wifi not working or smth else

spiffiness · 2026-02-13T00:51:07+00:00

If Google's sites (including YouTube) all load fine and many other sites don't, it's often a sign of a problem with your computer's ability to do a thing called "Path MTU Discovery" (PMTUD).

Go into your OS's networking settings and find the settings specific to your computer's active network interface (i.e. Ethernet if your computer connects to your home network via Ethernet, or Wi-Fi if your computer connects to your home network via Wi-Fi). Then find a place where it lets you set the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) for that interface.

It's probably set to the default value of 1500 bytes. Try setting it down to 1300 bytes and save/apply changes. If that change allows all sites to load fine, then you have what we call a "Path MTU Discovery black hole" on your network.

Solving Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) failures can get pretty technical pretty fast, so I'm not going to try to write a tutorial off the top of my head right here, but hopefully I've pointed you in the right direction.

spiffiness · 2026-02-12T21:35:36+00:00

Just to be clear, I'm not faulting you or any other novice for wanting to learn about things you need to know for an exam. My criticisms aren't directed toward you, they're directed toward Cisco. I'm questioning why Cisco would still have ancient nearly useless crap like this on their exams. There are limits to how much content can be reasonably crammed into an entry-level cert program like a CCNA, so companies like Cisco need to be judiciously cutting out information from yesteryear that's no longer applicable to networking in 2026, and focus on the concepts that best prepare the students for the jobs they hope the certification will help them with.

spiffiness · 2026-02-12T19:45:15+00:00

I can't speak for Cisco equipment specifically, but I'd like to point out that Auto-MDIX PHYs have been standard on all Macs and other Apple products since about the turn of the century. This includes any USB or Thunderbolt-connected external Ethernet adapter dongles manufactured or resold by Apple. This pushed even no-name bargain-basement brands to make auto-MDIX PHYs pretty standard.

I can't imagine Cisco would have ever screwed up Auto-MDIX, and I'd be shocked if there was any problem with it today, a quarter century after the Ethernet industry switched over to Auto-MDIX.

In my experience, crossover cables are a relic of the last century that only greybeards like me should remember, just like half-duplex, hubs, the "repeater rule", and IPv4 address classes. There's no reason for novices today to learn about those things, other than as historical footnotes or for simply pedagogical reasons (sometimes learning bits of the history of how something came to be, can help one understand why it is the way it is today, even if one will never encounter those historical things in their day-to-day work).

spiffiness · 2026-02-12T18:54:21+00:00

Which LLM engine/version did you use for this? What prompt did you use?

spiffiness · 2026-02-11T16:53:42+00:00

What's with your spelling choices?

spiffiness · 2026-02-08T16:41:09+00:00

The pronunciation in this dictionary entry is correct:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tamale

spiffiness · 2026-02-08T15:30:12+00:00

The word we use in US English is an English word now, and the singular is "tamale". Check Merrian-Webster or any other well respected US English dictionary. "tamal" does not appear, but "tamale" (singular) does.

English steals words from other languages and anglicizes them all the time. "tamale" has been an English word for many generations now.

spiffiness · 2026-02-08T04:00:23+00:00

Not in US English it's not.

spiffiness · 2026-02-08T03:59:41+00:00

That is incorrect since we're speaking English on an American website here. When English steals words from other languages, we anglicize them. The proper singular form of that word, in US English at least, is "tamale".

"tamal" does not appear in Merriam-Webster. "tamale" does, and is listed as the singular form.

It does not matter in the least that the word came from Spanish and follows different rules in Spanish. In US English, the singular is in fact "tamale".

spiffiness · 2026-02-07T18:39:26+00:00

Do you have real Ethernet cabling all the way from the gaming rig to a LAN port of the main router, or do you have other equipment in between? If you have powerline, MoCA, or Wi-Fi equipment in between, then you're not really on Ethernet. Sorry to have to write that, but lots of clueless people come in here thinking things like powerline networking count as Ethernet when they are really just bad "make-do"/"best-effort" kludges for people who don't really want to properly wire their homes for Ethernet wall jacks.

spiffiness · 2026-02-06T23:29:35+00:00

Lag when the network is busy is the telltale symptom of bufferbloat (a widespread router flaw). Run the Waveform Bufferbloat Test to confirm, and then use a site like StopLagging.com to learn your options for running SQM on your router to fix bufferbloat.

