That sounds brutal if you have 5 years of daily uploads or something like that. At some point, if you want your entire catalog, that becomes a very sucky process.
AI is making me 100x productive in some tasks, and 2-4x in others, and 0x in some. Knowing which tasks AI is great at and delegating is like 95% of the battle.
Yeah if you see the generated output of a lot of coding llms you realise without direction from someone with knowhow they quickly end up creating a mess.
I was never a big SO user in terms of asking questions or providing answers (maybe a total of 10 questions and ~15 answers all time), but I did browse a ton and learned a whole lot.
Thanks to ChatGPT and Claude, I just don't see the need anymore, when I can get an answer tailored to my problem in 5 seconds, and ask as many follow up questions as needed, with minimal snark.
Well, and as I always told myself - it’s an investment in tools I’ll use again later, and eventually it’ll be cheaper to DIY myself.
Which, at the point I was welding together solar panel mounts onto shipping containers was true. But maybe i could have asked myself ‘should I’ instead of ‘can I’ somewhere earlier in the process hah.
If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.
I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more tailored to you.
Plus, being stingy even if you have money benefits those who don't have money. It's why I buy the $0.50 macaroni and cheese instead of the $1.69 version. I don't really care; either would be fine. But I don't want companies to succeed in charging more. I want them to desperately need to cut their selling price in order to succeed.
People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't truly better) are helping screw over poor people. Just slightly.
I love how you make being upper middle class yet stingy to be about helping the poor. You're not buying cheap things because you're cheap and want to keep more of that money (and thus pay less taxes that would go to the poor), you're doing it to save the world!
Many people do things like this out of a genuine guilt over having it better than many others financially and not knowing how to resolve that.
I really liked the solution in the movie Our God's Brother adapted from a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s in Polish who later became Pope John Paul II.
The $.50 version is barely food. The $1.69 is not much better, and still very unhealthy for you. Have ground beef and a fiber rich low calorie food like brocoli or whole wheat whole grain noodles or something.
Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a few boxes of kraft dinner.
If more people did it, and it became a movement, like buying clothes from the thrift store is becoming, then clothiers will shift business focus. Which to some extent they seem to have done over the past 20 years. But only slightly.
I don't agree with the person above you in as much as the way they are doing it is very individualist "vote with your wallet", and yes, you're right that it's very ineffective.
The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.
The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.
LLMs cannot "teach you a language". They make for cool demos to show off. They can perhaps be a building block of a proper language learning experience.
Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.
Could I ask ChatGPT to just "teach me spanish"? Surely not. But if you've got even a slight idea of what to do (learn present tense and vocab, then progressive, future and past, then some conditional, hypothetical etc...), it can be an absolutely incredible tutor.
I started using it when i was already at a pretty high level, but I'm quite certain that it would have been excellent from the very beginning. It translates, gives varied examples, explains syntax, compares verb tenses and conjugation and more.
Using it and being surrounded by people writing and/or speaking the language is probably the right way to learn a language. That is how I learned Polish which is really difficult. I joined a community, and 2 years later, my Polish was quite good! YMMV.
After 4 weeks I also learned Spanish enough to maintain casual conversations just from trying to talk to someone online who did not speak English. I am rusty now, however, because I do not speak it with anyone, nor do I see or hear Spanish anywhere. Spanish is way easier, IMO, in comparison to Polish.
Oh, right. I think whatever works best for your personality but in general doing some exercises and/or interacting with people has been working for a couple .. ten thousands years at least. Hard to go wrong. I never heard someone make the believable claim that they interacted with too many people and it hampered their language learning.
My take is that basically anything can be made to work if you are properly motivated. Tech is - at best - a secondary concern.
I think the best way to learn a language is offline through actual human interaction.
I've used Duolingo in the past (and other apps) and quickly lost interest, it's a fun app, but I feel like you don't learn from it. If I had to learn a new language today, I'm confident I could make good progress with GPT or Gemini, but tailoring it to how I learn.
> If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.
Because the "customize it" part is not trivial. That is the value add for most people who can not do that customisation themselves.
That said, I've found LLMs to be terrific if the goal is to learn the rules of language's grammar. But to actually learn to speak the language, find HelloTalk to be best, beaten by nothing other than actually sitting down with a native speaker.
Duolingo does not need a moat. They are already an established incumbent and have market inertia on their side. They can afford to experiment and make mistakes, and then to backtrack those mistakes.
