Category: Worth Reading

Avery Pennarun published a lovely rambling on magic, science, engineering and a pinch of AI. You might enjoy reading it¹ with your Sunday morning coffee 😎.

Jeff McLaughlin wrote a nice blog post on the death of CLI (and why it has been greatly exaggerated):

The GUI-based layout tool [for iOS app development] is going away in favor of UI-as-code! The black screen always comes back!

As I’ve been saying for ages: people optimizing their productivity use CLI.

I have blog post ideas sitting in my to-write queue for over a decade. One of them is why would you need a VRF (and associated router) between virtual servers and a firewall?

Andrea Dainese answered at least part of that question in his Off-Path firewall with Traffic Engineering blog post. Enjoy!

Another interesting take on ChatGPT in networking, this time by Tom Hollingsworth in The Dangers of Knowing Everything:

In a way, ChatGPT is like a salesperson. No matter what you ask it the answer is always yes, even if it has to make something up to answer the question.

To paraphrase an old joke: It’s not that ChatGPT is lying. It’s just that what it knows isn’t necessarily true. See also: the difference between bullshit and lies.

Just in case you wondered why we have eight bits per byte: after Julia Evans investigated this mystery, Steven Bellovin published an excellent overview of the early years of bytes and words.

Another take on “what are large language models and what can we expect from them,” this time by Bruce Davie: Putting Large Language Models in Context:

My approach, at least for now, is to treat these LLM-based systems as very large, efficient collections of matchboxes–and keep working in my chosen field of networking.

Jeff McLaughlin published an excellent blog post perfectly describing what we’ve been experiencing for decades: the war on expertise.

On one hand, the “business owners” force us to build complex stuff because they think they know better, on the other they blame people who know how to do it for the complex stuff that happens as the result of their requirements:

I am saying that we need to stop blaming complexity on those who manage to understand it.

Enjoy!

One of the best descriptions of what ChatGPT does and what it cannot do I found so far comes from an ancient and military historian. The what is ChatGPT and what is an essay parts are a must-read, the preparing to be disrupted conclusion is pure gold:

I do think there are classrooms that will be disrupted by ChatGPT, but those are classrooms where something is already broken.

I can’t help but think of the never-ending brouhaha about exam brain dumps.

Javier Antich, the author of the fantastic AI/ML in Networking webinar, spent years writing the Machine Learning for Network and Cloud Engineers book that is now available in paperback and Kindle format.

I’ve seen a final draft of the book and it’s definitely worth reading. You should also invest some time into testing the scenarios Javier created. Here’s what I wrote in the foreword:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for decades. It was one of the exciting emerging (and overhyped) topics when I attended university in the late 1980s. Like today, the hype failed to deliver, resulting in long, long AI winter.

I get several emails every week¹ from people I never heard of telling me what a wonderful job they could do writing guest blog posts on a range of topics of interest to my audience.

I’m positive you must be pretty intelligent to be a successful scammer, so I’m sure the good ones are using ChatGPT to generate the “unique” content they’re promising. I felt it was high time to return the favor.