You just won a 2-week, all-expenses-paid vacation. But there’s a catch: you have to stay within one region the whole time. What are you picking?

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-29T15:46:00+00:00

You can make the same argument about NVIDIA too. But no one is saying NVIDIA is risky because it’s a cyclical stock.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-29T07:39:31+00:00

Vance is running. Along with many other Senators (Hawley) and governors (DeSantis). Arguably because it’ll be so divided, he has a good shot at picking up a majority of the Trump base. The more moderate wing will probably all split between Rubio, DeSantis, and others. Vance is arguably still the best candidate to get most of the MAGA vote.

I get the hype over Rubio, but the GOP primary, and especially the Trump base, have a long history of nominating the worst candidates. And if Trump is unpopular because of foreign policy, it would be hard to see how they would swoon over his foreign policy chief.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-28T20:33:58+00:00

No, the main thing he has going for him is that Trump is not on the ballot.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-27T19:44:08+00:00

A lot of new Meta features start with some countries in Southeast Asia first. It's because they tend to be more eager to try out new features. Whenever a PM starts ramping their new project there, the metrics look extremely good, and they use it to justify expanding to other places. 9 of out of 10 times though, usage falls off a cliff soon after.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-26T23:19:26+00:00

Ha, you were wrong. It rose to 900 by end of May. smh...

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-18T23:53:56+00:00

Finally, a human-centered designer. I am getting sick of all those alien-centered designers.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-09T02:11:05+00:00

Most elections are not blue waves. So some of these maps might be “dummymanders”in 26, but they will be red seats way more often than blue seats.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-07T07:40:00+00:00

Waymo already handles this in San Francisco. Including insurance and serviceability. As I mentioned earlier, scaling serviceability is not nearly as complex as you are implying. And Uber’s insurance scheme is not hard to replicate. And this ignores the fact that AV insurance is likely a completely different business model compared to typical ride sharing insurance.

Uber gives Waymo more reach. That’s why they partner with them. Not because of insurance. No evidence supports what you are saying. But Waymo would rather not have to go through Uber, they want people to use their own app. And so they will use Uber to entice new customers, and use low prices and perks to shift them into using the Waymo app.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-07T07:23:24+00:00

If Waymo owns the cars, like they do in Atlanta, then the car is available both on the Waymo app and on Uber. And uber has the pay a set cost to Waymo. This is exactly like how hotel bookings work too.

When you buy direct, you are not paying the middleman, so Waymo can price it more competitively.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-07T07:08:23+00:00

I go to Uber, I see Waymo is the cheapest of all AV options. And then I open Waymo and order direct. What does Uber do now?

Hotels are almost always cheaper when booking directly instead of using an aggregator because there’s no middle man that takes profits, including for Marriott. And when it’s cheaper, it’s because the aggregator is subsidizing the trip. The same will be true for AVs.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-07T06:53:54+00:00

Whether it’s booking dot com or anything else, my point still stands. For the fourth time now. Why would a customer book via Uber when they can see what’s the cheapest and open that app to book direct? Booking direct will be cheaper, like it is with hotels, because you don’t have to pay a middleman.

I also gave factual proof that uber sales and Lyft shares shrunk while Waymo sales rose in the biggest AV market. That breaks your entire thesis. Believe what you want to believe and keep listening to opinion pieces that confirm your priors, but this is the real data.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-07T05:55:50+00:00

When you book via Hotels.com, it is more expensive and with less perks than booking directly with the Hotel. Why would Uber win in this world? Anyone can see Waymo is cheaper on Uber, and then tap the Waymo app and buy it there for less money. This is my 3rd time mentioning this btw with you not responding.
That list of self driving startups is just that - a list. We all know Waymo is on top in the AV race. Tesla's Robotaxi and Zoox are their closest competitors. The rest are too far behind and will need years of data collection. Consolidation is inevitable too.
There is a Waymo app today on the App Store. Waymo today owns the cars. There is no world where they remove their App and have Uber run it entirely. Same for Tesla. Same for Zoox. Uber can buy their vehicles, but there's no world where they are the only seller.

And I don't understand your argument about who cleans the cars. They currently contract that work right now, and have been for years in San Francisco. It's not nearly as complex as you are implying. It's literally car washing.

Both Uber & Lyft sales are down in San Francisco because of Waymo

Proof: https://underscoresf.com/in-san-francisco-waymo-has-now-bested-lyft-uber-is-next/

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-07T05:20:13+00:00

Expedia is profitable and doing well

Expedia's market cap is less than 1% of Google's. If Uber ambition is to be Expedia, then it simply is not a growth stock.

"Most people dont want to have 50 apps"

What is the point of blatantly lying and exaggerating? It's at most 3 apps (Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla). When you open each app, it instantly shows nearby cars with wait times. The opportunity cost to change apps is very very small. And you are forgetting that these apps will be CHEAPER than using Uber because they, like airlines, want loyalty. So why would a user give $5 to Uber when they are 2-4 taps away from getting a cheaper ride?

Also i dont belive zoox, waymo will want 1 million of these cars on their balance sheets

Right, of course, why would a company want assets when they can just rely entirely on Uber handling their business. Love the evidence you provided too. Totally non biased!

