My first job was at Westinghouse instrumenting a nuclear power plant. Our entire hardware-software package was a freebie given to the customer as part of a $200 million refueling contract (and that's in 1988 dollars). We, a team of 10, created a bespoke application stack which was effectively a web browser. The client machines were Sun 3 workstations. The server was some industrial mini computer that didn't have a TCP/IP stack - so we did in fact have to roll our own network stack.
Hah, the first engineering job I had was on Ovation DCS doing power plant controls. That system traces the lineage to the WDPF systems.
Was the server you mention here the actual DCS? With the Motorola CPU's? Running vxworks? Pretty cool recognizing something niche that is still, vaguely familiar. :)
A while back I wrote an FPGA-based minimal network stack to work with the MRMAC hard IP of an AMD VC1902 with basically the same functionality: ARP, IPv4, ICMP Echo reply and UDP send/receive. I added the bare bare minimum to get UDP GRO working on the receiver side (Linux).
I also enjoyed the learning experience and works perfectly fine at up to 100G. But I definitely appreciate that I didn't have to go through the same pain under Linux where this stuff just works.
Prediction: as agentic code generation gets better, more and more code will be written JIT for it to be executed for security reasons. The engineer of the future is not only the one who uses agents to code, he uses agents to code each time "the" program is ran.
What's there to gain security-wise? Nondeterministic generation & then execution of that code without proper verification seems to be the opposite of a good security posture.
Proper verification would be deterministic rules the JIT-ed code would be checked against, so it would have to be non-JIT. Since the comment is talking about using more & more JIT for security reasons, I assumed it extended to verification too.
I don't get why you'd generally switch to JIT for security reasons.
I doubt it. It seems far more likely that such code will be written just once by LLMs, but in a way that allows its claimed guarantees to be formally verified (e.g. in Lean). At that point there’s no need to JIT an implementation each time.
My bet is one ultra-hardened, minimal, front-facing system which does N-modular redundancy which N systems, each written on a different stack/different language.
The hardened software picks the computation that wins the majority.
It's not an issue to write all the implementations in the various stacks/languages: we'll have better and better LLMs to help us.
This shall bring security and shall allow to detect shitload of bugs (both in the implementation itself but also in the stack).
Heck, this could even be compatible with GP: one of the implementation could be JIT'e by a LLM, others could be written in advance (and Lean formally verified). Not sure which sense it'd make though.
I'm 99.9% sure it's coming for if it's not, I'll make one.
Good to see that people still have this spirit of rolling their sleeves up and doing something like this for fun. Underneath it there is a very real point about mono-cultures and the increased magnitude of the impact of a risk, although more eyes checking one implementation should reduce the probability.
So do I. According to today’s prevalent tech/science culture, “everyone” should
- write their own network stack, compiler, text editor, operating system
- learn 3-5 foreign languages
- travel extensively
- learn how computers work from the silicon principles to the userspace
- have a complete understanding of algorithms and data structures before even attempting to build anything, because nothing else will do
- read obscure Russian poetry
- “deeply” engage in 5-10 different philosophical practices and meditation techniques
- work out regularly, but according to strictly scientific principles, which you first have to research by reading a dozen books
- appreciate fine art, homestead food, and family life
Sorry folks, y’all are just Instagrammers with MSc’s. Most people here probably have no idea how ridiculous this world appears once you step out for a year or two and then take a look back in.
Everyone should: be computer illiterate, monolingual, never leave their home town, use left-pad, be regular illiterate, sedentary, uncultured, unlanded, and... alienated from their family?
My first job was at Westinghouse instrumenting a nuclear power plant. Our entire hardware-software package was a freebie given to the customer as part of a $200 million refueling contract (and that's in 1988 dollars). We, a team of 10, created a bespoke application stack which was effectively a web browser. The client machines were Sun 3 workstations. The server was some industrial mini computer that didn't have a TCP/IP stack - so we did in fact have to roll our own network stack.
