Your confusion is exactly the problem, it wasn't going to work. More importantly, they were relying on autonomous cars to become a thing, but they weren't building a ride-sharing business, they were building a rental car business? So in essence even their business model didn't make sense.

It literally never was.

Kyte billed themselves as a convenience and hassle-free experience for rental cars. they provided door-to-door delivery and pickup. They had an app, and argued that Enterprise and Hertz were still wedded to brick and mortar and "didn't have the technical foundation that customers demand." Also, from this Forbes puff piece, they 1) didn't do any airport service because their customers already caught an Uber or Lyft somewhere, were going to offer door-to-door drop off and pickup service (which Enterprise already offered), but most importantly they "believed autonomous cars and autonomous fleets were the future".

ANd right away there's the problem. They competed in a market that was heavily commoditized. They chose to not compete in the market where the largest share of rental cars were, airports, by assuming that their customers "would just take an uber to some place then pick up a Kyte later". But if the customer took an Uber some place, they could take an Uber to the next place too? Or the customer doesn't want an Uber, so they rent a car at the airport. Then they assumed that customers demanded a bigger tech stack, which clearly they didn't. They offered a Hassle free service, but Hertz and Enterprise already do that; you can book your car and just go get it without having to go to the counter now. And then they wholly relied on autonomous cars to take off and become a robotaxi service, but A) that's taken a lot longer to roll out, B) they weren't building the infrastructure to run a robotaxi service, and C) the companies that are (Waymo, Tesla, etc.) are operating their own services, meaning they had no way to become a robotaxi service.

Further they had to buy cars, so they financed them; they carried $450M in debt despite being unable to service the debt to buy their fleet of cars.

Actually, it's pretty obvious why this didn't work.

I have electrical components right now in things I manage. 2 years in, they're obsolete, because a new part comes online, particularly in electronics components.

When Apple went from the iPhone 14 to the 15, there were 30 distinct part changes, 15 major component redesigns, and multiple small changes in parts.

You break your iPhone 14, and want to fix it. They're not made anymore, we're on to iPhone 15. One of the broken parts is one of those distinct parts that is no longer used, therefore you can't get the part because there is no longer a market for it. What would it cost the manufacturer to produce another part for you? Or to produce excess and hold inventory that might not sell? The cost for them to do that doesn't make it feasible, you might as well just buy a new iPhone 15.

Sorry, you're logic flies in the face of the fact that parts only exist for a period of time. Yes there are standardized parts out there, but again the problem is the companies that make those parts are built for efficiency; they cost $1 or $3 to Apple because Apple buys millions, but they're not built to sell one or two. If you're lucky you can find a distributor who buys in bulk and is built to sell one or two, but it's going to be about 1000% markup because the inventory holding costs money and he has no idea when you're going to come buy that part; it costs him money while he's waiting for you to buy.

And on top of that, let's say you get the part. Who's going to install it? The assembly companies are the best at this because their people do thousands at a time, or they're automated. Once you install it, is the workmanship good? If something goes wrong, would it interfere with another part, causing a problem? These things are tightly designed assuming a quality of workmanship in assembly that you can't guarantee in a repair. But Apple's brand will suffer because your poor quality workmanship in repair made other parts of the phone not work.

Sorry, all of your scenarios just don't work when you get to implementation. I'm one of the few people in the West who actually has not only worked in final product assembly, but I often visited vendors not just direct, but often 3 or 4 layers into the supply chain to understand what's going on. Our electronics are priced a certain way because of scale and efficiency built into the system, but it only works at volume. If you were to hand make a single smart phone from scratch assuming you had the skill and material, that phone would cost north of $1,000,000 in parts and labor to make; it's $1,000 because of industrial efficiencies that are achievable at scale only.

All that sounds amazing, until you realize that this will destroy the market for most consumer products or jack up the prices for the base units.

Full disclosure, I've been managing global supply chains in multiple industries for over 20 years. The problem with this is that there is no single price for any of the components that goes into a complex consumer product like an electronic device. Instead the pricing you get is predicated heavily on how many you make. Apple gets the pricing of components that they make because they commit to 20 million phones' worth of products or whatever that number is; the opportunity for cost savings in that volume is so enormous that both Apple and the parts manufacturer gets to make savings, which gets reflected over time in the price of the product to the consumer. However to make 1, or 1,000, or even 1,000,000, the cost to manufacture that is substantially different. It's so incredibly different in efficiency, particularly if the OEM is tooled for high volume, that they simply wouldn't do it.

