I'm a product designer with no training in development. I've been hacking together a ridership data analysis platform for public transit planners using Claude Code. The data is all fake generated right now for King County Metro routes, but it pulls real GTFS for the route / stop information. AI coding is making things possible that I never dreamed of until recently - glad to be learning these tools.
Not just rideshare, but food delivery has been practically outlawed with all the taxes and fees. We have…
Sales tax: 10.25% on prepared delivery food.
Commission cap: Apps can only charge restaurants up to 15% per order, which leads to apps passing on fees to consumers
PayUp ordinance from 2024: delivery workers must be paid at least $0.44 per engaged minute + $0.74 per engaged mile, or a minimum of $5 per offer, whichever is greater. For 2025, those rates increase to $0.45/minute, $0.77/mile, or $5.20 per offer.
I tried to order 1 pad Thai and 1 curry the other night and it was going to be over $70. Insanity.
Delivery seems expensive now because it was only ever made cheap by underpaying workers, giving them no benefits, making them cover their own car costs, and forcing them to rely on tips to survive. The truth is, having someone drive your pad thai and curry across town costs real money, and I’d rather pick it up myself than keep pretending cheap delivery was ever anything but exploitation.
The problem isn’t that delivery itself is exploitation, just the delivery apps. The issue is that the claimed scaling factor that makes the apps work doesn’t exist. Turns out drivers get more money and delivery costs less if you pizza is delivered by a pizzeria employee than a delivery driving app contractor.
> Tipping should never be expected and be part of the base salary
I agree. Here, the choice is between tipping and rendering that person unemployed (or underemployed) because of projected morality. I'm arguing that it's better for the people one purports to help to hand over a tip and not support reducing their work, or worse, to advocate that others not use their services.
No! It is the company’s job to price their service to cover costs. I get to decide if I pay. Tipping does not make exploitation any less real. Of course I tip when necessary. That's besides the point.
> It is the company’s job to price their service to cover costs
They did. They made money. The delivery staff made money--OP is quoting the real, lived experience of actual gig workers. The government came in and decided that was unsavory, and so now those staff are making less (not counting the ones now unemployed).
There is always someone willing to work for a dollar. That doesn't mean we should abolish the minimum wage to exploit desperation.
Gig workers are just bullshit countries invented to hide unemployment. They don't ad anything to the economy. Nobody is buying a house or starting a family as a Uber delivery driver.
> doesn't mean we should abolish the minimum wage to exploit desperation
I agree. If all the city had done was raise the minimum wage (and make it applicable to these workers), that would have been fine. They didn't. They added a targeted tax.
> Nobody is buying a house or starting a family as a Uber delivery driver
Not in Seattle, but objectively untrue across the country. But also, I don't think it's fair to say we should render unemployed everyone who has a job that they can't start a family or buy a house on.
>Commission cap: Apps can only charge restaurants up to 15% per order, which leads to apps passing on fees to consumers
You mean you have to pay for the delivery service you're asking for? Shocking!
IMO it should be 0% of the cost should be borne by the restaurant. You still have a sizeable amount of your convenience being distributed to all patrons of the restaurant with 15%. That's 15% too much. Pay for what you ordered. I like to go in person, I don't want to support single-use delivery waste, Currently I'm forced to foot your bill if I want to go to any restaurant.
> I'm forced to foot your bill if I want to go to any restaurant
Deliveries are marginal business for a restaurant. Like, yes, as a consumer I have a better experience if a restaurant has lower volumes. But that's not as much fun if you're the restaurant!
In most major metros, an entree is easily $25. So paying $50 for your food, $15 for somebody to deliver it to you, and $5 in taxes is really not all that crazy
Why do you have to pay taxes? You already paid them before salary hit your bank account (~30% in most countries) and anybody who receives your money will pay it as well.
Different taxes go to different places, and taxes do not exist only to take money from people. Amongst other reasons, they exist to discourage certain behaviors, pay for externalities, or because the market does not price in the costs of certain things.
Very interesting to see firms who already bet big on OpenAI (like Altimeter) on the list for this round. Anyone else remember when OpenAI told investors they couldn’t invest in competitors [1]?
The way that this write up describes it, the "ads" would be well curated, expensive responses from top AI models with lots of reasoning. If this is the case then the responses would be far more valuable for the user than a free response from a GPT-4o type model could ever be. It sounds like a win-win
I talk to people all the time who say "I love Instagram ads, they always know what I need before I do." People don't hate ads, they hate bad ads. The best AI in the world laser focused on burning compute to get the user the most helpful information sounds like it could capture the same sentiment as Instagram, but taken even further.
