The robots stole my job!
Permalink | Author: Ember Dart | Published: 2026-10-07 19:08:02 UTC | Tags: acting ai audio chat claude cto documentary engineering evil freelance gpt music product production robots software tech video voice
Hello again,
Terrible news. The robots stole my job. By which I of course mean that I am yet another casualty of the huge wave of AI redundancies. I already did not like generative AI, but my work had become Claude workflow after Claude workflow and left little room for what I joined up for. What I actually liked about the job was the mathematics and logic of programming, and now LLMs have made needing this skill a thing of the past, with little left for creativity. So, what am I to do? I'm currently looking at my skills to figure out what would work well for me, and have a good few ideas of where to go next:
Voice Acting
Something I'd love to get into, since it's a creative venture, and somewhere I wouldn't mind going next. I have adamently followed a few VAs' journeys and admire their work, and even though I'm just trying to improve my default voice, I can already do silly impressions. Maybe that's good enough.
Acting/documentaries
I tried to get into the drama clubs as a kid, and enjoyed filming skits when I was at school. I feel like this skill could be improved, and my memory would need extra tricks if I were not to get into pitfalls, because after all my memory works well from numbers, rather than words.
Music
One of the ideas that I feel I am rather already better at, although I still fail to understand how I am supposed to make a living off of it. Perhaps people would like to hire me to make ditties and tunes for their media productions, like I used to advertise myself as. I could make my music section of my website more prominent or create a domain especially for it. After all, I was professionally trained in piano and flute, and taught myself the guitar.
Video production
I have made silly little edits before, and quite enjoyed the process of using video editors to express my creativity. Perhaps I can be professionally hired for this.
Audio engineering
One of the things I also enjoy is the process of making and mixing music and audio into a production using some of the tools I have learned to use over the years. It's also something I'd really like a foot in the door in.
3D modelling
I did quite enjoy playing on 3D model packages from quite a while ago, and did find it quite satisfying to refresh my memory of Blender recently. I'm in the middle of a 3D printable boom with the correct holes for a 1300MHz antenna. You knew I did ham radio, right?
Game development
It's a bit of an overlap with some of the below, but I have already programmed a couple of game demos, so with more inspiration I would be happy to continue.
Product manager in a tech company
The natural step up from what I've mostly been, and about time to do the upgrade, if I'm going to work in a large tech company again, and own the production and delivery of a piece of software. Even though I have been the sole tech person in a team, I have led one commercial product in a large team before, and it seems the logical next step.
CTO in a tech company again?
I've been the sole tech person in a technology company several times, and having the architecture decisions and freedom to express my learnings and understandings of software from a CTO's perspective, with communication between customers is something I'd quite enjoy doing again, which is why I've tried to continue my personal software projects to practice the art of delivering software from requirements to finished, deployed product.
Freelance software
Whilst I have done freelance software before, the last conversation I had with a potential client was just going to use ChatGPT to make their website. My skills seem like they are no longer required. The world as we know it has changed drastically over the last few years.
Let's see what the future holds, and if you have any suggestions on anyone who would welcome extra help with any of the above, please get in touch.
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General update on the current state of my life
Permalink | Author: Ember Dart | Published: 2016-10-19 19:00:00.003 UTC | Tags: blog doctor entertainment games gnu hunting job life linux maths media podcast skyrim social software star transgender trek who wolfram
Hello everyone!
Thought I'd give something of a general overview of my current October "2016" (but is it really, etc.). Life updates are something I'm really, really bad at, and I thought it would be nice if I didn't just have 140 characters or a broken platform to play with. Not that Google isn't a total joke.
Maybe I'll move this blog over to my real website, which uses Let's Encrypt, which is a free SSL certificate vendor, and offers an automatic client to refresh (since oddly it only gives 3-month certificates).
Job hunting is sour. I had really hoped to be able to carry on getting people to contract me to make websites but I haven't had anything for going on 7 weeks now (gosh, I sound like a mother telling you the age of her child). My usual contract profession is that I build websites for people at home (If you happen to know anyone who needs it, please get in touch), but I am also an avid musician who plays the guitar and keyboard mostly, and am interested in perhaps joining a local band.