You could argue then ok, if they plan to make 20M phones, make enough parts for 22M and keep the remaining 2M in inventory for when it's needed, right? Wrong. In this case someone, Apple or the OEM or the distributor or whomever, has to pay for the manufacture of those extra 10% parts. Let's say each is $1; who's paying that extra $2M? More importantly, how does the company make that money back, and when? The general rule of thumb is around 1.5% per month in financing cost, warehousing cost, logistics management, etc. Who's going to pay the $2M for those extra parts plus $30,000 per month to keep that inventory on hand? What if they don't break and no one buys that inventory for years? who's out that money holding a bunch of parts no one wants? It's just bad business.

Notably for warranties, companies already do this. If they have say a 3 year warranty and at that volume they'll have statistics around Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) for each part plus an estimated user-caused failure where the warranty applies, and they order that many excess, because they know most will get consumed in the warranty period with the excess as a write off when the warranty is up or sold on the secondary markets, but the cost of that warranty period is calculated on that finite period. In most Right to Repair, the time frame is undetermined, you can't cost account for that.

In order to meet that need, companies will have to risk adjust their pricing to hold extra inventory, which means the cost of everything goes up. That or they'll have to price the cost of each item as though they were buying 1,000 instead of a 20M commitment, which in most cases could be 4 to 5X the piece part cost with volumes at that level.

This is why repair parts cost so much more than the fully assembled device, because the assembled device has cost efficiency built in because of volume you simply don't get in small volumes, paired with the need for inventory to just sit there, paid for, and no one is buying for an indeterminate amount of time.

Also, to just nitpick your post, you said 2 things but you listed 3, although to be fair I've done that a dozen times myself in posts.

Tell me you know nothing about the law without saying those words.

That's not how copyright works. Software like video games are subject to copyright. Under copyright cases, there is rarely ever any evidence of actual direct copying; if there was it would be more like a criminal case; a subject of criminal theft of code for example. Instead, copyright is adjudicated on the concept of Substantial Similarity. These things prove indirect copying, and use a few concepts such as how unique are similar sections or if the original work contains idiosyncratic elements that the infringing work repeats. There's nothing wrong with having a red-haired female protagonist, or robot animals in a game, or a post-apocalyptic "resurgence of humanity" elements in your game. However when you put those all together in a 3rd person action environment and give her a bow to fight said robot animals with, it's pretty much Horizon.

But fundamentally the simple litmus test is how does the market perceive it. Copyright at it's heart is about selling products, and if potential customers see it as a copy and could be confused to think it comes from the original work's creator, then it meets the standard. Given the sheer number of comments and articles about this all of which overwhelmingly see the substantial similarities, then it's pretty clear that the market would respond in a way that would involve missed revenue here.

I like where he's going. Makes sense that servers should almost be like a utility with available resources to serve various public needs. And his point about services like libraries doing this is great.

But it's not free, and it's not cheap. It's the government that has to pay for it via tax payer dollars, the power, the people, the hardware, the maintenance, etc. It could be free to the user, but the cost has to come out of some government budget somewhere and that's not a simple solution at all. So I like the idea from a policy perspective, but it may not be logistically feasible.

Seems from a practical implementation perspective it'd be more like a public utility, a regulated monopoly like power distribution or some such.

Both of my work and personal computers were Win10, they got a free upgrade to Win11. There are versions with ads to them, stripped down subscriptions and such. My versions of Win11 do not have that but they do recommend Microsoft products and features, particularly Copilot these days. However they're very easy to disable, and to respond to a reply below, my elderly parents have no problem telling it to disable those recommendations without my IT help, so it's not a big deal. Again, I get what they're doing, but turning it off isn't hard and notably it stays off when turned off, even after updates.

So yeah, I find this whole article and summary entirely confusing; just not my experience at all. I do not mind intrusive ads as "recommendations" if I can opt out and they stay off, and so far they have including my less technically inclined family members. So not a big deal to me.

OK thanks for this. I was incredibly confused by this article and summary; so he's talking about the Free version of Win11? Because this is not my experience either. Win11 is just fine for me on both my work and home computer, but then again I am using enterprise version.

Notably, I also disable many "features" of Win11. This new Recall thing? I get what they're trying to do, but just no. No thank you. Others are just odd, but it's not that hard to disable them and I'm not even an expert user.

Then why did you make your original post? You're clearly not interested and have no desire to understand why your suggestion is nonsense.

Professional Cycling may not be your bag, but there are an estimated 470M fans of professional cycling, with the Tour de France reaching 1 billion viewers via TV and streaming. With that kind of reach, the sport is heavily sponsored for it's advertising value. There's a reason Lance Armstrong is a household name and is worth tens of millions of dollars, and there is a huge incentive for teams to perform and win to stay ahead which is why pro cycling is so heavily mired in cheating controversies; the money is enormous.

