December Days 02024 #5: Community: The Imposter

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

People who struggle with imposter syndrome believe that they are undeserving of their achievements and the high esteem in which they are, in fact, generally held. They feel that they aren’t as competent or intelligent as others might think—and that soon enough, people will discover the truth about them.

( This worry that I am not as good as you think I am is one of my communities, too )

Having this imposter's feeling is a lot of shouting at people "Don't you get it? Past performance is no indication of future returns!" and having them look at you and say "Sure, but your past performance gives us no reason to doubt your future returns." Or "Your past performance is a lot better than you think it is." Or even "I like you anyway." That last one is pretty frustrating to someone who is trying to convince you they're an imposter, or trying to convince themselves they're an imposter, because there's nothing there to argue on the merits. The only argument that's there is to tell someone else their opinion about you is wrong. Which, when you're getting bitten hard by the brainweasels sieging you, yes, that's something you can try to argue. (And fail at.) Some exceedingly strange people even like you with all of the insecurities, worries, and certainty that you are going to expose yourself as the imposter any time now and, because of that, fuck things up so severely that the only option that person will have is to terminate any contact at all with you.

If Peter's right, though, then eventually we all get promoted to the level of our incompetence, and I suspect at that point, it's no longer a question of whether we think we're bad at the things that we're doing, it's that we end up being bad at it, and probably suffering from other things like burnout from trying to do a job that is actually beyond our competence and that makes us and the people around us cranky because we're not good at it. At that point, we're not fooling ourselves about what our real skills and others' opinions of us are.

Adventures in Home Automation #14: No, YOU decided you wanted to restructure your network...

Okay, so, the inciting incident for this is that my venerable and useful routers were declared End of Life by their manufacturer at the end of this year, which meant that the slightly aftermarket firmware that I was using on them would also be discontinued at the end of the year. Cue me trying to figure out whether or not I needed to purchase some replacement hardware, and what kind of network I would want to set up if I did need to do so. Mesh networking seemed like a useful option, given that there were, based on current router placement, a few dead spots in the house or places that got less than optimal signal, But also, so could the deployment of some access points and running cable to them from where the router was. But if I was running cable anyway, then I could just move the current router to a more optimal position and see if that managed the dead zones.

( First, the router flashing and the re-setting of the network names and assigning IPs to devices on the network, rather than letting DHCP do all the work )

( Second, setting up the environment for a set of scripts to run properly involving re-partitioning, reformatting, and soft-bricking a file system on a flash drive )

( Third, after all this hardware flimflam, actually setting up the scripts and getting them to transmit properly )

[VICTORY FANFARE GOES HERE, IF A BIT CONFUSED.]

This one definitely goes in the column of "if it works, you've succeeded." There's got to be a better, cleaner, more elegant solution that somehow manages to notice when Home Assistant comes back on-line after the reboot and knows to rebroadcast all the discovery messages that have happened before, so Home Assistant jumps back in to understanding. Or I need to get better knowledge of how the discovery bits are structured so that I can turn them into sensors that know to seek their own discovery after a restart or have it already in the Home Assistant configuration what topics to listen to for their values. Something that's both automated and flexible enough to adapt to the circumstances and to work with the tools that are available to me. Some of the documentation and community posts I've read about this suggests, however, that it is not that simple to collect a list of what topics have been generated so far on an MQTT broker. And if I can't get it to go in Busybox, then I'd probably have to do something on Entware, and that would still mean writing a script that's specifically listening for something to fire so that it can do something in return. The elegant solution has a significantly larger amount of complexity in it than the simple one, and if I really wanted something that was truly flexible and responsive, I could just set the router to run the command that deletes the file of things that have already been set up at regular intervals, so the topics would be continuously rebroadcast and never more than so many minutes away from coming back online, regardless of when I restarted Home Assistant. That sounds like a lot of unnecessary network traffic, though.

So I've done something else to make my Home Assistant more full of data, using a communication protocol that I've already set up on one machine and a suite of scripts that someone else has already designed for use along with what is essentially an add-on system for the router. And then figured out how to (inelegantly) ensure that the sensor data would continue flowing after a scheduled restart of Home Assistant. Now that I'm on the other side of it, and of the network restructuring that took place before it, I can see how long this could have taken, had I gone straight to the correct (or at least the working) solution immediately, but a lot of how I get to the solutions I either accept or use until a better solution presents itself is reading docs and fucking around and finding out. Which, through its iterative nature, takes time and frustration and thinking and coming back to a problem after sleeping on it for a bit. And accepting that even if this solution is not the correct one, it does not necessarily mean that there isn't one or that I cannot find the correct one. And sometimes it means research. Not succeeding the first time, or the hundredth time, does not mean I am permanently a useless failure at everything. It only means that I have not succeeded this time at this one thing. (Which can be hard to remember when the weasels are biting.)