolate brownie/cake (I honestly can not tell which, it sort of dances the line between both) topped with a chocolate icing and Rolos. For those reading who might not know what they are, Rolos are small chocolate swirls that are filled with caramel that are off the charts delicious.
And £2.50 to get a cake with a wonderfully soft texture that combines two amazing sweet treats made it a no-brainer, serving as the perfect dessert for a lunch that helped ease the pain of the last couple days.
That will do it for today, considering my period is about to start the writing may get a little more intense slash unstable in the coming days, but I am still keeping to my commitment to write something every day before my convention trip. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review, wherever you are I hope you are able to take it easy today.
Rosalia Rambles 