The size of these vehicles is certainly absurd, but flying packages with drones that consume most of their energy to fight gravity does not seem particularly efficient either, (e.g. compared to small road electric vehicles with the same payload, which would have its own practical problems).
Sure but there's a tradeoff with ground transport. A drone can make the trip with much shorter traveled distance and potentially higher speed, resulting in higher utilization per vehicle. It also doesn't interfere with road traffic, which could have externalities in longer idle time for other vehicles at intersections and whatnot.
Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.
A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one. If you look at it in terms of a one-package utilization rate, a van has over 100% rate, because it holds multiple packages, in fact it may have over a 1000% utilization rate using that metric.
You're essentially wasting tons of energy and resources getting very small packages delivered faster, but in urban setting there are no efficiencies here, quite the contrary.
I just hope my DoorDash order is not sandwich #9,836...
A locomotive would be even more efficient over long distances, carrying 200,000,000 such packages. A containership even more so, carrying more than 20x the capacity of a big freight train, though I don't think they have the draft to fit up the drainage ditch behind my house. Nor do I have rails.
I jest, but the long tail is a real problem with such efficiency calculations.
You're right that it's never going to make sense to have migrating swarms of drones flying above the interstate carrying packages cross-country, but are real efficiencies here at the individual level:
This is why I don't feel bad ordering smaller items from Amazon when I could drive across town and get it myself.
But Uber eats and DoorDash are a reality, and I would pay someone to pick something up for me from Home Depot within the next hour. Services like Zipline have the potential to help out there.
>This is why I don't feel bad ordering smaller items from Amazon when I could drive across town and get it myself.
I've long thought this. UPS isn't driving from the hub to my house to deliver a package, 90% of the incremental driving distance is the length of my driveway.
>>A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one.
In a perfect world, yes. In reality, no. You would need a perfect storm of a huge wave of orders all to the same restaurant (or cluster of restaurants) to be delivered to the same neighborhood to ensure timely delivery so the food was hot and the customers were happy. In real life, you are almost guaranteed to never hit the ideal conditions.
Edit: After re-reading your comment, I’d agree with you for the non-food deliveries. My comment was obviously focused more on the UberEats use case.
Clear example: Hospitals have helicopters, but most patients are still moved using vans. The helicopter is faster (when patient's life is acutely ending), but prohibitively expensive to utilize for every patient.
That example doesn't quite hold up. A helicopter is roughly the same size and weight as an ambulance and needs to transport a whole bunch of equipment. If we could get a Zipline drone to drive on the street, it would be vastly more efficient than its airborne brethren, but our infrastructure isn't set up for that.
I've long thought there's potential in using drones to transport drugs and light equipment to hospitals. Crewed helicopters are expensive and risky, but the stakes are lower when your drone is only carrying a few thousand dollars of a drug that's rare enough it's not worth stocking.
Here's a thought: vehicles that are already scheduled (uber or robot-taxies) are already scheduled from point A to point B. Drone scheduling could piggyback on this such that as large vehicle passes restaurant R at A', a drone from R lands and disgorges your sandwich into a locker mounted on a landing pad on top of the taxi. (hand waves - that's just a mechanical problem, can't be worse than what a fast food place is doing.) As the ground vehicle approaches B, a new drone (or the same drone, if it was just hitching) could finish the delivery to your home H at B'.
Obviously it would take a lot longer than a direct flight, but the energy consumed would be far less.
A network of "wardriving" drones that use semi-trucks and box trucks as charging hubs while in transit is the next innovation of short distance delivery.
You've got the answer, but just to point the problem with your comment from another point of view...
No, last mile delivery is made package by package. If you place 100 packages in a van and go delivering them, you will make 100 mostly independent trips, just carrying all the packages at once.
That's why those are very often done by motorcycle.
But indeed there is often a highly correlated trip segment. The Amazon's model of running a van into your neighborhood and distributing things there by drones may make sense. It doesn't make sense for Uber Eats business model, but it makes sense for Amazon.
There might be different ideas of what makes “bad” weather.
Some Californians think that any weather at all is bad, and some midwesterners think “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing”.
I wouldn’t hesitate to order delivery if it were raining or snowing, but maybe in this world there are people who would still order delivery during a tornado warning (because that way they don’t have to risk driving during a tornado).
If it's genuinely life-threatening out, an actual tornado warning, then nobody's delivering in the first place. You can't order delivery even if you want.
It's up to the business and driver (or mayor ordering all non-essential vehicles off the road). Not you.
> I was raised to consider ordering takeout in truly awful weather as pretty rude.
What’s more rude? Ordering takeout in bad weather, or not ordering takeout and indirectly punishing the delivery driver’s livelihood whenever the weather is bad..?
The existence of migratory birds proves that the loss of energy due to the Earth's gravitational pull is not so catastrophic. A vehicle in motion also loses energy because of the friction of the wheels. Above a certain speed, air friction becomes the most significant loss. The comparison of the energy balance of a vehicle on the road compared with a vehicle in the air is not as clear-cut. Vehicles on wheels are much heavier and require infrastructure (roads) that must be taken into account.
Lots of CGI and notices about "simulated" though. The videos that appear to maybe be real show something that does have wings, but looks too small/light/thin to carry much around.
The ones they are currently using in Africa are normal drone planes. They drop their payload without stopping though, so the payload has to be packed securely and nothing that can break easily. So it's used for medical supplies. This what Mark Rober's video was about.
If they were to create a drone that can deliver arbitrary packages, then it needs to be able to lower a package safely. That's what those renders are, they show a typical multi-rotar drone with small wings. So it can stop and lower a package. I don't think there's any real footage of these yet.
The concept of a fixed-wing VTOL UAS is well-tested, though. They’re not as simple as a quad or a “native” fixed-wing, but well within reach of a motivated hobbyist.
Came here to say that (i think their operations in Africa are quite impressive) but it seems as their "Zips" are a different kind of breed and more like a drone than a plane.
If you were to ask a migratory bird, they'd tell you that it's fairly tough. You have to put on enough subcutaneous fat to double your body weight, and then do it knowing that either you or some of your friends and family will die.
I'm sorry if it wasn't clear, but I was asking for sources on GP's claim that climate change has shifted the north-south spatial location of birds' migration destinations.
The research you linked to doesn't seem to be saying that; it's claims are about the influence of interannual climate variation on timing of migration IIUC.
Abstract
For ∼100 years, the continental patterns of avian migration in North America have been described in the context of three or four primary flyways. This spatial compartmentalization often fails to adequately reflect a critical characterization of migration—phenology. This shortcoming has been partly due to the lack of reliable continental-scale data, a gap filled by our current study. Here, we leveraged unique radar-based data quantifying migration phenology and used an objective regionalization approach to introduce a new spatial framework that reflects interannual variability. Therefore, the resulting spatial classification is intrinsically different from the “flyway concept.” We identified two regions with distinct interannual variability of spring migration across the contiguous United States. This data-driven framework enabled us to explore the climatic cues affecting the interannual variability of migration phenology, “specific to each region” across North America. For example, our “two-region” approach allowed us to identify an east–west dipole pattern in migratory behavior linked to atmospheric Rossby waves. Also, we revealed that migration movements over the western United States were inversely related to interannual and low-frequency variability of regional temperature. A similar link, but weaker and only for interannual variability, was evident for the eastern region. However, this region was more strongly tied to climate teleconnections, particularly to the east Pacific–North Pacific (EP–NP) pattern. The results suggest that oceanic forcing in the tropical Pacific—through a chain of processes including Rossby wave trains—controls the climatic conditions, associated with bird migration over the eastern United States. Our spatial platform would facilitate better understanding of the mechanisms responsible for broadscale migration phenology and its potential future changes.
The actual harm from the drone's wasted energy is pretty negligible aside from the waste heat itself, though, as compared to the many, many side effects of road vehicles of any kind (for example, just starting with the air pollution from tire particles).
Of course, that equation changes a bit once there are enough drones that noise pollution and collisions or other incidents become a real issue.
Noise pollution and collisions are a much, much larger problem with cars, since they're constrained to two dimensions while drones can use three. Plus, cars tend to kill people when they collide with each other (or with pedestrians), and drones would not. Hopefully they will all use engineered quiet propellers (such as Zipline uses) and electric engines (similarly).
People are ingenious at getting killed, and birds can do it so eventually if we have enough drones someone will die to one.
However, much mini deliveries could be done with vehicles smaller than a full size car - and places where it is common you see lots of mopeds and similar.
It seems like a drone falling out of the sky could still kill people. It just seems less likely to us because there aren't as many right now to worry about like cars.
I like these devices for use for medical supplies but do worry how polluted the skies could become when multiple companies are flying these things for standard packages.
They've been working on those things in Tallinn for years, and I've only ever seen them operate in a very limited area, and even then it's not unusual to see them seemingly stuck at the nearby rail crossing. Meanwhile a human on a Bolt scooter ate their and their investor's lunch IMO.
They do look cute, I remember being completely taken-aback the first time I saw one in the wild - I had to resist the temptation to stand in front of it, to see what would happen.
Though I did wonder how they'll cope in winter-weather. I can't imagine they'd do so well on snow/ice.
But there are plenty of places that don't have much snow and ice where they should be perfectly practical. Ice shouldn't be a problem, they could swap to studded tyres in the winter just like we do for cars here in Norway. Snow would be a much bigger problem though I agree!
