Way more than cheaper rides.
* App to summon
* Automatic driver mapping to pickup
* Predictable arrival for pickup
* Predictable arrival for drop off
* No BS routing and you knew the cost before pickup/dropoff.

Back in the day I called for cabs ahead of time and had them fail to show up 25% of the time. I've never lived in a dangerous area, so that wasn't it. They just were not reliable or predictable. Uber saw a huge opening for a service and they took it. They also saw a huge opportunity for destroying the existing market solution in an anti-competitive and illegal way and took that, too - banking on the notion that government would not act fast enough to stop them. And they were right.

And because cars are a certain size. Making it half the size for just one person would be nearly as expensive and would be worse for taxi'ing 2 people (which are still a reasonable number of fares).

Too bad the concurrency was not indefinite.

Account closed.
I created my twitter account when the service was practically new and only used it a handful of times - so I might not be the target audience. Even so, I miss the original idea of it.

Oh, no. I have it on good authority that computer vision is about to exceed human performance.

Wait - what year is it, again? :-p

Imagine 10,000 clusters of 20 homes. Each cluster no closer than 5 miles to.. anything. And all of them behind some mountain or in some valley or somewhere else that's really inconvenient. AI tells me you can run copper 5 miles without a booster - so that's what they did - sometime last century when they ran power. Work was cheap, copper was cheap, and someone was running power so they piggybacked. Easy peasy.

You can't run modern stuff nearly that far - except for fiber. But then you're running fiber to 10,000 hubs and each will probably need some kind of a station to do processing and splitting and further wires. I don't suppose any of this is hard - it's just expensive. And for each of these 10,000 hubs you're going to do all this work for 20 customers that only want to pay $10/month because that's their deal. You will *never* recoup those costs.

So I get why they don't wanna. But that's the deal they get for monopoly power and right of way and all that.

This is not so much about dropping copper service as it is about dropping service. AT&T (or their predecessor) put in the copper and now they just want to drop those customers because they are expensive to maintain. I can't say I blame them - I would want to, too. The thing is they don't want to replace the copper with anything - they just want to ignore those folks.

The state would be more than happy if AT&T put in fiber and dropped copper. After all, they've secured tens of millions in California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) and Last Mile infrastructure grants

That's not what they signed up for when they were granted right of way and monopoly powers. They just want to weasel out of it.

I feel like I need to spell out the math.

300 * 1,000,000,000 = 300,000,000,000
300,000,000 * 5% = 15,000,000,000

That's all CA will get from the one time tax "from Apple". Just 15 Billion Dollars.

Although NY does not adhere to this standard, and these generally aren't kids, it still seems like a form of attractive nuisance. If they actually cared about the property they'd use it or maintain it. So either do that or sell it. Otherwise, unless someone does something stupid, like arson, let it go.

I just have to chime in here. My drop-out paper - back around '91 - was titled "Shovels & Society". It was the final for my Computers and Society class - which I did not think much of. The TA was great, though.

After a few weeks in the class, the TA asked our group how many of us were in this because we enjoy programming. I raised my hand. I was it. I decided I was no longer in the right place.

Anyway, my brief argument was that computer/software advances were a lot like those of the shovel -> bulldozer, etc. Just like every other advance, ever. People would lose jobs like they always had, etc. It was supposed to be 15 pages - but I just wrote 3. I feel bad for my TA - she was so disappointed.

I've been happily programming ever since (and before). I'd learned everything I was gonna for compsci anyway.

But holy crap. AI. The shit I can get done now. I feel like there is no way I could get another programming job - between AI and Agism.

It might be an option, but should not expect everyone to take that "bargain". Moreover, with the reliance on stop-loss in recent times, four years is hardly a guarantee.

No. Federal loans are not readily dispatchable, are supposed to be an investment in the future of the country, and still Congress sets the rate stupidly high.

Any justice official caught fabricating evidence ought to receive the typical sentence for the crime they were fabricating evidence for, plus time for the offense of violating the public trust/their duty.

What a funny thing to say about something that is literally all text. Match up the code itself with the commit message and the ticket that caused it to happen - we work in the most documented business there is.

If you don't force/write good commit messages then you get what you deserve.

If you don't force/use good issue tracking then you get what you deserve.

In general, AI now composes my commit messages. Then I delete 2/3 of it. Sometimes I'll touch it up a bit. So it is helping our process...

For every line of code in our repo I know who wrote it, when they wrote it, what they said about writing it, and why they started to write it in the first place. If you don't know those things then you (or your organization) are doing it wrong.

True, but their production is linked. Maybe, as drinkypoo suggests, that's the idea: artificial "demand"/synergies.

OTOH, wikipedia suggests that warhead plutonium pits are far richer than is typically used for power generation, making it a rather wasteful end use. Seems like it would be best to repurify the existing high-purity material to create replacement pits.