Depends on how lousy your family is, I think. Actually, it sounds kind of like a stereotypical teenager of years past: never talking to parents and blasting loud music all the time.

Given what he’s undoubtedly being paid, I’m sure hiring a nanny to look after his unfortunate offspring is well within his budget.

Author admits smartphones are ubiquitous, and doesn’t at all consider, in a hypothetical situation where everyone unanimously agreed to stop using them, where all this e-waste will go?

Pretty much every single smartphone in use right now will be ewaste 20 years from now, and most of them will be within 10. So we have that disposal problem already regardless. Hypothetically, if everyone were to get rid of their phones, we’d at least stop creating even more future ewaste.

No, but not for want of trying.

The good thing: half of them have come to their senses.

The bad thing: half of them haven’t.

Minority browsers. Since I daily drive Pale Moon, I’m among the people affected. It’s suspected that they test only the 3-4 most popular browsers, and whether anything else works with their code is up to luck.

You may think browsers with tiny market shares aren’t important, but all new browsers start out that way. I fear for Ladybird if it ever makes it past the alpha stage, for instance.

It blocks anyone not using one of its preferred browsers, among other things. It’s become the gatekeeper for a large fraction of the Internet.

The site formerly known as Twitter would be more respectable these days if it were a porn site.

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.

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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.