I loathe Windows, love Linux, but Macbooks are my machine of choice for laptops. My last one lasted over a decade of abuse and travelled all over the world with me. Perhaps another manufacturer does as good a job on their portables but I’ve yet to find one. I have a ThinkPad for work and by comparison it feels clunky as all hell on every level.

What’s so WTF about it? I’m repurposing old hardware and testing out the concept. I’m not shelling out a pile of cash on something that might not work for me.

Even if I had that luxury, I really don’t want to spend my time fixing someone else’s UI. I have my own projects to work on.

I used to do a lot of user testing and I think it’s something every bit of software needs. I really admire projects that decide to do big pushes on usability and papercuts.

I thought it was just me! I’ve been using Inkscape for a long time now and I always feel I’m wrestling with the damn thing. I understand the principles behind vectors but I’ll be damned if I can consistently achieve what I’m attempting to accomplish.

That’s the polar opposite of how I work with regards to manuals. I cannot retain that level of in-depth knowledge without anything to anchor it to. Reading a dictionary for a language before learning the grammar syntax does not work for me at all (and explains why I wasn’t able to really learn languages until I was a teenager!).

I see where you’re coming from, but I’ve encountered many things in professional applications where the UX baffles me. I know what I’m trying to get the program to do but it seems to require me to keep notes as to how to achieve the thing. Menu entries with needlessly cryptic names, heavily nested functionality, that sort of thing.

It’s entirely possible to know how to use a program and still think its UI is dogshit.

If you’re referencing the video, I didn’t watch it. It was a serious question because I don’t know whether using LLMs for any large scale coding task is a (terrible but real) thing or an elaborate joke. It’s hard to tell with some of the hideously stupid bullshit that has been happening in the last few years (e.g. NFTs).

That’s essentially what I’m saying - we need to learn to provide our own recognition for our competence.

Is “vibe coding” a real thing? I thought it was a meme.

These are internal drives connected to a desktop PSU wired to a USB interface to connect to the laptop.

Haha, yeah. It does make me wonder whether I should bin the whole TrueNAS approach entirely. It seems like a tremendous faff when I could just have the files mirrored to another disk as a backup.

The hard disks are on a separate power supply. The TrueNAS software is running on an old laptop so it effectively has UPS protection.

Yeah, another vote for Caddy. I’ve run nginx as a reverse proxy before and it wasn’t too bad, but Caddy is even easier. Needs naff-all resources too. My ProxMox VM for it has 256 MB of RAM!

Which logs specifically should I be checking?

zpool doesn’t see any pools to import. The system does see the disks but I’m not sure why the disks aren’t being checked for pools.

I’ll give it a shot. I was asking here in case it was a common thing that everyone else knows about (i.e. “Oh you’re running TrueNAS without a UPS? That’s a non starter, everyone knows that”.

It seems to either be completely fine and a power cycle makes no difference - or it loses the whole structure. I don’t know how I’m supposed to pull the disks back in. It doesn’t seem to detect that they’re already setup as part of a pool.

The pool I’ve created doesn’t vanish but it seems my only option for it is “manage devices” which takes me to the “Add VDEVs to the Pool” menu where my three disks show up as unassigned. The only presented option seems to be to wipe them in order to add them back to the pool.

Trying to search for this stuff doesn’t seem to give me anything useful. I don’t know what the intended behaviour is and what it is that I’m doing wrong. I would expect what should happen is that the disks come back online and get automatically added back to the pool again but no, apparently not?

I mostly find the framing tiresome. It’s a sort of learned helplessness.

It’s trying to frame life as something one is only “correctly” handling if everything is planned out in the tiniest detail. Anyone trying to do anything of the slightest complexity knows that’s not a good way to manage tasks.

Of course, if one goes through life imagining that what one should be doing is being an adult with a plan of infinite complexity and anything less is “pretending” (or “winging it”, or whatever) then it’s easy to keep the infantilising personal narrative going. “I’m not a real grown-up” and shit like that.

Defining a “real grown up” as a hyper-competent person found only in fiction or through the eyes of a young child then yeah, we’re all making it up as we go. But given that’s a bloody stupid standard, I think we can all be a little nicer to ourselves.

I’d argue that a great many people know what they’re doing but a fuck-tonne of them don’t know how to give themselves the credit they deserve.

It’s like they’re waiting for some mystical uber adult to give them a certificate saying they’re competent enough to trust their own judgement.

What is it people think “knowing what you’re doing” entails?

Most of what we do day to day is not new in terms of the human experience. We eat, sleep, work, socialise, raise our children, etc… Most people manage this, usually through a combination of learning from others and their own mistakes. Are a lot of people just not able to acknowledge their own competence at these things?

The joke doesn’t really work if you look too closely.