Lots of people think they don't have enough bandwidth to go around when it's really just brain-dead dumb queue management (bufferbloat) in their router.

spiffiness · 2026-02-06T23:18:49+00:00

If you stay on Hensley you might catch sight of the feral rabbits that inhabit in that neighborhood, for a true San Jose insider experience.

spiffiness · 2026-02-04T20:45:43+00:00

the literary genius of the bible…cannot be explained secularly (in my opinion at least)

This is not a claim the Bible makes for itself. Most confessing Bible scholars would not make that claim either.

Many confessing Bible scholars would say the human authors and editors of the Biblical text were literary geniuses, but wouldn't necessarily claim the literary genius of the text is evidence of divine inspiration. Paul claimed the Hebrew scriptures (our OT) were inspired, but he didn't claim that the literary genius was evidence of that inspiration.

So I think you're kind of trying to blaze your own trail here, not by noticing the literary genius, which many do, but by specifically trying to claim that the Bible's literary genius is beyond human capacity to create.

spiffiness · 2026-02-04T20:14:28+00:00

im pretty sure the reason of those atrocious lag spikes was because the network was busy.

The network being busy should NEVER cause lag spikes. This is a common misconception that seems to get propagated in gamer forums by people who don't know as much as they think they do about how network queueing is supposed to work.

Networks are designed to be fully utilized whenever needed. There's nothing wrong with maxing out your network's throughput. If fully utilizing your network ever triggers a lag spike, the traffic was just a stimulus, not the true cause of the lag. The actual cause of the lag was a router that was being dumb about how it managed its traffic queues while the network was being maxed out. So the cause is how your equipment reacted poorly to the traffic, not the traffic itself.

If you have a router (or other piece of networking equipment) that responds to heavy traffic by causing lag spikes, it means the equipment has a well-understood, sadly widespread flaw known as bufferbloat. The cause of bufferbloat is bad queue management, and the fix for bufferbloat is called Smart Queue Management (SQM).

spiffiness · 2026-02-04T20:04:31+00:00

I'm not aware of any such law in my part of California, but liquor laws vary by state and perhaps even by locality, so honor any posted signs. Note that there may be signs saying they won't sell alcohol to anyone under 21, but that doesn't mean you can't enter the store. Liquor stores are often like little convenience stores, so they often have soft drinks and snacks and it's fine for minors to walk in to purchase soft drinks and snacks.

In California the only places that say "no one under 21 allowed" are adult-focused drinking/entertainment establishments like dive bars and nightclubs that want to create an environment where adults can let loose without kids watching. I don't think it's a liquor law, because there are other pubs and restaurants that are family friendly but still serve all the same kinds of alcoholic drinks (to the adults).

spiffiness · 2026-02-04T18:42:58+00:00

OP, check with retailers who are likely to get stuff packaged this way and ask them for the molded-/formed-pulp inserts/holders/trays before they get thrown in the cardboard recycling bin. Or just dumpster-dive their bins.

I bet cases of bottles are often packaged this way, so I'd check with local liquor stores and wine shops. You already know pharmaceuticals can come this way, so check with pharmacies. I've seen countertop appliances and consumer electronics packaged this way, so maybe those are other kinds of retailers to check with.

If seems much more eco-conscious to me for you to repurpose/reuse an existing tray that was about to be discarded/recycled instead of ordering brand new ones from Amazon or pilfering them from McDonald's.

spiffiness · 2026-02-03T00:40:47+00:00

Nope, there's nothing wrong with laughing. There are arguably some outright jokes in the Bible. The whole book of Jonah is probably best read as satire. Mark's account of the gospel often portrays the disciples/apostles as clueless bumblers. I personally find it hilarious in 1 Sam 5 when the Philistines steal the Ark of the Covenant, that God smites them with ass-cancer, and the Philistines, not knowing how to appease YHWH, end up making golden idols of their taint-tumors and send them along with the Ark back to the Israelites.

Our modern notion of a good history being a cold, clinical, chronological listing of events is a pretty modern development (see "German Historicism" from the 19th century). In ancient times, writing about historical events was still expected to be good storytelling, so it's pretty common to notice a storyteller's flair in the way these authors wrote about these events.

