I was thinking about the applications that companies put on your work laptop. Most serve a business function like Zoom for video conferencing or a VPN. However, I had an unpleasant thought about how AI could be used for employee surveillance. There have been services that monitor how your mouse is moving during the day.…
Warning: This is pretty much an old person rant. I recently upgraded my Alexa devices to Alexa+. I am considering throwing all of them away and replacing them with some equivalent. What’s the problem? There are many, but the one that makes me the most aggrieved is that I want it to be more concise.…
I started taking photos and videos of my life and family about 25 years ago. I have them as a screensaver on this computer. It brings me happiness to look back on those photos after many years. I have over 180gigs worth of media compiled. Timeline of storage Recently, Onedrive has been experimenting with reading…
Artificial intelligence is moving fast. The way people interact with it will evolve as the functionality improves. These are my predictions of where the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is going, Pre- ChatGPT It used to be called ML or machine learning. I worked at a startup a few years back that used a very advanced system…
One of the biggest problems in AI is training. Where can you get source material for the AI to train that doesn’t break copyright laws? Google certainly has a ton of data, but I think there could a way to change the game. The hardware You need a pin that can be worn by the…
Honestly, I have loved my 2020 Tesla Model 3. It has been a wonderful car and way ahead of its time. If not for the buffoonery, cruelty, greed, and stupidity of their CEO (Elon Musk), I would have purchased more Tesla cars. Additionally, I would not have been in a hurry to get a new…
This is just like 2000 and 2007. Sound familiar? It preceded the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble and it’s happening now. The hype cycle This is the way bubbles are formed and evolved. The timing is sometimes variable and not everything eventually reaches productivity. For example, the Tulip bubble of 1634 was not a…
Many designers are anxiously wondering, “will I be replaced with AI?” To jump to the conclusion, I think many designers are at risk and the job of interaction designer will change dramatically in the next 2-7 years. However, as an optimist, I think it may have a happy ending. Bubble? Sure, we are in a…
As a beta junkie, I felt compelled to install the latest OS for my iPad and new iPhone. This is a few days in. First impressions are important. Here are quick first week thoughts. Liquid Glass Obviously, this is the most noticeable change. I feel mixed about it. It is very different depending on what…
Fewer and fewer people host their own website using a hosting service. Designers use Framer or Webflow or EditorX or even trying the new Figma sites. Corporate websites are usually hosted in the corporate cloud like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. Content creators have moved on from blogging to either short form text like…
Sometimes a large portion of the world believes something is true, despite the fact that it is not true. Here is one that is especially annoying to me. Myth: Companies use AI to auto-reject your job application based on your resume I have used multiple different recruiting tools over the years. Lever, Greenhouse, Bamboo and…
I’m at Figma’s annual conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Their annual event has really grown since the first one I attended almost a decade ago. Rough estimate is about 10,000 attendees, but I did not count them all. The announcements they released were fine and expected, but not really what I was…
I have been using Google Android phones since 2009. I was always a Windows person and never an Apple fanatic. So when Apple had the iPhone, I steered towards the cheaper alternative. I upgraded every 2 years like clockwork. A few years ago, I was traveling internationally more often and decided to give Google Fi…
Recently, I needed to answer the question of whether to default to dark mode, light mode, or system preference. System means that it would respect whatever preference the user had in the operating system. The engineers thought system preference was the most logical and it seemed to make sense, so we went with that. However,…