"2. Self Driving Cars. In the US the players that will determine whether self driving cars are successful or abandoned are #1 Waymo (Google) and #2 Zoox (Amazon). No one else matters. The key metric will be human intervention rate as that will determine profitability." - I love that he's not mentioning the speculation company of the century. We don't have to mention it either.

Tesla? I don't love the company or the owner, but it seems silly to completely dismiss them so early on, relatively speaking. Self driving has been a decades long effort; even though I am heavily in favor of Waymo, some speculation towards Tesla's path seems fair. At the same time, I agree with the article here:

> Tesla (owned by Tesla) has put on a facade of being operational, but it is not operational in the sense of the other two services, and faces regulatory headwinds that both Waymo and Zoox have long been able to satisfy. They are not on a path to becoming a real service.

Given that fully driverless Model Ys and Cybercabs have been spotted going around Austin, I find that the "they are not on a path to becoming a real service" is a little too strongly worded.

Given Tesla's abysmal track record on keeping their promises I feel like it is justified to dismiss them, at the risk of being surprised if they do make it.

Both of these can be true at the same time:

* Elon has been making wildly exaggerated and over-optimistic claims for a decade and continues to do so

* Tesla has recently made huge strides in capability and has a clear path to full autonomy

And to be fair, many other car companies also promised self driving cars, e.g. Audi in 2014 promising driverless cars by 2016 [1]. It's just that Tesla is still executing on the promise whereas many other carmakers have fizzled out on their ambitions. As the Rodney Brooks article itself mentions,

> As a reminder of how strong the hype was and the certainty of promises that it was just around the corner here is a snapshot of a whole bunch of predictions by major executives from 2017.

[1] https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/a610930/audi-promises-to-del...

Seems overly reductive, both supply and demand will determine what happens. So far demand for Waymos seem fine, they can stimulate it way further by lowering the prices. The problem is on the supply side, specifically unit price economics. Intervention per mile is just one part that goes into profitability and I doubt it's biggest one. I would estimate the costs to be in this order - vehicle cost, maintenance (and vehicle longevity), human intervention, charging, fleet management (cleaning, etc), and regulatory environment.

In particular, Jaguar Waymos are over 150k a pop. It seems far fetched that any of them will make ever break even. New generation is reportedly $75k per vehicle which is significantly better. I could not find any data for Zoox vehicle cost, but given how few of them there are it's a non-player.

Finally the elephant in the room. Outside of camera vs lidar holy war, Tesla seems well positioned to dominate supply side of the equation if the demand shows up. Robotaxis are reportedly under $35k, they own the factories and know how to build more, they also own the maintenance side.

You can build a GMC panel van that seats 12 for about $20k, I don't think vehicle cost is a significant hurdle.

You can’t build a self driving GMC panel van with non-Tesla tech for $20k.

(Or, probably, with Tesla tech. But you definitely can’t do it without.)

> I love that he's not mentioning the speculation company of the century. We don't have to mention it either.

The word 'Tesla' appears 17 times in the article.

I think they remove the invoice after a month. You can also, send them cash in an envelope

So there's no subscription thing going on, you just manually pay invoices?

I once spent an entire year issuing chargebacks on AWS charges coming from god knows what AWS account. Most likely some client project I forgot about and didn't have the login to anymore, who knows. Makes me think about that - for a service where you can't login if you lose the credentials, how do you cancel a subscription? In my case I had to eventually just cancel the credit card and get a new number.

No subscription. It’s pay as you go. You top up $X and you get X months. That’s it. If your month expires, it expires. Just top off and you’re good to go.

WTF Apple. And, yes, I've been the same boat. Thank for pinpointing that this is not me but rather another genius Apple design.

What about an iPhone. Can you change the battery without specialized tools?

From 2027 onwards the answer will need to be yes, as a result of these standards.

And this time the whole world can thank the EU, Apple is definitely not going to create a special iPhone hardware just for us.

Or curse the EU, if the compromises necessary to make the battery replaceable result in a less robust product.

If you don't care about e-waste and repairability, of course.

If the phone is less waterproof or otherwise breaks more frequently, it could result in more e-waste.

Except they do. Theres country specific variations of the iPhone, with Hong Kong being the special region that got dual sim.

Or Apple will throw a hissy fit¹, stop selling them directly here, but get the sales anyway as people will buy them elsewhere and import to sell on the grey market.

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[1] Though last time they did that, disabling existing features in response to the app stores decision, they backed down PDQ, so maybe that threat would have no weight.

I "envy" DownDetector these days ... I wanna know how much money they are making out of these Cloudflare downs...

Have you tried Ruby on Rails. That's my experience with Rails. Everytime I've tried something else (for web dev), I just felt too spoiled with Ruby & Rails and went back. This includes Django and Phoenix (Elixir).

Edit: The only thing that Rails lacks is a decent Admin UI included as part of Rails. I know that there are some external gems that can be used, yet that's something that should be part of the framework in my opinion.

Even before you get to the lacking Admin UI, the first thing Rails asks me to do is implement authentication. Coming from a true batteries-included framework like Django that feels like a complete non-starter.

Rails now provides an authentication generator that creates a super terse but fully customisable auth capability. Here’s an example: https://insidertrades.directory/built-with-rails/google-sign...

I use Django a lot and it's great, but even I have to admit that Ruby on Rails is better. It's just that I don't really do a lot of Ruby, so I ended up on the familiar tech stack, and also finding other developers to join a project is much easier with Python.

It's beautiful and helpful. Thanks for sharing. Which are your top competitors in your opinion?

There are many that do this TBH.

But currently the only competition I consider is Paprika. They have been in this game for over a decade.

I am going to add recipe imports directly from Paprika soon too. For people who would migrate from Paprika to Only Recipe.

I know it's a long shot, but I am going for it. :)

Which is not not smart.

edit: highlight: "not not". I think it's very smart.

Why is it not smart?

The classical answer would be RCA, who famously bought Carpetland, Banquet Foods, and Hertz car rental, and was bequeathed the moniker "Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles" by the investment community.

Buying a stake in Nokia is admittedly different than taking it over and managing it, but the danger there is very clear. Distracted management that strays away from core competence can easily kill the golden goose driving revenue.

The contrarian view is that Berkshire Hathaway is able to hold an array of successful manufacturing and service businesses (Kirby vacuum cleaners, Dairy Queen, Clayton Homes, and the prominent Sees Candy) without losing management control of GEICO and their other insurance holdings.

Hopefully, Nvidia sees the example of RCA and Gulf Western, and will not lose focus on their core competence.

RCA famously birthed the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. I think that focused trade regulation would prevent a repeat of that event in modern times.

Edit: It appears that RCA bought Coronet Carpets, not Carpetland.

There were two nots

Such a smart move to "limit" piracy.

OK, it seems you are on the path of another 8 fig exit. Good on you. It seems like a great project and could possible save so much time if well executed and well integrated.

I've added it to SaaSHub saashub.com/orgtools. If you have an @orgtools.com email you can verify and improve the profile. Cheers!