harmmonica

Can you give more color on local partners? I don't think you mean Uber, like I think it was or maybe still is in Austin, but maybe that's what you mean.

And, yeah, them charging more makes sense strictly on quality of experience so a price premium makes sense, but if there is margin to be eroded and these other providers roll out more broadly the prices will end up coming down.

One other thing I found interesting here and you and others might as well... I couldn't help but give feedback about my happiness with the service overall, but my reluctance at the current pricing and I specifically said I don't need to receive a reply to my request (Waymo asks if you want someone to reply when you give feedback and I said "no"). But sure enough they replied and the gist of it was we're sorry we're not a good fit for you now because of the price and hope you'll give us another chance down the road.

I'm not sure what I expected them to say, but at this still-early hour I would've expected more nuance in reply. Would've been better for them to not reply at all given the tone of the reply they sent.

I said it and thought it but they’re saying they are not doing it by individual. Does that mean they have zero access to proprietary Google user activity? Anonymized/aggregated/etc. to inform pricing?

My intent is not to spread misinformation so I guess I’ll believe there’s a solid wall up between Waymo and Google data sharing.

A bit off topic, but I've been a Waymo booster for a minute here, as you can see in my comment history, but here in LA their pricing has jumped the shark a bit. Yesterday it quoted me > $10/mile for a short, < 5 miles trip. That was the return trip after I had a less expensive price of around $6/mile to the original destination (still pricey!).

I have zero insight into their pricing mechanism, but I was getting in the car coming back from, no exaggeration, one of the most expensive cities on the planet and so if I was Waymo I would probably price that ride pretty aggressively based on the location alone. Then you throw in all the other data points Google has about its users and I had my first "fuck me" moment where dynamic pricing really slapped me in the face (I've seen it firsthand with the airlines but Waymo is particularly insidious because of the use of my Google history).

And of course I'm aware Waymo has to price high while they're fleet-constrained or folks are going to be waiting forever for a car, but I hope they don't get too content with the absurd margin at $10+/mile. They will be tempted to do just that and so instead of flooding the market with fleet decide they'll put just enough cars in service to maximize profit instead of going for market share (of all riders I mean). But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.

The stock and real estate market, huge sources of wealth for the us population, are still near all-time highs and many people, tens of millions at least, have way more real money than they’ve ever had in their lives, and yet a massive number of those people would rather not take a hit to their wealth when it’s easiest to absorb the hit and instead prefer cutting things that even they like the government providing (medicare this week the latest example in an endless number of examples these past months). It really is crazy how wealth-obsessed many Americans are.

And I say that as an absolute hater of how the pols run the place (yes both sides. One for having no sense of how to manage money and the other having some sense but ignoring it; one of these is objectively worse than the other (yep, I said it, objectively!)).

Seems like the end goal is not to have a country left but instead a bunch of factions more likely to be at war fighting over cash, resources and culture issues. Depressing as fuck for those of us not excited about that end goal.

I looked this up yesterday triggered by their threat to move the combined company out of CA. Oracle’s stock price, at least, which is way off its 52-week high, is about the same as it was at the time the WBD deal was announced.

What does that tell me? Just one of many things about the prospects of the deal still happening. That one in particular says to me they won’t be deterred. Bond rating may suggest the opposite. Lots more complexity than those two things but “fun” to speculate.

Hi there, I’ve used this for hospitals local to me but correct me if i’m wrong but those are only the prices for services. What I’m talking about is unit economics for the service. The difference being pricing is opaque (or rather pricing alone is not transparent enough) until you know the cogs and then you can evaluate how profitable the pricing is.

edit: clarity

Probably an obvious/dumb thing to say on HN, but I just want every medical service to have this exact type of breakdown. And then we can at least somewhat pierce the veil of health care costs. The thing I can't figure out is why this doesn't already exist, or, if it does, why it's not more widely known amongst laypeople. Everything from ambulance rides to MRI's to surgeries can be baselined and then we can talk about unique situations that can push that baseline price higher, but at least have a baseline. Seems like a good thing for an LLM actually if you could trust it.

As to your specific $200 quote, which others have attempted to refine, it can't be a coincidence that you come up with that number and the Medicare number is $300+, which, if your $200 is even somewhat accurate, seems like a perfectly fair gross margin on what's being delivered. Imagine if the government actually reimburses for cost plus a decent profit margin! Unthinkable the gov could somehow be accurate in their reimbursements.

Edit: spelling

Not particularly knowledgable about this, but I was under the impression the front of the bus subsidizes the back. So if the front opts for more expensive supersonic flights then the back will have to increase in cost to make it profitable to fly subsonic flights at all.

This is interesting but I'm not sure I get it. I can't tell if you're saying these folks leaving Google are part of that small group (I think you're saying they are, but why would them having those skills lead to them leaving? Because there are already other people at Google doing those roles and so they aren't making use of those unique skills?). I think I'm just not quite getting it, but I'd like to understand.

One other thought from your comment, which has been beaten to death, is the legacy product problem for Google, which is not going to magically go away. For people on the bleeding edge they just don't want to have another meeting where someone brings up, for instance, search. You don't have to worry about legacy products at Anthropic and OpenAI because none exist so it's certainly more greenfield.

Right. There are two (very cursory) ways I think about these marquee DeepMind departures: these folks are (are, not were) amazing talents, but despite their capabilities they could not surmount some internal obstacles at Google that kept them from realizing their full potential. Or these folks were amazing talents for what they did in the past, but today those talents aren't able to get DeepMind to today's bleeding edge. Reality is it's probably a bit of both and there's just no nuance in the discourse so I share your fatigue.

And then I guess there's the third option which is money. These folks already have "enough" funds for generations to come, but there's a lot of financial fomo out there when you see all your peers becoming billionaires and you're a lowly centimillionaire.

Rightfully so (worried I mean). And the SpaceX IPO was on that and a lot of other things, but if Elon’s proven himself effective at one thing (there are more than one course) it’s generating revenue from the government.

I feel like this is part of the “negotiation” between the US Gov (Trump) and Anthropic and other labs for an equity stake. “If we have a seat at the table, and a confederate engineering team embedded, then we can ensure you won’t let nefarious actors use the models.” Either that or a temporary gate on Anthropic to benefit other labs (think maybe SpaceX started trading today).

I don't see anyone replying to you here, and I don't know what your background is in this, but I think and hope you're spot on here. The more I've read replies in this thread the more I think this is mostly regulatory and maybe slightly a hardware issue (hardware issue is that there needs to be some kind of plug on an electrical panel that would remove the risks of having to pull the face off the panel, install a new breaker and connect the inverter).