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The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

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Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#421

Post by bigiain »

Retric wrote: post #348
svachalek wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sliding off topic but I think that's more like 49% of pulls. The amount of time that it takes a slot machine to drive your odds of walking away richer down to hopeless levels is pretty short.

I have only played slots for a few hours, but my lifetime average is up ~3x and a few hundred dollars vs. what I put into the machines. So, I think they are set fairly close to break even as that's from a few dozen minor wins vs a single jackpot. Honestly, if every single time someone played for 3+ hours they where always down then fewer people would come back. That said, they probably set machines in very high traff…

You seem to misunderstand human nature.

(How many people do you suppose play lotteries week in week out never winning back a fraction of what they out in, but dreaming about and planning what they're gonna spend the $10,000,000 jackpot on?)

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#422

Post by VikingCoder »

Animats wrote: post #133

Uber, in their usual rule-breaking way, may come out OK on this. Suppose everything in the complaint against Uber is proven true. Google/Alphabet/Waymo gets an injunction against Uber using their rotating LIDAR, a clunky technology that's on the way out. (The future of high-volume 3D LIDAR is either flash with a staring sensor or MEMS with chip-sized moving mirrors.) G/A/W gets paid a few billion dollars, but far les…

> a clunky technology that's on the way out.

How much do you want to bet?

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#423

Post by yohoho22 »

pm90 wrote: post #139
r00fus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#3 if anything should be proof to Uber's potential future investors that they need to be wary that Uber has anything but name recognition and first mover advantage. They have no moat, no barrier to entry, and a whole lot of hubris just waiting to mature in the form of fierce competitors and negative PR.

To be fair, the new apps do suffer with reliability issues in periods of high loads. e.g. I would not, from experience, trust fasten to get me back home at 2.30am on a weekend night (even if I'm willing to pay their "boosted" fares). Its not an unsolvable problem though. I bet if they could hire more/better engineers and invest in infra for reliability they could be a lot better. And it might actually happen if Uber…

Yeah, they're having some real troubles right now with SXSW crowds: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-12/upstart-r...

This is their first go at this especially crazy rodeo, though.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#424

Post by jgalt212 »

Was the Otto sale the quickest $680MM ever made? Has anyone gone from zero that amount (exit price, mind you) in that short a period of time?

For those reasons alone, I think there is definitely something fishy going on. Perhaps not as fishy as Daniel claims, but something just does not smell right here.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#426

Post by [deleted] »

flylib wrote: post #402

"That Otto hadn’t received funding from any VC’s is unusual. With 91 employees, getting paid $150k/year (this might even be too low given they are working on self-driving cars, one of the hottest spaces in tech right now), they would have had a $13.6 million/year burn rate just on salaries. Otto always aimed to get to market quickly, but getting to profitability without funding seems like it would have been very hard…

[deleted]

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#427

Post by obstinate »

nunez wrote: post #408
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.

I was a Windows engineer for Google's Corp Eng PaaS SRE team and have familiarity with this topic. It's not hard to get this data or set this data collection up on a Windows domain or machine. Anyone can set this up as long as you have the TBs to collect the data and the presentation/searching layer to find it. Windows has the ability to log everything , including device installs/uninstalls, file opens/closes/creatio…

I don't think GAIA has been publicly commented on by the company, in case that matters to you at all. Could be wrong, though, as it seems the term is present in the deposition and un-redacted.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#428

Post by obstinate »

londons_explore wrote: post #356
nlh wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I think in this case, it's not just about money (per se), copying a public design, or patent-related technicalities ("we had a patent on that very generic thing!"). This one is about bad-faith theft. Google didn't sue Uber because they want to extract some $ from them, they sued because they feel their hard work was literally stolen by a bad-faith actor who is now competing against them with their own work. N…

Divisions in a company are fairly tightly budgeted. If Waymo can sue Uber and get $5b, that might keep them away from the prying eyes of the ruthless shareholders looking to cut unprofitable side projects.

The only shareholders at Google with a meaningful vote are Larry and Sergey. I don't think they're likely to be fooled by something like a lawsuit win. If they want to cut side-projects, they can. If they don't, there's nothing in the financials that would compel them to at this time.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#430

Post by obstinate »

londons_explore wrote: post #359
heisenbit wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protection of IPR is a strategic concern of Google. Outright theft committed by the highest levels in both companies is hard to settle for them because of the message it sends. Google may perceive to have more at stake than simply the self driving related IPR.

Not filing suits/charges against the individuals involved suggests "sending a message" isn't the goal. In fact, the people involved look to have done rather well financially out of it so far.

Although when you have as much money as Levandowski already had even before this acquisition, it's hard to imagine that money is really the main motivating factor any more. He won't make it out with his reputation or his power intact.
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