I think it's more comparable to Uber or Lyft. Some passengers may actually prefer to not have a driver chatting with them.

Yup, for some types of rides it's definitely better, and the not having to chat up the driver is definitely an advantage.

To take off as a real replacement for ownership, self driving cars likely needs to meet at least these criteria: 1) overall cheaper vs ownership for average mileage/year, maybe 12kmiles/yr. 2) consistent delivery of car to rider in <5-10min, 3) a way to ensure the cars are always clean when they arrive (how? route them all through a cleaning station first?/lotsa cameras in the car to monitor cleanliness?/ability to order replacement car in <3min?).

Seems the short rides

, if they are cheaper than ownership, .

maybe? But also LiDAR just gives a more complete picture of what is around the car. I think this is supported by how many miles waymo cars run unsupervised vs Tesla.

I am skeptical that tesla has this solved but interested in seeing how it goes when as they move to expand their robotaxi service.

This is just off the cuff, but I could go for something sort of like a 'daily paper' deal where I get debited a couple bucks for access to the news papers site for a day, or maybe even just the materials published that day, but that sort of seems more complicated to implement.

Then, if I'm reading it so often that it would be more cost effective to just subscribe they can start pinging me about it.

We have that implemented, it's just that nobody wanted it. Our pitch basically was that "Why can you buy today's paper on the stand, but can't do the same digitally?" Turn out the answer is complicated.

Yeah this kind of work is really important but man I just don't think I could do it.

It is, but it is not one of those jobs that you don't take home with you. EMT also has my respect, I could not do their work either but this is a level of nasty that makes you lose any kind of hope for humanity.

They seemed to have given up on this in some areas. I don't think they asked me this once during my visit to France in October. This included Paris and smaller towns.

I have been able to prototype way faster. I can explain how I want a prototype reworked and it's often successful. Doesn't always work, but super useful more often than not.

very interesting to find other folks who jibed with this comic at a young age. My mom and aunt had cubicle jobs and the entire idea seemed very fun to me. I recall looking at my 4th grade classroom and thinking we could really benefit from some cubicles.

Sadly I'm doomed to work in an open floorplan.

I wasn't exactly a daily reader at the time, but I was sad to hear when dilbert was pulled, and why. I tried to send him some fan mail when I heard he had fallen ill, but the email of his that I found had been deleted.

My very first job in tech I had a cubicle, but that was the only time. I’m also not a fan of open floor plans, but seems like they’re standard now. Feels like a “careful what you wish for” situation since everyone hated the idea of “cubicle farms” and wanted them gone (like the famous scene in Office Space), but somehow open floor plan is actually worse.

I actually had an office at my first tech job. It was more like a cubicle that went to the ceiling, with a sliding door. I didn't know how good I had it.

Yeah I agree. It was a little weird without a touch screen, but at that point I was not navigating the start menu visually with a mouse anymore anyway.

Windows phone was great. I think I got it when Android was still growing up. I liked the focus and the speed for sure.

Microsoft's bread and butter is no longer OSes, I think, and it's unfortunately starting to show.

replit worked really well as a way to play with code ideas. Going from 0 to running code on their site is very handy. I can try something out in python without much setup, as someone who rarely uses the language.

I tried their AI coding feature a few months back, and it was quite bad, but it was interesting to watch it iterate.

I am comparing it to the state of the art of AI envs and as for the setup; github could also do that for quite a long time now (but it got a lot easier and cheaper); for the past, I would say year, it was easy to experiment with whatever on github too, and recently on chatgpt and claude. All of them now have containers that start which can run anything.

So they caught up with Replit there, but AI wise replit didn't catch up with them. Sure it is interesting to watch it iterate, but that is also interesting for all the others as they do that too, just better.

I cannot see why one would use replit over the rest at this point but obviously that can change if it does get significantly better.