jmwilson

TrueNAS is just web-based configuration management. As long as you only use the web UI, your system state can be distilled down to the config file it generates.

If you do a vanilla FreeBSD+samba+NFS+ZFS setup, you'll need to edit several files around the file system, which are easy to forget months down the line in case of adjustment or disaster recovery.

Firefox does do the right thing and seems the most usable browser for private CAs. Chrome and derivatives mostly too, except the problem mentioned about the public suffix list. Mobile clients seem the most broken. I can't get iOS to work well with my private CA packaged into a .mobileconfig, but it could be my error as well.

Another obnoxious behavior is clients enforcing lifetime requirements for domains they have no business imposing their opinion about: .internal and .home.arpa. These are specifically carved out for private use. If I want to roll my own CA with a 2.5.29.30 name constraint extension for one of these domains and hand out a 10 year wildcard certificate, I should be able to without interference from my web browser.

Additionally, Google and the PSL have inadvertently broken .home.arpa on Chrome by misclassifying it as a public suffix, while leaving .internal alone. A wildcard cert for *.home.arpa will not work on Chrome, but *.internal will, despite these two domains being essentially equivalent in purpose.

HyperCard was my introduction to programming and delivered on the vision of personal computing as "bicycle for the mind." RIP

Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift - one that I wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the industry moves in cycles, and all glory fades. I got my turn at Facebook in 2010. A bunch of times I'd see a name I'd recognize pop up in internal discussions: an esteemed classmate or colleague had joined, and you knew with all this talent concentrating in one place, good things were to come.

The lack of the ohm symbol Ω is also quite a bummer given the technical domain of the font.

Who works Sunday morning then?

The maintenance window will morph into a do-big-risky-changes window, which means everybody in engineering will have to be on-call. Many years ago, when I newly joined a FAANG, I asked, "shouldn't I run this migration after hours when load is low?" and the response was firm, "No, you'll run it when people are around to fix things". It may not always be the answer, but in general, I want to do maintenance when people are present and willing to respond, not nights and weekends when they're somewhere else and can't be found.

Tuning feedback loops is a topic I've found to be fiendishly good fun, perhaps because of how obtuse the final result is. There is no at-a-glance way to see the connection between your high-level goals (closed-loop bandwidth and phase margin) and the implementation (the R and C values). Consequently, I make it a point to document the hell out of these circuits with parameterized simulations so that my future self has some hope of understanding and adjusting them later on.

A lot of applications are usually tolerant of suboptimal compensator design. I've participated in a few designs where these circuits were plucked from the datasheet reference design and never touched. There's a tradeoff between having a little bit of ringing vs. having an engineer model, tune, and test, and also adding to the BOM complexity with a bunch of different passive part values.

> they aint ever going to pop a North Korean threat actor bc they simply cant travel at will.

True, but the USG has a long memory and holds grudges. Even if they never travel, they have to be confident every future government of the country will have their back. What's the odds the North Korean or Russian regime substantially changes in their lifetimes? Probably higher than the chance a future US administration will stop caring about an outstanding warrant.

> In the mid nineties the Internet was largely a research network between university computers and paid for by tax payers.

Your timeline is off by at least half a decade, and things were changing very rapidly in that time. By the mid-'90s, NSFNET was formally dead, after years of accepting commercial traffic. Local ISPs for home users started popping up and AOL opened its access to USENET in 1993.

The push for residential broadband also started almost immediately; @Home was offering residential cable internet in 1996, it was the future at the time, just not very evenly distributed. This was well before PCs had the processing power to do standard-definition video.

> The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them.

It's a problem if you're building systems as a dilettante. There are enough individuals on the planet that people can specialize so we need not be at the mercy of systems built by people of average discernment.

> If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.

One counterexample to this viewpoint is Damascus steel. The exact art of making it has been lost (although now effectively reproduced), but modern steels surpass the qualities that made Damascus steel prized. It turns out those ancient masters didn't know bad their steel was. Maybe modern piano tuners don't know how bad their technique is, once the process of "finessing how the overtones interact with each other" has been thoroughly characterized by present or future technology.