danielnaab

The first question to ask with any James O'Keefe video is "where is the raw video." He has a long and sordid history of fabricating these kinds of storylines.

Quick, someone feed the instructions for each of these sandwiches through an RNN.

>> Decentralized has no immediate direct benefit for riders.

Yes, but decentralized could have a very direct benefit for drivers... considering that sans an army of driverless cars, driver supply is what makes Uber's "sharing economy" work.

(Not to mention that the insurance/license guarantees are not currently being satisfied.)

The software agent that consumers interact with would have to be responsible for determining the accuracy of ratings.

I suspect that the most important aspect of such a system would be trusted participants: eg, insurance companies, city licensing agencies, etc. If you get one hundred great, but fake, reviews from shell accounts, it would be rather meaningless if your city didn't issue you a license on the blockchain, or you claimed false insurance which was somehow disputed on the same blockchain by the legitimate insurer.

Interesting observations on the dynamic with "real cabbies."

I would envision a decentralized system including both "real cabs", whose parent company vouches for a driver's licensing, as well as independent drivers, whose insurance company does. But if any driver participated in a transparent network, their reputation would be important to them, and I would assume that would be a deterrent to taking fares you don't actually intend to pick up.

Good points. I meant "overnight" loosely, but I have a few other comments.

* Any software may be branded - no one needs to know the word "blockchain" when they use a well-designed app. If a driver may have more take-home pay from an open network, there is no reason they wouldn't list themselves there in the same way many drivers are on both Uber and Lyft.

* The blockchain would record all transactions in a manner that any software could get something similar to Uber's intelligence, with some allowances for the privacy of the rider.

* I've taken Uber rides that reek of cigarette smoke. If anything, many cab companies have standards that you can't guarantee with the closest Uber. But like you say, reputation systems could address those issues.

I agree, though, that the technical challenges are real and not trivial. In particular, the privacy concerns seem very real. I just find it difficult to believe that a multi-billion dollar industry will allow a middleman to take all their customers away when really the only thing that Uber sells is UX.

A decentralized ride solicitation tool with a reputation system, maybe blockchain-based, could kill off Uber and Lyft almost overnight. Especially if existing taxi companies embraced it. I want to know if a driver is licensed, insured, etc. Uber doesn't provide that, and I don't like the rent-seeking aspect of their service.

If it's winner-takes-all, it's only a matter of time until another winner takes all. I don't think we've seen the end of this market yet...

EDIT: Wow, two down votes in 10 minutes. Care to say why? There are a lot of incumbent players losing market share to Uber - how do they compete? It seems like the perfect opportunity for more of a SaaS business model built around selling integration with an open network. There are already reputation-based blockchain implementations. Why would a decentralized model not work?

Years ago, my impression was that the goal of the Volt was to be fully-electric with a range-extending flex-fuel generator that recharges the batteries (rather than a hybrid approach with a separate internal combustion engine to extend range).

Is this idea just totally dead for some kind of innate technical challenge? It seems that mechanically, the cost of a generator and one drive train would be preferable, if it were feasible performance-wise.

I've used a WeakMap for a kind of memoization.

Assume an immutable object may undergo an expensive transform that returns an object, which is then stored in a WeakMap keyed to the immutable. When there are no new references to that object, the garbage collector will clean it up, but otherwise the expensive transform may be avoided with a lookup on the WeakMap.

It provides a pretty nice way to decouple your caching from the rest of the codebase.

Of course culture plays a role, as does education level of one's parents, access to opportunity such as good health care and higher education, the role of the criminal justice system in your community, the stress of dealing with basic material needs, etc, etc. Point being the cards are stacked against you if you are born into poverty, and those who escape it are basically the exceptions that prove the rule. So if we were sane, we'd focus our attention on leveling the playing field so as to lower the barrier to entry into the middle class, and not focus attention on blaming poor people for having poor values.