Gentoo is quite happy to allow you to copy your world file and config files from one system to another, then just issue emerge --emptytree world and take a couple of days’ vacation somewhere while the system rebuilds itself as specified. That’s been an option for as long as I’ve been using it, so at least 20 years. Other than the speed, the only issue is that you have to know where to find all the config files, of which there may be many distributed across /etc and ~ (and maybe other places if you’re really unlucky).

(Figuring out how to word the emerge command so that it downloads as many binary packages as possible to shorten the wait is left to the interest of the reader.)

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.

That’s still help text, even if it isn’t very helpful. I was installing to an older laptop recently that had no help for most BIOS options at all, plus I found a forum post on the manufacturer’s website indicating that even they had no documentation for those settings. (Naturally, it was made by HP.)

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.

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.