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Probably illegal car company. AirBNB isn't terribly different (as a renter) from previous renting sites. I made some money off Bitcoin but even then it is so much wasted power for something not terribly useful. Generative AI and AI art is fun as a toy but eh, that's mostly it.
Being able to pretty easily get a cab from anywhere to anywhere (obviously within reason) is actually kind of a cool innovation to me. It's probably saved lives too by giving inebriated people an easy way to get a cab home. (But I'm not giving them a huge pass because I think they've been accused of finding ways to charge drunk people more.)
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You're not wrong, but you are leaving out some convenient parts of the experience. Yes, before, you could call a cab company and they would come pick you up and take you somewhere. But, you didn't know how long it would take for your driver to pick you up. had no idea how much the ride would cost you, and there was a pretty good chance the driver wouldn't accept a credit card for payment whether it was company policy to or not.
When illegal cab companies came along, they forced competition by giving you realtime information on where your driver was and how long until they would pick you up, price estimates before your ride begins, and a guaranteed method of payment that isn't cash. Cab companies had to modernize with mobile apps, lower their prices to stay competitive, and improve the overall customer experience.
For as badly as the drivers are treated by the companies, the services were successful because the existing experience with established cab companies sucked.
Taxi accessibility varies wildly depending on where you are.
I lived in a small city (700k-ish people) for a decade and almost never saw a taxi on the streets. One morning, I locked my keys in the house and had to call a cab to take me to work. It took 30 minutes for a taxi to arrive. I lived literally one block away from the city's taxi depot.
A couple of years later, Uber hit the scene. With their service, I never waited more than 8 minutes for a ride anywhere in the city.
If all the drivers are out on call, it doesn't matter where the depot is. But waiting half an hour for a cab was also my experience with calling for one
I use to do it in spare time, you can't have a cab company without professional drivers that do it full time
Generative AI and AI art is fun as a toy but eh, that’s mostly it.
If you keep an eye on low budget Netflix / Max shows and on a number of the popular digital journals (particularly financials) you'll notice a rising tide of AI generated content. We've had this in the financial press for a long time - Benzinga is notorious for churning out tons of automated functionally-unresearched articles that amount to "Stock price changed because news happened". But its creeping into everything else.
Generative AI is increasingly a way of making really cheap, lazy templated art into the framework for an endless flow of vapid white noise media. And that's there to keep you subscribed to these paywalled services, with the illusion of continuously fresh content. The real implementation of this tech isn't as a toy for media hobbyists. Its as a wholesale replacement of the human-generated fine arts and journalism to reduce costs.
It is about cheapening new media until nobody human can afford to participate anymore and everything in the market space is this thin tasteless slop.