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Like, no matter how many tech journalists (lol) hype it up. I refuse to believe anything with this amount of fidelity and flexibility exists until the result is literally in my hand.
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Jul 6, 2018 14:56
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AceOfFlames posted:
Now instead of mashing zero at every menu item, you have give a Turing test to the voice on the other end of the line.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:06
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It's going to be another bullshit layer in the "can I just talk to a loving HUMAN BEING" process while calling support lines.
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To be fair I don't think an imperfect AI would be noticeably worse than an outsourced call centre employee reading off a script. In fact, given that AI could still be constrained in such a way to provide exactly the desired responses without having to follow a script or a flowchart so rigidly, it could easily be better until you reach a higher support tier.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:30
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withak posted:Now instead of mashing zero at every menu item, you have give a Turing test to the voice on the other end of the line. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrP-_T-h9YM
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Jul 6, 2018 15:36
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MiddleOne posted:Like, no matter how many tech journalists (lol) hype it up. I refuse to believe anything with this amount of fidelity and flexibility exists until the result is literally in my hand. This is generally a safe bet with literally everything technological these days.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:37
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Mods, can we have a new top-of-thread thread poll on how long before Uber is sold/merged for pennies on the dollar?
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Jul 6, 2018 18:01
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Can Uber have a "run on the bank" scenario with their investors?
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Jul 6, 2018 20:19
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PT6A posted:To be fair I don't think an imperfect AI would be noticeably worse than an outsourced call centre employee reading off a script. The only thing I ever get out of phone AIs is “I’m sorry. I did not understand that. Press 1 to listen to the menu again.” I pray for the day when all companies have text chat support, or websites that actually do something, because I loathe having to call companies.
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Jul 6, 2018 20:22
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AceOfFlames posted:"I'm sick of these outsourced call centers! Why can't I speak to some who speaks proper ENGLISH?" I went on a rant in maybe the legal questions thread about how even the phone trees that require you to speak (and have no number options) are a big fat ADA violation because they don't work for people with even minor speech impairments (which don't require a TDD or relay service with a live person.) There will be so much worse. Too bad the Republicans just gutted ada self-enforcement.
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Jul 6, 2018 21:02
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Mercury Ballistic posted:Can Uber have a "run on the bank" scenario with their investors? Do you think buying private untrading stock entitles to make a withdrawal from Uber account? You must to try to convince other investor to buy your stake and even then can only do with Uber approval.
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Jul 6, 2018 21:42
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Mercury Ballistic posted:Can Uber have a "run on the bank" scenario with their investors? Any money already invested is gone unless they were able to successfully sue for breach of fiduciary duty or fraud. However, most VC works by having stages of funding and milestones for getting money released. So even if a VC hooks up for a series of funding, the actual money won't necessarily transfer over until Uber can meet whatever requirements set up for it. I'm not sure how Uber's funding is currently structured; but they have received an assload of actual money that they've burnt so there are plenty of investors who could be out significant amounts of money with zero recourse.
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Jul 6, 2018 22:00
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Why do people believe that Uber is actually in bad financial shape?
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Jul 6, 2018 23:08
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blah_blah posted:Why do people believe that Uber is actually in bad financial shape? They’ve never made money, op.
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Jul 6, 2018 23:11
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blah_blah posted:Why do people believe that Uber is actually in bad financial shape? Because they take a loss on every sale basically. Choice quote about their 2017 numbers quote:Despite a turbulent year for the ride-hailing company, sales were $7.5 billion. But the company also posted a substantial loss of $4.5 billion. There are few historical precedents for the scale of its loss. Hmmm taking a loss of $4.5b on $7.5b of revenue? Why on Earth would anyone believe they're in bad shape. 