For what it's worth, I also stopped using Duolingo when the human forums closed. I often found as much value in the forums as in the actual course. And like GP, the hardest part was relinquishing my nearly 1000 day streak.
I'd love to see someone build Duolingo with a single system prompt. By HN standards, no one would be paying for Character.ai, Cursor, Windsurf, or dozens of others tools because they could just call the ChatGPT API themselves.
In Colorado, a law went into effect at the beginning of 2025 that showed you how much of the actual fare the driver gets. I took an Uber ride to the airport last week and the total cost was ~$98 before tip, and the drivers share of that was reported as ~$41. I don't see how it makes sense that Uber for connecting me to a driver gets close to 60% of the fare, while the driver who does all the work, puts miles onto their car, etc, gets less than half of the fare.
I seem to remember Uber’s tilt to profitability coinciding with a move to extend their “dynamic pricing” to a driver-side reverse auction for fares, which they called “Trip Radar.”
Mysteriously I’m having trouble finding much reference to it now, although I remember it being discussed at the time… the only real discussion I can find now is recent and vaguely agenda-flavored [0]. Complete with extra-weaselly non-denial denials from Uber’s PR.
> In 2024, American media non-profit More Perfect Union conducted an experiment to discover whether Uber’s algorithms facilitate wage discrimination. It gathered seven experienced Uber drivers together in a high-traffic area in Los Angeles and asked each of them to open up the app and place their phones on a table next to each other. It found that Uber offered the same rides 46 times to multiple drivers, and that there was discrepancy between fares for 63% of those trips. Uber refuted that this was discrimination, saying in a blog post that differing pay was due to GPS discrepancies.
So the drivers bid each other down, while the riders bid each other up through “surge pricing” (even as they’re individually priced according to their willingness to pay). Nice market position if you can get it…
It’s a good party trick if they’ve clocked you, like they apparently have me, as a total cheapskate. As a rider I routinely see prices 50%-70% of those Uber offers to my richer and less price-sensitive friends when we call for the exact same ride from the same place at the same time, whether I call first or second…
They are a natural monopoly. All network-based marketplaces with barriers to entry are.
That competitors exist does not make them not a natural monopoly. Even the fact that the are not a current monopoly does not mean they are not a natural monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
The first 6 worlds in your cite are "a natural monopoly is a monopoly...". That competitors exist mean they're not a monopoly and therefore can't be a natural monopoly.
>Specifically, an industry is a natural monopoly if the total cost of one firm, producing the total output, is lower than the total cost of two or more firms producing the entire production.
The industry of operating a network connecting independent taxi service providers to taxi service clients is the natural monopoly, simple because the cost to operate the service is wildly scalable, and become more useful as more people use them, as all network-based industries are.
Except at some level you do obviously believe that using the app was worth $57, because you didn't end the story by saying you called a cab company and got a big discount by doing it the old fashioned way.
OR could it be that the scheduling, summoning, and advertising infrastructure is actually close to 60% of the cost, and the added convenience of the app is in fact worth the difference in price?
> Except at some level you do obviously believe that using the app was worth $57
That's ridiculous. "because you didn't end the story by saying you called a cab company and got a big discount by doing it the old fashioned way." is just bad-faith weaseling. Uber is worse in every way than the taxi stands that used to be at airports; now you hail a car via an expensive app and have to wait for them to all jockey to where you are if they don't bail on the way.
Taxi stands still make the most sense at events and leaving mass transit and that's even before considering the ridiculous cost. Visiting europe felt like a breath of fresh air in comparison—technically they have uber, but there was no point in using it because taxis were so prevalent, reliable, and cheap.
Part time I went to Paris I had a 30 minute wait for a taxi at Gare du Nord.
However last time I was as Dulles I wanted straight into a taxi, having been burnt the previous time when I ordered uber while going through customs and had to wait for ages.
At Singapore Changi taxi queues can take ages, or no time at all.
In Kenya I waited for an uber for 40 minutes to have it cancelled by the driver as I saw him get close to the airport, with a message saying he had “been arrested”.
I don’t bother with uber in the U.K. any more - very rarely works. Used to be nice and reliable in cities
It was in, about 10 years ago.
You can’t draw a conclusion based on personal annecdotes.
'Europe' is a big place. Lots of local variation. Here in Ireland, only taxi's are allowed on Uber. So the same people are driving on uber, freenow, and being hailed at taxi ranks (although costs vary depending on the app).
> Visiting europe felt like a breath of fresh air in comparison—technically they have uber, but there was no point in using it because taxis were so prevalent, reliable, and cheap.
