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.
I'm sure of it. And yet based on this rapidly getting to the front page, it seems like many of us are part of today's lucky ten thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Might be more than ten thousand, even, based on the reactions :)
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.
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.
But it could be rain helping close a circuit on a rusty antenna connector port. Or rain improving the grounding of some neighboring circuit that otherwise drains through the metal scaffolding the antenna is attached to. Or rain attenuating a neighbor's own Wi-Fi that otherwise might have been aggressively transmitting on the same channel as our units.
The rain and the Wi-Fi devices were clearly related. How they were related, was not clear. Aging hardware rusts, breaks, gets yanked around or unseated or pulled out of the ground, or has water enter in places where it shouldn't be.
I was already running diagnostics on everything to figure out which devices might be faulty (local AP, local bridge unit, local antenna, remote antenna, remote bridge unit, remote switch, remote modem/router, upstream connection to ISP) so checking for "update gone wrong" was a 3 second job: I was already in the admin UI, so check logs, nope, no recent updates, done. I'd rather spend 3 seconds checking something that probably isn't the problem but I can know for sure in 3 seconds than risk climbing precariously up a scaffold 30ft in the air only to realize it was just something I could have solved at a keyboard instead.
Risk/reward. Low risk, low reward is okay too if it's super fast and already on the way.
(Author here) For our Wi-Fi bridge, the devices on both ends were set to max power.
I don't recall them being able to change data rates very much (if at all) because the ones at the beginning of the story were 802.11g devices, and 802.11g didn't have channel bonding capability or similar tricks up its sleeve. Newer equipment definitely has more options like this.
This story happened a bit over 10 years ago at this point. At the time of the story, the Wi-Fi bridge was already almost 10 years old -- we'd had the same equipment since I first remember getting internet at home.
That means the antennas at the start of the story were mid-2000s mid-tier consumer level equipment. I don't think a 16-17dB antenna would have been $35 at the time, in either mid-2000s dollars or in today's dollars. I also grew up in a country much poorer than the US, where $35 could feed a family for a week.
At the end of the post, we upgraded to 802.11n antennas (but still tech from 10+ years ago) which solved the problem by being newer, nicer, and having beamforming + MIMO capability which let them be more tolerant of obstacles (effectively, get more dB at the same emitted power level).
(Author here) Across several city blocks, in fact, and longer than the max range of Ethernet on normal (Cat 5/5e/6) cables.
Past ~300ft/100m, you need a repeater even for Ethernet. We would have needed at least one repeater somewhere along the line, which adds even more cost and complexity on top of needing to get permits from the city and approvals from all the neighbors in between. Anyone that says "just go get a permit from the city" has never tried doing it.
(Author here) Worse: to the balcony of our apartment building. Imagine asking your HOA how they'd feel about you mounting your antenna "higher" AKA on someone else's balcony or on the roof above someone else's apartment.
"Just" move it higher vs replace ~10yr old (at the time) equipment with newer, faster equipment that doesn't have the problem? Easy answer if you ask me, and I'd make the same choice again with ~10yrs of retrospect -- the same 802.11n antennas are still there today!
Even if you are looking at the turbines "edge-on," there's probably going to be a noticeable Doppler return as well.
Plastic drones with plastic propellers are still visible on radar because the tiny propellers spin super fast, so they light up like a Christmas tree on Doppler radar because the approaching vs receding velocities of the blades are so different.
(Author here) I didn't forget, it just didn't seem like the most likely problem.
Like I said in a reply to a sibling to your comment, the gear was ~10yrs old at the time and had been working fine until then. It was perched in a very inconvenient spot because it had to "look around the corner" of the building, so checking the line of sight wasn't just a case of looking out the window.
I went in order of "most likely to be the problem, weighted by how easy they were to check." This is a debugging strategy that has served me well, and I don't regret using it that time either.