Hah, the first engineering job I had was on Ovation DCS doing power plant controls. That system traces the lineage to the WDPF systems.
Was the server you mention here the actual DCS? With the Motorola CPU's? Running vxworks? Pretty cool recognizing something niche that is still, vaguely familiar. :)
A while back I wrote an FPGA-based minimal network stack to work with the MRMAC hard IP of an AMD VC1902 with basically the same functionality: ARP, IPv4, ICMP Echo reply and UDP send/receive. I added the bare bare minimum to get UDP GRO working on the receiver side (Linux).
I also enjoyed the learning experience and works perfectly fine at up to 100G. But I definitely appreciate that I didn't have to go through the same pain under Linux where this stuff just works.
Monoculture. It's like when all bananas used to be clones of each other and a disease wiped out the whole species.
Prediction: as agentic code generation gets better, more and more code will be written JIT for it to be executed for security reasons. The engineer of the future is not only the one who uses agents to code, he uses agents to code each time "the" program is ran.
What's there to gain security-wise? Nondeterministic generation & then execution of that code without proper verification seems to be the opposite of a good security posture.
why are you assuming there would be no proper verification in this scenario?
Proper verification would be deterministic rules the JIT-ed code would be checked against, so it would have to be non-JIT. Since the comment is talking about using more & more JIT for security reasons, I assumed it extended to verification too.
I don't get why you'd generally switch to JIT for security reasons.
Because the verification would also be done by something non deterministic and then that’s a paradox.
I doubt it. It seems far more likely that such code will be written just once by LLMs, but in a way that allows its claimed guarantees to be formally verified (e.g. in Lean). At that point there’s no need to JIT an implementation each time.
My bet is one ultra-hardened, minimal, front-facing system which does N-modular redundancy which N systems, each written on a different stack/different language.
The hardened software picks the computation that wins the majority.
It's not an issue to write all the implementations in the various stacks/languages: we'll have better and better LLMs to help us.
This shall bring security and shall allow to detect shitload of bugs (both in the implementation itself but also in the stack).
Heck, this could even be compatible with GP: one of the implementation could be JIT'e by a LLM, others could be written in advance (and Lean formally verified). Not sure which sense it'd make though.
I'm 99.9% sure it's coming for if it's not, I'll make one.
Good to see that people still have this spirit of rolling their sleeves up and doing something like this for fun. Underneath it there is a very real point about mono-cultures and the increased magnitude of the impact of a risk, although more eyes checking one implementation should reduce the probability.
I disagree
So do I. According to today’s prevalent tech/science culture, “everyone” should
- write their own network stack, compiler, text editor, operating system
- learn 3-5 foreign languages
- travel extensively
- learn how computers work from the silicon principles to the userspace
- have a complete understanding of algorithms and data structures before even attempting to build anything, because nothing else will do
- read obscure Russian poetry
- “deeply” engage in 5-10 different philosophical practices and meditation techniques
- work out regularly, but according to strictly scientific principles, which you first have to research by reading a dozen books
- appreciate fine art, homestead food, and family life
Sorry folks, y’all are just Instagrammers with MSc’s. Most people here probably have no idea how ridiculous this world appears once you step out for a year or two and then take a look back in.
That's a great list actually.
Let's invert it.
Everyone should: be computer illiterate, monolingual, never leave their home town, use left-pad, be regular illiterate, sedentary, uncultured, unlanded, and... alienated from their family?
Well, I'm off to a great start!
What’s wrong with aspiring to do any or even all of those things? Those sound like nice things.
It was a joke if you read the article.
Glad to see you two read only the title, not the article; that fulfills the cliche.
And in your list you forgot taking a lecture in category theory.
Oh, the list wasn’t meant to be exhaustive. I also didn’t mention Homotopy Type Theory, Stoicism, and urban beekeeping.
Much more fun on microcontrollers!