For a page titled “schools for the deaf”, this is incredibly US-centric. There are plenty of other schools, in many other countries, and other sign languages that have no historical connection to French Sign Language (LSF) or American Sign Language (ASL). Perhaps “history of schools for the deaf in USA” might be a more appropriate title?
My first thought was: “oh, that’s an interesting concept, I wonder how hard it would be to learn?”
Then I saw the frequency/time graph, and realised that didn’t seem to have been a consideration at all. This was obviously designed by a sighted person who cared more about what the pictures looked like!
Blind person: “But how do I know which letter is which?” Designer: “Oh, that’s easy! Just look at the picture!”
Take a look at when this was invented, it's a critical detail in evaluating all this, it was 1913! They were working with the very limited technology they had, they couldn't detect the letters and map them to a particular new tone or chord that might be easier to understand, that tech just wasn't possible [0]. They had to directly translate the image of the letters on simple photo receptors into a corresponding frequency value.
[0] As I was writing this I did have the wild thought that in theory if you had the weights already you could, in theory, implement a very basic character recognition neural net with analog circuitry using vacuum tubes that could recognize letters for direct mapping to sound but it's entirely impractical to create from scratch in reasonable time frames. Maybe over the span of decades you could manually tune one?
IIRC from reading the paper years ago, they chose the tones for each row in the column so they would provide distinct combinations of concordant and discordant sounds.
I’m with you on the shared photo albums. I’d been using lockdown mode for quite a while before I discovered this limitation, though. For me, this is one I’d like to be able to selectively enable (like the per-website/app settings). In my case, it was a one-off need, so I disabled lockdown mode, shared photos, then enabled it again.
The other feature I miss is screen time requests. This one is kinda weird - I’m sure there’s a reason they’re blocked, but it’s a message from Apple (or, directly from a trusted family member? I’m not 100% sure how they work). I still _recieve_ the notification, but it’s not actionable.
While I share with your frustration, though, I do understand why Apple might want to have it as “all-or-nothing”. If they allow users to enable even one “dangerous” setting, that ultimately compromises the entire security model. An attacker doesn’t care which way they can compromise your device. If there’s _one_ way in, that’s all they need.
Ultimately, for me the biggest PiTA with lockdown mode is not knowing if it’s to blame for a problem I’m having. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve disabled and re-enabled it just to test something that should work, or if it’s the reason a feature/setting is not showing up. To be fair, most of the time it’s not the issue, but sometimes I just need to rule it out.
