The civilian air taxi thing is obviously a pipe dream. Not going to happen.
But in the process of failing in that market, some of these eVTOL companies might create some IP that would be very attractive as an acquisition target for the major aerospace defense contractors. It's probably impossible today to build an air taxi that would meet FAA certification safety requirements while still being cheap enough for profitable operations in US airspace. But it might fit the resupply or medevac mission for ground troops under enemy fire. The military doesn't have to make a profit, and they're more flexible on safety requirements. So it's a long shot but some of these investments might turn a profit.
It's appealing to people who don't want to drive because they don't want to have to deal with other drivers and who don't want to use public transit (even if it were improved) because they don't want to be exposed to yucky poor people.
The requirements for piloting this being more expensive and bureaucratic than for driving a taxi are a plus because it means you only have to deal with a pilot (well-groomed, stylish, sexy) and not a taxi driver (nasty, smelly, weird accent).
Much like all "privately owned public transit substitute" startups, yes, the target demographic is obnoxious rich people.
Because somebody is happy to give you money for it. That somebody might themselves be getting money from someone else for such a project.
It doesn't have to be viable or lead to a successful business. If you can live the "founder lifestyle" and get a decent salary for yourself and your friends while bolstering your resume (since such failures aren't seen as bad by the industry), a lot of people will be happy to do it.
This happens very frequently in software/SaaS startups but there's no reason it can't happen with physical things.
I think it depends a lot on what you mean by "better output"
DALL-E is very good at conceptually representing complex prompt. Something like "a bear with a diving mask surfing in the ocean, a pelican is sitting on its shoulder", DALL-E will immediately produce coherent results, while SD requires lot of prompt tuning, and sometimes it's even impossible to get it to represent some concepts (I haven't tested this particular prompt tho)
SD is good for producing "artistic" images if that makes any sense
edit: ok I tried the "surfing bear" prompt with DALL-E 2 and SD and the results are consistent with my point, I put the raw prompt without tuning, and cherry picked the best image out of 4 with both models, here is what I got :
So the team is now responsible for backups, hardware ordering,.forecast etc?
How big is the team now compared to before?
Does it scale?
If you price it correctly and keep the free tier small, I would either talked to AWS for better pricing or moved to another cloud Provider.
S3 on AWS is a total no-brainer, minio on bare metal might mean much more work and a bigger infra team than business actually wants.
I would also love to know what optimizations are already in place. Does cloudflare caching work? Are the results compressed on rest? Is geolocation latency relevant?
Why even Cassandra? Are websites not unique? Wouldn't a nginx and a few big servers not work?
But who knows? The article doesn't tell me that :-(
Easy life changing money. Once in a life opportunity.