Rosalia Rambles

Tag: ai

  • Redundancy Review: Day 372-378, “On-Track Tuesdays”

    Redundancy Review: Day 372-378, “On-Track Tuesdays”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning pyromancers and firebenders, welcome to Day 372-378 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    It is too damn hot.

    But I have fled my flat into the safe confines of a place with air conditioning, and considering I have a habit of trying to get the schedule back on track on Tuesdays, may as well take advantage of being in a better space to help my mind write out what I have been feeling lately.

    The lack of reviews and my emotional state are quite entwined right now, because the worst thing I feel is that I have almost entirely lost my drive to be myself. I was always a person who prided themselves on being someone who persevered through it all, never letting boulders get in my way, and kept moving.

    I do not feel anything like that anymore.

    Avoiding falling into doomerism is the hardest challenge I am coming across right now. Every day feels like a constant struggle to not let my negative thoughts and feelings win, to do as I said in my last review and stay positive. 

    The pain still feels raw in my mind, even though I have not been out of the job for even a month yet, but each day feels longer than the last and finding the strength to do anything is getting extremely hard, which then makes it harder to write because even though I want to present the messiness of the modern job search experience as part of the Redundancy Review, a part of me does not want this to become “Rosa rants into the void in the hopes someone will hear her”.

    Within the scope of my current industry, I am one of ten of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – who is out of work for various reasons. Lack of funding, AI taking business, shifting market conditions, AI taking business, greed of the C-Suite, AI taking business…

    …you know after writing that out it kind of feels like I wrote the same thing six times in a row rather than it being an attempt at a joke about one of the leading causes around software redundancies right now.

    Tangent aside, I am ultimately not special in the current landscape of tech workers in 2026. All of us are struggling with issues regarding self-esteem after layoffs, financial concerns in the short, medium, and long term, and wondering if the industry that some of us still love will ever recover to the point where we could come back.

    And then I fall into another category, a rapidly growing category if my browsing on LinkedIn means anything.

    The ones who are done with it all.

    The ones who do not want to take the strain or stress anymore.

    The ones saying goodbye for good, contributing to a greater industry brain drain that I do not think AI will be able to compensate for in the slightest without a massive downgrade in quality output – especially when you consider QA is often the first to go when these kinds of layoffs come around.

    Combine this with the reluctance to hire junior talent, and the industry as a whole is moving towards a collapse that may not be coming imminently, but will arrive when things break beyond repair and no one is left to fix them.

    I started this talking about tech, but everything I have said also applies to the games industry as well, and I genuinely think we are in the midst of the next big video games crash, spurred on by lack of original ideas coming out of studios and spiking hardware costs thanks to – you guessed it – AI data centres taking up all of the market for components.

    You know what, while I am here making predictions about various industries, I am going to write out my genuine prediction for how AI will take shape in the coming years.

    It is not a difficult task to recognise I am against Generative AI. It has pervaded my hobby spaces in a horrendously parasitic way that has taken away my ability to enjoy things on a first glance without having to look for the telltale signs of generated imagery, it has made components for PCs more expensive in a way that is taking a massive toll on the industry and making me panic whenever I think my components are glitching out, and ultimately, I think the window for it in its current form to be utilised in any productive way has long since passed, especially when the executive mind just sees it as a way to cut costs.

    But we have gone through a period where NFTs were the next big thing, and even though crypto is not in the news as much as AI is nowadays, there is still a dedicated space for crypto related topics and there is a business going on around it.

    Generative AI in its current form will probably fall off massively within the next half decade. After the capex dries up for data centres, after the venture capital dries up for salaries, or maybe as the lakes dry up for both of the above, the bubble will burst leaving a massive toll on the economy.

    After that, machine learning based AI is likely to take the forefront and dominate the next evolution instead. A lot of machine learning applications have already taken to branding themselves as “AI” to hop on the gravy train of getting more investment and eyes on the tool – looking firmly at you Grammarly – but it is also where the more practical uses of AI can be found in medical imaging, protein folding, and assistance tools across multiple industries.

    We are in a cycle of hype right now, where the ones in charge are desperate to get people hooked to keep this cycle going, and once it is all over, there will be plenty of R&D to build a better foundation for something more utilitarian to take the place of Generative AI.

    One I hope actually achieves the talking point of “AI and humans” rather than having all of the big heads spout it as a way to save their arses.

    Feels weird to have called this “On-Track Tuesdays” when I have changed track multiple times as I write this out, and now I have to derail myself from “serious and semi-nuanced takes on the tech landscape” to “god I love virtual puppetry”.

