tuchsen

Yeah I’ve been doing DoorDash deliveries in SF for close to two years now it’s pretty clear to me that these companies having an adversarial relationship with their drivers is very much so not working. They have an incentive to pay the drivers as little as possible, but the drivers congregate around the most busy spots and so… they talk. Little cabals of people working together form to figure out how to game the system as much as possible, then the platforms adjust strategies to close those holes. Additionally the platforms use every dark pattern and psychological trick in the book to get you to work for less. People quit in response. Theirs no stable group of people doing this work. It shows up in the quality of what the platforms can provide.

If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.

For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.

Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.

The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.

Hey this looks neat, I’ve been thinking on trying something similar. I’ve not encountered the ANT protocol, what bike ya using? Is it a higher level thing that your display is giving you, or something your controller uses? I know Bafang uses CAN protocols in their newer e-bike systems and a lot of manufacturers (especially Chinese) use a proprietary UART protocol to stitch things together on the cheaper end.

The mess of different implementations makes it really hard to hack on and share this kinda stuff.

AI does make it really easy to figure out these protocols now so that’s nice I guess. I just flipped my bike upside down and hooked up a logic analyzer and it took LLM no time to figure it out… it is really impressive

Can you cite a source for that one? Of the 25 fatalities in sf in 2025 all but two were someone driving a car, truck, or van.

Of the two others, one was a scooter operator striking and elderly person, and then the other was an elderly person on a mobility device swerving out of the way of pedestrians crossing against the light. Zero bus accidents involving pedestrian fatalities.

I believe that their was one bus fatality this year, but of 12 total, I haven't looked up the causes of those accidents yet but I'd guess that the majority of them are going to be caused by drivers as well.

I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike in the city over the last year and a half. The toothpaste is locked up because groups of people were just going into stores with garbage bags, filling them, and walking out. I saw three in one day once. It was really chronic for a little while. Prop 36 passed and criminalized that kind of group theft, and then it all but stopped early this year, but retail hasn't caught up to this fact yet, and probably wont ever.

I think pretty much everyone agrees though that peoples habits have just changed with work from home. The cost of having to wait on an employee has been externalized to people shopping for a living in batch orders, and those people don't mind waiting given that we're only paid for minutes that we're actively on an order (Prop 22).

So yeah, retails not completely dead, just serves a different audience now.

Ah nice demo! I flew around SF for way too long just enjoying the sights. On my M3 Air using Chrome it eventually just turns into blobs and my character get stuck, takes about twenty minutes. I popped open the DevTools and the game loads in at like 400mb but after five or so minutes I'm at 2GB of memory consumption. I'd guess that you need to have your agent do a couple of passes for memory leaks. Very fun otherwise!

You're spot on, I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike on the weekends for exercise and the wait times are BS because everyone orders lunch/dinner at the same time and they're in essentially a random queue with everyone else who orders. Add to that multiple pick ups and drop offs and you've got a mess.

Talking to people really does help though, everyone wants to be more forgiving when you remind them theirs a human factor involved in getting the food to them.

The last time I upgraded my networking setup (just as the pandemic started) I went with Ubiquiti, shortly after (before?) they started default forcing you to sign up for their cloud service to use the router, you can switch it to a locally operated mode after you sign up but they bury it in the options. Their networking equipment works great, don't get me wrong, but they don't open source anything. I keep waiting for the full rug pull when sales start to slow because everything they release is rock solid and everything I have is "good enough." I don't feel the need to upgrade for as long as the rug pull doesn't happen.

I am super grateful people are starting to work on open source solutions to this stuff :).

Yeah I think we're in agreement that the current solution is not very good. I can understand why they opted for it initially though, given the thing that happened with protesters putting traffic cones on AV's to disable them. Imagine if instead of doing that, protesters hijacked cars and drove them into situations where the AV couldn't easily navigate out of, like driving up onto sidewalks for instance. The bombastic headlines write themselves. In the end I bet they end up making a kind of "master key" that works with all AV's to distribute among first responders. I'm in the "it'll get sorted out eventually" camp on this one.

This looks neat, but isn't it already implemented natively in Chrome? You can go into the Network tab in the Chrome Dev Tools and right click a request in the "Name" list, go to "copy", then "Copy as cURL". It'd probably be easier to use CnTUI if you wanted to bulk resend requests that Chrome's making though.

Yeah I'll raise my hand here to say I did a file manager that automates file management tasks by using AI to write Bash scripts (Aerome.net). It's still super primitive though, if I'm being honest. I think the problem is that it's way harder to write a cross platform file manager, or browser wrapper in your case, then it is to write a chat interface on top of ChatGPT. I suspect in a year or two many good use cases will emerge, as people write more complicated software to take advantage of LLM's capabilities.

I'm going to check out you're browser thing later tonight, it looks good!

Yeah it might have lied to me but i tested your theory and the bot swore back, then left early when i called his mom names. I thought for sure that was a human... but alas it said it was a bot.

Do ya mind me asking where you are in the country? I ask because I have a severely disabled nephew, and if I recall a few years before Covid our corner of California tried to get rid of special ed in elementary school. It went about as well as its going for your kid. My nephew literally couldn't integrate with the rest of the class, he's got severe epilepsy, even if he could understand the material, he couldn't actually write because his hands shake horribly! It was actually insane to put him in a normal class, the only thing he could do was disrupt it. It was bad for everyone involved.

Fortunately though, they had kept special ed programs at other schools nearby and he got transferred pretty quickly for being a severe case. It was my understanding that our school district backpedaled and reinstated special ed, but maybe that's not the case? I thought that it was just a crazy liberal California thing, but is this cancelling of special ed a more widespread phenomena? Why the hell is that happening?