ay

SNMPv3 absolutely doesn’t require PKI nor key management, it works fine with shared keys.

You can take a look at an implementation of that, which I had built for entertainment: https://github.com/ayourtch/oside/blob/main/examples/snmpwal...

"Read diligently" - that’s a very optimistic statement. I can not count how many times Claude (LLM I am most familiar with, I had it write probably about 100KLOC in the past few months) explicitly disobeyed what was written in the instructions.

Also, a good few times, if it were a human doing the task, I would have said they both failed to follow the instructions and lied about it and attempted to pretend they didn’t. Luckily their lying abilities today are primitive, so it’s easy to catch.

I had to do a little bit of “cross-eyeing” and then I can see something that does look like 3D. That said, my eyes are a little weird this way - back in childhood I trained to move them separately as well - a great party trick to freak out the people ! :-))

Same here - but I can switch my vision for screen tasks to either only near-sighted (by being about 25cm away), or to far-sighted (by being about 70cm away). If I am doing that in the middle of the task, it feels a tiny bit “strange”.

Do you notice any difference in thinking when you are “left eye active” vs “right eye active” in front of the screen or reading ? Asking because I have a much milder version of the situation that you describe (still within the boundaries to make it work without the glasses almost all the time), but I notice a weird “not the same” feeling when I am using not the eye I am used to.

I found your example of a joke child made very interesting - me a good jokes is something that brings is unexpected perspective on things while highlighting some contradictions in one world models.

In the adult would model there is absolutely no contradiction about the joke you mention - it’s just a bit of cute nonsense.

But in a child’s world this joke might be capturing the apparent contradiction - the sky is “in the tree”, so it must have climbed it, to be there (as they would have to do), yet they also know that the sun is already in the sky, so it had absolutely no reason to do that. Also, “because it’s already there” - which is a tricky idea in itself.

We take planetary systems and algebra and other things we can’t really perceive as granted, but a child model of the world is made of concrete objects that mostly need a surface to be on, so the sun is a bit of a conundrum in itself! (Speaking of my own experience remembering a shift from arithmetics to algebra when I was ~8).

If not too much of a personal question - I would love to hear what your child would answer to a question why she finds that joke funny. And whether she agrees with my explanation why it must be funny :-)

The first transition was to IPv4, and it was reportedly (I wasn’t in the workforce yet :-) relatively easy…

https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2016/09/final-report-on...

Some more interesting history reading here:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc33

There’s a “EU Inc” initiative which is aiming to fix things. Fingers crossed.

https://www.eu-inc.org/

This is a super apt analogy. Every time I decided to let LLMs “vibe-fix” non-obvious things for the sake of experiment, it spiraled into an unspeakable fubar territory, which needed to be reverted - a very similar situation to this financial collapse.

Invariably, after using the brain, the real fix was usually quite simple - but, also invariably - was hidden behind 2-3 levels of indirection in reasoning.

On the other hand, I had rather pleasant results when “pair-debugging”, my demanding to explain why or just correcting it in the places when it was about to go astray certainly had effect - in return I got some really nice spotting of “obvious” but small things I might have missed otherwise.

That said, definition of “going astray” varies - from innocently jumping into what looked like unsupported conclusions to blatantly telling me something was equal to true right after ingesting the log with the printout showing the opposite.

It was Claude in November 2024, but the “west of equator” is a good enough universal nonsense to illustrate the fundamental issue - just that today it is in much subtler dimensions.

A not-so-subtle example from yesterday: Claude Code claiming to me yesterday assertion Foo was true, right after ingesting the logs with the “assertion Foo: false” in it.

My favourite story of that involved attempting to use LLM to figure out whether it was true or my hallucination that the tidal waves were higher in Canary Islands than in Caribbean, and why; it spewed several paragraphs of plausibly sounding prose, and finished with “because Canary Islands are to the west of the equator”.

This phrase is now an inner joke used as a reply to someone quoting LLMs info as “facts”.

Just a few examples: Bicycle. Car(driving). Airplane(piloting). Welder. CNC machine. CAD.

All take quite an effort to master, until then they might slow one down or outright kill.

