Having lived in California for 30 years—in arguably every major city in the state (LA, SF, San Diego, San Jose), multiple times in multiple neighborhoods of each—fully autonomous point-to-point car sharing networks honestly sound less pie-in-the-sky to me than a mass transit system that is efficient OR well funded.
But we did just spend twenty billion dollars on a bullet train from Bakersfield to Merced, so there's that, I guess.
Public transit in SF sucks. It takes 45 minutes on the so-called "rapid" bus to go 5 miles. The Geary corridor is one of the busiest in the country, approaching (EDIT: well over!) 100k passengers per day if you include the 4 parallel bus lines running 1 block away from each other. It desperately needs a subway. But we're still 5 years away from even a BRT line, which will still take a minimum of 35 minutes.
I think it's a fair bet that autonomous cars will come before Geary BRT is completed, and it's a certainty that they'll come before Geary gets a subway. And while Geary is one of the worst, there are a half dozen similar bus corridors in the city. Also, most of the rail is above ground and similarly slow and crowded.
While I generally think rail and autonomous cars can be symbiotic, autonomous cars are likely to kill buses. Middle-income people ride the bus only out of necessity. High-income people never ride the bus, though they will ride a decent subway system. Once autonomous cars and autonomous shuttles come out, middle-income riders will flock to them, the only people riding busses will be the poor and working class, and the system will collapse, sooner in most other places, but it'll also happen in San Francisco.
Because San Francisco doesn't have a real subway network, SF MTA is in for some rough times in the not too distant future. I wouldn't be surprised if San Francisco bans or heavily taxes private autonomous systems. If they were smart they'd be digging tunnels as fast as possible. Some cities, like Madrid, seemed to have learned to do it cheaply, and the savings aren't just because of geology.
i don't understand why nobody sees them as a symbiosis. We haven't solved anything if driverless cars are clogging up the highway, but they can solve one of the biggest problems for mass transit, the last/first kilometres. I don't know anything specific about the bullet train, but most of the time the problem is getting to/from the bullet-train. If it shortens your travel by one hour, but you have to wait 2 hours for a bus to get to the station it's not going to work.
It's also worth noting that regardless of which keyboard or combination of apps you're using on Android, it's not possible to send an animated GIF as an MMS attachment without dropping so many frames that the clip becomes essentially unwatchable.
If you're sending a Hangouts message (Google account to Google account) it works just fine. Otherwise, even if you roll all your SMS/MMS activity into the Hangouts app, no dice.
When I went to sleep last night the group I was in had just grown from ~800 to ~1500 after a merge. In my absence it grew to ~2500 and then ~4400 before Reddit crashed and the room was abandoned.
Just a few hours into the experiment several Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey userscripts were released that enabled auto-voting, among other features. The ability to mute users was also welcome, given how spammy the big rooms got.
There are auto-voting scripts that can be installed as plugins in Chrome and Firefox to help with this. I did exactly this last night and woke to find myself in the largest of the groups. It was entirely unfulfilling.
Congratulations to Justin, and to Sam/YC for making a great choice.
On a tangential but related note, does anyone recommend any good follows on Snapchat, particularly anyone discussing tech/entrepreneurship? (There are obviously tons of entertaining celebrities, athletes, musicians, etc, but that's not really relevant here.)
Mark Suster (msuster on snap) of Upfront Ventures/bothsidesofthetable is good for at least a few 'snapstorms' a week covering a wide variety of VC topics. I've also really been enjoying the stories from Bobby Kim (bobbyhundreds), co-founder of seminal LA streetwear label The Hundreds, which tend to be a mix of standard day-in-the-life Snapchat fare as well as more introspective reflections on life and business. Bobby's a smart guy with diverse interests, even if you don't care about skateboarding or which overpriced, limited-edition collaboration is responsible for today's line out the door somewhere on Fairfax, it's still worth checking out Bobby's snaps.
I thought I saw that he had posted them somewhere but I just went looking and couldn't find anything. Hopefully he publishes them because I keep missing them!
(Preemptive N.B.—I'm far from an expert, but I'm very interested in seeing this aspect of the topic discussed further by folks who might be experts.)
Isn't the general premise here that one can choose to package up any program in as many deeply nested (virtual or physical) sandboxes as one would like, but there's an inherent benefit to the piece of software inside all those boxes exposing to one's adversary as few avenues as possible to attempt to escape them (specifically as it pertains to people in the business of painting targets on their backs e.g. Soghoian)?
