Cynthia Johanson

Google, when are you releasing a Gemini voice assistant that “knows” all my personal emails, calendar, docs, etc? So I can ask it “when is my order coming” or “can I dress in sweats today?”

A three year old dances on a seating plinth. Spontaneous and effervescent. His mom looks down wearily.

As my train pulls away, I see her turn around to take a quick picture with her phone. #powellstbart

So not quite the dystopian end of days but also not an overhyped tool. More of a big scale-upper on the order of the internet or mobile phones.

As a software-engineer-turned-product-manager-turned-vibe-coder, surprisingly, one of the hardest things for me to do is not get too distracted during long builds. “I’ll just peek at ______”… 2 hours later… “what was I doing again??”

Thought: is generative AI just making it easy for anyone to code? Mediocre entry-level code, but still.

Yep- actual motion!

Got porn for a YouTube ad, at 7:30 in the morning. Right before a stretching video. On an account that watches baseball, kpop, and mark rober videos. And the report-this button is broken.

I worked on YT ads targeting 10 years ago. This seems a huge slide in quality. Too much AI instead of humans?

This has me wondering whether a safe question to start convos across the aisle is “what do you think are the top problems and why? What about _____— what do you know about this?”

Did an incognito foxnews visit. The topics were singular crime events, libs reactions (eg not what happened at Hyundai, but backlash about it), and celebs. Nothing about tariffs, vaccines, Middle East, China, Ukraine, Sudan, etc. Minimal actual facts.

I love pepper!

Me too!

Everyone else: …
Me: clicking figma to check my slack messages for the 47th time today

One of the biggest surprises of my professional career is how much calculus (via statistics) has ended up being my most useful math class.

I need head to toe Cursor merch to fully embody how much I fangirl it.

When will the pendulum swing back to kindness, and not selfishness, being revered?

For ICE, I hope so, but for randos impersonating ICE, the kidnapping would already be done.

The scariest part to me about ICE being masked and unbadged is it’s normalizing randos grabbing people off the street (like me!). No trace, no paperwork, and no resistance. I wonder how many women have been grabbed and trafficked, and no one knows. @scottwiener.bsky.social @padilla.senate.gov

I’ve never experienced a go-around before. In my last two flights, *both* had to abort landings because there were airplanes on the runway.

Another example of the loss of local community due to profit chasing. I fully support his proposals— we can’t trust the new owners to fulfill civic duty, so take away the tax advantages that no longer make sense.

This. The loss of local news sources corresponds with the deterioration of local government as it operated unchecked. Fund the ones that are barely surviving. Rebuild the ones that died. There’s no quick fix.

Maybe the reason product managers are so good at utilizing genAI is because we’re already trained at telling enthusiastic but likely clueless people what to do.

Saw a gay pride post on Instagram. For fun, I began blocking the homophobic commenters. It says “block any other accounts they may have”. As I continued, more and more of the “new” commenters were already blocked. I didn’t realize just how many trolls were multiples of the same accounts. ‘Til now.

Yes. All of this. Especially as genAI content floods everything– what does it mean to be trolled by a bot? Or to troll back to a bot? Any ethics involved there? Reminds me of Kate Darling's research on ethics of mistreating robots: www.katedarling.org

#72 on my list of frivolous things I’d pay for if I had boatloads of money: power wash the Glen Park Bart, and plant trees in the planters.

When will Gmail’s and Slack’s searches work like LLM queries?

2) a friend got an eye sunburn from his goggles, which were only 3-5 years old. Apparently, the uv protection in sunglasses can wear out, especially cheaper ones where it’s just a coating instead of embedded. They say replace every 2 years (!!). Shine a uv flashlight onto a US dollar to test.

A couple observations after two days skiing under intense sunlight:
1) my skin burned with Korean sunscreen, but not with MDSolarScience’s mineral-based sunscreen. I was applying a stick form every hour. I’m taking this as Korean sunscreen is more like an spf 2-4; maybe ok for indoor but not outdoor

2) DEI is mutually exclusive from merit (ex: hiring on merit instead of DEI)

3) D’s would rather give money to other countries instead of fixing things at home

These are separate from the culture wars, which is why they’re getting lost in the news cycle. But they need to be addressed.

I’m hearing 3 talking points for why undecideds went R that D’s need to address (and I don’t agree with these):

1) R is better for national security; that they’re able to make the hard moves with other countries that D’s can’t
…

@indivisible.org

*this*. People are used to seeing a search box and thinking they’ll get facts from it. But gen-AI hallucinates all the time. And its super strength is *sounding* like it knows. We need more education about how best to use gen-AI (less facts, more constraints, assume it’s wrong).