I think Codex is a better fit for professional software engineers. It's able to one-shot larger, more complex tasks than Claude and also does better context management which is really important in a large codebase.
On the other hand, I think Claude is more friendly/readable and also still better at producing out-of-the-box nice looking frontend.
Context management is one area where I’ve found Codex is a lot better than Claude. Sessions last forever without degrading. Codex doesn’t forget things that Claude drops from context.
Another sketchy practice: if you get Uber Cash through a card like Amex, when you go to use it the price for the ride is automatically $15-$20 more than someone who doesn’t have an Uber Cash balance.
I’ve checked this side by side with colleagues at the airport getting ride quotes to the same hotel. When you have Uber Cash they will quote you more. You can find numerous Reddit threads on the topic as well.
I remember the days when Uber prices from SF to anywhere on the peninsula would suddenly spike exactly a minute or two after each Caltrain departed. If you just missed the train you paid a lot more.
And then the many times that Lyft violated the triangle inequality in pricing: Ride from A->B followed by a ride from B->C was often cheaper than a direct ride from A->C, if you knew how to pick B correctly. I once confused the hell out of a driver when I got out and got back in the same car at some nondescript spot.
> That doesn’t strike me as malicious. If you just missed the train, other users probably did, too.
You may not have started with malicious intent but you may have unintentionally created a malicious algorithm that learned to squeeze profits off of lower income people who normally take the train to save money but just missed it.
When the train leaves, some people miss it. They then use the app to hail a ride. The increased demand leads to a corresponding increase in price. This is how surge pricing works. What you seem to be suggesting is that this is inherently predatory, but it seems more likely that it’s just the result of a large number of people requesting rides at the same time.
What I am suggesting is that whether or not the people are predatory, they created a system that is mathematically predatory.
In the pre-Uber world taxis would line up, the fare wouldn't be any different whether or not it is just after a train left, and more drivers would just know that there is higher demand at that location at certain times, without fare surges.
I do love being able to hail rides with a phone app, but I detest this fluctuating pricing.
It reminds me of why I like train travel in other countries but not so much in the US: In almost all of Europe and Asia, train tickets are fixed price based largely on distance travelled and class of train. In the US, Amtrak plays the idiot capitalist game of predatory money grabbing you if you need to make last minute emergency travel plans or changes.
Going by pure economic theory "dynamic pricing" actually benefits both buyers and sellers in a marketplace. There are plenty of cases where it makes sense – lunch menus at restaurants, grocery store coupons, retail bargain bins, dollar menus, happy hour deals, senior/youth/student discounts, even surge pricing in Uber & Lyft. Of course like with every aspect of economics how something is implemented matters a lot more than how it sounds on paper. Especially in the case of rideshare/food delivery, where the middleman has all the data and makes all the decisions.
Yes. This is why getting an Uber is merely expensive instead of impossible on rainy days or on New Year's Eve.
Dynamic pricing makes it possible for both riders and drivers to respond to changes in supply and demand. If prices were static, many drivers would prefer to go to a New Year's Eve celebration themselves than work, but when it becomes their biggest paying shift of the year, they're a lot more willing to do it. Riders have to pay a bigger price if they want a ride at peak times, but it's still possible to get one when they really have a strong preference to.
Wouldn't perfect individualised dynamic pricing mean that the seller (Uber in this case) would get to capture the entire consumer surplus? Is that good?
Yes but also that some people would be getting a service that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. But there’s little/no incentive for a pure seller to do that, although for a marketplace like Uber there is more possibility for that, in order to maintain liquidity on the other side of the transaction. I listened to an interview where Uber CEO Dara K note there is always an incentive pool, and based on the market it is either riders or drivers who are getting the incentive money at any given time.
Prices are always dynamic in every business. The only difference is in how frequently the price changes.
If you take your idea to the logical extreme then you're essentially arguing for permanently fixed prices. This is one reason why it's sometimes impossible to get a taxi in places where the rates are fixed by government edict.
I don't think we're referring to the same concept. Dynamic pricing implies charging two different concurrent customers different prices for the same good or service. The only place you can see this now are basically reward/promo/point programs, which while also gross (basically, making transactiobs cheaper for the rich) at least seem to have some proponents.
> Dynamic pricing implies charging two different concurrent customers different prices for the same good or service.
That is price discrimination, not dynamic pricing. Price discrimination involves charging more or less based on the buyer’s perceived willingness and ability to pay. Dynamic pricing is based on fluctuations in consumer demand. A taxi ride at midnight is not the same as a taxi ride at noon; if there are proportionally fewer drivers available at midnight, fares will be higher at midnight.
The same principle may be applied in the restaurant industry; kitchen throughput has limits. If these limits are reached during peak hours, the restaurant can either raise prices during these hours or reduce prices outside of these hours to spread out the consumer demand, maximizing earnings during peak times while reducing kitchen idle time during off-peak hours.
You are thinking of price discrimination, which is a subcategory of dynamic pricing. Changing prices based on time of day, current demand, tiers/SKUs or really anything else is also collectively dynamic pricing.
Price discrimination isn’t a subcategory of dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing is equivalent to what is colloquially referred to as surge pricing, whereas price discrimination is based on the buyer’s perceived willingness and ability to pay.
