@tmcfarlane @preinheimer i think there were vastly different experience with pre-uber car services. in pittsburgh, it was an incredible mess, a different nasty private equity firm had bought up the local places, made it both super expensive and super unreliable to get a taxi, so nobody misses them here. but, sad for places that had a working model before

@tmcfarlane @preinheimer interestingly, when you book a ride in advance on uber, they do find a driver beforehand, at least for less busy routes. you can actually get someone in fairly kind rural'ish parts of the U.S. doing this

@preinheimer uber has been able to increase prices b/c they pretty much killed off everyone, thank goodness for lyft. it's less clear to me how this will develop in AI … Google seems capable of staying around for the long haul, and certainly people are betting big on Anthropic and OpenAI, will they specialize in some way to find a silo, or will competition lead to someone dominating?