Agreed, but I find for even these simple tasks it's hit-and-miss for accuracy. My Google device will randomly not know what a "shopping list" is, or the interactions go something like this:
"Hey Google, put dishwasher salt on the shopping list"
"OK, I added 'put dishwasher salt'"
(strangely, this particular bug only manifests for dishwasher salt).
Timers are useful, but sometimes they can't be shut off by voice command.
I used to work in aerospace. One of my projects involved running avionics bench tests at a customer facility, basically the avionic subsystem of the aircraft in a big room on shelves. We were using a laptop for data logging and started getting dropouts in the data every 5 minutes. This was worrying because a) this hadn't happened at our site on similar equipment and b) this was a final customer-facing check before doing a real test flight.
We spent about a week trying to debug the system and the software and at a certain point while I was just sitting and thinking about what to do next, Flying Toasters popped up in the data logging PC (the lid was normally closed because of the space on the bench).
The Windows screensaver was hogging so much CPU that the datalogger couldn't keep up.
I understand what you mean. I don't imagine I could work very long on a project like this with asking myself if it's the most important problem I could be solving.
But we don't know these guys, they may feel the same and this is a means to an end. Luckily the entire generation isn't working in Silicon Valley and there are similarly motivated people in climate change research, biotech etc.
I started out with a Dragon 32 at around age 14, typing in programs from computer magazines. When I went to university (in 1989), I studied Aeronautical Engineering, which had no computer science or programming at all. I chose a final year project to write a propeller performance tool in Pascal. When I look back at it, I realise what an awful program it was. I was just learning as I went along.
After the engineering degree, I did a "conversion" Masters degree in computer science, though it was rather theoretical and placed great emphasis on formal methods, the management of software projects and being able to write essays comparing OO with non-OO programming. Most of the practical IT/CS skills I got from that time were through my part-time job on the university's computer services help desk.
My current skill set is almost entirely unrelated to my CS degree - I taught myself Python, learned C and my way around Linux through pair-programming with a colleague.
I'm still teaching myself - functional programming in Haskell, using web frameworks to do some nice webapps, and dipping into new languages and technologies that get mentioned on HN and other places.
So I guess that I'm a programmer in spite of my CS degree rather than because of it. I love what I do, so much that it rarely feels like a real job. I'm very lucky.
This is very nice and simple, I like it a lot. One thing I would change is to make the "Select the thing to be added" pane disappear after I've selected something, or add a close button so I can get rid of it.