Well said but by the time mobile phone towers were built we had been tapping phone lines for a long time. Hard to not think that to an extent default insecurity for telecoms was a choice.

When it was developed it was assumed that the cost of cellular equipment and, in some countries, the regulatory hurdles required to get authorisation to purchase radio transmitters that operate on licensed bands would make it almost impossible to do this.

I worked in a company that had a base station emulator in their testing lab in 2008. I can’t recall the cost but it was well over $10,000 and only worked with direct antenna coupling, it couldn’t broadcast.

Now we have software defined radios.

No milk though

And it’s actually attempting a periodic table rather than just using the aesthetics as found in Mendeleev’s.

?

Mendeleev's periodic table was organized by periods of chemical properties...

Yes, the cheese are arranged by properties rather than just looking like a periodic table.

Here in Australia Apple Maps names everywhere by local council, which isn’t used at all, we use localities. I have reported this as a bug repeatedly but they just keep at it.

It just means nothing here except who you pay to collect the bins.

Google is not without its errors.

I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.

It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.

Addresses are hard. OSM Nominatim struggles with them all the time. Probably the biggest hurdle to OSM adoption, imo

Yep, they all have flaws. I just fine that when I want to drive somewhere, Google does better for me than Apple, though certainly Apple has improved a lot recently.

actually a sign of our times that we can gripe about this. i remember how annoying it was to rent a car on a business trip without anything other than a road atlas. you had to dedicate a fair bit of cognitive load you really didnt want to use.

Indeed. I remember flying to Atlanta and arriving at midnight. I rented a car and had to try to find my hotel in the dark with one of those one-page maps the rental car company had. So, yea, we’ve come a long way for the better.

In the 80s I rented a car from the Minneapolis airport. Drove to my hotel visually navigating with respect to the tall buildings of downtown. Eventually realizing I was in St Paul.

I was at a small conference north of San Diego and thought I could find my way back to the airport for an early flight. I did but not before making a U-turn at the Mexican border. My excuse is the darkness (and of course no gps at the time).

I mean the problem was the Google contract, yeah?

Same in Australia, after they were corporatised (turned into companies run for profit rather than run as a service by some level of government) it was recognised that as natural monopolies there would need to be some sort of regulation on how much money they could recover, it was decided a method based on their costs was best, so they spent bad money agter good im expanding the network hugely (based on crazy projections of growth in demand to nowhere) rather than building resilience into the network and lowering their costs.

And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.

Series of awful blunders.

I can’t imagine stopping every note. I think it is pretty good practice for me to never stop if one can avoid it.

I used to stop all the time, when I made a mistake, between repetitions, when I finished the piece.

I agree about ear to fretboard.

I think you need both. If you never stop or slow down, it's hard to build the proper muscle memory to improve and get more accurate. However, it's also valuable to practice playing through mistakes to finish a whole song. Mistakes happen, and if you're playing for a crowd you can't just stop and start over.

Yes, both. A good example why is for example, as muscle memory grows it will bias your note selection when improvising. Sometimes you really need to slow down to consciously force yourself to explore other sounds. Once you've done that, you need to wear it in again so it sounds natural in your playing.

Absolutely. You can get "locked in" to certain patterns / phrases just via muscle memory and familiarity. Need to balance that with a little improv to find new patterns phrases you like, and then can train those in via muscle memory.

I repeatedly play the same phrase though.

> It can't be a real thing that you can avoid being a monopoly by owning more of the supply chain.

Move the most important aspects of your software to hardware. Hard for MacOS but for a Chromebook style thing you could write the browser into its own pice of wafer.

Google should pay me to be this evil.

> Move the most important aspects of your software to hardware.

So now you have a piece of silicon with a two year old version of Chrome with seventeen CVEs hard-coded into it, and still have all the same antitrust problems because the device still also has an ordinary general purpose CPU that you're still anti-competitively impeding people from using to run Firefox or Ladybird.

I was speaking to a Kuwaiti princeling a few years ago about solar and he just couldn’t get his head around zero marginal cost, the efficiency of assembly of the panels, and the economics that would drive the growth. We spoke for about half an hour and he kept bringing up that powerbrokers don’t care about the environment and I had to repeatedly point out that I hadn’t mentioned the environment once.