I'd encourage you to stand in front of it. Commercializing public walkways like this is fine, I guess, but as a human walking around for non-commercial reasons, I feel like you have the right to do whatever you want (within reason) that doesn't impact other humans.
Aircraft are more energy efficient then cars[1] at scale. But even a light plane like a Cessna 172 does 13L/100KM[2] depending on flight speed. Certainly more then my Prius, but it can take a much more direct route too.
There's also the simple practical issue: self-driving cars can't navigate a complex crowded environment, whereas self-flying planes navigate a much simpler environment with many more regulatory controls on behavior.
I lost confidence at the very beginning of the article:
> In fact, unless you drive a car that gets 33.8 gallons per mile (or carry more than one passenger), new airplanes coming off the assembly line are more fuel-efficient
Cars typically get about 0.03 gallons per mile, so it’s not even close.
What is a drone to you? If you are only thinking about multicopters when you hear that word then yes, those are not efficient and probably never will be.
But the term commonly refers to all unmanned aerial vehicles.
For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.
On the other end of the spectrum The Spirit of Butts' Farm crossed the atlantic with 118 US fluid ounces (3.5 L) of fuel. It was flying for ~39 hour and 1,881.6 mi (3,028.1 km). That is about 2045 mile per gallon if I count it right. That is very efficient, and of course since the aircraft was unmanned it is a drone.
> For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.
Wow - this is what they are planning to use to deliver packages?
Nice thing about drones is they're unlikely to kill anyone if they crash, and they're not sharing the roads with cars in the first place.
In some places, bikes are first-class citizens of the road, but in other places they're very much not respected and riding one is tantamount to suicide. Every single cyclist I know, when they meet another cyclist, immediately asks about gnarliest injuries and they compare scars like dogs sniffing each other's butts. And in the past 20 years I've lost more friends to cycling fatalities than any other cause of death.
Specialized in flying, including eyes and brains, at that!
Autopiloted is much easier than cars because air space is less crowded with less obstacles and extremely well controlled. Low flying delivery drones don't fall in that bucket.
Less crowded now. But if they take over all those deliveries that are going on now the sky will get quite crowded and I suspect we will see people asking for no fly zones and for drones to be constrained to fly along roads instead of low over people's gardens. I certainly don't want hundreds of drones flying over my garden every day. Something like 35 million people in the UK buy something online every week, that would be a lot of drones. If you imagine that there is a distribution centre for every 50 000 people in the UK, that's roughly 1 500 distribution centres each with over 3 000 drone flights per day.
I realize that this is a very rough calculation and that of course there would be large variations in flight frequency but no one else seems to be showing anything better.
With thousands of drones crossing the city sky, there would have to be some kind of system to organize that traffic, both to minimize collisions and sound pollution.
It's not hard to imagine how systems like that could be organized.
It's also important to consider how many road vehicle trips this would replace.
I don't care how it is organized, I just don't want them all flying over me. Living near such a distribution centre would be like living next to an airport unless there are regulations enforced that they ascend vertically so high that they cannot be heard.
How many road trips would it replace? Drones capable of carrying a 5 kg payload over any distance are fairly big. The DJI Matrice 600 Pro for instance weighs 15 kg and is over a metre across. It has a hover time of only 18 minutes. Maximum speed is 65 kph so its round trip range is about 20 km.
A small electric van can easily carry a hundred such packages and has an empty weight of roughly one hundred times that of the drone.
Presumably the drones used for deliveries would have to be much more robust and have much longer ranges, both of which would make them heavier.
So 100 drones replace one van.
I'm sure there are huge holes in my analysis perhaps, you can improve it so that it shows that a substantial number of road trips would be replaced without filling the sky with drones.
Only on places where they concentrate. It's not really flying that is difficult, it's approach and take-off, because they have to go through all of the heights.
Anyway, I guess the main problem is that most people will not want a sky full of drones just so that some random Joes can get their stuff from Amazon or AliExpress a little sooner.
If the skies fill with drones while traffic jams ease, there’s less double parking for delivery, and streets generally start looking more airy, people may make the association.
Couldn't that be said about humans? As I understand it, once upon a time in some parts of the world, walking alone unarmed could get you abducted and sold into slavery. But then we decided as a society that we want to have this "Human Rights" thing and now most of us feel relatively safe about other people on the street not randomly abducting or assaulting us.
So I'm just not getting the argument for why we can't trust humans to not vandalize or steal robots, especially internet-connected ones that constantly film their surroundings. I for one believe that just like we can learn to be civil to one another, and can also extend our civility to other species (e.g. we generally don't go around kicking dogs we see on the street), we can also be civil to robots.
Somewhere like Japan, with a strong cultural sense of societal cohesion and obligation, it could work.
But I live in a country where "societal cohesion" and "obligations" are considered communist propaganda and our constitution gives us the right to as many guns as we want in case we decide to hunt the government for sport.
I mean, this robot[0] make it all the way across the Netherlands and Germany, and only 300 miles into the US before getting beheaded.
This might be news to some people, but there are other modes of transportation / delivery than 2-ton cars. "2-ton cars vs. flying drones" is a false dichotomy.
This is a policy problem, not a tech problem. People need to be paid a living wage, period. The lack of this and the subsidizing of delivery fees by VC money has led people to believe it's somehow sustainable to sit on your lazy ass, order food and have it delivered within 30 min for next to nothing. Or maybe people know that it's not sustainable but just don't give a shit. Greedy corporations and unethical people will always exists, that's why we need better laws.
I'd say it IS a tech problem as much as it is a policy problem. Technology historically has allowed humanity to develop society in a way that constantly minimises risk, reduces "hard labour" tasks, and delegates repetitive "brainless" work to computers. Only with technology could these policies come into fruition. Otherwise, we would be effectively shutting down industries completely, and as far as I am aware this rarely if ever happens.
I do believe minimum wage should be set at the local living wage standard, and that companies like Uber are exploiting their workers through weak labour laws, but unless the market is much more tightly controlled, in a somewhat-free market (which is most of the world) economy, it is a tech issue.
It is absolutely a policy problem because technology doesn't come out of nowhere, is not free for everyone to use, and not anyone benefits the same way.
Automating all work, sure. Removing people's mean of subsistance (a wage) and keeping the money for yourself, no. In a capitalistic society, technology only helps people if capitalists give away the product of (automated) labour, and that is not what is happening.
If we want to optimize economic growth with the most powerful force in the universe, compound interest, shouldn't we pay people the market rate which is usually some combination of the scarcity of labor and the economic value of that labor?
If this rate is too low, then that is what the welfare system is for. Forcing employers to pay a "living wage" for jobs that don't generate a "living wage's" economic value simply retards the economy and robs our children of a wealthier future.
> This is a policy problem, not a tech problem. People need to be paid a living wage, period
false. no one is forcing these people from taking those jobs (uber eats, grub hub, etc) at the agreed upon wages. tell me how somehow it would be better for those folks if these jobs didn't exist at all given that unemployment in the USA is incredibly low.
Creating a regulatory environment in which a large fraction of the population end up on wages that don’t sustain a reasonable standard of living is a problem for everyone, not just those experiencing low wages.
from a utilitarian perspective we could easily be better off as a society taxing tech bros enough to pay them UBI rather than doing food deliveries on serf wages.
Or the even more efficient and eco-friendly "make and bring your own lunch", but somehow this isn't considered, instead it's a long thread of drones vs cars vs mopeds and low-wage delivery people.
I don’t even really
Live in a rural area and there may be a few fast food options but there’s nothing I’d want delivered. There are things I can go out and pickup in 15 minutes or throw together at home that I’d rather do.
In general barring difficulty in leaving the house food delivery seems awfully optional.
Agreed. Something I commonly observe, which I’m guilty of too, is getting so excited about technological innovation that we can’t see the forest for the trees. I get that the idea of being able to order a sub sandwich on a whim and have it delivered directly to you via a drone is really cool, but why not plan ahead and bring it with you? One could also go to a sandwich shop next to where they work. My coworkers and I would walk to the sandwich shop next to our office once per week when I still worked in an office. Seems remarkably less wasteful and more efficient all around.
I don’t see it ever happening, but I’m not even sure we need package delivery available for anything every day of the week. If we limited it to once per week for bulkier items (such as large furniture), we could reduce a lot of waste and traffic. Rather than deliver tiny lunches via drone, perhaps we should reconsider the greater idea of ordering objects. As someone without a car in a car-dependent city, it’s certainly on my mind.
And this doesn’t expand into societal implications of ordering everything without interacting with other humans. That’s perhaps a more interesting conversation!
And I live in such a lovely city. I can bike anywhere so quickly, so easily. Scooters & micromobility are abundant. But so many people (so many roommates over time) make a habit of ordering delivery, on such a regular basis. It's unfathomable to me: both the negative impact in general, and particularly here where it's so close & pleasant to go walk or bike around. It's such a huge expense to the world, and such a great enriching activity, getting a little walkabout.
Not everyone bikes or uses scooters. I don't. But, if I'm in a city, I'll certainly walk someplace rather than getting a food delivery which I haven't had since... I really couldn't tell you when.
When I was in the city, I'd order delivery from the restaurants on our street. The waiter would just walk up, and hand the food to me.
Delivery apps just made people get food from a larger variety of places. Before them, you'd order from the pizzaria that's on the route home, and pick up up before jumping back on the subway. Or you'd eat at the diner on your block.
Speaking as someone who just goes downstairs and makes a sandwich, or who takes some to work, ordering lunch seems absurd to me. Is it that cheap in the US / do you earn that much? Food culture is so weird over there.
