When you order something, do you express where you want it sent in coordinates or as an address? You can’t assume that the device’s coordinates at the time the order is made correspond to where the order is supposed to be sent, even if the device gives coordinates. Plus, they’re either not precise enough (could encompass the yard of the house next door, or just the snowbank at the edge of the property) or too precise (“drop this in the center of the roof because that’s where the coordinates are”). You’d need software capable of parsing building layouts well enough to figure out where the main entryway is and leave the parcel there, or you’d have to require that people interested in receiving deliveries by drone put a beacon where they want the drone to drop stuff.

Beacons are the simplest solution, but they immediately put Amazon in a position where most people won’t care enough to set them up.

The drone’s only as good as its software, the map it’s using, and the address data it’s given. All of which were created by fallible humans.

Ain’t it fun having turtles all the way down?

That’s because Perl doesn’t do operator overloading in general. Even the equality operator is different for strings (eq instead of ==). As a language, it may look pretty weird and lack some modern features, but the underlying design is surprisingly intelligent and consistent in many ways.

It’s almost enough to make me feel nostalgic for the DOS version of Borland Turbo Pascal, which wasn’t bright enough to do any of this stuff. (Well, it could freeze up, I suppose, but the only time I actually managed to do anything like that, it involved a null pointer dereference that would have triggered a segfault on any modern system.)

Some people think that only compiled languages are true programming languages. (Needless to say, they’re wrong.)

The poor will have scavenged the abandoned buildings in built-up areas, yes. Still-occupied buildings and those in smaller towns with no easy access to a scrapyard are more likely to be intact. So it’s more likely to be a case of “these are no longer to code, they are not grandfathered, you have a two-year grace period to switch them out” (staggered geographically or by building classification to avoid a run on plastic pipes) plus “road trip!”

We might also end up mining older dumps for stuff discarded when copper was cheaper.

How much old copper piping is still out there that could be replaced by other materials to recover the copper? I’m sure there are other common obsolete applications. The nice thing about metals is that we already have a pretty robust recycling chain in place for them. That plus the remaining supply plus aluminium plus other replacements plus careful design to minimize the use of copper where it’s absolutely necessary might be enough to carry us through.

[tardigrade_violin.jpg]

Much of the animation takes place outside Japan these days. If you watch enough recent anime end credits, you’ll see a lot of what look like romanized Vietnamese names. And there was a scandal . . . about a year ago now? . . . when some material for an anime then in production was found on the server of a North Korean studio (probably because a Chinese studio to which the anime had been outsourced then outsourced it further without paying attention to little things like international treaties). And I don’t think the teams remaining in Japan have any shortage of recruits.

This issue, as with any business, is “can AI produce more for cheaper at an acceptable quality?” If it does make real inroads, it’ll be the outsourcing studios doing the less-important scenes that get replaced first.

There are alternative sources for these . . . but the US has pissed all of those countries off too.