Dynamic pricing could technically fall into the category of price discrimination if the discrimination is temporal (e.g. people who need a taxi at 8:00 AM pay more than people who need a taxi at 8:00 PM), but generally price discrimination refers to changes in price based upon anticipated demand, whereas dynamic pricing refers to changes in price based on actual demand.
I would probably call this "charge discrimination", which gives a clear indication which side of the party is empowered with this concept.
Still, wildly volatile pricing is also an excellent reason to avoid taxi apps. Why politicians have no desire to rein them in is baffling. I guess the stock market is really all that matters at the end of the day....
In theory surge pricing should bring more drivers into the area making the service better for riders. Not sure how much that actually works out in practice though without data only Uber really has.
Surge pricing in theory incentivizes more drivers to operate during peak times, reducing wait times for passengers. If you’ve used these kinds of apps in regions where they aren’t popular, it can be quite common to not have anyone pick up your fare.
If you could bid up the price, you would be more likely to incentivize any idle drivers to pick up your fare. A driver might not be willing to get out of bed for a $10 fare, but the same driver might be willing to get out of bed for a $30 fare.
> Jobs was kind of infamous for making people put their app / product in front of him while he sat in silence and used it. Harder to fake.
Yes, faking that really well is basically equivalent to actually doing it for real.
Of course, there are many good and worthwhile things an exec could have done that wouldn't show up in such a demo.
Eg if you increase reliability of your cloud services from 99.9% to 99.9999% that could be huge, but most likely wouldn't show up in a short demo.
On the bullshitting front: I remember a particular re-organisation we went through at Goldman Sachs that the local bigwig was explaining to us, and all the benefits it would bring. I made the perhaps unwise decision to ask what observable measurements we could take in a few months to tell us whether the whole thing was a failure (or success).
(I suspect the actual main purpose of these semi-regular re-orgs is to shake things up enough so that after a few shuffles person A can eventually land ahead of his former boss B, without anyone ever losing face. And that's a good thing! But hard to admit to.)
A CEO just needs to make sure that stuff gets done; doing it personally is just one of the ways to get there. (And not a particularly scalable one.)
For Apple it probably made sense, because the whole company's image and reputation is built on that stick.
But eg for a toilet paper manufacturer or a producer of fighter jets, the CEO shouldn't spend too much time personally testing the products.
For the former, because presumably the product doesn't change that often.
For the latter, because there's not even a single 'user' of the product. The experience of the huge ground crew (with various specialised roles) is just as important as the experience of the guy in the cockpit, etc. No CEO, and actually no single person on earth, has the expertise to judge all of these aspects of use by themselves.
That doesn't mean the experience of the users is irrelevant. Just the opposite! But the CEO will have to intelligently delegate.
One of the things I love about ChatGPT is voice mode for collaborative searching. My wife and I will both ask questions about things like house repairs, meal planning, sleep training, etc. So much better than both of us googling separately in silence on our phones.
Voice chat with LLMs is a complete interface, and it's one that already works and can be slotted right into the product. You can prototype voice chat-based ordering app via no-code tools today, and without much effort going into it.
Dynamically generated interactive UIs are something people are barely beginning to experiment with; we don't know if current models can do them reliably for realistic problems, and how effort has to go into setting them up for any particular product. At this point, they're an expensive, conceptual solution, that doesn't scale.
I find it fascinating how communication channels are subject to some form of Goodhart’s law. Channels that are recognized as valuable by subscribers become more desirable by publishers, receive more noise, and then cease to be useful.
I worked for an academic support program at a college once. They used texting to communicate with their small population of target students. It worked so well that the institution started texting. For everything. Everything.
After about three weeks, students blocked all texts from the institution's numbers.
We can't have nice things because there are so many of us to ruin them. Ever read the Consul's Tale in Hyperion?
The reaction is that people disable notifications. Only, it’s really hard to get data on this as a publisher. You just, silently, get decreasing click-through rates on subsequent messages.
“This app would like to send you push notifications!” -> Deny. “It’s just for (legitimate reason)!” Fine. “And marketing!” -> Uninstall app. “Are you sure?” - I’ve never been more sure in my life.
There’s a setting in chrome & Firefox to block websites from even being able to ask for the ability to send notifications. It’s one of the first things I set when I setup a new computer.
It's funny because in a group crowded channel there is feedback so long as you are part of the channel. But I think even in those circumstances, the feedback you get from the noise of everybody else, you don't interpret that as the same thing as you sending just "your one message".
Humans are really bad at understanding distributed harms.
Honestly the idea of a valuable communication channel getting abused for selfish purposes feels like it needs its own law. I'd happily call it csharps law. Maybe it's already got a name. We have the idea of spam, but it's vauge, nebulous, and doesn't concretly identify the systems and forces in place that lead to this innevitable outcome. It casts this outcome as not even a problem of individuals, but something like "the problem is someone sent me a message I didn't want." As if that person had not done that, then this wouldn't be a problem.
I think this is important because it feels like an endless surprise to everyone that this keeps happens. It feels like we have to cover the same ground again and again in discussions about it, and it feels like if we could tackle this problem more generally, the benefits to society at large would be massive.
Product reviews are valuable, producers capture reviewers, spam fake reviews.
Email is valuable. Spam nearly destroyed it until we migrated the entire decentralized system to Google.
Public discussions like these are valuable, and God knows how much work Hacker News does to moderate all this.
None of this feels like it's designed to resist this problem.
