This is of interest to approximately none of my audience, but I used this guide to eliminate all bufferbloat issues on the home network.
If you have pfSense, it works perfectly. Some tuning required.
Month: July 2018
Absurd Universe
The thing about quantum mechanics — and one of the reasons scientists don’t like to talk about it philosophically — is that if it’s true, you have to non-optionally accept at the very least one of these ridiculous ideas (and in reality, two of them*):
1) That determinism cannot be true.
2) That locality cannot be true.
3) That the many-worlds interpretation is true.
Them’s your options. Seriously. There aren’t any more. Now I am sure you can see why scientists are loathe to discuss the meaning of quantum mechanics, because no matter which interpretation of it is true it leads to absurd results. And since it appears to be a solid theory that makes very exact predictions about the universe, then absurdity is baked in. You cannot get away from it.
Since determinism in most formulations of QM cannot be true it’s a mystery to me and many others of a more philosophical bent why nearly all scientists claim the world is fully deterministic when the very foundation all of science is based on absolutely is not deterministic if locality is preserved (and if locality is not preserved, whoops, then no causality!).
*Due to the fact that recent experiments show that Bell’s inequality is violated in this universe.
To Be Clear
To be clear, though I support immigration in a controlled manner, I do not believe in any loony leftist variant of open borders, and believe a nation is defined (at least in part) by its borders, and should be. Therefore, I strongly support:
1) Border controls
2) Turning people back at the border
3) Rounding up and deporting those in the country illegally
4) Mostly allowing desirable immigrants in (those with special skills, etc.)
5) Pretty much denying entry to all economic migrants (more than 80% of immigrants)
6) Very importantly, strongly prosecuting the CEOs and other C-level execs of companies that hire illegal immigrants to do jobs that American citizens and green card holders should be doing
Open borders and even accepting everyone who wants to show up can only work if the in-flows and out-flows are roughly equal. Furthermore, a generous welfare state can probably only work if there is not huge amounts of immigration (politically). For this reason, I do not buy 90% of the leftist immigration talking points, and believe that it is mostly just poorly-repackaged corporate propaganda masquerading as liberalism.
(Observe how most of them spend so much time prattling on about immigration, but very little time protesting military entanglements overseas, or our policies and actions in Central America which cause a lot of immigration, etc.)
Is It Good For
The idea of #SkininTheGame: watch what people do not what they (or their staffers) say.
Ron Paul opposed every war. Unlike these virtue signaling frauds who caused wars.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) July 3, 2018
Ron Paul might be racist. Probably is.
But honest set of questions here. Which is more racist: 1) Voting for and prosecuting a bunch of wars where brown people die in the hundreds of thousands or millions or 2) Saying some racist things occasionally and not supporting our imperial wars?
You know, given the choice, I’ll take door number one every damn time.
Virtue signaling is the primary mode of modern “liberals.”
Complexity
I know this is some dude’s home setup where he is probably just using it to learn and play, but it reminds me of overly-complex enterprise setups that are unsupportable and so convoluted no one knows how they work (especially after the person who built it leaves).
Ran into a few of these myself over the years, and alas to my great shame in my early years of IT (early 2000s) I even built a few of these monstrosities.
This commenter said it best about how I now feel about such needless complexity.
I went to the page to read details about how he load balanced upstream connections, or if he was using heartbeat or whatnot. I didn’t find that, but what I did find was a gratuitous amount of kit that made me happy my infrastructure choice at home is much, much simpler.
My setup is Comcast going into a simple, reliable Surfboard modem, feeding a Google Wifi setup. If it goes down, which it just really doesn’t do, we can use cellular data.
Complexity is the enemy of availability. Keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
A few years ago, I was involved in the design of a call center that needed failover capability. I can’t go into details as it would involve just loads of writing no one would care about, but my simple design was overruled in favor of a much more complex one that had multiple points of redundancy, an extremely convoluted networking and phone setup, and other complications that in someone’s mind made it more resilient.
My design was simple enough that a person with no technical skill of any kind (save functioning hands) could unplug one cable and plug in another cable to achieve effective redundancy. This was a 24-hour call center, so someone was always available to do this task. (With a slight modification and a little more money, this manual cable plugging could’ve been avoided, at the cost of a bit more complexity.)
Even better, my design would’ve run somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000. The design that won was closer to half a million dollars all in. My design, I was told, was not “reliable, not elegant, and was not enterprise class, and depended on people rather than systems.”
