I hate how modern tech companies assume that everybody always has access to a high speed internet connection.

I suspect it's deliberate, especially when said company also sells cloud services.

That's sort of a disingenuous phrasing, but yes. I'm not thinking of them as "air gapped", since I'm intentionally attempting to form an ad hoc WiFi network between them, but yes, until two laptops are connected over a network, yeah, they're effectively "air gapped" I suppose.

They have normal, consumer OSes on them. Whatever one might reasonably already have preinstalled.

I'm sitting at an macOS machine presently. If I poke around the Wi-Fi menu, and the Wi-Fi settings … IDK, I come up empty handed.

So let's cheat, and Google it. But the entire point of my post above is that needing to Google it defeats the point; if I have an Internet connection (which would be required to Google something) — I can just network the various machines using that Internet connection. In every situation I've wanted to form an ad hoc network, it is because I do not have any access to the Internet, period, but I still have the need to network two machines together.

Anyways, Gemini's answer:

> To set up an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network on macOS, you can use the "Create Network" option in the Wi-Fi menu.

Apparent hallucination, since there is no such menu item.

The first result says the same thing:

> 1. Click the wifi icon on the menu bar. 2. Click “Create network. . .”

(… I suppose I see where the training data came from).

The next result is a reddit thread; the thread is specifically about ad hoc WiFi. The only answer is a link to a macOS support article; that article tells us to go to General → Sharing, and use "Internet Sharing". But AFAICT, that's for sharing an existing WiFi connection over a secondardy medium: i.e., if you have WiFi, you could share that connection over a TB cable, or some other wired medium. And "To Devices Using" conspicuously lacks "also over WiFi", or similar. I.e., this also isn't what we're looking for.

The rest of the results are mostly all similarly confused, and I've given up.

So even if I had Internet, … I still can't do it. So if I'm actually in a situation where I need an ad hoc, it definitely isn't happening.

I never got around to installing NM in Linux. wpa_supplicant on its own is just … mostly good enough.

Perhaps that's mea culpa, and I suppose perhaps I should try NM again, but I also sort of thought this wouldn't be rocket science, until I tried to do it and failed.