3,922 karma · joined March 31, 2007
e: my username @berkeley.edu - put “HN” in the subject line
w: zamfi.net
Let me quote the illustrious submeta here:
> This topic was dealth with so controversially, so polarisingly, that it divides the nation. One group even made a political program with being anti-covid measures, pretending there are dark forces limiting personal freedom etc.
That just about covers it.
In many industries large players will benefit from economics of scale. This is definitely true for Uber. But it's not a natural monopoly position -- if someone could offer the same service for half the price, people would switch, as we all expect they will when Waymo does this.
This is different from, e.g., AirBnB, where there's not that much a competitor could offer, necessarily, and they'd have to build a huge set of inventory from scratch, a true two-sided marketplace. A competitor that manages to cut the service fee in half would still face an uphill battle building up that marketplace.
I don't consider Uber/Lyft to be self-driving taxi services. There's no question these are different.
Winner-take-most markets, like Uber, tend to be two-sided marketplaces with major network effects: folks use Uber because they’re pretty ubiquitously available and relatively inexpensive; they’ve available because the many users request many trips which makes working for Uber as a driver appealing. (Ditto AirBnB, etc.)
But Waymo’s competitive advantage is pretty much only technology here. There is an argument to be made that this technology has a “network effect”-style moat: you need massive amounts of data from cars to build the tech; you get that data by being first to market. But this post doesn’t make this argument, it simply points to Uber/Lyft/the-taxi-app-graveyard and says “see?”
It’s also not clear that this set of data will forever be as critical as it is now, nor that in 10 years it won’t be comparatively easy to collect.
If the only edge that Waymo has here is technology, that’s not a natural monopoly position on its own. Autonomous driving is surely hard, but it’s an absolute-performance-baseline task, not a zero-sum market like ads. The existence of one set of 0.0001%-accident-rate-drivers doesn’t prevent anyone else from producing a 0.0001%-accident-rate self-driving car. There’s a small market stickiness effect from being first, sure, but this is not the same kind of natural monopoly as a two-sided marketplace. It’s clear why users use Uber and AirBnB over alternatives: it’s where the drivers and properties are, and that takes time to build up and it hard to take away. It’s not clear why someone would be a tied to Waymo if another equally-available self-driving taxi were available that were substantially less expensive, even if it were marginally less safe. (Of course, everyone has their trade-off point here—consider airlines: while people are more likely to pick an airline based on convenience and price, rather than safety record, these days—United perhaps excepted—that’s only true because the overall accident rate is so low.)
Assuming the baseline for “safe operation” doesn’t escalate, improvement in technology (e.g., more capable GPUs, better sensors, more public datasets) will only make this baseline easier to reach for newcomers. If the tech gets easy enough, all it will take for a new entrant is CapEx, and it’s not clear how Google would differentiate, and could end up as a single commodity provider among many, rather than a two-way marketplace owner benefitting from network effects on both sides.
That said, to construct a monopoly here, Waymo does have a couple of options:
1. Argue for regulation around self-driving cars that protects incumbents, by (e.g.) setting safety standards that are impossible for new entrants to meet. The NRC has a “good” model for this: by analogy to nuclear plants, any new vehicles on the market would need to prove that they are better than existing vehicles in the market.
2. Cut deals with major auto manufacturers so that incumbents just can’t get the data through partnerships with camera-equipped vehicle manufacturers.
Number 2 seems like it could be clearly anticompetitive, but number 1’s playbook is being written by the big AI companies as we speak.
Perhaps one advantage of these agents is that they degrade fast enough that they cause relatively limited harm after destroying their host cell, maybe unlike other poisons?
I'm not particularly fond of the founder hype train, and the typical line is indeed "various risks and blah blah blah" but what's often left out is that employee #1 at a post-funding startup is a pretty different job/profile than co-founder.
Most employee #1's don't have relationships with investors, might not be as employable outside the startup world, and they don't sit on the board, don't have the same formal responsibilities, and rarely are able to raise money to found their own startup -- in fact, this is the often the key reason they're even interested in being employee #1.
It's a market, and as a market I'm not sure it's that skewed.
Want 25%+ of the company? Start it. There's no cabal preventing you from doing that. Have better options than 1% of a likely-dead startup, that pay more and have better WLB? Take them.
After all, few industries give any employees equity. First employee at an ice cream parlor? 0%. First employee of a hedge fund? 0%. First employee of a medical practice? 0%.
Equity grants can be motivating and aligning, and frankly more industries should probably consider them. But not that many people are in a position to found a startup that can raise money (larger equity grants are much more common for pre-external-funding employees) and this differential reflects that.
Btw, "1% of the other 10000 startups that folded" is worth about the same as a founder's 40%: $0. The issue is the middle ground, but there the equity grant is often not worth the paper it's written on: typically the acquirers dictate who gets the money. 1% or 5%, unless the acquirer is trying to retain you, chances are you'll see nothing even if the nominal payout is large.
Anyway, the upshot is what people have been saying for decades: don't do a startup for the money. Do it because you want to be part of that kind of thing, and treat any exit money as a bonus.
1) One big change is the recognition that Autism, regardless of particular definition, responds to therapeutic attempts much more effectively in early childhood, rather than later.
