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).

The best system that's been done is called SOCIALISM. It combines the best and most useful aspects of communism with the best and most useful aspects of capitalism. Straight capitalism, like what the right and far right in the US want (and are largely starting to get under their God-Emperor Trump, unfortunately) ultimately leads to fascism and assholitry. See "anarcho-capitalism". The end result will be some system akin to slavery, even if it has a different name, just like has happened in the past. See "sharecropping", "Russian serfdom", and "feudalism". The end result of Socialism taken to its logical conclusion, on the other hand, is basically Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Before you say "No True Scotsman", see "the Scandinavian Economy, Post World War II". We've seen what Communism brings when you turn it on like a switch, and when you take it to an extreme, and it sucks donkey. See "Maoist China" and "the USSR, post-World War II".

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

I forgot about /proc and I think there's also another filesystem that's relevant, /sysfs. The original idea was to make a central /etc, but, yeah, the Registry is a bit more general than I made it sound.

What's wrong with the Registry? Its original intent was to be a database of all system settings. Linux and Unix has had the same thing from the start, except that the Unix/Linux solution is a directory containing a bunch of files (that is, /etc). They both even have system wide settings trees and individual user settings trees. (On Linux, this would be the dotfiles in your user directory. On Windows, it's just a second root tree in the Registry. HKEY_LOCAL_USER\, if I remember correctly.)

Now, I'll grant you that most program settings today aren't stored in the Registry anymore, but system-wide settings still are. This is similar on Linux where a lot of configuration stuff is stored within containers like flatpaks.

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.

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.

Fixed-point decimals and scaled integers are fundamentally the same thing. The only real difference is that decimal data types use base-10 at the representation level (aka binary-coded decimal, or even straight ASCII numerals. You can do math directly on both using techniques that are practically identical, save a few differing constants.). Of course, I doubt you meant actual decimal data types. Fixed-point binary and scaled integers are exactly the same thing.

Historically, money was computed using only BCD representations, largely because that's what COBOL used. BCD representations are fixed-point by nature. Most COBOL implementations used packed BCD (2 digits per byte), although modern implementations often use either integer types with a scaling factor or straight ASCII numbers. Using integer types is WAY more efficient, both cycles- and storage-wise, but using ASCII is convenient. Other languages with a native Decimal type do the same.

Using floating-point of any kind for monetary values is a VERY bad idea. When numbers get large, you silently lose precision. When you get big enough, you can no longer store cents. You also get issues with not being able to represent cents exactly unless you scale the numbers anyway.

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.

For all we know, what looks to you like a one-day delay is actually a three-month delay, they just had a different launch scheduled the next day.

No. Launching a rocket is not like launching a plane. You have to get it to the platform and set it all up. You have to register with the feds. It's a whole thing. And here (well, at Vandenberg) there is just one SpaceX platform at the moment. I think they are talking about building another.

Launches slip *all the time*. I live about 50 miles from Vandenberg, so I keep an eye on when they go up to see if there's gonna be a good view. My guess is that about 25% of them slip - and when they do, mostly it's a 1 day slip.

So slipping to the next day can't be a big deal. Especially if you're planning it ahead of time. Unless you're pushing up against the next launch - which would be unusual.

Yes, there are windows for some satellites. But I think they are roughly daily with these.