It's not cheap. When I still worked in the city, I was always blown away by how much of their salary most of my coworkers were willing to spend on restaurant lunches every day.
Typically I would expect a restaurant lunch in a major city in the US to cost $20-$40 per person after taxes and tip.[1] So, essentially $5,000 - $10,000/year. This was for people with salaries running from about $50,000 - $200,000 before income tax, so something like 7% - 20% of their after-tax income.
Making a lunch and bringing it instead should be less than half of that, especially if one makes extra food for dinner and brings the leftovers for lunch the next day, but I guess a lot of people actively dislike cooking for themselves.
A decent amount of tech workers also get dinner at restaurants nearly every day, which is of course even more expensive.
[1] Excluding inexpensive franchises like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, because my coworkers typically did not get lunch at places like that.
I see a dichotomy... many colleagues bring lunches to work in e.g. glass microwaveable containers, but many have an "ick" abt prepping their own food. A huge "tax" on the lazy.
According to zipline[1] it is still better than motorcycles at least. Considering we are talking about 100km, I would not consider a bicycle an option for such small packages.
That said for me delivering a package by bicycle+ train + bycycle is an option but it will always be more expensive unless you can stand long delivery times.
At least a delivery vehicle is amortizing by delivering multiple lunches to multiple people in a single trip. When someone drives themselves to lunch, they’re using a 2-ton vehicle for a single lunch.
Delivery vehicles for packages aren’t traveling very far between stops. A 2 ton vehicle dropping off 200 packages on a 100 mile delivery route is averaging 0.5 miles per package and 0.125 kWh where a drone might need to fly 15 miles each way per packages = 30 miles to and from some central hub to do those same routes. Drones are light, but 0.125 kWh to fly 30 miles seems unlikely.
Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.
The drone would still be the better option. Electric motors and propellers don't produce any pollution, unlike combustion engines and/or car tyres.
And of course the obvious part where it removes hundreds of thousands of vans from already massively congested road traffic. The skies remain mostly unused.
Drones aren’t necessarily electric, and cars can be EV so that doesn’t favor one over the other.
Pollution wise you need to consider the lifecycle of a drone which is likely far worse than a van. Many drones are using very dirty small internal combustion engines. Safety wise replacing 1 van with 30+ heavy drones each traveling far more could easily favor the van.
Any solution that isn't a stopgap is necessarily electric given climate change, and while EVs do reduce CO2 emissions they increase particle emissions from heavy tyre use by 20% (given their massive weight), which is arguably even worse for residential use. Anything that is in contact with the ground will produce some kind of particle pollution.
The extremely limited flight times and weather conditions you get from electric drones means large scale drone deployments will likely require small internal combustion engines and all the associated pollution from that. Some hybrid approaches where a land vehicle uses fully electric drones for drop off have been prototyped, but they don’t reduce tire ware.
Longer term it’s more debatable but we hand waving delivery drones as completely pollution free when we don’t know what from they would actually take is simply wishful thinking.
To be clear I'm talking about zipline's specifically designed delivery VTOLs, not your average consumer quadrotor. I wouldn't call over an hour and a half an "extremely limited flight time" and 50 miles is enough of a delivery range to make it operable from whichever restaurant/warehouse is making the delivery. And that's just today's tech.
Zipline 1 does have an 50 mile range but it isn’t VTOL they use fixed wing and have a launching system and a net to catch drones. Packages are dropped at 100 feet while the drone is flying at high speed requiring a parachute and a 5 meter wide landing zone which makes it undesirable for large scale adoption.
Just search "drone engine" or "UAV engine", there are tons of fuel-powered engines (many optimized for JP-8 since the military likes to be single-fuel) made for planes of various sizes.
The larger ones tend to have an electric generator to power the control surfaces, smaller drones tend to carry a battery for that and use the engine solely for forward propulsion.
This is for fixed-wing only, so it would apply to Zipline P1 but not P2, by the way. There have been some engine-over-electric setups to run multirotors from a single powerplant, but it's generally awful. It may or may not work for hybrid architectures like a quadplane, or a single-engine-VTOL like a tailsitter, all these things are in active development.
Single meal delivery as an institution is wildly inefficient. The absurd inefficiency of the car as delivery vehicle does not make drones a meaningfully wiser choice.
For every proposed technology, we need desperately to ask: does this really make ecological sense?
Delivering necessities (e.g. medicine) to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not.
That's because it is absurd. The same way any convenience is absurd.
Most of the deliveries around the world are done by motorbikes though, not only that but they are done not one at a time but in big chunks. Which is not absurd and pretty good.
Quick tangential question: I watched a few seconds that video and was immediately struck by how Mark sounds so....YouTube'ey? What is it about his intonation and narration style that is so distinctly YouTube? I don't watch enough YouTube to get a sense for whether it's distinct to him or to an entire class of popular channels. Every sentence or two is a "quip" - it's loud and sing-song'y. Lots of phrases seem to end on a rising tone (my parents used to call this "upspeak?" because it sounds like you're asking a question? all the time?).
TLDR: They use various ways of emphasizing words and adding variety to speech. It's almost exclusively done in videos where it's just a face talking to camera to try to make it attention grabbing.
They use Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a pre- YouTube example of someone using the same techniques for the same reasons.
Interesting thanks for the link. I was a college radio dj and there is a similar thing for when people are speaking on-air. It's kind of strange to be in a basement alone talking into a mic, especially because people are listening!
Makes me think of sports broadcasting mannerisms across different cultures/languages.
This is an interesting observation. I had a similar observation about tik tok influencer speak, though it’s not the same style as YouTube speak. There is a distinct shared way of speaking I’ve just called the tik tok accent (not talking about the AI voiceover). It’s something I’ve noticed mostly with female influencers, where they talk in a lower, quieter voice, that feels both like they are educating as well as perhaps infantilizing the listener. It’s difficult to describe precisely but definitely a shared phenomenon.
> I’ve noticed mostly with female influencers, where they talk in a lower, quieter voice, that feels both like they are educating as well as perhaps infantilizing the listener.
It’s called “patronizing.” These people think they are more interesting and intelligent than they actually are and take on this air of pretentious lecturing.
It's awful. I was impressed by the video and the technology, but the presentation style is irritating.
I felt especially sorry for the people working at the Rwanda site just trying to do their jobs efficiently, while he mucks about being fake-excited about everything. There's almost an air of "smile and nod and hope he goes away soon" about it
> I cut my finger making lunch?
So I placed an order for some bandaids a couple minutes ago?
And now they're four seconds away!
That is a nearly silent drone system that can deliver a package from the sky?
Right to my backyard in as little as two minutes?
With dinner plate accuracy!
Where else do people talk like this? What motivates this kind of speech?
Viewer retention, remember when you were taught to make an interesting intro to an essay to grab the reader? This is just that in video form, to really succeed in getting to the front page/trending of Youtube you really have to grab randos who aren't necessarily coming to you for your content so it has to have an attention grabbing start.
You can ask ChatGPT to make it 500 words intro. It will sound natural, just like, how you talk with your friends. People don't want to wait for someone talking something 5 minutes then realize that it's not the video they want to watch.
The idea is that you want to say everything about the video within 10/15 seconds to make viewer interested.
Just like how you want that the title of HN story must be under 80 character, not 800. Do you start conversation with someone by saying 80 words then go on for 30 minute?
My totally made up backstory for why this is is from bad editing in the early days of chopping up multiple takes where the edit does not happen on natural sentence endings so those intonations happen at unnatural places. it then became a thing and now is done in normal delivery as a style to be emulated.
Oh, around 2010 youtube (peak vlogger era) the cool thing to do in monologues was removing pauses between sentences, making a sort of galloping cadence.
Can’t say for sure where it comes from. But upspeak and it’s tangential culture does more psychic damage to me than advertising, “bad ux”, dubious business models, and most of the other common gripes on here
Mark Rober is one of the big-name youtubers that so many other youtubers try to emulate, so whatever his reasons are, the reason it sounds so "youtubey" is probably because it's how Mark Rober talks in his videos.
Essentially its a learned affectation to come off as approachable and unthreatening (see also Jimmy Fallon) to garner views. Read a "boring" technical article at Ars or watch this guy fumble around and be silly and give these practiced big smiles? A lot of people would rather watch a 20-30 minute video that's entertaining and lower information than read a 5 minute article thats denser.
Essentially this is blogspam in video form and it makes a lot of people very wealthy, so its not going away anytime soon.
As someone who loves the arts, but can't get into youtube personality culture, its just so crazy to me people watch these things. They're a bit infantlizing to me. "Oh you want to learn about these drones? Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level." Umm ok.
The most positive thing I can say is that there are people out there who can't read well (or read English at all) or can't learn from reading well, so these videos can be seen as helping a vulnerable demographic in an accessibility-like way. It may also attract younger people who otherwise would never read an Ars or Hackaday or HN (or whomever) article because these outlets are just not super accessible to them (unknown site to them, written on a too low level, etc). And that these video personalities could be a stepping stone into better and deeper media.
Essentially media is a free capitalist market and people choose their media sources, via their own biases and limitations. If they want everything explained to them via a Jimmy Fallon impersonator, then it will happen. Eventually the lowest common denominator demands questionable gimmicks and the market is more than happy to oblige.