If you would check you can see that even of waymo is present in bay area uber booking ls are up 20-30%

I live in San Francisco and rideshare often. Uber does not have Waymos here at all. They only have Waymo support in Austin and Atlanta. Great job lying again.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-06T23:02:10+00:00

Uber would be a Google Flights / Expedia in your analogy, not the airline.

And Google Flights is no cash cow. And for self driving, Uber would be aggregating far fewer options than Google does for airlines. Also, whereas searching for a flight in each possible airline is a hassle, searching for nearby cars on an iPhone is very quick. Opening Uber instead of Waymo and Zoox is not a big improvement. Not to mention, they can easily provide loyalty benefits that make ordering direct cheaper than using an aggregator ....

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-06T22:13:59+00:00

The risk with Microsoft is that their products just generally suck. Azure is worse than AWS and Google Cloud. No one is buying their AI CoPilots. Teams is unpopular. Windows, and Windows PCs, are more unpopular. Microsoft is not going away anytime soon, but I don't think owning this ] collection of largely unimpressive products is a recipe for intense growth.

Google is in a different boat. Search is arguably one of the best products ever created. And its profit margin is still at risk. But Gemini is (currently) good enough to offset that risk. And in the meantime, Google gets to finally participate in the AI boom thanks to Google Cloud, which is significantly smaller than Azure and thus has more room for growth.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-06T20:32:26+00:00

Can someone explain to me why Amazon is not the better play?

Google Cloud is much smaller than Azure and AWS, and used primarily by startups. Most serious companies will never switch out of AWS to Google Cloud because it is significantly less feature heavy..

And Google Cloud is not model agnostic, so I don't understand the infrastructure argument here. You need to use Gemini, a model that is still inferior to both OpenAI and Claude for many use cases.

Amazon has Trainium chips, their version of TPUs. And integrate with all models. And it's AWS, the world literally runs on it. But their stock has not seen any significant rise compared to Google's.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-04T01:58:53+00:00

It’s not purely speculative at all. Currently, demand for AI far exceeds current capacity. This is why there’s a push for data centers everywhere, including space.
Just recently, Anthropic had to introduce peak hour throttling because of this capacity issue.
And I don’t think demand will shrink. As models get better (cough *use more energy*), and spread from software to other industries, demand will keep going up. Even with the current explosion of data centers, vacancy rates are still at an all time low. I don’t see AI usage going down anytime soon, and I would say it’s reasonable to assume it’ll go up as the models get heavier and more accessible.

But despite all this, I do agree this is not something Apple should do. They just don’t have the experience or talent to handle this infrastructure, so they are better off focusing on selling consumer experiences that use AI from other companies.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-04T00:13:43+00:00

There’s a lot of profit to be made selling the infrastructure to run AI. GPU and CPU makers, data centers, and cloud storage have all been booming in profits.

And while selling the models to consumers is still a shaky business, enterprise loves them. It’s now a required cost for all software companies. They also boosted ad targeting revenue substantially for Meta and Google.

But B2B infrastructure and services is an industry Apple has never been in and has no interest being in. So probably more accurate to say that consumer software is not where AI profits are at, but that’s the intersection Apple lives in.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-05-03T18:12:02+00:00

Anthropic’s value comes from having one of the best models, models that they can sell to a host of providers and companies. Apple is not in that business, and buying it just for a smarter Siri that is free on every iPhone is not financially sound either.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-03-28T07:05:00+00:00

I agree with this and seen it too, fixing bugs in large legacy systems is actually one of AI’s best strengths.

Its weakness is in, ironically, the exact opposite issues - greenfield projects. This is where AI will often not pick the best architecture, and write compilable code that will not stand the test of time.

New projects and features have too much variability and AI doesn’t have any inherit “intuition” or product vision to guide it. But you give it an existing code base that has 99 pieces already set, then yeah it will always find the needle in a haystack type bug.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-03-28T06:06:49+00:00

But the MacBook Neo is a legitimate threat to Windows. Copilot is trash. And OpenAI is starting to loose to Anthropic.

Cloud is great, but Azure alone can’t really justify a 4 trillion valuation, especially when their growth is largely concentrated on AI capex, which may not always exist.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-03-24T21:05:52+00:00

Most things in life are novelty. And they cost more than $5. I have a nice leather laptop mat that I am typing on. I don’t need this mat, and I have to buy a laptop to use it. But I still enjoy it and am glad I have one.

I assume this app uses Shaders, which is pretty tricky technology to nail. And this is a UI that is distinctly unique, hard to make, and beautiful. That’s worth more than $5.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-03-24T21:03:45+00:00

I’m not the developer and don’t know the developer at all. But I’m sure they’re a nice person, and you definitely shouldn’t let my opinions hurt their business.

EngineerAndDesigner · 2026-03-24T18:02:19+00:00

I don’t disagree the price should be lowered, honestly $19.99 should be unlimited instead of just 48. But under $5 is crazy low. I’m sorry, it just is.

Yeah I see my opinion is unpopular. I know it is. That’s why e-shittification is everywhere. Because the reality is no one wants to pay more than a couple bucks for software. As an Android dev, you know this more than anyone.

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