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?

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.

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Why would you inflict that guy on a poor innocent kitty?

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.

Most people aren’t willing to pay extra money or do extra work for something they themselves don’t need or use. Unless there’s a massive marketing campaign behind it, or the law requires it. This has been the case throughout history, pretty much.

My primary browser profile allows only whitelisted cookies. It also allows only whitelisted Javascript, so I don’t see the popups. If this breaks a site beyond usefulness, I seriously consider whether I really need that site (and if it falls into the <2% where the answer is “yes”, I either whitelist it or open it in the window for the other profile that functions on a blacklist basis).

That’s a lot more manual management than most people want to bother with, though.

If you think you can set up mail infrastructure with on premise everything that is available to your not on premise workers safer than Microsoft, you will be spending a huge amount of money to do so.

Even if they prefer not to self-host, there are plenty of providers out there that are more trustworthy than Microsoft. In fact, I would say that a medium-sized established company that derives most of its revenue from providing email and related services is likely to secure them better than an oversized tech giant that just does email on the side—they have more incentive.

How much would setting the main registry file to read-only break on Windows 11? Someone may be about to attempt the experiment . . .

Daenerys was the chatbot, not the kid.

I wish I could remember who it was that said that kids’ names tend to reflect “the father’s family tree, or the mother’s taste in fiction,” though. (My parents were of the father’s-family-tree persuasion.)

There are more hoops involved—stuff Windows 10 with your Adobe software in a VM with no Internet connection and you should be okay even after Win10 stops getting security updates—but it isn’t quite impossible for you to migrate everything else and have one or two specific Windows programs too. Granted, you may not have the time and energy to go that route.

Does it matter to the humans interacting with the LLM whether incorrect information is the result of a bug or an intentional lie? (Keep in mind that the majority of these people are non-technical and don’t understand that All Software Has Bugs.)

Dude, apparently unlike you, I remember Usenet, which uses precisely the sort of system you’re describing, in its heyday. That means I’ve also seen discussion groups implode because they couldn’t get rid of a single bad actor. Killfiles alone aren’t enough, even when combined with community naming-and-shaming. Someone always lacks self-restraint and engages. That encourages the bad actor(s). They post more, often using multiple sockpuppets to get around people’s killfiles and flood out legitimate discussion. Newcomers to the group see masses of bad actor spam and fail to stick around. The lack of new blood kills the group.

Self-moderation simply doesn’t work. Yes, bad moderation happens and I’ve seen plenty of examples. But no overarching moderation is also the kiss of death.

Anyone who thinks you can have both absolutely no restraint on speech and an environment that isn’t a cesspit hasn’t seen what humans do in an environment that has absolutely no restraint on speech. Constructive discourse requires that there be someone to moderate and throw out the trolls, the spammers, and that guy who, wherever he goes, preaches about the effect of weather conditions inside the hollow earth on the lizardmen who select US presidential candidates.

Because modest returns don’t attract investment, so whoever set it up would have to fund the startup out of pocket and never go public or sell the company off. Not quite impossible, but very unlikely (unless the world changes and investors start getting more sensible about profits).

All technically true, but how many man-hours would it take to calculate the set of holes necessary to print each layer of a non-trivial object (say, a Benchy) without electronic assistance? I’m sure it could be done, but most people couldn’t do it in a practical timeframe. Taking presliced gcode and translating it via an automatic or even a manual system should be doable, but you still need a computer to slice the model into gcode.

Jacquard looms are a whole other crottle of greeps. Each warp position gets either raised or lowered, so it’s in essence a binary model rather than full analog—conceptually much simpler than this printer, whose punch language is going to have to include slots for longer motor moves. I’d guess that, in the old days, Jacquard patterns were set up for manual punching by drawing up a diagram (which would look like a piece of black-and-white pixel art) and transferring the information one row at a time to the punch. That doesn’t seem like it would work for this printer.

Interesting, but not terribly useful unless you have a separate, likely electronics-driven, machine to punch plastic sheets for it (or have a pre-existing sheet defining something you want to replicate a bazillion of). It’s an ingenious but very niche machine.

What % of its GDP does the Netherlands have to put into international aid to make seventh place?!