I've been thinking about setting up twilio with PiHole so I can just copy-paste-sms a url to unblock for people on my network.

Any idea of the feasibility of this?

pihole has a CLI to block/unblock URLs, so it should be pretty straightforward

+1 The API support this too

I think that "using arbitrary roads" is a relatively hard part of self-driving.

I'm not as certain about that. Potentially optimistic, but I could imagine bikes taking on a larger role as we move to self driving cars.

If you read threads about biking[0], people seem to be motivated to bike more than they are motivated to drive. Although these same people are stymied by negative conditions. Self driving cars could improve biking conditions by opening up roadways, making them safer, providing better point to point transit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420271

I think I agree with the biking in general, self driving cars will probably make biking a lot safer both by reducing the chances of an idiot running into you, and reducing the number of parked cars on roads (riding beside parked cars is scary, because you are never sure when a door is going to open into you).

I don't think that I necessarily agree that this means bike shares will succeed though, I think private bike ownership has a lot going for it.

I have a bike and there are bike shares around me. I am still trying to figure out a policy, but I lean towards bike share for everything short, because it’s like a taxi, you don’t need to go back to your bike. But bike share are crappy, so for longer distance I need bigger wheels and gears.

I was skeptical about the business model, the bikes cost a lot, are rented for cheap, and for some reasons the companies go head to head in the same towns instead of covering different areas.

And if they kill each other and the winner raises the price, I suspect Detroit wins.

Yeah, the biking model seems fairly easy to speculate on, but sort of hard to pin down. Here's some speculation from a per bike perspective.

Revenue

  daily rides*365*$1

Costs

    $250 per bike
  + $15 per month for maintenance
  + 20% chance of catastrophe amortized over the fleet
  = ~$500

+ rebalancers + insurance + overhead?

So maybe 2 rides per bike per day gets them in the green?

We sure seem to buy a lot of bikes, but it doesn't seem like a proportionate number of people are riding them.

I suppose bikes fit in this interesting niche of being a leisure item/exercise item, but because there's potential for everyday/practical usage people are more willing to buy than other leisure items? I'm not sure.

I grew up in a tourist area where >50% of houses were summer rental income properties. A significant chunk were furnishes with a set of cheap bikes and bike locks for the renters to use. So some significant percent of half of all houses there had 2-6 Walmart bikes.

The guy that has a massive collection of 1930s Scandanavian hunting rifles (or whatever other niche) skews the "average" gun owner stats. I would bet that similar outliers are at play for bikes since it's a similar case of some people use them as tools, a lot of people own a few, some people own a ton

Right now my family has 8 bikes in our garage for 3 people. All of them get ridden at one time or another depending on the specific activity. My 3 bikes include a folding bike for short errands around town or transit trips with a long transfer on one end, a mountain bike, and a skinny tire road bike for longer weekend rides. For families that ride, we are not that unusual.