And as the GP said, it's not just about the athleticism of the cyclist, it's about the design of the bike as well, and the team strategies. It's not just a race; it's a team sport where other members of the team try to pace with and block other teams from catching the lead cyclist on their team to score the victory. That may not be your thing, but it is a thing for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Good proposal but the problem with these is the so-called AI detectors right now are at best questionable and at worst a bigger problem than the AI.

And it doesn't necessarily help with other uses of AI. For example, while I don't write peer reviewed papers, I often write a lot for various purposes in work, including some emails. I find myself writing out all of my thoughts, which can easily fall into the TLDR category, and then I copy the entire thing into AI and ask it to keep all of my core elements but make it more concise and maybe add a tone or two depending on my objective for what I wrote. As a result, my written communication has significantly improved, and the AI is not writing, it's editing. Should that be considered AI slop, when it has all of my positions and facts but condenses it to a far more readable piece?

I think you're on the right track here, but I think enforcement is a problem do it at any sort of scale and it may not change the incentive structure. Perhaps a better approach is to treat a fully AI generated paper, that a person can reasonably review and notice obvious errors, as equivalent to plagiarism in academic circles. Then throw the book at that academic, black list them from the publication, and take a firm policy that anyone submitting an AI generated paper will get the same treatment.

A few public hangings might be enough to dissuade bad behavior, and might be more cost effective.

TBH I find those "50's-style" retro movie trailers to be awesome, a guilty pleasure. Another one I love is these videos that match something like people out on a ship and a giant lovecraftian monster is coming out of the water to threaten them, with the video presenting it like it's real. That stuff is clearly fake and kind of fun.

But I do see a lot of Warhammer 40k stuff where an AI voiceover is just reading from the wikis and making up AI art that doesn't even match the voiceovers, same with Star Wars stuff and other stuff, and it's just bs nonsense. It could kill those guys.

I see it all the time. I watch a lot of videos on science fiction and fantasy, like Quinn's Ideas (I won't link it but great channel). Real creators who are passionate about their topic are getting drowned out by similar content videos that, if you know the content, are clearly incorrect and use an AI generated voiceover. Many of them are well optimized for YouTube's algorithm, so they get pulled up quickly in your feed and drown out the content creators; several creators are begging for likes and subscirbes now because they've seen their videos get drowned out in a flood of copycat material.

This is all fine, and there are situations where a 4-day work week can be beneficial to both the employee and the employer.

The issue is not having at-will employment. Most of the US has at-will employment, meaning you can be fired for any reason at any time. In general that means that a company has a very bad reputation if they abuse this and it'll be difficult to hire, but if you want qualified talent you have to make your workplace an attractive place to work. Not so in the UK. While in theory you can fire an employee for poor performance, the level of documentation required to demonstrate poor performance is so onerous; it can take 3 to 5 months of constant HR work to demonstrate that the employee is a bad performer. And maybe they demosntrate they're performing ok, but if they are a toxic personality in the work environment that brings down the morale of the rest of the group, in general you have very little recourse as an employer.

While maybe that sounds great from the employee side, from the employer side it makes hiring a significant risk. If you make a mistake in hiring a person, fixing that mistake is an enormously difficult prospect. This directly relates to why the UK has a comparatively small innovation economy; startups by their very definition are taking enormous risks, adding hiring risks on top of that is painful as hell; it makes you not want to hire people at all.

The US is much more dynamic in this regard; while yes it gives fewer protections for workers, it also shows that toxic employees need to shape up or they'll never get hired, and it also leads to a more dynamic employment market. It causes short term pain when you have to let someone go, but I've been forced to layoff whole teams because our company was struggling in all respects, and I was able to help all of the people I laid off find better jobs that advanced their careers; the poor emotional state near-term when they were laid off was absolved by the fact that they ended up finding better jobs that were better fits because of the work they did at our company. In contrast our UK teams were always just a giant complex issue; we simply could not afford to get hiring wrong which means we were always reticent to hire at all in the UK.

"Punishment isn't working": you can't prove that because it's proving a negative. How many people thought about causing damage to their employer after getting laid off, but decided not to because they knew they would go to prison?

Related to that, even a harsh punishment doesn't necessarily mean that someone will make an illogical choice not considering the consequences; you will never stop 100% of issues like this because there will always be someone who misunderstands their situation and makes an illogical choice regardless of punishment.

This. I regularly recruit PhDs and Engineers in my company. Many I get to know well, and despite their intellectual capabilities, far too many of them have made some of the absolute worst financial and personal decisions in their lives, and too often even in work they are myopically focused on viewing a problem through their own intellectual training that they miss very simple solutions. A few are well organized, but I am consistently stunned at the poor decision making of highly educated people.