I never understood why car companies don't put more effort and resources into their MMI systems. Audi is a big offender. I've never seen a more thoughtfully designed car with an MMI interface that's more frustrating and buggy.
The "personal AI agent" is what everyone's fighting over now. You have Grok Bots, Facebook's Muse, and Instinct doing this exact same thing already. Personally, I think Instinct is the best of the 3 right now. It's a bit like OpenClaw, abstracting everything behind iMessage or WhatsApp but you can ask it to monitor your email inbox, hand off a task like check for apartments that fit a certain criteria (and it gets back to you days later when a new one is posted), or ask it to check in every so often. But the landscape changes so often who knows what will happen. I think Instinct will get eaten up by one of the larger firms.
This reminds me of when Microsoft announced Bing Chat (which became Copilot) as a thin wrapper around ChatGPT. It turned out their value added wasn't integration, but tanking the quality and usefulness of it.
A silver lining to this is new parents are very aware of the dangers of screen time. In my little community, I haven't seen parents of kids under the age of 3 give their kid any type of screen especially when they're out. It's a real generational divide, since I used to see kids with tablets in restaurants everywhere back 5 or 6 years ago. The new thing is screen free electronics, like a device kids can stick cards in and it repeats words in English or Spanish.
The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So what ends up happening is seniors become more heads down, getting things done, and juniors struggle to get time with more experienced coworkers.
GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use.
CS Academia tends to lag behind industry practices. The research frontier can be very cutting edge, but course curriculum, assignments, and institutional norms are slower and more conservative. That’s usually manageable when the shift is something like cloud adoption, new tooling, or a new dominant programming language. But this particular industry trend, use of AI in software development, is massive and fast moving (especially the agentic workflow growth over the last 6 months). And we're just now understanding where everything fits in and its limitations.
Sure, you could argue it's like writing code that gets optimized by the compiler for whatever CPU architecture you're using. But the main difference between layers of abstraction and agentic development is the "fuzzyness" of it. It's not deterministic. It's a lot more like managing a person.
The endgame is clear. Mass surveillance combined with AI agents. Would almost be like having a personal government spy watching each individual person.
Zip codes do not have a one to one relationship to cities in the US. It's a common misconception. It's true about 90% of the time, but there are a lot of outliers. I used to work with GIS data and there are a ton of exceptions.