Put another way, of course Gmail and Chrome have dedicated security teams, but they won't ever have prevent $GIVEN_INFOSEC_RESEARCHER's box from getting owned teams.
Bruce Haack was a genius. There are songs on The Electric Lucifer[1] that would sound ahead of their time if they came out today (and that record was released almost 50 years ago). Of late he seems to have been canonized as one of those auteurs who is totally unappreciated in his time but winds up influencing everybody.
The experimental children's records mentioned in the article are absolutely worth your time, as well as the aforementioned Lucifer, but anyone interested should also hear "Party Machine"[2] (co-produced by Russell Simmons) and the 32 minute epic "Icarus"—both bonus tracks on Haackula[3], a 2008 collection of previously unreleased material. There's also some really good stuff on Bruce Haack Remixes[4] which came out on Stones Throw in 2012.
One of my favorite rap songs in recent memory is Micah James' "Blow Job (Give Up)"[5] which samples and builds on a Haack song by the same name.
Well that was quite cool. Theres that drum beat that you expect to kick in any moment but never does, which is kind of disappointing, but still its a cool track (just begging for a remix).
I have to say though, that video was weird. You've got Mr. Rogers who, judging by the looks, sells vacuum cleaners for a living, joined by Mr. Bruce, who would not look out of place in a Tarantino movie about a guy selling drugs in Las Vegas truck stop parking lots. Then in waltzes a scantily clad lady that proceeds to perform weird movements with kids who have apparently no idea whats going on, but decide to play along due to a lack of other options. I feel I've been missing out in my youth.
I don't know if I would call it ahead of it's time today, but I definitely think it's on par with a lot of electronic music today. It's actually quite good!
This is a great post. I cannot believe "Party Machine" is from '78. Holy crap, that's unbelievably contemporary.
It kind of goes to show how similar many of the music making tools are today, but here's a guy putting together an amazing jam and Carter was still in office.
Speaking of rap/hip hop I wasn't born in 1968 but I a Canadian kid was on a vacation in NY in 1977 but it was in August.
I thought it would have been interesting if I had been there in NY city in July 1977 when the big blackout occurred. Apparently looting of stereo equipment is what (maybe) spurred the new art form of hip hop sure it's debatable but it sounds cool. I'm not even a fan of rap or hip hop but it would have been fun to have been there for it.
It's also interesting that rap/hip hop was born about a month before Elvis died it's like to ages of music colliding one birth and one death.
>All of these features were pioneered in Asia. They're either trying to bring the innovations westward in the hopes that they can build a similar platform, or they're defending against the possibility that foreign apps like this will expand and take over their marketshare.
There's likely a third aspect: Fb (& Snapchat, et al) framing/reframing their services to be more familiar/comfortable for East Asian users as the business case makes competing in those markets increasingly appealing/unavoidable.
As others have noted, the truth is probably some combination of all of the above (and then some).
I doubt anyone has any idea how these concepts will play outside Asia. Snapchat has been crowing for some time now about their intentions to become Tencent West, but their success to date hinges entirely on the core offering. Is anyone—aside from strippers[0]—using Snapcash, for instance?
There's definitely something fascinating about this sort of nested bundling (social recommendations within a ridesharing service within a maps app, etc.) but I don't know if there are strong indications that American/Western users want that. It seems to me that the logic is "500 million Chinese can't be wrong!"—maybe? But the West hasn't even seen one messaging platform to rule them all since AIM, lately there have been far more web/mobile unbundling success stories, and I'm not sure what would turn that tide.
Messaging apps are all about social connections. Any kind of monetization has to build upon that.
Even if FB/Snapchat tries to make themselves more agreeable towards Asian markets, they still need to face the question from customer like this: if I have something (Line/Wechat/Kaokao Talk) that works great for me and my friends, what is the reason for me to use their western counterparts (FB/Snapchat)? Only because they are trying to make themselves similar to the local competitors ? That is not convincing enough.
Vulfpeck is also also the band behind four really terrific EPs in as many years, and you should absolutely give them a listen[1], although ideally not on Spotify.
But we did just spend twenty billion dollars on a bullet train from Bakersfield to Merced, so there's that, I guess.