People talk about this being a replacement for busses, but I think that misunderstands what a bus service is. A bus service generally is a utility provided by the local government to meet the needs of constituents. The routes are determined by what the government decides are useful, not by which routes are profitable. The problem with introducing competition to this system is that a universally provided bus service is going to have profitable and unprofitable routes and cross-subsidization. If you introduce a new service that's private you're going to find that service very quickly identifies and competes for the profitable routes, but it won't have an interest in the unprofitable routes. Suddenly the local utility is more unprofitable than before, there's no reason for it to be running on routes that are now serviced by the private company, and now the private company can start extracting a higher and higher premium on the profitable routes.
Readit Newsslivym commented on Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities techcrunch.com/2025/05/14... · Posted by u/rpgbr
Right, okay, let's look at their most recent SEC filling to see how much money they lost in 2024 to justify layoffs... right, they made 350 billion in revenue (the highest ever in their history from what I can see) with a 100 billion in net income. Yep, this checks out, they definitely need to lay off people, can't afford them.
They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way that's driving business. Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".
slivym commented on Google may shut down its news service in Europe techgraph.co/hubs/google/... · Posted by u/visitednews
I've got to say - I found it REALLY difficult to find an authoritative or trustworthy source on what the link tax is.
From my understanding here's the rub: there are two definitions. One definition is you'd have to pay a publisher if you link to their article whilst quoting it. That's what the opponents are saying. This seems disingenuous, since it's the quoting the article that triggers the tax - no the link.
The supporters characterize it as: If you rip off a significant part of a copyright work the publisher can charge you since you're taking their copyrighted work (whether you link to them or not).
Now people are saying sites link Google News would be affected because they list lots of news sites quotes with links to the source. I would've thought it was pretty obvious however, if the aggregater quotes enough then there's no point to click through and therefore the revenue accrues to Google rather than the publisher. This seems fine to me -- there should be a charge for that behaviour. What's more it actually seems self-levelling. If Google doesn't quote too much and people click through then there's no incentive for the publisher to charge Google for the content since they're generating demand and charging Google would cause them to be de-listed.
So let's move on, why is Google complaining? Well it seems to me that it's actually in Google's interests to be able to leech off these publishers by stealing their content wholesale and this would prevent that, and apparently they think whining publicly is a reasonable strategy. It's not.
yep. If anything, Henlein seeing the networking of computers as something that develops much more slowly than practical need for spaceflight has to go down as a big miss.
cf John Brunner writing in 1970 about computer-enabled surveillance, data theft and inventing the concept of the internet worm in 1970 (and yes, he also wrote books with near-omnipotent talking computers...)
I think it's a bit of a stretch to be saying that Sci-fi writers were making accurate predictions of what would happen in the future and when. Heinlein doesn't write about space because he thought it would happen at a particular time, it's because it opened doors into interesting stories and new ways of thinking about things whilst relating back to what already exists. It's less about what is going to happen and more about what's interesting. Personally I think even today we struggle to write good stories with that cope with the existence of instant access to every other person on the planet and every fact known to man.
slivym commented on If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley gatesnotes.com/About-Bill... · Posted by u/trequartista
It's quite amazing how good a job Silicon Valley does considering how badly wrong it could go (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory). I'm sure there are quite a few industries that could have similar comedies about them from people who really know what the industry is like. W1A is another great example.
slivym commented on International System of Units overhauled in historic vote npl.co.uk/news/internatio... · Posted by u/daegloe
It just doesn't have the same ring to it.
"He won't move an inch," or "He won't move a centimeter."
"She won't quit until she's six feet under," or "She won't quit until she's two meters under."
"I'll go the whole nine yards," or "I'll go the whole nine meters."
"You can see for miles and miles," or "You can see for kilometers and kilometers."
I think there's a serious point to what you're saying. I was bought up in the UK so I have metres for short distances and miles for long distances. If you say to me 5 miles I instantly know what you mean. If you say 8km, I have an academic understanding but not really an intuitive feel for what you mean (other than 8km=5mi, feel 5mi).
slivym commented on Uber Revenue Slows as Quarterly Loss Surges to $1.1B bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
There is always an "Uber is dead" sentiment floating around when losses come out, but I don't buy it. The long term on-demand transportation opportunity is absolutely massive. Uber has tried to win the land grab and "outlast" everybody with obviously unsustainable subsidies, and maybe that didn't exactly work out. But if the economics don't work for Uber, they won't work for anybody else at scale either. Consumers are benefitting as the industry is subsidized, but it won't last. As with most mature industries, there will eventually be 2-3 players that stay alive, and eventually become profitable. Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Tesla? I don't know, it will be interesting to see. But just because the economics are bad today doesn't mean they always will be. I wouldn't count them out.
The business model appears to be to get established and then use a combination of network effects and monopolistic pricing techniques to be profitable. The problem is though, you need to establish yourself as the dominant player, and jack up prices to start being profitable. That's a fine business strategy. The problem is that Uber has an outside clock ticking. The first player to economically produce a fleet of self-driving cars is likely to undercut Uber on price so violently that Uber's business model goes up in smoke pretty quick.
So either Uber wins the race to autonomous vehicles (which I think most people now regard as unlikely) or they have a hard limit on when their profitability is going to go away. So the valuation needs to reflect something along the lines of "How much money can uber make between now and 2025" and every year that goes by without profit, is a year towards the day that uber's business model goes poof!
slivym commented on Pseudonyms to protect authors of controversial articles bbc.co.uk/news/education-... · Posted by u/new_guy
For the sake of discussion, let's assume that the whole thing is a right-wing propaganda piece. Isn't the result the same? The fear is real regardless of whether it's proper or baseless.
If you want to ensure that academics don't self-censor out of fear of reprasials, you could prove to potential authors that their fears are baseless, or you could provide mitigations for their fears. Or, you could do both.
I would've thought it's self-evident that if the problem isn't real then you're never going to fix it. If the reason this problem exists is a political tool for the right wing then the way to stop it won't be to pander to it.
slivym commented on Pseudonyms to protect authors of controversial articles bbc.co.uk/news/education-... · Posted by u/new_guy
There was a recent article about an academic paper that was so controversial that it was erased after publication. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938318
Sorry but you're going to have cite some real sources, not right wing propaganda. I mean, I read the entire article and I still for the life of me can't actually understand on what basis the academic paper was 'erased'. I assume that's because this 'article' is written by the person who is pushing an agenda rather than an actual reporter reporting on the facts of an incident. Frankly the whole thing reads as 'Those nasty people are idiots and dont want people hearing how amazing my work is because then everyone will know how stupid they are!'. I mean really, it's very difficult to actually get any factual information about what happened. It's kind of difficult for me to have sympathy if the only reports of this happening are far right blogs where the author themselves is reporting what happened.
I think pretty clearly there are VCs who are quite cognizant that their main advantage is their marketing, and making a big splashy controversial investment serves that marketing well. A16Z don't give a damn if they throw 50m at a bad investment, that's not how the game works- they already know most of their 50m investments will fail, so if that investment can keep their name out there so they get access to the funding rounds of the ones that succeed? It's worth it.