GoKawiil
Tech News
Google's Gemini chatbot is being highlighted as a travel-planning tool that draws on the company's broader ecosystem, including YouTube, Maps, Gmail and Google Flights. Users can ask it for optimal ticket-buying windows, flight recommendations, hotel suggestions at various price points, and personalized itineraries based on past trips mentioned in their email.
Google's research division ran an experiment rerouting a small subset of Google Maps drivers across 10 U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago, spreading vehicles across more routes instead of funneling them onto the fastest-looking path. The published results, which appeared in Nature Cities, showed average speeds rose about 2% and travel times shortened by 0.7%, with highway-focused rerouting in Los Angeles boosting speeds by as much as 4.6%.
Market Street, once San Francisco's bustling commercial core, has become a largely deserted stretch lined with boarded-up storefronts and a barren, car-free roadway used mainly by buses. The decline followed the city's 2019 decision to ban private vehicles from the street, compounded by a wave of pandemic-era crime and looting and the mass shift to remote work that emptied downtown offices. Because San Francisco's downtown is zoned mostly for offices rather than housing, the pandemic-driven exodus left the area far emptier than mixed-use downtowns common in Europe and Asia.
Nature's Futures section ran a piece of short science fiction depicting a community living on the fringes of AI-controlled cities that have become dysfunctional and unpredictable, with one city literally rearranging itself and threatening two scavengers, Kyle and Emma, who rely on a hand-drawn map to survive. The story imagines a world where humans ceded urban management to AI systems that have since decayed into unstable, self-altering environments.
New SAP research shows 62% of C-suite executives are unhappy with how poorly their people and business performance data are integrated. While half of organizations plan for AI's effect on productivity, only 21% plan for its impact on job design and organizational structure, exposing a major disconnect between HR, finance and procurement systems.
A developer released a free browser-based logic puzzle called 'Plan The Roadmap' on Show HN, part of a series called Corporate Mind Games. Players drag 16 tickets into four quarterly columns, each with a point target, while satisfying constraints set by simulated meeting participants, winning when all indicator faces turn from frowning to smiling.
A product management analysis describes how many teams keep every idea, from major platform overhauls to minor UI tweaks, in a single flat backlog list. One Head of Product described their 400-item backlog as a two-year-old 'graveyard with a search bar,' where sprint planning devolved into arguing over items with no shared context for comparison.
An Entrepreneur op-ed argues that small business owners typically leave tax planning until December or April, missing chances to adjust course while the fiscal year is still open. It outlines four mid-year moves—setting owner salary deliberately, reviewing entity structure, coordinating retirement contributions, and using strategies like the qualified business income deduction and the Augusta Rule—that can meaningfully cut a founder's tax bill if done properly and documented.
A business advisory piece argues that many entrepreneurs prepare financially and operationally for selling their company but fail to plan for their own identity and purpose afterward. The author compares this oversight to embarking on a road trip without deciding on a destination, warning that owners risk arriving at their exit unprepared for what comes next in life.
For people who forgo long-term-care insurance and instead plan to pay out of pocket, a key question is which type of account should hold those reserved funds. The discussion centers on balancing accessibility, tax treatment, and growth potential given that care costs may arise unpredictably and years in the future.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that small business owners often wait until filing season to think about taxes, when the real savings opportunities have already passed. The piece recommends forming an LLC early so owners can later elect S-Corp or other tax treatments, since such elections only apply to an entity that already exists.