Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike.

My spouse and I are on vacation in Japan, spending half our time seeing the sights and the other half working remotely and enjoying the experience of living in a different place for a while. To get here, we flew on British Airways from London to Tokyo, and I entertained myself on the long flight by browsing the interactive flight map on the back of my neighbor’s seat and trying to figure out how the poor developer who implemented this map solved the thorny problems that displaying a world map implies.

I began my survey by poking through the whole interface of this little in-seat entertainment system¹ to see if I can find out anything about who made it or how it works – I was particularly curious to find a screen listing open source licenses that such such devices often disclose.

You know sometimes a technology just sort of... comes and goes? Without leaving much of an impression? And then gets lodged in your brain for the next decade? Let's talk about one of those: the iBeacon.

I think the reason that iBeacons loom so large in my memory is that the technology was announced at WWDC in 2013.

I'm sick and god-damn tired of this! I have written tens of thousands of words about this and still, to this day, people are babbling about the "AI revolution" as the sky rains blood and crevices open in the Earth, dragging houses and cars and domesticated