Personally, as someone who does enjoy youtube but also relates to the grating nature of over "blogspammy" content, I think the key is I'm rarely if ever only watching a youtube video. Audiobooks/podcast when I can focus, youtube videos when I can't/doin something else. Can tune in and out easily and mostly not miss most stuff as I'm scrolling elsewhere.
Great analysis though, "blogspam" in video form is a fantastic metaphor for the over produced algo gamey vids. (Perfect length to hit max ads, thumbnail, title, intro template, etc)
> Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level.
Well, Mark Rober's intended, primary audience (don't let youtube hear this) is 5th graders so I don't know what you expected.
They aren't trying to sell kiwico kits to 26 year olds you know.
That's fair but Rober does the standard "Youtube voice" and persona popular in many demographics. I don't think its fair to say this is something unique to 5th grader audience YT's. This is practiced persona that leads to social media success in many venues.
Also HN isnt a 5th grader's venue, so its interesting how normalized it is posting children's media in adult spaces, probably because he doesn't come off as much more childish than most YT personalities.
that's not bad, upspeak is a great way to label the phonetic dancing being done. For that guy he always talks like that, something in the strong direction of salesman like. Sometimes you can go far back enough in the video history to sample their persona developing over time, eg ChrisFix videos on YouTube have undergone a more muted and normal speech pattern to the more ebullient stuff you find later.
I think the style arose out of a need to fill a 1-minute video targeted at an audience of low attention-span 13 year olds with 9 additional minutes of CONTENT! in order to meet the length requirement for monetization. If the filler CONTENT! is bombastic and sing-songey, it keeps your attention, however vapid it may be.
Also noteworthy is that Rober is a really good looking former engineer/technician. Most men I've known in the field do not have such as mediagenic appearance, but he is attractive enough that people accept him as a presenter.
I mean, the part where it's pure electric is what strikes me as a significant for other applications: this is an adaptation in logistics that can be rolled out independent of people's personal transport preferences.
Every bit of volume pretty directly can knock some ICE usage off the road, and more importantly because batteries are integral to the process it's pretty amenable to be running purely on renewables.
That's a hell of "technology which can just plain make everything better" possibility.
I guess for me the difference is that one is only now being tested in the USA. And even if successful, it will take forever to come here in Germany, especially in any place but Berlin/Hamburg/Munich.
Completely agree; he should have led the video with the medical drones. When it was recommended by the algorithm, I watched a few seconds and then closed it—Okay, another drone delivery company... But then someone personally recommended I watch it so I gave it another chance and loved the Rwandan section!
They parachute deliver blood, but they will use a different technique for consumers.
From their website:
> Lowering from the body of the Platform 2 Zip, this little droid uses onboard perception to leave packages exactly where they're supposed to go, whether that's a doorstep or patio table.
While that is true for Platform 2 drones, from reading this article [1] it seems the ruling currently only applies to Platform 1 drones (ie. the specs I was referencing). Although it does seem like the Platform 2 drones would be more of what you’d imagine for drones dropping consumer packages in the US. And that article goes on to state that this ruling seems like a jumping off point for securing further exemptions (ie for the Platform 2).
With these specs, I wonder if some countries military wouldn't be willing to offer them more money than they could ever make with deliveries... (At least on a per-drone basis)
Spend 5-10 minutes on twitter watching drone footage out of the Ukrainian war, both sides are getting a lot of work done with less accurate, smaller payloads.
The traditional M18A1 Claymore mine weighs about 1.6 kg total and has optimal effect to 50m in a 60 degree arc (potentially lethal to 250m I think - Ed: "moderately effective up to a range of 100m ... fragments can travel up to 250m").
Most of the time if you've decided to go the 'air superiority' route, then you're in a traditional war. So I feel that the cost-value factors will still favor dropping larger ordinance from much larger drones.
Have you watched any of the drone footage from Ukraine? They are dropping hand grenades and modified mortar shells into tanks from drones. Mortar shells have about 500g of HE. Highly effective.
I guess I was thinking about it from the point of view of a large industrial power fighting its equal.
Ukraine vs Russia seems more asymmetric. For instance, Russia can be an existential threat to Ukraine, but the positions can not be easily reversed since Russia has nuclear weapons. While they wouldn't want to deploy them, they'd rather do that than lose Moscow.
Asymmetric warfare makes use of a great number of things, which wouldn't be very cost-effective in a battle of equals. For instance all the insurgents that use IEDs to harass checkpoints, would probably rather use factory made air-craft delivered ordinance.
> I guess I was thinking about it from the point of view of a large industrial power fighting its equal
Human-in-the-loop ethical concerns aside: a highly industrial power can fully automate the entire process and massively scale up from individual-pilot controlled prosumer drones.
Imagine a high-altitude loitering spotter-drone that autonomously identifies any tanks with open hatches and tasks smaller multirotor drones to precisely drop small munitions. You may take out an entire tank battalion for less than the cost of a couple of traditional air-to-surface missile without putting your personnel in harm's way. Future wars will be horrifying for infantry and ground vehicles.
And yet Ukraine is stopped by old school mine fields... Well, slowed down considerably. It is almost as if everything is a trafe off with benefits and downsides.
Drones work until drone-specific AA is developed, and then it will be the same race we see between tanks and anti-tank weapons.
The drones don’t interact with the the mine fields, and in fact, are extra useful in this in this situation as they can fly over them. I’m not sure I see the trade off here.
Well, a drone doesn't help ypu a tiny bit it getting across the mine field. Without that, well, your counter-offensive stalls, drones or not.
And for now, anti-drone AA is difficult. But not unsolvable. Jamming, small caliber radar controlled AA guns. Point defense weapons can shoot down cruise missiles and even artillery shells. Applying the same principle at slower drones isn't that hard.
Your demands are completely unreasonable, a weapon platform can be extremely effective in its role and not win a war outright. Yeah drones aren't magically solving the problem of minefields, so what?
My point was exactly that: no weapon system is a silver bullet, including drones. And just because something is old doesn't make it less useful.
And I didn't make any demands, not sure how you woupd read that into my answers to a thread started with "dropping stuff from drones is an attack that cannot be countered". People didn't learn anything it seems, first tanks were obsolete, until Ukraine wanted every single one of them. Then modern AA made fighters and helicopters obsolete, only to be replaced by drones as the latest shit. Those arguments are just cheerleading whatever is en vogue and hyped.
Tanks being obsolete is… not clear. Tanks vs. western anti tank missiles and drones dropping grenades does feel like a terrible ROI but they are still useful. Russia doesn’t have these things at the same level of efficacy so tanks are perhaps more valuable for Ukraine to have.
Helicopters and fighters are in the same boat. They’re useful, but vulnerable and expensive. The thing about drones is they cost $200 to take out weapons that cost up to millions of dollars.
Drones are immensely helpful in getting across minefields. Being able to attack enemy positions across the field prevents them from being able to safely attack sappers trying to remove the mines.
It is much harder to stop a small drone attacking a mobile position than it is to establish a large AA battery that defends against missiles. Missile AA is for protected largely stationary high strategic value targets. Drone AA has to be for small tactical level targets on the go. Way harder.
It’s not an ultimate weapon. I don’t know why you judge it as if someone said it was. It’s just that small drones can be extremely effective against personnel and light armored vehicles. That’s why both sides have to use them.
This doesn't negate the comment that you are responding to at all. Drones have been most effective in defensive operations, often in concert with mine fields.
Offensive is much more difficult, as it needs to be coordinated with ground forces that can be impeded by mine fields. It is also easier for prepared defense lines to stop drones than it is for an offensive operation in the open to defend against them.
However this FAA approval is apparently for the Gen1 fixed wing plane (which is quieter than a drone anyway). Their Gen2 "drone" design is barely audible.
I'm pretty sure Uber is now profitable. Not surprising considering the absurd prices they now charge for delivery. (probably not absurd w.r.t actual cost, but very very far away from the prices that they were charging when they started Uber eats)
Standard brick weights about 2 kg (4 pounds). Plus the drone itself probably another 2 lbs. Imagine getting bonked by a malfunctioning 6 lbs. drone at 200 mph.
This device though doesn't have the density of a brick, and it is aerodynamic: failure modes wouldn't be an uncontrolled freefall, it would be a stable glide.
You could fail-safe this by adding parachute pyrotechnics which require an active command signal to not deploy: that way the worst case total electrical failure of a drone would immediately deploy chutes to slow it down.
This seems like a much more acceptable control then the failure mode of a car: which weighs 2 tons and contrary to popular belief only stays on roads by convention.
That's already more or less a solved problem with consumer drones: outside a catastrophic mechanical failure like a wing shattering or the motherboars spontaneously dying, the failure state is that the drone either returns to its starting location using GPS, or hovers and waits for manual control until its battery is almost out and then slowly descends while beeping loudly.
The current version of the drones used here and mentioned by the FAA is a fixed wing design though, it’s only the second version that has the ability to hover. A loss of power at low altitude is going to mean it crashes into something. Reading through the links in the article there’s a lot of mention of their Detect & Avoidance system so presumably it can somewhat safely steer through the airspace.
I assume given the 5m radius for drops they’re going to be operating in places that mostly have low density though. I’d also assume that they’d plan flight paths to be as safe as possible.
> That's already more or less a solved problem with consumer drones
The words of a man who's never experienced rapid, unexpected, uncontrollable "drone flyaway". And yes, I have a modern, very capable drone and I'm not a complete idiot. Sometimes they just go... crazy.
