The comments on this post that congratulate/engage with OP all seem to be from hn accounts created in the past three months that have only ever commented on this post, so it seems like there is some astro-turfing going on here.
Stuff like this is ironic but I do think it's escape hatches like this that will make these tech companies, if they ever go down, go down kicking and screaming. Any platform holder that ever finds themselves in a bad place financially will 100% pull all the levers like this.
This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.
Correct, and this is why US big tech, including the big LLM players, need to be tarriffed/DSTed harder than Chinese cars by the rest of the world. They get big off of the exact dumping that China has always been accused of.
Maybe the one where you flagged down a car on the street, but you could always call to book a taxi and those companies worked exactly like Uber — over the phone, because it was the pre–app era.
Uber also gives you a price upfront, and that is the most you will pay (+ tip, if you feel like it). I don't remember pre-mobile phone taxi system that gave you a price upfront. They used to list the price per mile, and then it was up to you to figure out the distance and make sure the driver took a reasonably short route.
So no, the old taxi companies did NOT work "exactly like" Uber.
I've seen more than a few people on this forum assert that the old taxi system was/is comparable to Uber or somehow better. I even got some shit for referring to it as old, legacy, I forget the exact verbiage I used. But it is old, and it is worse. I get the price upfront, I can adjust the "class" of car I order if I'm going to the pharmacy alone or to a nice dinner. Calling ahead to preorder a taxi feels like calling to order a pizza over the phone at this point. If I called, would they even know how to handle it?
Obviously we live in a different era now where things are ordered by apps instead of websites or phone calls, but those used to be socially acceptable ways to order things.
For sure, I was there. But we also used to have to have the people on the phone read our order back to us to confirm it, now I've got a screen that does that automatically. I'm not at all nostalgic for the alternative.
The whole thing end-to-end is the ride service though. The interface is the differentiator that made Uber popular and forced traditional taxi providers to compete for once. There used to be tons of anecdotes about "the card reader being broken" in traditional taxis, because they dodged taxes by only accepting cash. Exposing the whole process through an app and handling your billing outside of the car made tactics like that less useful. Taxis thrived on hidden information games and obligation; Uber doesn't remove that entirely but the playing field is more level.
Quoted for truth. I still take taxis from time to time if there’s no wait at a taxi stand at an airport or building. I noticed in places like Las Vegas things seem better now, there’s flat rates and everyone has touchscreen payment terminals in the passenger area. I remember pre-Uber occasionally getting cab drivers that would take suboptimal routes like getting on the freeway to drive up the meter.
It depends on where you lived. NYC had a large number of "black car" livery services where you would call, arrange a ride, and typically get a price up front. It wasn't legal to hail them on the street, but in practice it was pretty common to hail a black car (a "gypsy cab") and negotiate a price up front. Source: I lived a few blocks north of Central Park and in Hamilton Heights before Uber was a thing and took gypsy cabs a couple of times a week.
Also, Uber drivers tend to show up. It was always a crapshoot with regular cab drivers. I don't have experience with other car services, maybe they were better pre-Uber.
Not in my country they didn’t. Booking or no booking, taxis did whatever they wanted. More often than not your booked taxi just wouldn’t turn up and you wouldn’t know until well after you needed it.
Heck, Elon's ownership of SpaceX even got to me to not really care about space travel anymore, one of my biggest passions since I was 6. But I just can't root for whatever his vision of space faring society would look like.
Yeah I hear you. I too wish he would have stayed out of politics. Sadly he chose not to, and not just go a little, but to go all in. And to choose to make it basically his public identity.
definitely. I got ad blitzed the last two days by "wow" YT videos which I admit is why I even ended up clicking through todays "bot news" to this site. It's been uber hyped with marketing strategy for sure, its only coz it was OSS I paid attention but was surprised by the marketing for OSS since that doesnt usually happen.
And now the data exfiltration stuff happening makes me put my tinfoil hat on and think this was actually a coordinated data exfiltration attack that leveraged AI hype lol.
Great comment. The best part about it as well is that you could put this under basically anything ever submitted to hacker news and it would be relevant and cut to the absolute core of whatever is being discussed.
This is one thing I find funny about all the discussion around AI watermarking. Yes for absolutely nefarious bad actors it is incredibly important, but what seems clear is that the majority of AI users do absolutely nothing to conceal obvious tells of AI generation. Turns out people are shameless!
Two immediate ones I can think of:
- The yellow hue/sepia tone of any image coming out of ChatGPT
- People responding to text by starting with "Good Question!" or inserting hard-to-memorize-or-type unicode symbols like → into text where they obviously wouldn't have used that and have no history of using it.
This is awesome, and thanks so much for the deep dive into process!!
One thing I would suggest is to also post-process the pixel art with something like this tool to have it be even sharper. The details fall off as you get closer, but running this over larger patch areas may really drive the pixel art feel.
Oh wow this is great, I threw a few of these tricks at it and never really felt like I nailed it... Might have to revisit after playing around with this more
I'm so bullish on CUE. It seems like it's really solving the "code as configuration" problem properly and I think there are lots of other upside use cases around general data defintion components of it that make for typesafe authoring.
I like to tell people that all the AI stuff happening right now is capitalism actually working as intended for once. People competing on features and price where we arent yet in a monopoly/duopoly situation yet. Will it eventually go rotten? Probably — but it's nice that right now for the first time in a while it feels like companies are actually competing for my dollar.
Aaahh the beautiful free market where the energy prices keep increasing and if it all fails they will be saved by the government that they bribed before. Don't forget the tax subsidies. AKA your money. Pure honest capitalism....
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