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Jul 6, 2018 23:15
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blah_blah posted:Why do people believe that Uber is actually in bad financial shape? uber has never turned a profit and continues to spend tremendous amounts of money. the company has spent over ten billion dollars so far. this is all done as basically a big bet that uber will be able to establish a huge market and eventually raise rates and become profitable however, uber's business model is extremely easy to copy and it is not clear that the company will be able to raise rates to a sustainable level without driving away all their customers to smaller competitors who aren't spending lavishly on expansion. even uber's drivers often drive for their competitors at the same time, there's no reason at all to assume people will continue to choose uber as a service if uber doubles their rates meanwhile, uber is also involved in lots of goofy schemes like flying cars, freight brokerage, and self driving cars that aren't strictly aligned with their core business model of being a jumped up taxi company. all of which are pretty obviously just there to make big promises to attract more investment
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Jul 6, 2018 23:17
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Raldikuk posted:Because they take a loss on every sale basically. Choice quote about their 2017 numbers A guy I worked with in the 1990's became an exec at Amazon. I told him the same thing, about Amazon, in 2000. I wrote: quote:Here s the point. It's very easy to adopt a siege mentality. His reply: quote:disagree with you. Best refutation would be Walt Mossberg's piece in Sept. 2000
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Jul 6, 2018 23:23
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VideoGameVet posted:A guy I worked with in the 1990's became an exec at Amazon. I told him the same thing, about Amazon, in 2000. amazon famously invested in infrastructure to support a foundation of future growth uber is investing mostly in expanding their brand without addressing the problem that they have no real infrastructure, just a shitload of contractors. it's possible that uber will spend twenty billion dollars simply on ensuring that people of the future call all app hailed taxis 'ubers' as a generic term like kleenex
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Jul 6, 2018 23:32
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So Uber is on fire and is barely alive, but what about Lyft? What are they doing differently?
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Jul 7, 2018 00:04
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CongoJack posted:So Uber is on fire and is barely alive, but what about Lyft? What are they doing differently? Well they don't have Travis Kalanick being a walking PR disaster for one. And I think they're less aggressive about expanding with all the necessary short term losses that entails.
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Jul 7, 2018 00:14
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CongoJack posted:So Uber is on fire and is barely alive, but what about Lyft? What are they doing differently? They’re not stealing rape victims’ medical records.
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Jul 7, 2018 00:15
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Lyft doesn't have as much toxic tech industry business practices going on, or at least they are better at keeping it under wraps.
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Jul 7, 2018 00:18
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VideoGameVet posted:A guy I worked with in the 1990's became an exec at Amazon. I told him the same thing, about Amazon, in 2000. do you keep this email that's 18 years old around for a reason or what
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Jul 7, 2018 00:21
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the only thing i get from your post is that every old person, no matter what field they worked in, can't figure out how to delete emails
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Jul 7, 2018 00:22
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:Do you think buying private untrading stock entitles to make a withdrawal from Uber account? You must to try to convince other investor to buy your stake and even then can only do with Uber approval. uber has debt financing as well. The terms of the debt allow for several different ways for debt holders to collect that do not involve getting anyone to buy more of uber. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-07/uber-technologies-is-said-to-seek-1-25-billion-in-loan-market
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Jul 7, 2018 00:31
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mandatory lesbian posted:the only thing i get from your post is that every old person, no matter what field they worked in, can't figure out how to delete emails Gmail would like to know why you would ever delete e-mails, now that they've invented this great thing called "search" (2004).
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Jul 7, 2018 01:52
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VideoGameVet posted:A guy I worked with in the 1990's became an exec at Amazon. I told him the same thing, about Amazon, in 2000. Amazon is famous for its lackluster profit #'s, but throughout its history its net income has almost always been positive. Same for their operating cash flow. They run on the razor's edge pouring everything back into the business to grow it. Like your friend said with growing into new markets. The biggest investments that they made that have paid off is with AWS. And that itself came about because their business fundamentally needed that tech infrastructure under it to handle peak loads. Uber's comparable there would be autonomous vehicles. In 18 years I might have egg on my face cuz Uber is able to pull off the impossible, but I won't hold my breath. The situation is not the same for Uber which has never had a year of positive net income and its only quarter to date where that was true was Q1'18 because of a sale of assets to a competitor. Uber loses a ton of money just offering the service they're in business for. They of course additionally lose a ton of money trying to expand into markets which they have no edge in. Their strategy is also to have their main product be a loss leader for a fantasy. Two in fact. The first is Uber's belief that they can create a monopoly in the scheduled-fare taxi market. The idea is that they can have cheap fares, get monopolistic market share, and then raise prices through the roof. As mentioned upthread, this is very unlikely because of how easy it is to copy Uber's model. There's the other problem that it simply isn't sustainable to churn through drivers at the rate Uber does. Their second fantasy is the belief that if they can hold out long enough while developing market share, that they can eventually eliminate the need for drivers with AV and solve their whole losing money on every transaction problem. Amazon ran razor thin margins in aggregate; but they never had their core business take a loss as a matter of doing business. The only reason Uber hasn't flamed out already is that they are able to cajole more VC cash. Keeping that up is their best hope of staying alive in the short & medium term. Luckily for Uber capital is actively searching for high risk endeavors in the hopes of big payoffs.