Luckily, I have not, nor do I want to. Using these cool inventions to kill people seems like a waste. The amount of resources wasted on wars is a shame. Solving problems like the energy transition to renewables would be so much easier with the kind of budget that literally gets blown up because one man with a tiny ego wants to hurt another man with a tiny ego.
This attitude won't help you stop wars from happening, though. You can hope it won't happen, know it's a waste and still expect any technology to be evaluated for usefullnes in warfare, be it trade, cyberspace or plain old kinetic conflicts. Thinking otherwise is irrational.
I’m wondering if eventually airspace will be carved out for commercial drone operations. And if in the future the FAA will attempt to stop enthusiast drone operations via costly regulations in the name of safety for commercial drone ops. As it’s very easy for someone with a DJI drone from to fly beyond LOS.
Also a Walmart in my area has blocked off part of its parking lot to launch 6 delivery drones. I’m going to miss the days of quiet skies.
It certainly looks like hobbyist drones/model aircrafts are going to be regulated out of existence almost everywhere (maybe still permitted at registered club sites, but nowhere else?). Especially now the world has seen videos of weaponised FPV drones in Ukraine.
But I don't see drone deliveries becoming a big thing outside of niche cases (e.g. medical supplies to remote locations with no easy road access). Payload capacity is very limited, wind/weather will ground them, and delivering to arbitrary homes/businesses (without dedicated landing/drop-off zones) isn't a solved problem. Then there's the safety/liability issues when they drones fail/crash. And the inevitability of Americans shooting guns at them.
Read up on the upcoming FAA Remote ID regulations. They were scheduled to go online last Saturday, but were postponed 6 months. They would effectively make it illegal to fly at any altitude without a transponder broadcasting the precise location of the aircraft.
The RC community has been pushing back on the regulations as it ads a lot of weight, expense, and complexity to drones and RC aircraft. There hasn't been any justification given by the FAA as to why these regulations are needed, adding to the confusion. Normally restrictions are put in place after an accident or some incident.
This reminds me of Uber, Lift, and food delivery companies... Years and decades of VC money poured in, and they still can't get profitable. How the fuck anyone can think using drones, with current technology, can be profitable in consumer-centric logistics?
Drone logistics has its unique value proposition, primarily for medical transfers and emergency deliveries in remote areas. But thinking that flying drones from city to city, or inside the city, will replace or offset road logistics to deliver someone a book in 50 minutes is just stupid.
Does anyone here think Zipline will justify its crazy multi-billion valuation?
Things like books are generally in the 'free delivery' part of the delivery market, where your parcel arrives in a day or two on the back of a truck, and one truck does hundreds of deliveries before returning to the depot to reload. IMHO drones are very unlikely to replace trucks in that portion of the market.
But there are also people paying ~$10 per delivery for someone to bring them fast food. Where the driver goes directly from the restaurant to the customer, only carrying a single delivery. They might not need to carry more than 2kg.
Of course that depends on it being safe, reliable, legal, having nontrivial range with its full payload, and not damaging the product.
The cost of food delivery is dirt cheap, though, in most places it’s under $5. The reason it’s so cheap is because it leverages existing infrastructure and there’s an unlimited supply of people willing to deliver for below minimum wage. I can place an order for food and have it arrive within 15 minutes because there’s hundreds of delivery drivers just sitting around waiting in any major city, and that system is very flexible, we can have thousands more drivers on the road in minutes if demand surges.
For drone delivery to compete with this on cost, it would need to have tens of thousands of drones available in any city. How much does a drone and the infrastructure to operate it cost?
Drones benefit from being better over longer distances in cities but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how they can compete (on price) with a system that is already extremely efficient (at the expense of the people participating in it).
> The cost of food delivery is dirt cheap, though, in most places it’s under $5.
I'm 0.6 miles from Starbucks and right now, a coffee that costs $2.78 in store costs $12.22 if I get it delivered.
Of course rather than listing it as a $9.44 delivery fee they just add a few bucks to the price of each item, plus a few bucks small order fee, plus a few bucks service fee, plus a few bucks delivery fee. So I can see why customers might perceive it as costing less than $5.
> How the fuck anyone can think using drones, with current technology, can be profitable in consumer-centric logistics?
Thing is, many societies are heading for demographic collapse or are already neck-deep in it (Japan). Even if it may be unprofitable now, we (as a society) need to invest serious amounts of money into automating a lot of unskilled labor, because otherwise we will run into disaster.
You're thinking about automation, not drone deliveries.
Where those aspects intersect is that it seems easier to build an autonomous flying vehicle than an autonomous road-going vehicle. Of course, drones have their own downsides for deliveries, including cost because of small payload.
Drones are quite similar, actually: unless they can safely drop into your garden they'll need some sort of secure storage for you to get your parcel from. They are a number of companies working on this: Basically drone lands on top of a locker station and dumps its cargo into it, then you collect your package with a QR code or similar. Even if drones deliver on the roof of residential buildings I think something like that is needed to keep things safe and orderly.
The "we've been automating since the industrial revolution and jobs have adapted" argument doesn't really account for scale. If I skin my knee (~1% of my skin) once a month for five years, that's hardly an issue. I might even form callouses. If I lose 60% of my skin to injury at once, that's a far bigger situation.
You don't seembto grasp the reality of delibery drivers salaries. Teamsters are the exception, and even they are competively cheap per parcel delivered, otherwise UPS would never have agreed.
2-3 grant for a month of delivering parcels. How many parcels. 500? 1000?
Thats 2 to 6 dollars per parcel. Goodluck bringing your costs down to that level with drones.
I would definitely use the service if it was offered and pay extra to have things delivered. For example say my car breaks down, I am reading codes off the car and it says I need a part. Call parts store and they have it, have it sent over while I finally get a chance to eat some lunch or something. Also I wouldn't have to find a ride to go get said part.
Middle of cooking dinner and realize you are out of a couple ingredients and they can offer half hour delivery, sometimes it takes 45 minutes in the last city I lived in to get to Walmart. This service would be appealing.
This is going to appeal to those who are ultra busy and are willing to spend a little extra to get something delivered promptly without leaving their home.
Uber, Lyft and other delivery companies require a human to be making the delivery. That's the whole point about why this has potential to be more economically sound.
So you think drones that require recharge (battery replacement) every 40-60 minutes and carry 1.8 to 2kg of cargo will replace a human? I don't think so.
I believe in autonomous drone delivery, which will probably be a reality one day. But the prerequisite for that is enormous advancement in battery technology. Nothing else matters if you can't fly a day or two without recharging.
> every 40-60 minutes and carry 1.8 to 2kg of cargo will replace a human
Yes, and I've seen it work for the already existing road drones. You still need a human to be there swapping batteries but that one human can do the delivery work of probably 50 people based on how fast each swap was. When I toured they weren't at the scale where they were continuously replacing batteries so it was only about 10x at the time.
The economics that will make or break it is the lifetime cost of the drone, but it absolutely can replace humans.
Why does that matter once there are enough charging stations and you have enough drones? Once you have enough battery life to do any single delivery and return to a charger, that’s all you need, everything else is just a bonus.
Given what they have been doing in Rwanda with blood delivery, yeah, I do think they have something going here. The tech is 'mostly' proven to me. The question is one of scale and usage.
There is nothing new there from a technology aspect. What part of the drone didn't exist 20 years ago? Or 50? But I primarily meant on battery technology anyway. Until you have entirely new battery technology that will be compact, ultralight, safe, and long-lasting (at least a day or two of flight without recharge), drone deliveries will not be profitable.
It will serve the niche market, though. But that's not a multibillion-dollar market with a bunch of competitors.
Why do they need to last a day or two without recharge? Just have charging hubs that swap out the batteries for fresh ones, and now it's an optimization problem
I don't know about justifying their multi-billion dollar valuation but the killer application of this in my mind is for pharmacies. There are a lot of pharmacies offering same day delivery now for both prescription and over the counter drugs, and a lot of people that need drugs that can't otherwise go out and get them on their own. My in-laws get their drugs delivered this way sometimes and it's almost always a driver in their personal car that drops off the delivery. I'm guessing the drivers are only dropping off a few prescriptions per trip, so it's likely not very efficient.
I personally believe this is the way forward, like in a star wars movie full of a plethora of "dumb" robots who have a specific work task, and are almost self sufficient. Like you have a robot that fix delivery drones, a robot that assembles them, and etc.
Drones will be also much better at avoiding obstacles, and they will be much more efficient than cars.
I am not really sure why there isn't more competition in this market. I believe they can build an autonomous delivery hub, and factory.
Irish company Manna have been doing this in two Irish suburbs for a number of years now. They're worth checking out - their CEO Bobby Healy often tweets interesting stuff around payloads, journeys per day, route maps etc. I've worked with them a little and think they're building something really interesting.
I also don't like how the rich get away with things - but is that the case here? Zipline's drones are probably better for the environment than ground vehicles because they are small, light, and electric. They're also supposed to operate at 55 dB for people on the ground - similar to how noisy a delivery van is.
Yea I definitely think it's the case here. The thing about the delivery van is that it doesn't go away, we just add additional noise with the delivery drone. Delivery vans can be made to be electric as well to bring the noise down further and so you actually just get loud drones and quiet delivery vans.
But the delivery drones are just one aspect. We're also going to get these flying taxis and those are going to suck too. Why invest or pay to maintain roads or highways or to build and improve sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, or rail lines when you can just take your air taxi directly to your landing spot and make sure to avoid contact with any humans along the way.