Taxis in Shanghai have been largely replaced by app-related taxis. I have no particular knowledge of whether this moved prices up or down.
But there are two obvious changes:
1. It's now possible to get a taxi when it's raining.
2. The app drivers feel free to smoke.
Point 2 is a negative, but point 1 is a huge positive. How do European taxis respond to the rain?
TBH, Uber wouldn't be so much of a problem with decent competition. But the critical mass required for a transit app is quite difficult to establish, and Lyft offers essentially the same deal with a slightly better margin for drivers. It's a de-facto duopoly here in the US where the two companies are incentivized to drive prices as high as the market will sustain, and the local apps (for instance we have one here in DC that is a co-op) are often legislated out of existence.
> Taxis in Shanghai have been largely replaced by app-related taxis.
The APP itself isn't the issue, it's the pricing. But it sounds like China has a much healthier market than we have.
> 1. It's now possible to get a taxi when it's raining.
Why would this make so much of a difference? I'm very curious.
>> 1. It's now possible to get a taxi when it's raining.
> Why would this make so much of a difference? I'm very curious.
I have no idea.† But the fact remains that traditional taxis in Shanghai (1) leave the streets when it's raining; (2) won't stop for you when it's raining if you do see one that hasn't pulled its disappearing act yet; and (3) won't let you in even if they have stopped for you and learned where you want to go. And believe me, getting stranded in the rain sucks.
Rain is common in Shanghai at all times of the year, by the way.
† That is, I have no idea why taxi drivers refuse to take passengers when it's raining. It's obvious why taxi apps will still do so - the app allows you to contact them at all times.
Or it could be that a massive influx of VC money into the for-hire transportation market allowed for a player (Uber) to more-or-less set prices as it found desirable.
OC has something they must do: get from point A to point B. If your choices for doing so have been restricted by anticompetitive behavior on the part of a market player, you will have to do so by a less consumer-friendly set of rules.
Why would the old fashioned way be a big discount? Old fashioned taxi companies are not taking 0%.
> scheduling, summoning, and advertising infrastructure is actually close to 60% of the cost
Funny story about that - "pre-booking" an Uber for a future date costs something like an additional 20% on top of the actual fare. Made that mistake once and never again.
> Funny story about that - "pre-booking" an Uber for a future date costs something like an additional 20% on top of the actual fare. Made that mistake once and never agai
Addendum from my funny story: It doesn't even really guarantee there will be a driver for you. A few years ago I "pre-booked" a car for an airport ride at an inconvenient time, only to have it cancelled as the driver was meant to show up. Luckily driver were more available than I expected they would be and I had another within a few minutes, but I could have been really screwed over.
I remember reading about the law going into effect but had never seen the split broken out until last week.
I highly doubt the scheduling, summoning, and advertising infra is close to 60% of the cost. I like Uber, I've been a customer for a long time. It's invaluable when visiting a new place imo. I also think they can and should pay their drivers more.
Taxi could be more expensive than Uber for the same reason AirBnB is cheaper than hotels: they do not respect the same standards (e.g. insurance, worker rights, etc).
Not same this is the case, but there's more than convenience embedded in markets.
We live in a society where the largest and most successful companies got that way by NOT making a profit, and now you're going to bring out the free market arguments?
It's hard to find a specific number, but that seems like it's even more than "traditional" taxi companies take.
So the enshittification has come full circle - Uber is now priced basically the same as traditional taxis and takes a possibly bigger cut for themselves without any of the overhead or capex of a traditional taxi company. Filing this away under: don't ever believe tech company hype.
What they never were, was "the underdog fighting taxi mafia". That's just propaganda. They beat "taxi mafias", plural, with divide-and-conquer, market after market, and they did that as a multinational corporation with ~infinite money supply thanks to VC funding.
Uber is a story of the Goliath going from town to town and beating everyone's Davids.
Uber won by offering services that people wanted and that existing taxi oligopolies were not providing: reliable pickups, not complaining about your destination, and not having "broken" credit card readers.
My experience with taxi in Italy (Napoli) was getting scammed by the driver and nearly missing my flight as he wanted to demand double fare because he had no guaranteed pickup from the Airport.
My very first experience in Germany back in 2019 was being driven from the train station to my hotel by a taxi that never turned their meter on. They just told me it was 20 EUR when they dropped me off.
My taxi driver on my last time in France (in 2022 I believe) almost made us miss our train from Marseilles to Paris as he drove us around looking for an ATM because he insisted he "left his credit card reader at home". I do not miss taxis and their scummy drivers one bit.
