One thing I like about their business model is that it isn't just the autonomous/teleoperation tech, but also that they're a full-service trucking company. That kind of integration should hopefully allow them to provide the same service as a normal trucking company but with much lower cost.
Even if the company just serves long-haul routes from depots in less congested areas very close to freeway on-ramps, that's still a huge market, and the labor cost savings would likely be huge if humans are just driving from the depot to the freeway.
Related, I was thinking about the idea of teleoperation for drone deliveries recently as well. The same kind of "last mile" problem exists for landing cargo from a drone. Have the drone fly from the warehouse to the customer location, and then pass it over to someone sitting in their house with a joystick to control landing and delivery of the cargo. Once the delivery is complete and the drone is airborne again, have it fly autonomously back to the depot. Pay people $1/landing or something like that.
The last mile is going to be the hardest part of any of these autonomous businesses. The hybrid teleoperation model where the computer handles the relatively easy (but mundane) parts makes total sense.
I've been fully remote for the past two years at a company that is mostly distributed (we have to have physical operations in markets we operate in, but the tech team is fully remote).
Overall, I love it, and it would be a challenge to go back to the office/commuting lifestyle. However, I still recognize that it is a nascent thing and I'm incredibly fortunate to work where I do. If the business goes under, will I be able to find comparable remote work with good pay?
To hedge that bet, I still live in one of the larger tech hub cities (born and raised here, so I also don't want to leave it). The thought has crossed my mind many times to move to cheaper locales and take advantage of the potential wage arbitrage that would come with it, but in the end, I like my expensive coastal city, and think it's worth the price. And if push comes to shove, I can commute into an office and make a living.
We have periodic offsites where everyone travels to a single place for a week, and those are great to get to know the people behind the webcam. With Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Github, etc., it really doesn't feel that much different than working in an office after awhile. The hardest part is learning that with remote work, you have to intentionally overcommunicate. When you're in an office you can get a sense of the vibe, which basically goes away when you're remote. It's really important for a company to focus on maintaining culture when you don't see each other in person every day.
If I were to found a company, odds are, I'd try to establish it as a remote-first culture (assuming the business could support it, which not all companies will ever be able to do). It just makes sense for a good number of tech startups.
The lifestyle isn't for everyone -- some people really thrive in the office environment, and that's great, but the flexibility of remote work is something I wouldn't trade for the world. I'm sure I'm leaving a little money on the table by not working for a local tech company and commuting, but the 10 hours a week I don't spend commuting are time I can spend with my kids, and I'm saving money in other areas like no gas or bus fare or eating out for lunch every day.
I think remote work is "a" future (not "the" future) and could be a great fit for many companies, especially businesses that do most of their work online. However, offices will never go away completely, and that's fine, too.
We have a Peloton bike. We used to be Flywheel members, at $300/mo, and that's pretty pricy. The bike pays for itself quickly if that's what you're replacing.
The class content is good. It's available anytime. Our friends have one so we can do rides together. And we're not paying $300/mo to Flywheel anymore.
Unfortunately we don't have a solarium to put it in, so we are really rubes.
In principle I agree with the author, but some of the patterns these big companies have introduced are valuable for companies with significantly lower amounts of traffic. For instance, in the article they reference Kafka. In one of our products, we use Kinesis, which has similar semantics, for data that is no more than 25k records per day. However, we find it useful because it enables us to have multiple consumers that operate independently, plus using Kinesis Firehose to automatically archive those records off to S3. We just use a single shard, which is more than enough throughput for us. We don't have any plans to scale to hundreds of shards, but find what it provides to be very useful in separating what each process does, and makes the code much simpler. And if we ever did need to scale, it wouldn't be much work to do so.
I inherited a Canon PowerShot 350 from a dead relative back in the late 90s. I was still blown away that I could take pictures that went straight to the computer with reasonable quality.
By today's standards it's garbage of course, but it was a cool camera at the time. The thing I find most disappointing is how useless they are -- there's no real value in them; they're not like old film cameras where you can still take good, interesting photos.
It's fun to see the evolution of technology, as now my iPhone XS is vastly superior to most things on this list, and of course my big Nikon DSLR blows them all away.
The Echo does this with Spotify too, fwiw. I ended up creating a separate account in my Spotify family for the Echo to link to Spotify, which is less than ideal as you lose your personal playlists, etc.
We actually canceled our shared Spotify account due to many similar friction points. The main benefit of Spotify was being able to discover new music, and I found it wasn't much better at that than subscribing to specific YouTube channels. The $10/month that I was paying to Spotify now goes towards about 10 DRM-free $1 songs per month, and considering how long I've been paying for Spotify, I think it's worth it. I imagine more of this $1 goes to the artist, too, compared to the royalties they'd probably have gotten from Spotify.
Same here. These services charge $5 more for a family plan, which lets you use five or six accounts. So you can make an extra account for your home devices, and then you have extra memberships you can give away for free to your family/friends. It’s not a great user experience but works well as a solution.