I'm making a plethora of new software (mainly because I like coding and I'm often bored, see my GitHub). I was inspired by Matt Parker in his video about letter to number relationships, so I tried to build something automated to see if I could find more. I do love maths and have made a bunch of programs to do a few maths-y things (here are some more!). I've even got myself onto the Online Encyclopædia of Integer Sequences (twice!), and made a Node.js library for accessing it.
A few things I've made that I'm particularly proud of are Project Chaplin (edit 2021: archived) (code) the first free software video sharing website, a half finished social network manager, an automated Apache vhost manager, a clever command-line Omegle client, the beginnings of a first person shooter, with its inspiration in a set of software-rendered demos. I have also made a DeviantArt and Pinterest photo scraper, and had yet another thought about how universal packages should be built.
A few more toys (I wouldn't call them big projects) I've created are a dumb wordoid generator, a Pastafarian finite state machine, a program to play cricket with the input stream to teach me a bit of C++, a few spacey gravity simulators, an equation-based synthesiser, a webcam-based tone generator, a third-party Jamendo audio player, and even a edit: 16, 32 and 64-bit OS, to teach me assembler and C.
Although hardly started, I seem to love gamepads so much, I made something that looks almost like a game (with free pictures taken from the Internet) that basically does nothing but allow you to test a gamepad.
On the useful scale, I decided I wanted to see how up-to-date a few popular GNU/Linux distributions were, so I made a little tool to find out. I might extend it with something or add automation later.
In the future, I will probably re-make my static silly Linux-based distribution into something more sensible (stay tuned), make something to do fun things with Wolfram Alpha (I haven't decided what yet), and make an automatic web page categoriser based on string matching of page structure, as I did when I used to work for an analytics platform.
Entertainment-wise, I finished marathoning most of the Star Trek (all series) episodes ever. I thought that series 3 of Enterprise was total gobshite. 4 was alright though.
I'm marathoning Doctor Who. It's fantastic stuff, I haven't yet gotten past the lost episodes, but there are plenty of clever reconstructions from photos, occasional surviving clips and the existing (I think?) audio. At least it sounds like the real Doctor (I've gotten up to Troughton, if you're interested). Maybe he's got an impersonator? Who knows.
I play computer games more than usual (which I know is an important life skill). My favourite at the moment is Skyrim. Let me know if you want more on that.
I research my family history. I've gone back about 500 years, I'm sure I could even find you. I use Ancestry for that kind of thing and have almost 1000 people in my tree. It's very interesting to me and one discovers pretty crazy things about one's own heritage!
I'm going to see if I can blog a bit more, as it gives me a bit of free reign. Maybe I should do regular segments like discoveries of the week. Yes, I'm definitely a podcast. In fact, I'd rather like to do a tech-related podcast with someone. Any takers?
Ta-ta.
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My favourite font is nonexistent!
Permalink | Author: Ember Dart | Published: 2016-10-19 17:59:00 UTC | Tags: education educational font fonts free letters ocd open picky preschool quirky sans serif software source text type typeface weird writing
I think I'm a bit OCD. When I was growing up, I was shown a way of writing and since have always preferred it. However, there seems to be no such font. This is very particular of me, and the font I'm looking for is close to a "natural" font, or so I've been told.
It is described thusly:
- Sans serif
- Single story "a"
- Round letters (based on circles)
- Double height "f"
- Single non-looped "g"
- Triple-tipped "G"
- Serif-topped "I" and "J"
- Non-flicked "q"
- Inside and outside straight 45 degree Q-tip
- Double-tipped "t"
- Asymmetric "Y"
- Seriffed "1"
- Non-stroked "7"
Font buffs, do you know of anything? A hint is that it may have been used for educational purposes. I may have to edit a similar font if I can't find what I'm looking for. It's a shame that none of the "describe to find" font websites provide simply free software and open source fonts, or are available on Google's font library.
That's it for my incredibly OCD rant, till next time.
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