A good lens that you can use to examine this technology is whether the drones and air taxis are additive or subtractive. Good technology tends to be subtractive, i.e. an iPhone replaced a lot of unnecessary things (of course it had some downsides). Sidewalks and bike lanes are another good example of subtractive technology.
Additive technology would be something like a heated seat subscription, or these air taxis and drones. We're not really improving anything we're doing today, we're just adding to it. It's like feature creep.
It's not clear to me why you think they won't reduce delivery van usage. It's hard for me to imagine that they would not.
I'd also argue that more environmentally friendly, faster, potentially less expensive delivers are an improvement on what people are doing today.
Air taxis are very different from a regulatory perspective (greater safety requirements) and from an engineering perspective (much heavier payloads). I don't really see this authorization as evidence that they will be approved in the future.
> It's not clear to me why you think they won't reduce delivery van usage. It's hard for me to imagine that they would not.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I anticipate that they will have an effect, and that effect may be reduced usage, but I don't envision any reason they will totally replace delivery drivers. More likely, they'll complement delivery drivers.
> I'd also argue that more environmentally friendly, faster, potentially less expensive delivers are an improvement on what people are doing today.
Faster deliveries already happened. Even faster deliveries for the routine stuff that you buy seems like a needless feature. I know I don't need a set of wine glasses the same day or same hour, and if I did then I'll just plan better or deal with it. Especially if the trade off for me enjoying my back patio or something involves watching humming drones wizzing buy all day so someone can get some cheap plastic stuff delivered to them an hour faster...
How do we get something faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly anyway? There's a trade-off somewhere. Maybe it's worth it, though I doubt it. It's hard to buy the environmental angle here when you could instead just reduce consumption. It seems more like greenwashing. Once you take away the environmental angle, you can see (or at least I do) how absurd the whole proposal of "drone delivery" really is.
There could be some other, fantastic innovations though that really are subtractive instead of additive. Generally speaking if we aren't eliminating the usage of 1 or more things though we should be skeptical of the technology.
Sometimes when I’m doing yard work in the front yard I’ll notice the Amazon delivery truck come on my street. I’ll watch as it stops at about other or maybe every third house on the street and delivers something. I live in a suburban neighborhood with dozens of other streets very similar to mine. There are hundreds more streets like mine in the neighborhoods surrounding mine and I’m imagining a few handfuls of Amazon trucks are hitting these streets each day.
Then I imagine the amount of drone’s required to replicate even a portion of these Amazon deliveries and it starts to make my head spin.
I can imagine some use cases for the drone deliveries but there is no way I can imagine it replacing much of the current delivery system.
Did you even watch the video? It specifically addresses the noise pollution question, and is one of their very significant engineering feats. Obviously, it is yet to be proven at scale, but if it works as the vision and developments so far indicate, it would be a net reduction in noise pollution compared to our current infrastructure which executes these deliveries.
It's not just noise pollution, it's visual pollution as well. Pretty soon they'll attach little advertisements to them and cameras and when they fly by your window as your enjoying your morning cup of coffee it'll ID you and slow down a little, track your eyes, make sure you see that Amazon or Costco sells coffee for $14, give you a score, send you an email, and send you a flyer in the mail. They'll know when your backyard is in need of watering, and maybe they'll even see that your garden isn't doing so well and send you ads for fertilizer or alert local gardening companies to stop by and talk about how whatever is really harming your tomatoes and they've got just the solution.
Being noisy and annoying is just the very tip of the development iceberg here.
Can a delivery driver do some of this stuff today and so why haven't they done it yet? Sure. And idk, it'll just take time. The UAV platform is going to be a lot better for this kind of nuisance.
This kind of seems like a sci-fi scenario, not something that is likely to happen.
If lawn-care companies wanted to do targeted advertising based on how your lawn is looking, they can already use satellite imagery for that. They don't need drone cameras.
These drones also aren't going to fly by your window. They fly above the height of houses, trees, etc. - and they are too small ads you could see from that height
The satellite imagery will either be too expensive or too out of date. Also lawn care is just one aspect. These drone platforms will have real time data, Amazon will sell it - there's little doubt about that unless there's a regulatory reason. Insurance, live police monitoring, product purchase/usage, snapshots of the inside of your house through the window. All of that, and more, is on the table.
Delivery drones (which is part of the topic at hand) will absolutely fly by my window, otherwise how will they deliver the packages? Flying above my house still means I see the drones from my window.
Ads? Just beam images down or in the sky. Airplanes do this now during big sporting events and such. Buy a car! So and so are getting married! Etc.
Oh I can see it now. Coordinated drone ads where they'll fly over the sky and let me know it's Black Friday Only at Wal-Mart or I can get the best deal on a new Samsung OLED Smart TV now by scanning the drone QR code with my mobile phone!
It's not sci-fi, it's happening today. Go to an Amazon Fresh store and look around - they have literally hundreds of cameras, and several cameras pointing at every single section of shelving. They are tracking your behaviors, how long you stand in a particular place, how you walk around the store, when you touch items, when you put items back, how long you look at an item, whether you're likely reading the label, the list goes on.
Companies have also had, for like a decade now, advertisements in places like malls with cameras to track engagement and how often people look at it and what number of people look at it.
Amazon Fresh also started sending me flyers in the mail after I visited a single time. I get them multiple times a week.
Wing/plane drones are substantially quieter than quadcopter drones. I'm out flying RC with folks all the time and it's genuinely hard to hear an RC plane from more than 100 feet away, and these are handbuilt planes flying for fun.
Yea but I don't want to see or hear them at home. There's enough noise pollution as it is with people revving motorcycles and the like or whatever other peacocking people waste time doing.
There's quite a good video on "Drone Delivery Was Supposed to be the Future. What Went Wrong?". It's been a decade since Bezos launched drone deliveries but it hasn't taken off for a number or reasons including air traffic control around airports, people living in flats and the difficulties of getting a drone to find a safe spot. On the other hand Uber Eats type guys on ebikes have proved a practical solution. https://youtu.be/J-M98KLgaUU
But it can stop and hover in place right? In that regard, it's still a sitting duck for people who want to cause problems. Though granted, the likelihood that someone from a neighborhood who wants to do something like that using the service seems unlikely...
Where are you getting this? I don’t believe there’s any such named street or naming convention like this in Salt Lake. Google Maps appears to agree, since it can’t find that street.
There are addresses that Google reports using naming conventions from other cities, which makes things a little confusing. But locals use Cartesian coordinates for most addresses, it couldn’t be simpler, e.g., 1259 east 900 north (fake address, real naming convention).
It was easier to navigate at night in Salt Lake before smartphones than almost any other city. You still don’t need a smartphone today to find addresses by their coordinates, it’s dead easy. You can instantly tell which direction to drive and how far away it is by the address too. I do not understand why you think a simple grid with predictable coordinates is difficult. What naming system or city layout do you think is easier?
One of Salt Lake’s defining features is how much easier addresses are than other cities. “Though the nomenclature may initially confuse new arrivals and visitors, most consider the grid system an aid to navigation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City#Layout
This is incredibly cool! I was wondering when it would come to the US, but figured it would get stuck in legal approval hell. So exciting that it's actually coming.
I personally feel it is NIMBY. They actually provide a useful service. They would like NOT to have clusterfucks because they are dangerous to their operations. The noise level is much improved in this design. I think an honest shot is worth it.
And it isn't a useful service, IMO. It's another attempt to sell something that's currently shared (air-space, silence), while not offering benefits in a city. In remote areas, it could offer something, but I'm sure the big bucks are to be found in densely populated areas.
> It's another attempt to sell something that's currently shared (air-space, silence)
Silence isn't part of the tradeoff, since delivery trucks and vans are much louder. And I prefer giving up airspace to deliveries, since my kids aren't playing in the airspace.
Yeah... people pay for it... because it's useful. That's usually how money works. I am kind of irked by this pervasive cynicism on HN where whenever some guys want to build something, the crowd goes "boooo, you're stealing from us!! This won't work!!! There will be some cost and we're not willing to pay anything!! "
There is a new externality that they're not paying for. I don't care if other people pay for it, I want to be reimbursed for the externality it causes me.
Usually it doesn't replace car traffic, it just allows more traffic from other sources of traffic, adding lanes to roads supports this, humans will fill the vacuum with something else. laws of efficiency demand it.
I don't think so. These would be a disaster for birdlife in any city. Not to mention privacy and the fact that many places have extensive no drone fly zones already for essentially these reasons.
Hard to say without seeing what it looks like in real life. In principle it seems like it could replace delivery vehicles on the road and those delivery robots on the sidewalk, which could be a net benefit. In practice I imagine we'll just get the worst of all three.
Trying to get your wheelchair across the street when there's an Amazon van with its blinkers on blocking the curb cut on one side and two delivery robots in a stalemate in the other curb cut, above you a delivery drone gets confused by GPS signals bouncing off the skyscrapers and crashes into a freshly cleaned window, falling to the street beside you. Two thirds of this story is already happening, we'll have to see what new excitements drones can add to the mix.
Just want to quickly point out how much of a lifesaver delivery services are for many disabled folks. As someone who is disabled I find it very strange how critical abled people are of these technologies, even going so far as to use our situations in arguments against it without actually getting our opinion on it.
I'd expect the economics to work better the sparser the region. In Manhattan you can just send out someone on a bike, in the endless suburbia called Los Angeles it starts making sense, but I imagine this really shines if you want a Starbucks in a town that doesn't have a Starbucks.
