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GeekNights Monday - That Penny Arcade Job Posting
Tonight on GeekNights, we consider the technical/skill requirements of one Penny Arcade job posting. We talk about how to learn how to set up that most dreaded of services: email. RMS proves that Bitcoin has finally "made it" by calling for an anonymous alternative. Amazon reveals its (entirely unsurprising) plans for drone deliveries, further casting into stark contrast the progress of technology and the inability of government and society to keep up. Rym is back from Istanbul and has photos to share.
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1. Before you went to Turkey, you said you'd be eating Thanksgiving in a restaurant overlooking "the Bosphorus, one of the most famous rivers in the world!" But, of COURSE, the Bosphorus isn't a river. Idiot! It's a strait.
2. The Great Chain didn't stretch across the Bosphorus! It stretched across the Golden Horn, which is the wide river mouth on one side of the old city. It's the old harbor. The Byzantines didn't want invaders to enter their harbor. A chain across the Bosphorus would have been super impressive, but completely useless for stopping ships getting into the harbor. Unless they used two chains.... no wait, even then that wouldn't have worked.
I'm also amazed at the reaction to this one. First, I agree with the armchair technologists who can only find the lowest hanging problems which are trivially solved if you use your brain for two minutes, and consider that how it might work is slightly different than how it works in your head right now. For example:
Everyone presumes "unmanned drones" means "100% automatic and controlled by computer". And then they start asking questions about safely landing and not hitting children.
My first thought: 90% of the service and flight is automated. Then the drone hovers above the landing spot, pointing a camera down. The remote operator takes a look, checks for anyone around, clicks okay or abort, and the drone lands, drops the package and leaves. The final dropping of the package, from 20 ft (out of reach of all humans) down to the ground and up again takes four or five seconds. As long as any children of people are more than four or five seconds away from the landing spot, nobody can get hurt. This way the operator is just doing final safety checks, not flying single individual drones. One operator would be able to run a dozen or so of these drones at once.
Second, I'm not sure why everyone is saying this is five to ten years off. All it takes is one city to do what Rym and Scott said, and just get it working themselves.
My prediction (and I'd put money on it) is that between one and two years we'll see a real-life implementation of drone-delivered goods in an urban, or more likely suburban, environment. It might be by Amazon, but it could be a single local service or retailer.
I think the city in America that could benefit the most would be Kansas City. They've already got some Google Fiber, and inviting Amazon to experiment on them with drones would make it into a real city of the future. The city is very sprawling (way bigger than needed for its population) and every building has plenty of space around it for drone landings. It's big enough to have its own Amazon distribution center (probably) but spaced out enough that deliveries by road would take ages.
Anyone want to take my bet?
I mean, they could have some crazy extended range drones if they wanted, but there's a point of diminishing returns on that - the longer range it is, the heavier it is, and the less range per step up you get, and the greater the cost per drone for it.
Let me try. Problem: "Drones don't fly very far."
Reframing outside of the way it works in your head: Who says they have to fly all the way from the fulfillment center all the way to the final destination without stopping?
Solution: a number of stations across a city, in a hex grid every two miles, where a drone can touch down, drop off a spent battery, and pick up a full charged battery. It'll be on its way within maybe ten or fifteen seconds. Even the Tesla Model S can do the same trick in 90 seconds. If the battery swapping stations were on the top of tall buildings or other high points in a city, they wouldn't even have to spend time or energy coming down to ground level that often.
That objection is trivially solved using known technical fixes. Next!
No, I'm serious, has anyone got any other problems with this technology? It's way more fun to find solutions than problems.
But I like your solution though. Sounds about right.
Reframing: "Why should Churba not be drunk?"
Solution: Churba should stay drunk.
Reframing: "Maybe the 30 minutes number is marketing spin. How long would it really take?"
Solution: To sign up for the drone delivery you'd have to submit a drone landing spot in advance. When you click on the "Fastest delivery possible" button, Amazon will know the exact distance between where the thing you want delivering is now and that landing spot. Amazon will check the routing options, flight time, weather, how busy the drones are, plus other factors, and say "We can deliver it in 52 minutes. Shall we do it?" You can always click the "Same day" or "Next day" option instead.
Live near to a distribution center? Good news! It might be 18 minutes for you. Live a long way off? It'll probably be easier to have it delivered by human in a vehicle.
Edit: from here
If regulators are cooperative, though, I don't see much of a reason that it couldn't happen within a couple of years.
Reframing: "Who gives a shit about the FAA?"
Solution: I'm sure there are loads of non-USA places where this could be tested within new regulations before the FAA get around to coming up with the right regulation.
Off the top of my head, why not do a test run in Monaco? It's a little nation of its own, can regulate its own airspace as it wants, is difficult to get around with vehicles, has many apartments and other towers, has a heliport. I'm sure people there would be willing to pay the extra for drone delivery too.
Do you have a newsletter?
I don't agree with the nonsense going around about trying to deflect attention from some expose book written about Bezos recently. They carry the fucking book on Amazon and as far as I can tell, most of the attention on the thing is due to Bezos' wife deigning to write a review of it in the first place.
I for one do not want to see unregulated or free for all use of drones in cities, one of the principle functions of the airspace in the US is the guarantee of safe corridors of flight for aircraft under instrument conditions.
Additionally, as an EMS pilot who lands in cities for calls I don't want to hit a drone of any size.
How high are these drones flying? Are we talking 20 feet of the ground, 75 feet? 150 feet? 500 feet? Each of those altitudes has a different concern and danger associated with it that has to be addressed. I don't love the FAA, but they are the correct agency for getting these issues of commercial drone use sorted properly for all the parties that use the sky.
The well regulated use of drones is the future, I can easily envision a day where drones are used to fight fires, monitor power lines, fly for police departments, do survey work, search and rescue, etc etc.
And I love RadioFree Equestria, so feel free to make more videos, your analysis style is a lot better than most of the videos the MLP analysis community puts out.
Kind of interesting to hear your thoughts on the BA/BS degree. Does enough experience ever make up that gap for you? On the flip side, I've heard some stories out here in SF about people who have chips on their shoulders about not having a degree or preferring to hire people without degrees. It's something I'm thinking about as I plan to move into web development full time but don't really want to spend multiple years back in school.
Even though I never got to go to college, I've been trying to round out my base knowledge of IT and some coding. At this point I could probably apply for the IT guy of a small office but I'd still need to do a lot of looking up.
May not sound like much, but I consider it a massive success considering where I've come from.
It's still fairly catchy in any case.
-EDIT- Hell, if you have the communication skills, you're already better than the majority of IT grunts out there.