171–180 of 224 posts
Agree with this article, and I almost threw up in my mouth when I read this quote from Stephen Levy: > By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for…
I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two. That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on an…
Having a city's worth of automated cars driving around all the time sounds like a hellscape.
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Standard procedure at the time for a meeting was: - no PowerPoint - 1-6 page write up of the problem, proposed solution and timeline, and alternate methods that were not chosen - meeting participants ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence to read and mark up their thoughts. - presenter says their piece, mostly just summarizing the paper and clarifying tricky sections - intellectual bl…
We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my c…
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> It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right. I just opened the Uber app. The first thing that pops up is a search bar that says "Where to?". I entered a destination address. Next thing it showed was a map with a path to my destination and nearby cars, and buttons where I can choose my type of…
Did you ever take Uber in a unfamiliar place? When you're supposed to be at a particular spot but you don't know where that is? When the driver doesn't speak English very well? When both your hands is busy with luggages? When you need glasses to read signs? That's very common when you travel. Agent would be godsend, and once you're used to it, you don't want to go back to the phone. Anywhere. What if the agent can al…
This feels a lot like all those "where did the soda go" commercials (i.e. https://www.reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago/ ), where some mundane task is imagined to be hopelessly complex with a bunch of possible what-ifs. For what it's worth, yes, I have taken Uber in all of those conditions, and no, I never found it difficult or had a problem with it.
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I agree with what you've written about robotaxis, and Uber/Lyft already put a ton of data analysis into ensuring they have capacity where it's needed. But I don't think apps are going anywhere anytime soon, or in decades for that matter, primarily because there are economic forces in play that make them desirable for the network owners.
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that the apps will or should ever go away, but rather that with sufficient volume both ways could become plausible options. If an available Waymo happens to be sitting there waiting for a passenger, I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off. Of course, summoning one or tapping my phone would ideally work…
I imagine because a huge part of optimizing fleet availability and distribution is knowing where you want to go before deciding which vehicle you should travel in.
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Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that the apps will or should ever go away, but rather that with sufficient volume both ways could become plausible options. If an available Waymo happens to be sitting there waiting for a passenger, I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off. Of course, summoning one or tapping my phone would ideally work…
> I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off. I imagine because a huge part of optimizing fleet availability and distribution is knowing where you want to go before deciding which vehicle you should travel in.
Agreed. The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language. The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does…
Agreed. The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language. The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does…
When that happens, it will notify the end of the hype cycle. Knowing about tech and working in it, you might have a very different perspective on AI and its limitations, but the companies are still literally selling it as if it's some magic black box that'll solve every problem and make humanity 100x more efficient. If we reduce that to a "smarter Siri that makes fewer errors", the public perception will be massively…
"Steve Jobs handling a tough question at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference."