251–260 of 316 posts
So are we talking Uber eats here?
For UberEats the listed prices are also different from when you order directly at the restaurant. Its not just he ridiculous service fees.
Big if true. But actually maybe not that big since people suspect it anyway. This is the "innovation" that defenders of the "free market" are always touting. How to be sure? Transparency requirements. I think we need way more transparency requirements. All sorts of financial and operational data should be publicly available.
I think we should be much more strict with what constitutes “fraud”: If you sell me better service, but don’t treat me any better, you should owe me triple damages for defrauding me. And your executives should be prosecuted for directing fraudulent behavior.
Greed. There are many ways to do good business, but we constantly push for exploitation. Technology will be blamed as always, not the operators. Humans such a disappointment.
>Humans such a disappointment. Compared to what, and idealized versions of ourselves? Or animals who rip the throats out of other mammals to eat?
Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just l…
> designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people Why do we think engineers are some special class of people who can't do bad things?
Software didn't create the gig economy or the microloan economy, but as engineers, we had the opportunity to step up and say "hmm, this doesn't seem right, I don't think we should do that". We didn't.
AI is a whole 'nother can of worms. I watched a lot of my friends deactivate social media over the holiday as their pictures got posted to Twitter and got live AI edited by Grok into things that horrify them. You probably wouldn't have gotten an A in Computer Ethics if you said "yeah, we should publicly show women nude pictures of themselves if someone asks in the comments section", but here we are.
It's not great. As a field, we have been remiss in our duty to society.
Lyft is also a scam for the drivers. In a ride from the airport to home during rush hour (1h and 15 minutes drive) I got charged ~$140. The company was paying, so whatever. During the ride I was chatting with the driver, and I was curious how much he was making from the ride. At the end of the ride he showed me. $48 (before my tip). WTF. From that he had to pay gas, maintenance and taxes. How is this legal? What is t…
LLM writing style. Including obvious em-dashes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some locations banks are allowed to charge you for the interests they will loose out on when their clients pay more of the principal. In other locations this has been deemed illegal and/or only allowed above a certain amount (think 10-15% of total remaining principal). I do not agree with this being an ok practice (to charge).
If we're talking normal credit cards in the US, you technically are getting a 30 day loan for free, no interest if paid in full every month. I don't see a issue if credit cards charged 30d interest on balance, but if mine did that I would drop it instantly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to write tests for a cryptocurrency trading platform. I regularly talked to the auditors, as they were the ones who made sure that the crypto we transferred into external wallets made it back into internal wallets after the test. I wouldn't say that I knew a bunch of accounting practices from talking to them, but I _did_ learn that the CTO and director of QA both lied to me during my interview. Sure, we made _…
Yup. Engineers do have visibility into fintech systems that they implement, maybe even more so than the bean counters since they can trace exactly which txns went where. These things are logged.
> we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison This in particular sounds very fake to me. If they are delaying the regular orders, then they are either a) having drivers sit idle or b) freeing up resources for the priority orders. In the (b) case this would just deliver the promised prioritization beha…
Beyond an initial effect when the delay is first implemented, adding a delay would increase the latency (waiting time) but not the throughput (utilisation of the system). It's queuing theory. A way to think of it is that the drivers that are made idle by adding a delay will be kept busy delivering previously delayed orders.
I believe throughput would actually be reduced every time demand increases, which would happen in the morning, at various meal times, around the different opening and closing times of various restaurants, etc.
I do agree that the throughput reduction would be more complex than “1 driver sits idle for every 1 order”.
Without evidence this is just fiction, I don’t trust some random Reddit post.
Knowing the tech industry it sounds entirely plausible. I'm surprised people think this is news.
Facebook, dating apps, etc all do similar things with affinities and desperation to boost engagement.
The pearl clutching is just cope from people who haven't yet internalized that our industry encourages and glorifies deploying scummy practices at a huge scale.