2) Much of the effective work is around "functioning" -- if you can't speak, well, an "autism" diagnosis is going to change what's attempted in response, but the goal is still going to be to get a kid to be able to speak. That's much easier when a child is still 2 or 3.
(Obviously if you ran the same study today you'd get a lot more of what you describe!)
Our expectations here are very much set by human-human interactions: we expect memory, introspection, that saying approximately-the-same-thing will give us approximately-the-same-result, that instructions are better than examples, that politeness helps, and many more [1] -- and some of these expectations are so deeply rooted that even when we know, intellectually, that our expectations are off, it can be hard to modify our behavior.
That said, it will be super interesting to see how people's expectations shift -- and how we bring new expectations from human-AI interactions back to human-human interactions.
[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3544548.3581388 (open access link)
Perhaps for the same reason we only stopped caring about IE 6 after its usage dropped below a tiny percentage.
For better or worse, making your website available to as many groups of people as possible, regardless of their browser selection or network configuration, has been a long-standing goal in the community.
If your website isn't available to folks at the offices of company X because they use appliance Y, through no fault of user Z's, well...that's not ideal, is it?
Why some of this money is categorized as “tuition” and other money as “overhead” is at the root of the question I think.
The question of whether senior doctoral students who aren't taking classes anymore should be paying tuition is a good one too! In the case described in the original article, though the student was in a masters program and quite likely taking classes—so not quite this scenario.
That said, there are a few pieces to this that unfortunately didn't make it into the article:
1) At that pay rate, the TA would have been expected to work at 50% effort (20h/week) in that position, in order to earn that salary.
2) At my UC, a "full-time" load for lecturers is 6 courses per year, or 3 per semester. (This may be different at quarter-system UCs.) That means that a course is considered 1/3 of full-time, not 50%, with an expected time commitment of ~ 13h/week over that same time period.
3) Thus from a "compensation for labor" perspective, the hourly rate for the TA is thus about 30% less than the lecturer -- of course, this rests on many assumptions about how much time is actually spent per course -- and the TA is expected to spend quite a bit more time on the course than the lecturer is. (This ignores the work needed to develop a course, of course, but often lecturers are asked to teach already-designed courses.)
The kicker, though, is that the TA is probably also getting their tuition covered, an extra benefit worth $7-15k, depending on a student's circumstances, and depending on whether you believe this tuition reimbursement is an accounting gimmick, as some do. If you do include this amount, the TA is indeed paid much more than the lecturer!
They didn't do it for the personal money, they did it because they thought their shareholders would sue them, at least in part, for turning out a deal that was too good to be true.
So I suppose if you were sitting on 300k in equity it was now worth 480k, but it's not like going from illiquid paper wealth to a liquidity event...and given the company's growth trajectory it seemed likely at the time that it would get there in a year or two on its own, without a (risky) acquisition.
Dunno, doesn't seem like a slam-dunk case of F-you money to me.
It's not the contracts that were the problem -- it was the fact that in those days it was uncommon for rank-and-file employees to really diversify.
We've mostly learned that lesson now.
It was "just" an offer with a large premium over the current stock price.
I even got it usefully updated when the format changed!
We can have justice, and we should, and then we should also feel a moral obligation to reduce harm from reckless or mistaken action in the future, no?
If we only have “justice” in the sense of punishment for harm, but do nothing to reduce the chances that we end up needing “justice” again later, then we’re just setting ourselves up for more future “justice” in the form of multiple destroyed lives: some through negligence, some through state action pursuing justice. Who does that serve?
I (and the original article) are advocating that we do more to reduce the likelihood that “being a reckless idiot” causes a whole family to be killed, because “justice” doesn’t prevent people from “being a reckless idiot” — and I for one would vastly prefer that my whole family not be killed, even if I knew that killer would be brought to justice.
It's statistically very unlikely that this driver will accidentally kill someone else. Keeping this driver locked up behind bars may be a reasonable punishment, but it doesn't change the stats one iota, and it doesn't prevent others from doing the same thing. That's why we also need systemic interventions like the 8 I listed earlier.
The approach that works is to fix systems so that mistakes are harder to make or their consequences are mitigated. This is sometimes called defense in depth: many overlapping protections mean that accidents are less likely. Extra defenses mean that when mistakes do happen their consequences are less severe. (None of this has anything to do with whether you punish people who act maliciously, and is actually independent of whether you also do that.)
The FAA is a good example: mandated redundancies, the NTSB does a root cause analysis on every accident to figure out how it made it through defenses. As a result flying is one of the safest modes of transport, even despite Boeing’s recent attempts to undo that legacy.
For the cases in question here, roads could be redesigned to reduce the likelihood and severity of vehicles impacting pedestrians. In another message in this thread I listed eight possible measures society could take to do this.
Honestly it’s starting to feel like it’s the “more punishment!” crowd that’s virtue signaling at this point. Of course it’s easier to feel like you’ve solved the problem when you punish any person you can point a finger at, it’s much harder actually getting to the root of anything.
Zero people advocated this approach in this thread.
> No strawman.
Noun: strawman.
1. An intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.
We need to do more than just punishment, few here are saying punishment is not "worth doing".
In fact, I described the penalties here as "paltry" and it is totally reasonable to expect greater punishment in this case.
I am also saying that this will do nothing for the next family, but you seem to have missed that point.