obi1kenobi

It's not self-cancellation in the way you're interpreting the title :)

Author here. This! The point isn't to name and shame, but to illustrate a complex failure mode. I too could see myself writing this bug!

Hi! Author here. You're right — but two things to consider here.

First, that quote is referring to human-made systems, not natural ones (as is the rest of the essay!) and I think our views align on whether human systems regularly work.

Second, natural systems (and all complex-enough systems) are always running in some degraded fashion. So what "working" means is ambiguous: they are broken, yet accomplishing the goal. The quote from the essay refers to "working" in the "free of faults" sense, in which I again think our views align.

The site's description says: "I was feeling nostalgic for the Windows Bubbles Screensaver, so I made my own, much more relaxing version."

Click the bubbles and they pop! Very satisfying :)

The shell script starts with the following comment:

    # All the code is wrapped in a main function that gets called at the
    # bottom of the file, so that a truncated partial download doesn't end
    # up executing half a script.

Seems like another user with way more experience than me did an excellent job explaining the situation -- I enjoyed reading their answer!

Oh wow, what a read! Great story, thanks for sharing :)

(Author here) The image is AI generated. I did not use any AI to write the post itself.

That's just my style of writing, you can check my pre-GPT posts and compare if you'd like.

Haha sadly from reading many of the rest of the comments, the typical HN reader seems unconvinced that trees or rain could impede Wi-Fi signals, because their Wi-Fi at home goes through walls just fine. A few even suggested I shouldn't have bothered with Wi-Fi and instead just laid cable across a few city blocks instead :)

But I do appreciate precise language and the desire to help people learn new things, so thanks for helping make the distinction between MIMO and beamforming clear! I hope at least a few more people know about it now thanks to your comments.