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The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

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Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#371

Post by shrewduser »

untog wrote: post #55
tekklloneer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. They were in a prime position to be "the" self driving car company, if anyone was. Instead, hyper aggressive business tactics (which were largely unwarranted) has backfired.

> They were in a prime position to be "the" self driving car company, if anyone was. I disagree: they don't make cars. That's a huge impediment. The prime position company is surely Tesla. Or, really, any car manufacturer.

i disagree again, making cars isn't the competitive advantage it's being able to run and service large fleets of cars, taxi / bus companies with all the physical plants would have the competitive advantage out of the gate.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#372

Post by sauronlord »

bigiain wrote: post #308
sauronlord wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What crimes or violations was he convicted of? Enough accusations and then you are guilty until proven innocent? Wtf

Having not been convicted of a crime (with the assistance of one of the world's largest legal budgets) is not the usual measure of being the sort of respected and trusted person you'd want at the helm of your corporation. The man is unquestionably toxic - it's entirely possible the entire company is toxic.

Innocent until proven guilty as a legal prescription has nothing to do with respect and trust and some peoples (filtered) opinions.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#373

Post by londons_explore »

Twirrim wrote: post #299
booleanbetrayal wrote: post #4

I can't imagine what Lewandowski and Uber were thinking here. The timeline is just too constrained to even be taken seriously.

> Summer 2015 - Anthony Levandowski told Pierre-Yves Droz, a colleague at Waymo, that he had talked with an Uber executive about forming a self-driving car startup and that Uber would be interested in buying that startup. This, particularly, seems absolutely moronic. If you're going to do something shady, don't tell anyone about it.

You tell the people you hope to poach, especially if you intend to give them equity rather than salary because you're cash-poor because you can't get VC funding.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#374

Post by memmcgee »

Animats wrote: post #184
memmcgee wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be fundraising awfully quick for a company that has plenty of cash on hand. They'd probably have to fund-raise again or go public to pay off the damages.

Going public just got tougher for Uber. With a big lawsuit with merit hanging over them, their IPO value drops considerably. Underwriters don't like open-ended liabilities like that.

I also think the sexual harassment claims pose a massive liability. If the harassment is as wide spread as Fowler says it is, Uber could be looking at a massive class action lawsuit.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#375

Post by chx »

haldean wrote: post #110
mmanfrin wrote: post #59

Outside of the case, the most striking thing to me about this is the level of detail that Google has over the logs and actions of their laptop. They were able to tell that a memory card was plugged in for 8 hours a year ago? I have trouble finding exactly how a customer encountered a 500 10 minutes ago.

If you send your kernel logs to a syslog server you could get that pretty easily. From plugging a USB stick into my computer just now, then running dmesg: [14863.014481] usb-storage 2-4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected ... [15045.488440] usb 2-4: USB disconnect, device number 34 They do, though, have quite a bit of pretty impressive logging!

If I read this correctly at this point the machine was running Windows. I have zero doubts, however, that Windows has equivalent impressive logging, apparently the USB vendor and device ID pair was recorded as well.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#376

Post by LeifCarrotson »

jsemrau wrote: post #321
dcosson wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of the comment was as kind of an upper bound. For instance if drivers made 100% (or more) of what the passenger pays, then Uber would be obviously not breaking even. At 65-75% it's feasible that at a certain scale Uber's cut would make them profitable.

Feasible but not likely. From this 25% to 35% Uber will still do this 1. Run their operating business - Maintain data centers - Maintain a global web infrastructure - Maintain the app 2. Run campaigns to compete in markets with strong local competition - Europe (Hailo, Car2Go, etc) - Asia (Didi, Ola, Grab, etc) 3. Finance their ongoing operations - Equity financing expensive - Debt financing hard to get at this stage…

Everything in that list, aside from 2 (advertising and expansion), 7 (fleet operations), and 8 (self-driving R&D, which is honestly well outside of their current business) is dirt cheap in comparison to their operating costs - paying drivers, vehicle purchasing, insurance, and maintenance, and buying fuel.

Service and hardware businesses have completely different cost structures as compared to tech companies.

Think about it - standard deduction is about about 50 cents per mile for vehicle costs, and actually having a human in the seat probably costs more than 50 cents per mile ($ per hour divided by average speed), and the average drive is about 5 miles. We're talking well over $5 in wholesale operating costs for each ride. Times literally a million rides per day.

The cost of a few programmers and servers is tiny in comparison.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#377

Post by chx »

dantiberian wrote: post #104
mmanfrin wrote: post #59

Outside of the case, the most striking thing to me about this is the level of detail that Google has over the logs and actions of their laptop. They were able to tell that a memory card was plugged in for 8 hours a year ago? I have trouble finding exactly how a customer encountered a 500 10 minutes ago.

Yeah I really enjoyed the technical details in Gary Brown's deposition: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3515476-Declaration-... . It looks like they could see: * When the device made check-ins to their management server, and appeared on the Google network * That the Windows OS was re-installed * MoMA search queries (some kind of internal system?) for "chauffeur svn login" * Downloading and installing Tortoise…

I now read that deposition in full, this guy is dead and buried six feet under.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#378

Post by Eridrus »

alpha_squared wrote: post #346
Eridrus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem that much stranger than the Cruise or Argo; people with real experience are getting snapped up like crazy without a product.

Can't find info on Argo (not looking properly, most likely), but Cruise raised over $18m before being bought (for ???). It looks like a solid effort to launch a product/startup that was snatched up. Otto was ~6 months and bought for $680m. I think there's a pretty large delta of strangeness there.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/argo-ai#/entity

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#379

Post by bitmapbrother »

bedhead wrote: post #105

Among the circumstantial evidence, the self-funding aspect is what jumped out at me the most. This is the equivalent of a hedge fund manage buying something based on inside information, but only for his personal account. Why cut other people in on the wink-and-nod-guaranteed payday? Besides, Lewandowski couldn't realistically raise money through proper channels if his pitch amounted to, "I stole stuff from Waymo."

That was definitely a red flag, but for me it would have to be how quickly Otto was able to develop the 64 laser LiDAR circuit board in such a short amount of time. This was a circuit board that reduced the cost of LiDAR by an order of magnitude and Otto was able to design and build it in 6 months. Additionally, the orchestration of the events leading to the acquisition were clearly premeditated.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#380

Post by chx »

londons_explore wrote: post #354
WatchDog wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know if this information was collected as part of a monitoring service or if it was collected by forensically recovering the data from the laptops hard disk?

If the laptop was re-imaged to Windows, I doubt much of the syslogs from linux were left. Especially since windows is much bigger than a default linux install these days, and this was a rarely used laptop, it seems unlikley any linux was left, even in free sectors.

No, it was running Windows and was reimaged to Linux. It is very strongly implied this was done to cover tracks as it was never switched on again.
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