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A bit surprised OpenAI didn’t acquire coda. Solid leadership team and the product would be a nice complement to OAI’s current portfolio. Lots of AI usage will seamlessly live in productivity tools which means OAI is disintermediated at point of use by its biggest rival Google (workspace) or its frenemy MSFT (office). Coda’s tools seemed well built and available for a fraction of the cost of buying eg Notion.

I would love to do this.. if only there were Uber/Lyft options on the watch

Sure—that seems like it can in certain instances be a great system. In general I think a fair/free labor market means individuals should have as many options as possible, including a government backstop, to leverage when negotiating with firms who want to buy their time.

This seems like terrible legislation. Yes, part time gig workers are exposed to harms that employees don’t face (i.e. lack of health insurance). But the ability to work flexibly and between lots of companies has huge upside for them and for firms. Why not tax companies who use these workers and put the tax revenue toward a special health insurance / social safety net specifically for gig workers? Mitigates many of the downsides and preserves flexibility.

I’m not sure I agree with the last line that these groups prize unity at the expense of truth. My takeaway from the rest of the article is that trust (performed as social cohesion) is the underlying social value that we are actually talking about in many of these conversations. Both verifiable truth (e.g. scientific predictions that we can trust) and fictions (e.g. elaborate stories that give us a shortcut to trust, as mentioned in the article) play a part in building trust. Successful organizations understand the right mix of truth and fiction to inspire trust—the morals of bible stories are powerful because they are “true” for many people to the extent that seem to reflect many people’s day to day experience. So, rather than unity vs truth, maybe we should think of unity as a function of a variety of strategies, one of which is truth? And successful organizations as ones that find the right balance?

It seems like they're following the "Donald Trump" strategy of publicity: (1)do something scandalous (2)get picked up by mainstream media for a cycle of handwringing/counter-handwringing, (3)profit (in form of outsize impact): you have the left angry, the right banding together in indignation, and the truly undecided unsure if what they're seeing is this "fake news" they've heard about. No billions required.

I hope other companies follow Stripe's lead here. Anecdotally, I've never been as happy and productive as I've been the past few years as a remote worker. It seems to me too few companies are taking advantage of the opportunity here. The few challenges I've encountered seem solvable: (1) effective team culture building: can be solved with travel budget & prioritization of good team cultural norms by team leads (2) whole team collaborative brainstorming (particularly when facing a "fire drill"-type time-constrained challenge): more challenging to solve from what I've seen, but might be solved by some combination of better tech and better work practices

I'm interested to hear how Stripe addresses these and which challenges they find.

One question at a higher level: what are the immigration law impacts here? Does Stripe need to get H1Bs for internationally located workers? I hope not: effective remote work is fantastic step toward bringing labor mobility more in line with capital mobility, with potentially positive effects on income, taxation, and social policies for people around the world.

I deleted it Jan 1 2018 and am trying to decide whether to reactivate Jan 1 2019. No part of me misses News Feed or mindless scrolling, but Events and Groups have become an essential part of discovering and organizing social events for my peers (I’m late 20s, live in Europe, am in grad school). I don’t think I will reactivate, but I find it interesting that those have become the “stickiest” part of Facebook: I have so many other channels for close interaction (email, text) and interaction with strangers (Twitter, Medium) but that mid-range acquaintance circle is most easily accessible (only accessible?) on Facebook

In all of these deal announcements, the key words are “up to”. That’s very different from a confirmed 62k order, and in all announcements related to that agreement timing of delivery was unconfirmed [0]. [0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/business/waymo-chrysle...

This is a bit of a let down and suggests to me that either they are not confident in the tech arriving at scale any time soon or they are not serious about directly challenging Uber. These are expensive vehicles and not custom-designed for a self-driving transportation service. I would be surprised if they were much cheaper per ride than Uber in cheap markets.

If they were serious about taking on Uber/Lyft soon I would expect them to be willing to make a bet on a long-life, extremely cost-focused custom vehicle. Maybe this is a stop gap to keep proving the tech until someone else (Uber?) gets impatient, licenses their tech, and spends the vehicle capital.

I bought the series 3+LTE hoping to get a device that would allow me to leave my phone home when I went out at night. After getting stranded one too many times when the Uber and Lyft apps both failed, I abandoned that dream. Hopefully broader watch adoption and watchOS 5 fixes this (I’m not sure which exactly is causing the problem). Judging from conversations with my friends, I’m not alone. It seems like “ability to reliably hail a ride” is key functionality for any technology that hopes to replace a phone in any meaningful part of someone’s daily/nightly routine in a place like San Francisco.

How do you get to 20-30% margins off of $1/mi costs? Uber and Lyft are already <$1/mi for pooled services and around $1-1.50/mi for non-pooled services in low cost markets. Price competition should make anything beyond classic transportation margins of (negative) - ~5% standard for any self-driving taxi service. 20-30% gross margins might be standard but operating margins at that level seem like a pipe dream.

I agree those other factors are complex and challenging to develop, particularly for Waymo which has the additional challenge of delivering self-driving tech that works.

But Lyft (and Uber for that matter...) doesn't really have those capabilities today anyway, at least to the extent they will be needed for autonomous fleets. They have blunt tools for supply and demand management, but drivers take on much of the risk in terms of positioning, routing, and deciding whether or not to get on the road in the first place. If Waymo owns their fleet, will they let Lyft have complete control over their assets without some balance or at the very least data to make sure the vehicles are being used efficiently? And if Waymo learns enough about scheduling, routing, etc. to make sure Lyft is using the vehicles efficiently, how much harder is it for Waymo to just run the vehicles efficiently themselves and capture the value of owning a direct relationship with the end rider?

It will be interesting to see how Lyft's partnership with Waymo evolves given this tech announcement and Waymo's acknowledgment that they plan to offer their own ridesharing service.

Lyft's approach to self-driving partnerships in general seems to rest on the assumption that self-driving providers will catch up to each other before any of them can fully handle everything a human driver can do. If this assumption is correct, Lyft ends up in the great position of being compatible with all major self-driving providers before any of them can feasibly launch a standalone service without Lyft's driver network (who wants to take a car service that doesn't take you downtown? Or doesn't work in the rain?). Ideally, this means Lyft can negotiate favorable terms with all the providers and maintain their position as marketplace brokering between riders and ride providers (either human or robot).

But, if this announcement means Waymo is truly way ahead of the competition, is Lyft aiding and abetting its own demise by covering Waymo's short-term holes (weather, urban areas, etc) up until the day that Waymo can cut Lyft out and run their own service? If Waymo is the only self-driving game in town, and they solve the urban case, why do they need Lyft? I wonder if we'll see any tension develop between the two if leadership at Lyft starts to get concerned about this scenario being a likely outcome.

Waymo is doing this with real, public customers (albeit hand-selected ones) in Phoenix[0]. Uber has been doing this for months with customers in Pittsburgh[1]. This is certainly a sign that Cruise is making good progress, but I wouldn't say it means they've leapfrogged the competition by any means.

[0] https://waymo.com/apply/ [1] https://www.uber.com/blog/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-self-driving...

At 6:40, Bonderman (a male board member) makes a sexist joke about women leading to "more talking" on boards [0]. Seems like the leadership team's cultural issues go beyond Travis.

[0] https://twitter.com/SallyPancakes/status/874720682822828032

Probably a shift from testing mostly on the highway (which was the initial proving ground for the program) to testing on surface streets