When I try to prompt it with something that obviously needs up to date web search (when will Minneola Tangelos be in season this year?) it says..
"I believe they're usually available from November through March, but I'm not completely certain about the exact timing for this year's crop. Would you like me to search for more current information about the 2025 tangelo season?"
It doesn't just search, it wants me to confirm. This has happened a lot for me.
Would be cool if @openai built a mode where 4o voice mode interviewed you for context until it determines it has what it needs then it feeds a structured output into o1 and helps decide what level of reasoning you need
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This is a genius idea for how we can all leverage these models much better. We need to use chatty AIs to help us prompt reasoning models in the right way so the average person can get the benefits
Really good write up. I keep hearing people say that we need folks outside of AI to start paying more attention and weighing in on how these systems are used (Ethan in this piece, Eric Schmidt, Sam Altman, Dario, etc), but how can we do that when most people aren't even aware of what is happening? When I talk to friends outside of tech, they are still thinking of AI as a homework helper or parlor trick machine.
What will the "ChatGPT moment" be for the rest of the population?
As AI has continued to improve quickly, it’s been interesting to watch the sentiment of the tech community get more negative on it. “It’s not very good yet.” “No improvement since GPT-4.”
Objectively, today’s AI is incredibly impressive and valuable. We blew past the Turing test and yet no one seems to marvel at that.
I’d argue and we still have yet to discover the most effective ways to incorporate the existing models into products. We could stop progress now and have compelling product launches for the next few years that change industries. I’m confident customer support will be automated shortly - a previously large industry for human employment.
Is the negative sentiment fear from tech folks because they have a lot to lose? Am I just not understanding something? It feels like I can watch the progress unfold, but yet the community here continues to say nothing is happening.
> We blew past the Turing test and yet no one seems to marvel at that.
We didn't blow past the Turing test. Such comments are often made, but I think they are a result of misunderstanding or overgeneralizing of what a Turing test is. If you interact with a chatbot and it produces human-like answers, it doesn't mean it would pass or blow past the Turing test.
Turing proposed a rigorous setup for the test, he designed it in such a way, that passing the test could really mean reaching human level intelligence. In the Turing test a human is asked to use all of their intelligence to reveal which of the two peers in a conversation is human and which is a machine. Current chatbots are very far from passing such a test.
From my perspective, the negativity stems from a general disregard of environmental impact, copyright or intellectual property, or education around hallucinations.
yes this is indeed a huge problem. all these models are trained on massive amounts of stolen data and the creators aren't receiving any of the benefit. that seems a sheer disregard for private property rights, the one thing the govt should be in charge of.
I'll share a perspective as someone who doesn't really have a dog in the fight (For the record, I'm over 20 years into my career but don't fear losing roles/income/status due to AI, and am using it in my projects and can see plenty of ways I could benefit from it):
Lots of people on HN have been in tech for many years or a few decades and have seen several hype waves come and go, including ones involving AI. Plenty of us understand the technology that underlies current AI tech (even if we couldn't have built it ourselves). Some of us have spent plenty of time researching or contemplating nature of consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and see predictions/presumptions of human-like intelligence emerging from GPUs as at least a little silly. Plenty of us have come to know what it looks like when people are making grandiose claims – which they deeply believe to be true – particularly when great status and power seems within reach.
We can at-once happily recognise that contemporary LLMs are highly impressive and powerful, and the efforts of the researchers are brilliant and commendable, whilst also noting that these technologies have major pitfalls and limitations, and no obvious ways to resolve them.
The "blew past the Turing Test" claim is overblown, because we all know that an LLM-based product can seem human-like for much of the time, but then start generating crazy nonsense any moment. A human that behaves like that can cause millions of dollars in business losses, or planes to crash, and all kinds of other costs and harms. Human workers are evaluated on their ability to perform at a high-level on a consistent and predictable basis. By that measure, LLMs are nowhere near good enough for critical applications yet (even if they may be better than many humans at certain things, much of the time).
The claims that LLMs will just keep improving at an accelerating rate until they don't make mistakes anymore are fair enough to make, but until we see solid evidence that it's happening and details of the technology breakthroughs that will make it happen, people are within their rights to reserve judgement.
I’ve always found that you.com features are ahead of their time on paper, but the UX is so bad it’s hard to figure out how to get the most of it / keep me coming back. Great ideas and great technical founder, but just not a compelling product.
I just logged in now and they have a whole agents section with no clear value prop shown. I tapped on the “Genius Agent” and it seems like it just selected a “Genius” filter that had already been on the screen?
https://transit-proto.vercel.app/
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