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Jul 7, 2018 02:03
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Evil Robot posted:Gmail would like to know why you would ever delete e-mails, now that they've invented this great thing called "search" (2004). cause i see no value in keeping worthless emails around? thats the main reason anyway
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Jul 7, 2018 02:11
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https://twitter.com/bbhart_ca/status/1015406543641034752
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Jul 7, 2018 02:29
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 This is so they can release images from "right before" accidents showing the driver doing some dumb poo poo rather than their car being at fault.
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Jul 7, 2018 02:35
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Imagine Uber got everything they wanted (except the autonomous car pipedream stuff): - Drivers are independent contractors, Uber isn't liable for anything they do - Uber isn't covered by taxi laws and regulations - Lyft and all other ridesharing companies go out of business Uber jacks up their price and start raking in obscene profit. At that point, there's nothing that stops Uber2 from entering the market. - There's nothing risky or special about the software. A million or two and six months will get you an equivalent app+backend. - Uber's already established that ridesharing is exempt from taxi laws, so there's no regulatory barrier - The drivers are contractors. Uber2 can get them to be also be Uber2 drivers by increasing their pay per ride and cutting their obscene profit slightly. It's easy enough for a driver to run both apps. - Uber2 can lure customers by charging them less and cutting obscene profit again (especially if drivers have Uber2 sticker alongside their Uber ones, so it's obvious that it's exactly the same people and service). No one is brand-loyal to Uber. It's not the same situation as Amazon because building logistics and warehousing to sell people a huge variety of widgets with economical 2-day shipping is risky, expensive, and hard to build out incrementally. Starting Amazon2 to undercut them is a lot harder
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Jul 7, 2018 02:59
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The tesla beeps at you if you don't touch the wheel every x number of seconds, cadillac "super cruise" lets you drive hands free but vibrates your chair if it's eye tracking decides you aren't looking at the road enough. So they are probably getting in line with what other cars on the market do.
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Jul 7, 2018 03:45
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1 good example of Uber being in a horrible business situation is that when they drastically cut driver pay in Honolulu literally everyone, both drivers and customers, switched to Lyft nearly overnight. They still haven't really recovered. No one has loyalty to their brand because they are literally identical to all other taxi apps.
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Jul 7, 2018 03:46
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There are a lot of unhappy Amazon shareholders because Amazon insists on plowing profits back into the business instead of issuing dividends or buying back stock at the scale other companies do.
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Jul 7, 2018 14:30
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There are also a lot of happy Amazon shareholders because it's increased over 300% in the last four years.
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Jul 7, 2018 15:00
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Mozi posted:There are also a lot of happy Amazon shareholders because it's increased over 300% in the last four years. But I want money noooow!
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Jul 7, 2018 15:17
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MickeyFinn posted:
Drivers React To Their Horrible Death By Car Crash Be sure to Comment, Like and Subscribe
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Jul 7, 2018 16:13
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Ghost Leviathan posted:But I want money noooow! Then just sell...? Like trust me. There are no unhappy Amazon shareholders this year. The share price is exploding because, beyond the hype, everyone can see clear as day that Amazon is approaching a monopoly with the US legislative too paralyzed to do anything about it.
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Jul 7, 2018 16:43
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MiddleOne posted:Then just sell...? Fair enough, I just thought that sums up end-stage capitalists.
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Jul 7, 2018 16:57
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MickeyFinn posted:
kinda - for liability purposes it is essential for first gen self driving cars to be able to prove (by the manufacturer or insurer) whether or not accidents could possibly be a machine defect or if the tech was misused since everyone wants the tech so they can goof off instead of paying attention, which is exactly how you should not use the tech, manufacturers are very interested in this and it is likely to be ubiquitous soon. insurance companies have already been offering discounts for teen drivers for a decade if you point a camera at them which is how we get fun videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDWmwxQ_NnY
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Jul 7, 2018 17:13
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luxury handset posted:since everyone wants the tech so they can goof off instead of paying attention, which is exactly how you should not use the tech This is exactly how level 4 self driving cars should be though. Anything less than that should not be advertised as self driving
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Jul 7, 2018 18:06
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