[Aurornis]

Classic GitHub issue thread: Someone shows up and tries to explain it’s not a bug and never could have worked. Everyone else points out that it does work on other Mac hardware. Person doubles down and tries to claim that the bug was that it ever worked, and not working is the correct behavior. New Mac OS beta release fixes the bug and makes it work. Nothing related to the repo was changed.

[burnte]

I loved the last comment where he inferred no one knew the difference between a MAC address and a Mac computer, meanwhile he's fundamentally misunderstanding how networking works and making bizarre statements about wifi that literally everyone disagreed with him on. I bet he's still insisting he was right even though it's all fixed now because he doesn't get how VM network bridging works.

[fouc]

Also classic, someone finally jumping in with a full and insightful explanation. What a turnaround!

[montjoy]

This is actually what’s interesting

[subarctic]

So, are they gonna add official support for this in the wifi standard someday? It sounds like the way that this works is a non-standard workaround

[aurelian15]

You might be looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_distribution_system

This is a standard way to form bridges in WiFi networks and does not require any ARP proxying. In practise this requires certain OS/driver/firmware/chipset combinations to work though.

[eqvinox]

WDS is not something a client/STA can ask an AP for, it's a different mode of operation. What you need is 802.11ak GLK (General Link). Unfortunately, that one also isn't really negotiable and never gained much traction.

[altairprime]

Buried in-thread, both macOS 26.6 and 27 beta have fixed the issue — has anyone studied whether they implemented this or resumed the old proxy arp method?

[tosti]

> the bug was that it ever worked

https://xkcd.com/1172/

[doctorpangloss]

remember how there used to be people whose lifestyle was answering Stack Overflow questions? 3 years from now we're going to be looking at charts showing engagement from GitHub Lifestyle people going straight down too.

[lloydatkinson]

Like that probably still open huge github issue with hundreds of comments, the one about how docker will blow your firewall wide open.

[naikrovek]

Your assessment is inflammatory, to my eyes.

Everything that person said was factually correct. They weren’t wrong, they simply didn’t have the whole picture.

[skygazer]

But, they were wrong ... in assuming what they were saying was at all relevant. And they were so sure they knew what they were talking about and that it applied that they dismissed all the ample evidence to the contrary and also dismissed the, they assumed, delusional people pointing out the contradictions. Their initial misunderstanding was understandable given the overloaded terms but their confidence was poorly calibrated to their weakness detecting the misunderstanding.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

I’ve seen younger engineers (still very senior and capable but with quick tempers) make this mistake time and time again.

The funny part, to me, is that it all could have been avoided by simply saying something to the effect of “the APIs they call in UTM are Apple’s and there are no hacks or workarounds they can do at the UTM level. Any differences between the hardware are just that.”

The actual thread was wildly inefficient but if it hadn’t gone that way no one would have learned anything, including us!