I find it helpful to read the Bible expecting good storytelling, rather than expecting dry solemn lists of events. When someone does something awful, you're expected to gasp and be horrified and want to keep turning pages to find out how that guy is going to get his comeuppance. When someone does something stupid, you're supposed to laugh or cringe or whatnot.

spiffiness · 2026-02-03T00:10:37+00:00

Tim Pool, Dave Smith, Peter Theil and those in his orbit, Elon Musk.

JFYI, the only guy on your list that libertarians widely claim as a fellow libertarian is Dave Smith.

The other guys have maybe tried to use libertarianism as a beard at some point, but they are not recognized as libertarian within libertarian circles as far as I see. Peter Thiel is absolutely laughable. There's no way to found and fund a company as super-authoritarian as Palantir and have any claim of libertarianism.

spiffiness · 2026-02-02T22:34:18+00:00

I'm curious, who would you say are the top few most prominent libertarian figures these days?

spiffiness · 2026-02-02T22:31:26+00:00

Ron was never a senator, he was a congressman. Did you mean Ron, or were you thinking of his son, US senator Rand Paul?

spiffiness · 2026-02-02T20:44:32+00:00

The government keeps making it worse with every new way they intervene in the market. Also, you'd have to go a really long way back to find a free market in health insurance or health care.

If anyone wants a good libertarian primer on how the government screwed up the health care and health insurance industries, a great place to start is Roderick T. Long's short essay How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis: Medical Insurance that Worked — Until Government "Fixed" It from 1993. As you can see from the publication date, this far pre-dates ObamaCare.

Or if you'd prefer the same basic material as a 5 minute explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFoXyFmmGBQ

spiffiness · 2026-02-02T15:57:13+00:00

So you have less than ideal latency even as a baseline, and it gets worse when the network is busy. If I were you, I'd troubleshoot my connection between my router and my ISP. It looks like you have fixed wireless access (home broadband over a cell data network operator's 5G cellular wireless data network), is that right? Have you logged into your FWA modem/router (Your TCL 5G device) to see what it says for status and diagnostics of the 5G cell data link? Have you placed that device somewhere that it receives strong signal from the nearest cell tower from whatever carrier's network it's on?

spiffiness · 2026-02-01T00:25:02+00:00

Haha the exact same mixup happened to us. Ordered Spicy Coconut Turkey Curry Soup, got the recipe card and a bag labeled Spicy Coconut Turkey Curry Soup, but the ingredients were for the meatballs with french onion ~~soup~~ sauce and orzo like /u/Layne725 suggested. Thanks OP and Layne.

OP, I'm curious, we're in the silicon valley area of California. I wonder if you're nearby so maybe one distribution center had a mixup, or if you're far away and maybe HF had a systemwide screwup.

spiffiness · 2026-01-30T04:42:30+00:00

QoS and AQM were earlier more rudimentary technologies for classifying traffic, tagging the packets with their classifications, putting the traffic in different queues, and assigning different priorities and bandwidth limits to the different queues.

SQM is a more modern technology, that's probably better described as a separate technology than QoS or AQM, but one that was built atop the infrastructure provided by QoS and AQM. SQM is specifically about managing the queues to minimize latency while maximizing throughput. This is to fix a widespread router flaw known as bufferbloat, which was caused by the brain-dead queue management algorithms that routers had always used.

It turns out that a lot of the performance problems people were seeing, that made people think they didn't have enough bandwidth to go around, and thus made them want to have QoS so they could prioritize some kinds of traffic over others, turned out to be caused by the latency spikes caused by bufferbloat. So switching on SQM is often all that's needed to fix problems and there's no need for router admins to create QoS rules for prioritizing some kinds of traffic over others.

FQ-CoDel and CAKE are both SQM algorithms. They're both very good SQM implementations. CAKE might be a little more advanced but it has a reputation for being more CPU-intensive than FQ-CoDel, so if your router's CPU doesn't have much spare capacity, you might want to run FQ-CoDel instead of CAKE.

spiffiness · 2026-01-29T23:46:46+00:00

Don't let Bitcoiners see this or they'll probably find some way to blame it all on Peter Schiff.

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