It's easy to offer a better service when you're cheating. And when a cheater wins, the service invariably gets much worse very quickly.
Uber was able to offer "reliable pickups, not complaining about your destination, and not having 'broken' credit card readers" for a competitive price by a combination of:
- Not servicing people with mobility issues
- Not servicing unprofitable areas in the city
- Subsidizing fares with their ~infinite VC money supply to a degree that didn't even pretend to be sustainable
- Offering unsustainably favorable conditions to drivers to create the initial impression of premium, high-quality service
- Blatantly breaking the local laws, and using their ~infinite VC money supply to avoid law enforcement and tie up any cases against them
The last three points being a plain and obvious bait&switch. The business was based on hoping they'll destroy local transportation businesses and gain reputation with people to make regulators face public backlash faster than they run out of money.
Market by market, they succeeded to a greater or lesser degree, and then perfectly predictably, they behaved like the paragons of honesty and virtue they always were: the drivers got shafted, service went to shit, and all good it did was to replace local businesses with multinational franchise of shit pseudo-taxi.
A McDonald'ification of the taxi market, if you like, except McDonald's doesn't suck as much.
I've still seen Uber drivers complain about a destination taking them out of the busier areas where they'd get more work. In some places Uber really did improve the wait for a taxi though, and taxis never cared about offering the little extras as far as phone chargers and bottled water.
>What they never were, was "the underdog fighting taxi mafia".
The only people who ever fight mafias, are up-and-coming crime syndicates themselves.
I wonder if a state could cap their cut of the fare to say, $1. Index it to CPI every 3 years, so they don't have future legislators itching to bump that number up so often. Would this be fought out in courts, by secret meeting lobbyists, or would they just add a bunch of fees to it in such a way that it becomes opaque again (the fees could be paid by the driver, for instance, so it's totally under the radar of any customers/passengers)?
Shows up sometimes. Sometimes it wanders off for 10 minutes because the driver is finishing a Lyft ride first but accepted your fare anyway, or they got lost, or they stopped to pick up food (all of these have happened to me)
Yes, this. Sometimes they cancel because they claim they have a malfunction. Sometimes they cancel because fuck you, that's why. Almost cost me an appointment with the doctor when our small kid got sick and a driver strung us for 15 minutes of extra wait time while he circled a grocery store, then claimed his car broke down.
I don't trust those companies with important stuff anymore, I either go straight for public transport, or in some cases (airport) I pre-book an early enough departure to still be able to catch a bus to airport if the driver doesn't show.
Similar, I've been scammed by a taxi once out of three times, Uber/Lyft never out of dozens. The worst with an Uber I've had was a guy who didn't know you could make multiple stops.
I wouldn't say that Uber or Lyft (or other NEMT rideshares) ever scammed me, but I've had enough shitty experiences and felt burned enough times that their reputation is on-par with classical taxi services IMHO.
On the other hand, Waymo has never scammed me; I've never had a conflict with a shitty Waymo driver; and in fact I'm rather happy to participate in their testing phase and give generous feedback about minor things that could be better after each trip.
Killing the anachronistic and corrupt feudal medallion systems that some big North American cities used was a good thing, and that was one of their explicit goals... I'm no libertarian but there's plenty of municipal regulation that has an abominable effect on quality of life.
But once that was dead and all taxi competitors no longer have to pay medallion-holding gentry for the right to do business? Uber is just a massive pile of debt and some slick marketing that adds very little value. Now that my local taxi companies have mobile software basically as good as Uber plus decades of established good name in my community? I've no reason to use Uber.
Uber is still better than a Taxi from the consumer side. Transparent and low friction interactions are worth a modest premium, especially when traveling in places where you don’t speak the language very well.
And as for Colorado, I’ve had my share of Uber bills there. It’s 30% tolls, 40% Uber, 30% Driver in my experience.
IANAL (also, not from Colorado; never used a rideshare); it seems that this would provide benefit to both drivers and riders.
My nephew used to commute to work via rideshare, and would usually work outside deals with regular drivers. Knowing how much each person in the rideshare might save would definitely incentivize out-of-network rides.
Unintended consequences, or not, presuming the rider/gypsy decide to "split the difference": that's still 110% more money staying within the local economy. With obvious safety concerns/trade-offs.
YouTube just doesn't make this available via API, but you've always been able to manually from YouTube Studio download your uploaded videos.