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Comment by _puk | Hacker News Reader

If there's financial incentive for it to, why wouldn't it?

The way I see it, the best way to serve is to remove all financial incentives.

My dream is a free of cost at the point of service Uber pool like service that takes you door to door in one of those Ford transit vans.

Over time, you learn patterns and put in mass public transit and the door to door vans then become door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door

At least that's my dream for the US where we are spread apart like this

We already have this in downtown Houston but you don't get a Transit van.

Instead it's a little battery-powered multi-passenger buggy, covered with ads and limited to downtown.

>door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door

Still works like this but once you take the train or bus outside of downtown, then you're back on your own for the "last miles" except for a few other non-contiguous neighborhoods where they are beginning to add additional cells of this limited-area connector service.

This has been willingly subsidized by the major businesses in each service area, so it is free to use on its own, once you get onto the regular public transit though, then normal fares apply there.

Because some startup that's managed to cobble together a pizza-extruding machine that works when 20 technicians are standing around it carefully watching is not something whose future success you want to bet your business on?

Some of the greatest breakthroughs are when there is no financial incentive, or when unbridled ambition outperforms sometimes very significant runs for the cash.

There’s physics for one. The dough takes the temperature and time it takes to bake in the oven, the rocket needs certain ampunt of propulsion to fly etc.

So, the "it'll get better" is the robot pizza learning.

There's no reason it won't improve because we know that there is actually a world in which amazing pizzas exist.

Teleporters seems a rather random comparison for the sibling reply

I talked about rockets, not ”teleporters”. I also let aside that these systems do not learn, let’s pretend they do. What will it improve in? What does it mean to ”improve”? Ask yourself, what makes the difference between an amazing pizza and kinda ok pizza? How do you quantify that? Is it a binary value the way a mathematic formula either works or doesn’t, or how code runs or does not? Or is it more like poetry? kinda hard to srite into code when something that is literally a matter of taste is ”good”.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter, Marinara is pretty easy to make, 5 ingredients in an oven. Can we improve upen speed, like they say on the article? Up to a point yes, but there’s a bottleneck, the dough itself. It takes certain amount of time to make it into a oval shape, you can’t go too fast, since you break it. And then it has to be in the oven a certain amount of time, no matter what. That has nothing to do with automation, but the physical facts of the matter itself.

Now you have an average pizza that cost a fortune to make, but we accomplished it slightly faster than $10/h pizza chef. You see why those startups all fold?

What makes an amazing coffee?

That's a truly dialled in experience based on many iterations and fine control of input factors.

That's the parallel I'm envisaging.

Robo pizza doesn't need to mean 30 second pizza.

Just a perfect pizza at the end of the process with no humans involved.

I see that as infinitely achievable.

There's a financial incentive to invent teleporters, and yet...

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