Eventually, the design I was against was implemented and as I’d expected, it was not at all reliable. It was failure-prone, no one knew how to support it, and it had undiagnosable failure modes. During the first weeks of production it went down catastrophically several times, vexed with inexplicable problems.
There were hours and hours of downtime on the “more elegant and reliable” system that I didn’t design. In my less complex system that would’ve actually worked, I estimate that the call center would’ve experienced less than five minutes of downtime in that entire year.
Complexity in matters like this is your enemy, always. HA and redundancy should be as simple as possible so that any schmuck can invoke it and have it work without having to call in 20 system admins and network administrators.
This commenter also makes the same point.
Adulting
When I was a kid, adults (even very successful ones) went out of their way to tell me how difficult and terrible and arduous being an adult was. And perhaps it was, for them.
But my childhood was pretty terrible itself, and nothing I’d ever want to return to.
By comparison, while not always a cakewalk, being an adult has been a pleasant, fairly easy, sometimes boring but mostly great experience. I’ve seen amazing things and done many things people assured me I could and would never do. None of the horrors that other adults assured me awaited ever occurred, nor are likely to.
The adults as usual were wrong — my youth while not wholly unbearable was pretty unpleasant, while being an adult has been mostly great.
Truth Obfuscation
While this is true — that just being in the country undocumented is a civil violation — there is much more to it than that.
But let’s look at it a little deeper — something that most Tumblr types (and people in general) never do. The reason that it is not a criminal violation is because as a civil violation, there is no due process. No public defender is required. If someone is found to be in the country undocumented, in other words, they do not have to appear before a judge and can be escorted to the border and told to scram, no questions asked.
Following that up, if being in the country illegally were a criminal violation, often the undocumented would be better off. There would be a public defender required. They would have to see a judge at least once (technically, twice, at minimum) and there would be much different standards of evidence required of the state. They could not just be escorted to the border on little to no proof and told, “Good luck.”
So, to both sides: be careful what you wish for, especially if you don’t understand any of it.
However, entering the country illegally is a crime. Usually, a misdemeanor, though until recently very few were prosecuted for it.
Tech
What‘s something that seems obvious within your profession, but the general public seems to misunderstand?
— Louie (@Mantia) July 1, 2018
That most computer problems regular users experience are shockingly easy to fix and you could probably Google it and fix it faster than someone can walk to your desk to do so, even if you lack all computer experience. The vast majority involve three button clicks or less.
Other Times
I linked to this on my other blog, but wanted to say a bit about this portion.
Up until my teenage years, ordering something meant it arrived in six or eight weeks — now Amazon can get some packages there on the same goddamned day — the first time it happened, I thought it was a prank. I remember when you couldn’t get every kind of fresh produce year-round — they couldn’t just import that stuff from warmer climates like we do now, which is why I didn’t see a mango or avocado until I was in my 20s.
I’m old enough to remember all of this. Even though I grew up in Florida (North Florida), I didn’t see a mango until my late teens. An avocado was something I saw once or twice, but was not common, and was not something I ate until I was in my late 20s.
Cherries were rare and expensive and exotic.
And as the author mentions, ordering anything from a catalog meant a bare minimum of six weeks of waiting — often far longer. When I saw that Amazon was delivering items in two days routinely (much less same day), I thought it was an impossible, doomed to failure marketing stunt that just could not be true.
Now, though, I use this service all the time. I buy more big-ticket and even everyday items from Amazon than I do from local stores because the selection is so superior and the service is just better.
The world has changed so much since I was a kid, and people tell me it has not.
Last Straw
Seattle becomes largest U.S. city to ban plastic straws and utensils.
Good. Never want to go back there anyway. Fucking hate Seattle. One less reason to ever return.
The Lesson
Both Mexico and America are finding out the hard way that you can’t just throw millions of people in the trash because it “benefits everyone” (?) and then not expect blowback and consequences.
The UK, too, for that matter. There will be more.
Info Access
The most relevant sentence I’ve read all week:
Google makes its money selling advertising – it has no incentive to provide unfettered access of information to everyone.
Google search is just about useless to me these days except for the most basic search queries. It can’t find anything old, for the most part, it downranks anything not HTTPS, and it censors anything from a variety of countries (including the US).
Search should be a public service, not some company’s private fiefdom.