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.
Are they really either of those two things? Natural systems have no "goal", they just are. If they change, they change. If they stay the same, they stay the same. Because there is no goal, there is no "broken". It is only we who assign some sort of meaning to them and characterize them as "working", either because they meet our needs, or just because we are inherently impressed by complex systems.
If you follow through on there being no goal, there is no working or not-working state, in which case it bears no relevancy on the question of whether "Working" is not the natural state in a complex world!
Or rather, you could say TFA is made more correct, by virtue of “working” not being a natural state in the first place.
But if we allow room to anthropomorphize, we can basically state that the natural goal of a natural system is to keep doing what it do, at least in regards to the larger outcomes. And for some strange reason, these systems are shockingly difficult to influence at meaningful scale in ways that are rarely true for the systems we design. In one sense, they continue to operate despite continuous minor and possibly major (but not catastrophically so, by definition) perturbations to their state
You need to burn ridiculous quantities of dino juice to influence the weather system. You need to look at windows a little funny to bring it to a complete halt. You need to bully only few substations to bring down the electrical grid.
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.
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 :)
(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.
(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.
As for cable, you'd use fiber optic. There is really no need to go with copper in such a case.
Other than that I'd agree about your solution being optimal back then, and now. Btw how did you check the power brick, peak to peak voltage measurements? Bad capacitors is likely the single most common failure.