    It is still VTuesday after all, and my unemployment has given me more time to enjoy actual streams from talents rather than engaging in VODs or music as I am normally one to do. Even if I am only able to catch the end of an eight hour stream of Hollow Knight (thank you Biboo) or if I can watch something from start to finish to zone out to, it feels nice to engage in one of my hobbies live rather than living in catch up land.

    Before I was only able really able to catch small amounts of streams when I had bandwidth to put them on in the background as I worked, which is why I was able to watch so many different Holomems play Monster Hunter World during the whole “Return to World” push around the time of Monster Hunter Wilds starting marketing itself.

    One of these talents is one I have mentioned before, the very fluffy fox of Hololive 1st Generation, Shirakami Fubuki. A VTuber in contention for my all-time favourite from JP, often referred to as “kamioshi” in community lingo, my infatuation started the same way it started with a lot of HoloJP members: through their music.

    And then one day, I saw Fubuki streaming Monster Hunter World. I only really tend to engage with the JP side of things when it is something I am able to understand without needing to understand Japanese. Monster Hunter falls perfectly into this category, as I do not need to understand a single word of what is being said or any word on screen because the universal language of “oh shit I am about to be crushed into soup by an Anjanath” is universal.

    Watching Fubuki stream World is one of the best memories I have as a Hololive fan, not only for getting to watch someone I admire greatly play a game I love, but also because it has bore a running joke with me and my partner from seeing a Dodogama – my all time favourite monster – absolutely body an endgame monster in a fight, all the while she was cheering “DODOGAMU!” in the hopes he would win, which now causes me to shout that whenever I see a Dodogama.

    But ultimately, I follow Fubuki for her music, which is the subject of today’s piece… kind of.

    Cause whilst it is a Fubuki song I want to talk about today, it is not the original.

    KONKON Beats is Fubuki’s fourth original song, initially released on October 6th 2022. It is my… second… third… favourite of her original songs, but one I still love dearly nonetheless for its catchy beat, amazing MV courtesy of Haru, and a chorus I cannot help but dance along to given how simple the moves are for it as shown in this short from the fox herself.

    This is a cover from her genmate Ookami Mio, one who has a close relationship with Fubuki and sang this song in the 2024 Hololive Shuffle mix, where talents found themselves swapping outfits and singing each other’s songs as one big showcase as part of the New Year’s show. Unrelated to the topic, I miss this shuffle mix so dearly, it was such a fun way to showcase other talent’s songs in a fun way and I am so sad it never made a return past 2024.

    Mio does not change any of the lyrics as part of the cover, which gives some segments a wholesome touch. Sadly Fubuki does not put official English lyrics on her MVs, which makes it hard to do lyrical analysis due to the variety of unofficial translations available, but I will be working from this video from Pina on Youtube.

    The chorus goes as follows:

    “KON KON KON
    Yes I’m head over heels for this fox
    Knock knock knock
    Open your heart
    Cause I got the feeling that everything’s gonna be alright
    Now, I’ll cast a spell to bewitch you”

    It is specifically the second line of the chorus that gets me in the wholesome feels when taken in the context of Mio’s cover. In the grand scheme of things they are just colleagues, but like last week’s discussion of CCGG Madness showed, Hololive has the wonderful of having colleagues turn into close friends that you can rely on in tough moments whilst also being able to produce wonderful art alongside them, which Mio saying “I’m head over heels for this fox” definitely helps emphasise.

    The ending of this MV also helps to reinforce that, with absolutely gorgeous art of Mio and Fubuki performing together on stage at Our Sparkle, Mio’s first official solo live concert, reinforcing that Mio sees Fubuki as a trusted colleague and close friend, and wants to keep performing with her for however long her career may last.

    There is no way to predict the future when it comes to how long talents can stay, but the important part is to cherish them while they are still around. Fubuki has had an illustrious eight-year career with Hololive up until now, and there are no signs of her stopping any time soon, but regardless of what happens, I will always keep the memories I have with her close to my heart.

    Started this review talking about how I have lost drive, with the person behind the keyboard worrying about how much she would be able to write, and I end up doing almost two-thousand words entirely within the confines of this cafe over the course of about an hour and a half.

    Pretty good work if you ask me, now if only I could do it consistently.

    Regardless, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are able to relax today and stay away from the heat. It is boiling hot in the UK and even the measures I take inside the flat do not work too well. Hopefully the end of the week cools down a bit and I do not have to stress too much about cooling down.

    I say that, and my intention tomorrow is travelling to my parent’s place to make sure my mum’s plants survive – pray for me.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 105, “Gaining Clarity”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    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.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 79, “Inevitable Is Anything But”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia’s Rambles)

    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.

    For more information on Brambles, visit their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/Bramblesshrewsbury/