This only works in sparsely populated areas like the US though. I can't imagine this working in European countries (or cities like New York) where most people live in multi-story buildings in the city that are shared with other people. Where would the drone land?
Most of these are small. It's already a challenge to navigate a Mini 3 Pro, or even a GoPro Karma (~1 kg) as it can jitter around quite a lot simply due to random wind.
Show me the overlap between potential demand for drone delivery, on one hand, and people who have no porch, fire escape, balcony or window from which they can suspend a platform?
How many of those have a clear vertical space reaching to the sky?
Most balconies around me in a European capital have other balconies above them, all up to the roof, which would be the only suitable place for a drone to land. No fire escapes at 99% of the buildings here.
Have you been to any modern downtown? LOTS of modern skyscrapers have no access other than the emergency exits and guarded entrances on the bottom floor(s)
> LOTS of modern skyscrapers have no access other than the emergency exits and guarded entrances on the bottom floor(s)
Fair enough, exempt luxury buildings with doormen and staff where they deliver packages to you anyway. Going off New York, San Francisco, Miami, London, Frankfurt, Roma, Napoli, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Montevideo, New Delhi, Bombay, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo and Seoul, I think that covers it.
The drone doesn't land, but the roof is the obvious answer. Pretty sure other apartment complexes/drone delivery services have proposed this model. It actually seems more ideal than dealing with a suburban environment that has trees and utility poles.
They're quiet enough that if you're anywhere near a road you won't hear them over the noise of car tyres. In the video you linked the sound of the parachute deploying was significantly louder than the drone itself, that's close enough to silent for me.
I live in the center of a big city, but my windows are pointed away from the road. At the moment I am hearing someone one building over three floors down practicing piano, and the startup devs opposite chatting over a cigarette on the fire escape.
Might be "close enough to silent" for you, but cars are really loud. If this is in even the same league, this is too loud, especially as you just can't get a flat with windows pointed away from the drones.
This is HN, so I think I can be pedantic without reservation here.
In Rober's video the drone is not any less loud, it's just that the power in each frequency is smoothed out. In that, the total power is the same, just now more evenly distributed. We humans then perceive this as more quiet. The drone is essentially more akin to a white noise machine than a machine that buzzes in certain frequency bands.
There is also a short posted below that which shows the drone in action. Seriously watch it, it's 10 seconds long and you can hear how quiet it is with no other sounds around.
Been following them for a while, this episode from No Priors podcast to be honest is one of the best episodes I've listened in a while (all podcasts in).
Really happy for them on being approved to fly in the US.
So now we will be surveilled everywhere we go. If you think these drones won't be recording you and that that data won't be used against you then you haven't been payimg attention.
Have you heard of smartphones? Not that the fact that we willingly buy surveillance devices (crave them, even) justifies additional police-state BS with delivery drones, of course. Both are bad news couched in very awesome ideas about convenience and connectivity. My biggest worry is that if everyone turns their attention to the sky, the devices in our pockets will just get more invasive. A near literal "look at the birdie" distraction!
Can we please not fill the air with delivery drones... Between the noise and the inevitable surveillance that'll come with them can we not just deliver via e-bike or something...
Eating Prime Air's lunch. Zipline is to SpaceX what Prime Air is to Boeing, often literally because Prime Air has hired so many ex-Boeing guys in the Seattle area.
That is a very interesting idea: to build small tunnels / raise along the side walk/streets for small robots/drones.
It even does not need to be a tunnel: a covered trench, 50cmx50cm , would do the trick.
We have tunnels (in cities in the UK), they're called storm drains. Using such tunnels for deliveries when it's raining would be right out.
However when cycle lanes are put in, alongside them we could have delivery-bot lanes, maybe? Although if you have to install infrastructure then it might be as well to go full Futurama and have giant vacuum-delivery tubes.
NYC does have delivery tunnels! Or tunnel, probably. There’s a tunnel in manhattan under 9th avenue that connects the Morgan postal sorting facility to the Farley post office!
I remember seeing a big one of these built at the CCC Congress. It had some bugs but people were able to use it to send capsules all over the convention center. It was a cool steampunk alternate future kind of experience.
Where can I learn more? A first instinctual impression of this is that this is a terrible idea and may lead to many injuries and damage to property. I'm open though to having my mind changed as there seems to be a growing set of people doing this.
The basic gist was, convenience of ride-sharing / seduced us into over using cars. It was supposed to have the opposite effect
"...ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. ... With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses"
but ... they did not take into account changes in human behavior. People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...
"On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced."
I think this is what will happen with these drone delivery services. As it becomes easier to order a box of bandaids and have it delivered in 4 minutes, people will change their behavior, we will be ordering more frequently one-off things from Walmart several times a week, and the sky will be filled with drones...
This isn’t a new idea. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons pointed out that increasing the efficiency of machines that burned coal would lead to more coal being burned, not less.
Making something more efficient makes it cheaper, unlocking new use cases and consumption by people who couldn’t afford it earlier. That’s what we call Jevons’ Paradox.
Jevons was worried that the UK would run out of coal entirely. This question, asked in 1865, is similar to the 20th century worry of Peak Oil.
> Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?
Jevons, William Stanley. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines. Macmillan and Co., 1865.
This is also the case in software, improvements in hardware performance simply cause software to consume more resources, and not meaningfully increase the overall productive capability of a system.
Even that wasn’t the first time introducing efficiency had the opposite intended effect: the cotton gin was invented to reduce the reliance on slavery, it of course famously had the opposite effect, increasing demand for slavery as cotton became even more profitable.
It wasn’t the first time it happened or noticed, but it’s the first time we know of that someone wrote a paper about it.
The Gutenberg press in the 14th century could have saved a lot of time spent copying books by hand. It did, but also triggered a Cambrian explosion of book publishing.
Most big US cities are designed to be incredibly hostile to anything but cars. The only reason that people weren't already taking taxis all the time is that the legacy taxi system is also incredibly unfriendly to users.
Imagine that the drones would need to follow quite stringent routes for safety and noise avoidance. Also imagine that (currently) a <50-pound drone flying at 300 feet overhead has a lower sound volume than a passing delivery truck. Actually, don't imagine; it's quite true.
> Imagine that the drones would need to follow quite stringent routes for safety and noise avoidance
Does that matter if I can IPO the "future of delivery" for billions? Corporations consistently show us they are willing to eat fines as "the cost of doing business", especially if its a means to eating all competition.
I like the idea of quiet, localised drone delivery over trucks, but I also lament a future that has me looking into the sky to see no birds, only Ama-line™ drones dragging TikTok banners behind them.
The future probably has no birds anyway - nor can I halt the drone delivery progress, so I guess it's not worth thinking about.
> Does that matter if I can IPO the "future of delivery" for billions?
Unless there's a downside, not really. The downsides are often hidden from the IPO. But, let's go on.
> Corporations consistently show us they are willing to eat fines as "the cost of doing business", especially if its a means to eating all competition.
I concur with you. Being willing to eat fines, for just about any reason, is unethical in my opinion.
Being willing to destroy all competition is the opposite of my understanding of capitalism insomuch as I understand capitalism wants to encourage competition. And it's unfortunately very prevalent in societies that claim to love capitalism.
> I also lament a future that has me looking into the sky to see no birds, only Ama-line™ drones dragging TikTok banners behind them.
This is a valid complaint. I suggest that if you care about birds, with respect to drones, then you should become active in drone communities to determine the effects that drones have on birds. How do drone activities affect birds flying patterns or nesting habits? How do drones affect birds' food chains? Some birds have been known to have some level of intelligence and can mimic human behavior -- will birds mimic drone behavior?
> The future probably has no birds anyway - nor can I halt the drone delivery progress, so I guess it's not worth thinking about.
While I agree that, due to climate change, the future probably has far far fewer birds (perhaps even no birds), I think drone delivery is young enough that you can affect progress. There are government agencies that drone companies are beholden to; the FAA is certainly one of them, and the FAA (for things that fly) often works with the EPA (for things that affect the environment). There's plenty of avenues to affect the progress of drone delivery.
> I suggest that if you care about birds, with respect to drones, then you should become active in drone communities to determine the effects that drones have on birds. ...
Without meaning to be snarky, what is your intent in this comment? I cant move the mountain that is US domestic policy from here, which will inevitably infect my country -- where it turns out I'm equally unable to effect policy (yes, I do vote, I have campaigned, things get pushed through anyway).
It just reads as "Well if you care so much about birds, why dont you get into drones", which feels almost like a non sequitur. The birds were here before me, and before the drones. I cant imagine there are any studies done on the wide spread integration of birds and drones, we wont get any until after we have hundreds of drones in the air at one time. Then we'll be treated to repeated NYT articles labeled "Where have all the birds gone?", discovering that, in fact birds were ok with 1 drone on the weekend but have suddenly freaked out when there are 100s/km^3 of airspace.
I sometimes see one or two drone pilots in summer, but largely they're non-existent here which might be the cause of some of my distaste for the idea of their proliferation. When they're here, they're loud and annoying (and scare my dog!). Probably I'm just being a curmudgeon.
My take is that autonomous cars will help parking and perhaps reduce the need for taxis, though that won't help traffic, indeed.
For instance, if my car can drive itself then I no longer need to park it near where I'm going and I no longer need a taxi to drive me to airport/station.
Regarding drone deliveries, the locations where it can be done safely is limited and there may be further legal restrictions if they cause a nuisance. We also need to see the cost, I doubt it will be worthwhile to order one-off small things often.
