Branching from Dave's thread because I don't want to get into the
politics, but I would like to very strongly endorse Dave's remarks
about how the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are
totally unacknowledged and misunderstood (e.g., note the public
policy emphasis on line speed over all else.) As such, I'd like to
solicit the members of this list to suggest some of the greatest
accomplishments in network engineering that you've never seen
properly acknowledged or appreciated. I'd like to promote and
discuss them in speeches and papers to help get more sunlight on
them.
0. Let's get network engineering some applause, please!
Both recent and historical accomplishments are welcome. I just want
to help get more people thinking about what a difference network
engineering has made to everyone's lives! All technologies,
personalities and accomplishments welcome!
Beyond this specific thing, in terms of public discourse, I'd love
to get more opinions about how to communicate to the public about
the tech underpinnings of the world we live in now, and I'd love
comments on how to discuss and promote any of these topics:
1. Infrastructure advances
It would generally do a lot of good if the public were to think of
"tech" less as purely the consumer-facing side and more in terms of
fundamental architecture and infrastructure. For example, there's
really no point talking about "AI" in the public-facing aspect of
end-user LLM experiences without first looking at how the cost of
compute and transit has gone through the floor compared to 15 years
ago or so. I can't even disentangle all the drivers, but they must
include at least:
* New uses for GPUs driving advances and slashing prices in GPU
tech
* Vast advances in back-end cloud (to pick one company,
Sawzall/Lingo/GFS/Colossus plus associated datacenters is almost
invisible to the public, and I have no idea what's powering Chinese
AI back-ends)
* Nuts-and-bolts development in ML/data science that are eroding
the fuzzy boundary between ML done as a planned, discrete query by
an expert over a small, curated dataset and ML as a quasi-autonomous
system not requiring expert queries, given authority over physical
devices, doing its own ingestion, etc -- "a sufficiently large
difference in quantity is itself a difference in quality"
This stuff is particularly worth asking about because we are now at
least 30 years into what I think of as "pervasive networked personal
computing," now in wireless and appified form, and I think the
public experiences this as just advances that "happen by themselves"
in the ordinary course without seeing the jags in the step functions
underwriting the apparent smooth curve of progress.
2. Security in real-world systems
Getting hacked used to mean losing data, having devices bricked,
maybe getting co-opted into a botnet, etc. Now it's a lot scarier,
because we are increasingly surrounded by always-on,
always-connected devices whose security infrastructure is a black
box and which may be trusted with controlling physical equipment.
It's bad enough if your household appliances are phoning home
(where?) with your credit card number. It's a whole new level of
scary if there are possible APTs in the power grid and whoever
manufactured the IOT modem in a transformer is about 8 degrees of
separation from the grid operators. Even if there's no malice
intended, modern grid balancing is a new level of challenging
because you may have multiple sources of generation with immense
moment-by-moment fluctuations in inbound generation, etc., and
that's just one category, leaving groceries, ports, financial
markets, building security, whatever replaces positive train control
(PTC) down the road, vehicular autonomy, industrial operations, etc.
to one side...
Panic reactions are one thing, but it would be more productive for
the public to think about what their expectations are for how to
react to these new capabilities and challenges and then demand that
the policy sector cashes this out into new standards by consulting
with technologists. I would therefore love advice on what you think
the public needs to know. Maybe some kind of public forum that could
get press or a white paper that could get written up in an op-ed?
On that note, in addition to (or instead of) commenting on this
posting, please consider commenting on the US Cyber Trust Mark
proceeding now open at the FCC (comments close November 10th,
commenting link here:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/23-239). If you'd like
to talk about this off-list, please drop me a line at n...@fcc.gov.
I'll let you know in advance if anything you want to say requires
you to file an "ex parte" statement so that you don't have to worry
about going on the record unintentionally. This is a fantastic
opportunity for the network engineering and computer security
communities to air their concerns in a federal forum in a way that
may bind the federal government going forward.
3. The future isn't evenly distributed
Talking to a friend who does industrial devops reminded me of this
fantastic postmortem on healthcare.gov [1]'s rollout:
https://lobste.rs/s/igt4ez/10_year_anniversary_healthcare_gov.
Obviously I don't need to tell the career professionals this, but
tech advances don't necessarily propagate, and if they do, it may be
at radically different rates between different countries, companies,
sectors... (If I needed a reminder of this, I recently had to upload
DICOM files to a hospital using a terrible Java applet that was
obviously written so long ago that it only wanted to upload from
CDs, i.e., at a time when you wouldn't have spent hard disk space on
DICOMs. I eventually managed to "persuade" it that a flash drive was
a CD.)
This ties into points 1 and especially 2, because if we want the
full social benefits of all the advances modern engineering has
accomplished, we need to get people in "nontraditional" sectors
thinking about the benefits of the communications and controls
capabilities that are now on the table. Everyone should be asking
why we aren't doing ML to reduce the cost and energy consumption for
making breakfast cereal, totally pedestrian stuff like that; if the
answer is juice isn't worth the squeeze, that fine, but that's going
to run on a delay because, as the healthcare.gov [1] example shows,
high-value new practices may be invisible to a sector that would
definitely benefit from them.
Sorry for the very lengthy post, and as they say on the artist
formerly known as Twitter, "my DMs are open." And thanks for
everything you all do!
All the best--
Nathan
On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain
<nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff
goodfellow via
Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims
on
this part of his post:
https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
to be true. Any one question this?
I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load,
and,
acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their
own
rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs
those
that didn´t.
The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied
on
to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies,
and
illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed
towers,
produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late
fighting
off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how
to
make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet -
Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do
not
remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you
Paul
Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind) and
Simon
Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice"
-
there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
working *right now* the way they expect.
There are no nobel prizes for networking. But the scientists,
engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are
keeping
civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very
irked
at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least,
sometimes
asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my
wifi.
If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other
aspects
of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping
the
Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love
to
hear it.
[1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only
achieve
then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
--
geoff.goodfel...@iconia.com
living as The Truth is True
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Oct 30:
https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
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