You laugh, but the concept of this funny YouTube video was the actual business model of a SoftBank-backed startup that raised half a billion dollars [1]. The crucial flaw in their otherwise ironclad plan was that the pizza had a tendency to fly around and lose all its toppings when the truck went over a bump in the road.
> I'm pretty sure that was a money-laundering scheme disguised as some silicon valley-esque startup
considering some of the half baked shenanigans I've seen conducted in SF that actually raised funding back when I was there. this would explain a LOT...
Im kinda with the other reply, sneak. Isnt softbank a Japan/asian based cartel? From the first articles I can find they just cost saudia some money (not to say it wasnt laundered ... maybe they bought some softpaintings?)
They need that tech tanks use to keep their gun level, that multi axis gyroscope thing. This is the sort of tech crossover that could make military spending more acceptable.
To illustrate just how capable that tech was even back in 1986, look at 1:45 of this Bundeswehr video demonstrating a Leopard tank carry a keg of beer and not lose a drop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2mcO6l-0cY
His cellphone uses GPS and connects to other computers over the internet using TCP/IP, but I guess you're waiting on pizza gyroscopes to see any valuable tech crossover relative to this project.
Hard to say. Would the research even have occurred if there weren't military applications? At the end of the day, there are only a few ways to get politicians to fund research:
* War (physics, chemistry, computer science, psychology)
* Fortune-telling (astronomy, economics, political science)
I imagine military applications for "know where something is in world" and "have network of computers communicate in a damage resistant way" are no more costly to develop than non-military applications.
Most notably, the company enjoyed a generous infusion from Japanese investment firm SoftBank, which injected a whopping $375 million into the startup in 2018. By the end of its lifespan, Zume had raised as much as $445 million.
Yeah, the headline’s wording implies valuation, but that’s actually the amount they raised. Who knows how they managed to spend it. That’s a lot of Bali offsites and kombucha on tap.
My current company was somewhat involved with them as a supplier I think, before my time. They never had robotic pizza trucks, they were just regular pizza trucks with an app. They hired so many engineers they loaned some out to my company because they had no idea what to do with them.
Is Colin’s recklessness a fake act, like Electroboom, or is he really as reckless as it seems? I’m not sure I’ve ever really figured it out, and for some reason it makes it hard for me to watch. I guess obviously they wouldn’t publish a video where something goes horribly wrong, though.
I think I'm slightly more worried that photonicinduction has actually died when he goes silent for a while, though. I know it's mostly down to career/relationship ups-and-downs, but there's always a chance it's "got turned inside out by a flying washing machine drum".
FWIW, there's a pizza restaurant, Waypoint Pizza in Tiburon, which if you ask nicely will deliver on the water in the San Francisco Bay. This comes in handy during weird less serious sailing races like Three Bridge Fiasco.
You'd have to call+ask. It was a thing circa 2012. It's been awhile but the woman who ran Waypoint was a racer on the America3 team. It was more of a courtesy to other racers than an Uber Eats thing. Dunno if she's still there or if they still do it.
It's literally the second hardest thing to do after the biking/running/swimming/skiing itself. Fueling is the operational excellence challenge of endurance sports.
It does. Getting your stomach good at that (and figuring out what food you can personally tolerate best) is a nontrivial part of training for longer ultramarathons.
Breaking down fat costs a lot of oxygen. The body can run on fat if you have a lot of oxygen to spare. If the effort is causing you to breath heavily, then you are probably mostly burning faster carbohydrates (glycogen, a sort of sugary fuel the body has already stored in the muscles).
Running out of fast carbohydrates is (at least in biking) called "bonking". You'll feel extremely tired, maybe be shaking, and feeling dizzy. It's a blood sugar dip: a very low and long dip. Your brain usually runs on sugar too, so you'll feel stupid and angry. Your body still has fat stores, so your body can keep running - but at a much lower effort intensity.
If it is a react website that would imply it has an api you could just use directly. Might still need to login to get a token but that's a lot more robust
Agreed! I always am confused when people screen scrape instead of just monitoring and replaying network requests. Much cheaper and much more robust. Is there anything I'm missing?
i cannot tell you how much i enjoyed this article. it was very funny. it had so many great elements. a fun tech problem, pizza, getting me to look up what “s-tier” meant, a dash of humor (as if the premise wasn’t already hilarious), the mea culpa at the end and the ideas as to what the bug was (his theory sounds plausible to me, but idk).
Hm. I thoroughly disliked it - 100 layers of abstraction, glue and duct tape in the cloud to construct a rube Goldberg machine that doesn't work. It felt like everything wrong with modern tech.
This is pretty neat not gonna lie. I wonder now if something similar can be done with Deliveroo or similar - on day X if certain conditions are met (eg: working late), have preprogrammed order Y submitted when approximately Z distance from house.
Add enough pizza alternatives to make it a somewhat plausible diet and that's an actually great idea - for the crowd that can afford a fully delivery-based diet.
Yes, it’s seems like food ordering services should have good APIs for this—why not make it easy for people to integrate food ordering (and paying!) into IFTTT-style hacks?!
Software, cycling and pizza. Some of my favorite things in life. This project and write-up was thoroughly enjoyed, and has inspired some of my own similar ideas now! Cheers
Great stuff! Thanks for the Playwright link and detailed Lambda blog posts, I had a similar project I was working on trying to convert text into animated (typed) code videos (on visual studio code) - trying to get anything non trivial in lambda to run is indeed an interesting endeavour to say the least!
This is the right answer. He’s immediately closing the browser after clicking the button. He should wait for a success UI or at least that the resulting network call finishes with success or a failure to retry on. Not lambdas fault, it’s performing as coded.
This wasn't obvious to me just looking at the problem from a distance, but thankfully testing reduces the level of skill required to get something right :)
If they take phone orders you could just play a pre recorded messages and call them using twillo. I've done this in the past to call many stores and check inventory of an item
Twilio has different verbs you can use to quickly and easily throw together a small voice controlled phone tree with basic conversational understanding.
makes sense in a weird way. if you're running. pineapple got plenty of sugar in em which is exactly what you need when you're running and eating at the same time.
Exactly. Personally I like making calls whilst riding my bicycle, in part to make motorists go mad because we all know that texts, calls and such phone activity causes accidents. But, on a bike you are not going to kill anyone.
> In other words, after having wasted an ungodly amount of money trying to make pizza in the most complicated way possible, Zume decided that the best course of action was to just try selling boxes instead
Started off as a Futurama episode, finished off as a Simpsons episode.
Sorry for being kinda off-topic, but what's going on with these small(-ish) businesses configuring their websites to block users randomly through Cloudflare nowadays? I've seen this happened at least 5 times this week clicking random links, they are all local business websites.
Access denied
Error code 1020
You do not have access to www.caseys.com.
The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site."
Is this a GDPR measure (but My IP is in Japan, not EU), anti-proxy measure (I do use one), or cost-saving measure?
I guess that makes it even worse. Large companies surely want people around the world to visit their websites for brand recognition even if they don't operate in their regions.
This really is a hard stop being applied on Cloudflare WAF rules to stop any traffic from geo locations a sys admin believes would stop threats and also reduce their bandwidth utilisation.
If companies don’t have business interest outside or their territory/ country the new trend seems to be just geo block that domain.
While https://investor.caseys.com/ is accessible from Europe for eg., the main site isn’t . This isn’t a GDPR thing just a playbook some of the cyber security and ops team seem to be applying across various retail companies now a days .