Emissions are getting irrelevant as EVs take over and electricity is generated by renewables.
> On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced.
Some points from the study that came up with that figure:
(Bottom line up front: electrified ride-sharing can lower emissions by 70% compared to driving a combustion car and is a good solution)
> A pooled ride-hailing trip shared between two passengers is similar in emissions to a private vehicle trip, and about 33 percent lower polluting than a non-pooled ride-hailing trip.
Electrifying ride-hailing vehicles would dramatically improve the climate emissions of ride-hailing trips. An electric ride-hailing trip would cut emissions by about 50 percent compared to a private vehicle trip; a pooled, electric ride-hailing trip would lower emissions by nearly 70 percent compared to a private vehicle trip (or about 79 percent compared with a non-pooled ride-hailing trip).
> On average, bus and rail travel have lower carbon emissions than car travel in either a private vehicle or in a pooled or non-pooled ride-hailing vehicle. However, using ride-hailing to connect to transit can be a good low-carbon choice. For example, a pooled ride-hailing trip connecting to the train, where the ride-hailing trip is a quarter of the total trip length, can be more than 50 percent less polluting than a private vehicle trip.
> Why would this be hell? We aren't in the sky, are we? It's mostly empty there.
This attitude is why the planet is polluted and ecosystems are regularly destroyed. I wonder, is something else in the sky? Does the sky have a purpose beyond being a place where humans happen to not be?
Yes, with noisy drones flying over houses, each with a single package.
And due to tech issues, drones falling out of the sky, smashing into houses, and dropping objects from height.. a small mass at high speed, hitting the head, can kill, blind, maim.
It's one thing to have planes, with maintenance schedules, flying. And those same planes are expensive, thus there is great incentive to not destroy them by accident. Not to mention, the build and quality control is generally high.
Now imagine endless "cheap is best" drones from China. A lost drone? Meh.
The drones are winged, so they don't produce nearly as much noise as their VTOL counterparts.
Safety will have to be engineered into these things(if it's not already) because it's enough for one high-profile accident to make the public lose trust and vote for banning them. The story is very much like with fully autonomous vehicles.
I'm curious, did you read the actual press release or the approval letters?
From the press release:
> The FAA authorized Zipline International, Inc., to deliver commercial packages around Salt Lake City and Bentonville, Arkansas, using drones that fly beyond the operator’s visual line of sight.
emphasis mine and
From the approval letters:
> Flight operations must minimize ground risk and not overfly the
following, unless otherwise approved by the Administrator: Power plants, Open-air assemblies of people, Schools during times of operation (e.g., elementary, middle, high, preschool and daycare facilities), Moving vehicles, except transitory flight operations, Roadways or highways, except transitory flight operations, and Any other area deemed high risk by the operator during the flight route design process.
> For all current operations areas, and prior to conducting operations in a new
area, the operator must complete a ground risk assessment and submit it to
the FAA for acceptance.
> The operator must maintain a conflict management capability to ensure that
the PIC is able to keep the UA clear of any manned aircraft and other UA.
> The operator may only conduct operations at a UA-to-PIC ratio of 1:1 unless
otherwise authorized by the FAA.
> Flights under special visual flight rules (SVFR) or instrument flight rules
(IFR) are not authorized.
There's lots and lots of stipulations here. So what's your concrete complaint?
> A few days ago, i saw this article in SF Chronicle; a joint opinion piece from MIT professor Carlo Ratti:
"Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse"
The basic gist was, convenience of ride-sharing / seduced us into over using cars. It was supposed to have the opposite effect
"...ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. ... With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses"
but ... they did not take into account changes in human behavior. People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...
"On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced."
I think this is what will happen with these drone delivery services. As it becomes easier to order a box of bandaids and have it delivered in 4 minutes, people will change their behavior, we will be ordering more frequently one-off things from Walmart several times a week, and the sky will be filled with drones...
and it will be hell.
People have a right to convenience and a better quality of life. Urban planners have a similarly flawed argument — tearing down highways will reduce traffic because everyone will take public transport. It merely forces the lower class and poor to suffer through public transit. The upper middle class, and similarly the tenured academics and policy wonks who came up with this sort of nonsensical arguments, never have to suffer the consequences of their own policies. It is a great thing in America that everyone can easily buy a car and enjoy the freedom. If cities want better traffic, then spend more money renovating or widening roads, not forcing poor people into crowded and uncomfortable public transport.
Sure, if you deliberately are obtuse and think what others are saying are "widen the roads".
I don't wish to share my space/commute with drug addicts and literal human feces, I don't see why anyone in this world would prefer to do that, can you explain why since you prefer that?
> I don't wish to share my space/commute with drug addicts and literal human feces, I don't see why anyone in this world would prefer to do that, can you explain why since you prefer that?
If you spend an hour in literally any medium-sized European city you can see that public transport doesn't have to be like that given proper funding and a critical mass of ridership.
Why do you think tolerance of bad behavior is inevitable?
In one system near me I've ridden I've ridden hundreds of times and seen one example of really bad behavior ever and the person was kicked off.
In another in a big city they suffer from far more problems but even there most trips are trouble free.
In this system the dominant method of payment is by using a RFID card one swipes. Credit cards are not accepted and few use cash as it stands. If you are poor the cards are free.
One could strongly tie cards to identity, deprecate cash, and ban people who commit crimes on transit. Note if you don't have an ID you have a fingerprint.
Oh looks like you were caught smoking fentanyl 3 times on the bus no ride for you. Refuse to get off get a free ride to jail and unpleasant detox.
Most of the trouble is literally 0.001% of riders. It's not like most bus riders are offensive drug addicts.
What a weird statement. Here in Switzerland, public transport is great and arguably preferable to using a car (although quite expensive as everything here is).
It's always a question of how much is invested. If, like in the US, little is invested in public transport then it is inevitably also going to be pretty bad.
Reminder that Google is utterly a joke. Effectively infinite cash. Among the first-movers in the space. Literally nothing in full-scale production to show for it. And today, beat by Zipline. Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.
Let's not pretend our industry doesn't immediately up the prestige and desirability of anyone who has worked at Google.
I can already think of a friend off the top of my head who worked there. They will tell me their engineering work at Google is not even that impressive compared to her other technical accomplishments. Our industry doesn't seem to care and she gets immediate extra-prestige just from having "(ex-)Google" on her resume independent of her actual technical accomplishments at Google.
Those Stanford grads aren't dumb. They are reacting to the incentives of our entire industry and making a wise decision that favours their professional growth through accruing status and wealth - both resources which can catapult you to finally having what you need to go do "the thing" you actually want to do. Hence all the ex-Google startup founders.
> Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.
It's about the money.
Work at a startup, and get paid meager table scraps to "follow your dreams" and "work on something meaningful." Watch all your friends become millionaires while you work 14 hours a day to afford name-brand ramen noodles.
Or, work in Big Tech, get paid an actual decent salary, clock out in 60 hours or less every week while getting every perk imaginable, and retire into the upper-middle class before 50 (or 40, or sometimes 30).
>> get paid an actual decent salary, clock out in 60 hours or less every week while getting every perk imaginable,
....is that....meant to be good? As someone who works in "big tech" and works 37.5h a week I have no idea what kind of perk/money they would need to offer me to work 60 hours a week. I'm not sure that even exists - I like having a life outside of work.
Of course it's about the money. But wait, if these folks were so brilliant, couldn't they just do their own thing instead of throwing their weight behind an incumbent, bloated, legacy giant? Let alone their talent going to /dev/null?
Both of these seem .. illegal where I am from. 40 hours a week is the maximum an employee can ask of you in EU. So does Google in EU then explicitly ask in the contracts that you agree to work more hours or how does that work? And also, why the heck would anyone want to work more than 40 hours a week?
IMHO, misplaced blame. Rather let us think as _Amazon_ is utterly a joke, because they sprayed infinite(in terms of plebs like me) cash into drone delivery and still didn't make much progress in the space. Google is not even in logistics business and drone doesn't make any sense for them.
> Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.
In long-term, nothing trumps comfortable money and the prestige that comes with the name "GOOGLE" on a CV and opening more useful doors later on, compared to Zipline, which could've been any one of the other thousands of drone startups that came and went silently and didn't turn up much. We don't live in an ideal world, something all of us should remember.
Amazon didn't go anywhere with drone delivery because for most last mole delivery peoblems drones don't make sense. Especially not at the scale of Amazon. Sure, drones are great for really fast point-to-point deliveries, especially in remote areas. And that is not a problem Amazon, or any other company like UPS or DHL, has to solve.
Another business Amazon retired, but a ton of start-ups still think is a good idea, is groccery deliveries.
They did that same move with bard, proving to put out fluff rumors and underdelivering by an order of magnitude from the public expectations while their competition silently overdelivers with a functioning product to all.
That's the problem GP is outlining. CS grads are breaking their backs to get a job at Google, then Google goes and wastes all that talent 'cause they can't get their house in order.
This doesn't surprise me, because unlike Google, they actually have an innovative contribution in production; and given all the evidence, it ain't gonna' be cancelled any time soon.
I think people should pay a lot more attention to your comment. It’s a monumental statement and one which we, as technologists, should really be paying a great deal more attention to.
Changing the world involved actually thinking for yourself. And that is exceptionally rare.
Edit:
Downvoted immediately. What social commentary. Now I know what I’m saying is true: people hate it.
https://youtu.be/DOWDNBu9DkU