Category: Worth Reading

Many engineers who tried out (or use) various AI products would agree that they’re useful when used correctly, but way overhyped. However, as Anil Dash explains in his Majority AI View article, we rarely hear that opinion:

What’s amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality.

Jason Gintert published an excellent explanation why AI won’t replace (all) network engineers, and reading it, I felt like reading one of my “automation won’t replace network engineers” blog posts.

Here’s a quote to get you in the mood:

AI will make good engineers better and will expose mediocre ones. If your value proposition is memorizing CLI commands or being a human grep for log files, then yes, you might need to be worried.

Pat Allen wrote an interesting guide for managers of networking teams dealing with the onslaught of AI (HT: PacketPushers newsletter).

The leitmotif: use AI to generate a rough solution, then review and improve it. That makes perfect sense and works as long as we don’t forget we can’t trust AI, assuming you save time doing it this way.

Is it possible to deploy Precision Time Protocol across a country-wide WAN network and reach nanosecond-level synchronization between cities? It’s definitely not trivial and only works over dedicated infrastructure; for more details, watch the PTP in WANs (video) presentation Oliver Ettlin had at SwiNOG 40.

Whenever you see Gerhard Stein and Thomas Weible from Flexoptix in a list of presenters, three things immediately become obvious:

1. It will be about transceivers
2. It will be fun
3. It will include some crazy stuff

Their SwiNOG 40 presentation (video) met all three expectation. We learned how well transceivers cope with high temperatures and what happens when you try to melt them with a heat gun.

If you know as much about submarine cables (the thingies that carry 90% of international Internet traffic) as I do (= nothing), you SHOULD watch the Technical Update on Submarine Cables (video) presentation Liam Taylor had at the SwiNOG 40 event. Have fun ;)

Suresh Vina published a great netlab tutorial, going from the very basics to a full-blown MPLS network with custom multi-vendor device configuration. Thank you!

PlanetScale published a great article describing the high-level principles of how storage devices work and covering everything from tape drives to SSDs and network-attached storage — a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in how their data is stored.

Is an LLM a stubborn donkey, a genie, or a slot machine (and why)? Find out in the Who is LLM? article by Martin Fowler.

Did you ever wonder why pressing an up-arrow in a (Linux) terminal window sometimes recalls the previous command but other times creates ^[[A?

Julia Evans did, and spent months exploring the quirks of the Linux terminal (and writing blog posts describing what she found), finally resulting in The Secret Rules of the Terminal (including the various shells, terminal emulators, escape codes, and TTY driver). A must-read if you’re a newbie who wants to understand why things happen the way they do.