I had a cab driver do this to me once, in 2016 or so. He dropped me off at the destination and told me it’d be $20 or whatever, cash only. I didn’t have cash on me, and said all I had was a card. He demanded that I prove I had no cash. Being a little dumbstruck and just wanting to get away from him I showed my empty wallet and he begrudgingly pulled out a phone with a square reader on it. Left a very sour taste in my mouth about cabs.
It’s no surprise why Uber/Lyft are eating their lunch.
Lifehack: offer to call the cab company on speakerphone and pay with a credit card over the phone. This usually causes the in-cab CC readers to start working again.
As I mentioned above, transaction fees are a killer on already thin margins. And in some states it's illegal to add a charge for the credit card transaction.
libpostal is a pretty incredible open source project, but addresses are so complicated and nuanced that depending on what you’re doing, it might not be able to keep up. I work for a real estate tech company where we do a lot of address parsing and we had to move away from it because it’s just not quite powerful enough to handle all of the edge cases you find in US addresses. Right now we use SmartyStreets because their address parser is a bit better for our use case. Libpostal is a great general purpose library but depending on what level of accuracy you need, you might have to look for alternatives.
I spent time trying to use libpostal and build USPS address normalization rules on top of it but there are so many edge cases it was more cost effective to just purchase a solution from a vendor.
That is not to take away from this project — it’s quite good for a broad set of addresses across the world — but for narrow use cases such as ours it just couldn’t quite cut it.
My dad spent his career as a natural gas pipeline technician. For a long time they maintained their own radio towers and VHF or UHF (I forget which) radio network. Each district had their own comms guy who maintained the network, and it was very resilient and reliable, allowing the entire company to be in contact essentially anywhere.
In the early 2000s as a cost cutting measure, the company decided to nix the radios for satellite phones on each truck. Of course this proved to be problematic, as the sat phones often had reception issues. They relied on cell phones as backups, which was also quite foolish as the remote compressor stations had very poor reception. They also had issues where someone would leave a voicemail and they wouldn’t get notified of it for days or weeks due to some issue with AT&T.
After a couple emergencies where communication was identified as a big issue, they proposed moving back to the old radio system, but they had already sold off the frequencies and dismantled the infrastructure. My dad retired not long after this, but the “corporate bean counter” trope rang quite true here, and in the long run we were all a little less safe because some executive with no field experience wanted to make a name for themself by saving a little money on something that proved to be mission critical.
That makes me sad to hear, because not only was this company left with an inferior solution, the man hours and effort that went into the original project (including purchasing part of the spectrum!) was essentially nullified.
It's an alarming trend among new grads as well, who see existing systems as bloated and in need of rewrites. Who would've thought the bloat was kind of important?
But then we wouldn't have single threaded wonders like node.js
It's part of our culture that the young kids dismantle the 'old people stuff' setup their new stuff to only re-invent the wheel again and again, run into the same problems that were solved decades ago to only be repeated again.
Remember how TCL was going to save us all from K&R C? Then it was perl to save us from TCL? Then Ruby? Python? javascript, Go or whatever is the flavour of the month?
I wouldn't argue that bloat is important. I wold argue don't let bean counters make technical decisions.
Unfortunately those bean counters probably got large raises and bonus. Then moved on to their next job proclaiming their victories and got out into higher positions.
And the board let the financial wizard violate the old principle [1] of not taking a fence down until you fully understand the reason why it was put it up in the first place (i.e., don't assume that your predecessors were stupid just because you don't yet understand why they did what they did.)
Really sad results there, throwing away a sound investment & body of know how, for worse results everywhere, and less safety for everyone.
BNSF railway still maintains its own point-to-point microwave network and VHF/UHF repeaters on mountaintop tower sites, if you pull the public FCC ULS database data for any western US state you'll see their 6 and 11 GHz band licenses.
> After a couple emergencies where communication was identified as a big issue, they proposed moving back to the old radio system, but they had already sold off the frequencies
This is one of those cases where, if it isn't broke dont fix it was a rule to be followed.
Now its hard for the company to fallback to the old system, since they need to buy another set of frequencies, before they can even plan to rebuild the radio tower network.
Since they had stopped with the good running radio network to cut costs (unwise since it ran fantastic) the chance that they will invest in restarting such a network is not really big, unless they get heavy lossses due to their unreliable current system of modern (but worthless) gadgetry
Even if the company just serves long-haul routes from depots in less congested areas very close to freeway on-ramps, that's still a huge market, and the labor cost savings would likely be huge if humans are just driving from the depot to the freeway.
Related, I was thinking about the idea of teleoperation for drone deliveries recently as well. The same kind of "last mile" problem exists for landing cargo from a drone. Have the drone fly from the warehouse to the customer location, and then pass it over to someone sitting in their house with a joystick to control landing and delivery of the cargo. Once the delivery is complete and the drone is airborne again, have it fly autonomously back to the depot. Pay people $1/landing or something like that.
The last mile is going to be the hardest part of any of these autonomous businesses. The hybrid teleoperation model where the computer handles the relatively easy (but mundane) parts makes total sense.