You will need to first sit and ballpark, and then sit and benchmark, and discover your ballpark was probably wrong anyhow:-)

Some (for me) useful pointers to that regard for both:

1. https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf - an extremely nice resource on micro architectural impacts of instructions

2. https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm-mca.html - tooling from Intel that allows to see some of these in real machine code

3. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... - shows you whether the above is matching the reality (besides the CPU alone, more often than not your bottleneck is actually memory accesses; at least on the first access which wasn’t triggered by a hardware prefetcher or a hint to it. On Linux it would be staring at “perf top” results.

So, the answer is as is very often - “it depends”.

Try “3M earplugs yellow” on amazon. They are pretty much fully immersed in the ear (for me), and the insulation is very good. The pressure - yeah it took maybe a few days to get used to, but…

The effects for me (living in Brussels city centre, so quite noisy - police, ambulance, sometimes loud tourists past midnight, and a bit of construction at 6am nearby to keep it real :-) ) were very pronounced:

From needing 9 hours and feeling groggy in the mornings anyway, to easily going on 7-8, feeling very refreshed and alert each day.

A cool side effect was that this superpower works also while traveling - so, I no longer care how noisy the airco is in the hotel room, being next to the lift, or having the window above the lively bar.

The only downside with those earplugs that they are good maybe for 3-4 nights and then are too squished to be useful; but the upsides more than make it up for me.

Same thing with PNG. Just call the format with new additions it PNGX, so the user can clearly see that the reason their software can’t display the image is not a file corruption.

This is just pretending that if you have a cat and a dog in two bags and you call it “a bag”, it’s one and the same thing…

There might be another factor at not using the debugger beyond the pure cluelessness: often you can’t really run it in production. Back when I started with coding (it was Turbo Pascal 3.0, so you get the idea :-), I enjoyed the use of the debugger quite a lot.

But in 2000 I started working in a role which required understanding the misbehavior of embedded systems that were forwarding the live traffic, there was a technical possibility to do “target remote …” but almost never an option to stop a box that is forwarding the traffic.

So you end up being dependent on debugs - and very occasional debug images with enhanced artisanal diagnostics code (the most fun was using gcc’s -finstrument-function to catch a memory corruption of an IPSec field by an unrelated IKE code in a use-after free scenario)

Where the GDB shined though is the analysis of the crash dumps.

Implementing a “fake” gdb stub in Perl, which was sucking in the crash dump data and allow to leisurely explore it with debugger rather than decoding hex by hand, was a huge productivity boon.

So I would say - it’s better to have more than one tool in the toolbox and use the most appropriate one.

Interesting, so in your experience Gemini 2.5 Pro bests Claude 3.7 ? I didn’t pay much attention to it, will give it a go, thanks for the reference!

Again, I think of the task I mentioned as not easy (it’s a lot of code) but it is simple (it’s a very boring for me code that I know how to write).

Caveat: (and I realized this throughout our exchange) is that the definition of “simple” differs a lot depending on the person and the field they are in vs. the domain of the task.

In part the task was “simple” by my standard is I have three decades of experience in the field, and the task is within my domain (networking protocols). 3500 LoC was what LLM generated, I will need to refactor and probably reduce that.

What you describe in my view would be probably “ complicated” (will require a lot of knowledge I don’t have) & “not easy” (it is lots of code) - I can imagine the data model is probably not trivial, plus you have to think a lot about potential extension points, future data migrations, etc)

Collaborative planning is an interesting new use, I will try it out, thanks for sharing!

FWIW, this past week I wrote up my uses of LLM (Claude 3.7) and published them, for a longer form experience than my comments here).

http://stdio.be/blog/2025-05-18-How-I-use-LLMs/

Your comment that you have to explain very well to it what you want is in part what I wanted to convey - LLM is an amplifier/executor, rather than a creative generator. The initiative is still fully yours.

Agreed, and the analogy with calculators is very apt.

I suspect indeed we have the difference in terminology.

I put distinction between “simple” and “easy”.

Digging a pit of 1m * 1m * 1m is simple - just displace a cubic meter of soil; but it is not easy as it’s a lot of monotonous physical work.

A small excavator makes the task easy but arguably less simple since now you need to also know how to operate the excavator.

LLMs make a lot of coding tasks “easy” by being this small excavator. But they do not always make them “simple” - more often than not, they make bugs, for fixing which you need to understand subject matter, so they don’t eliminate the need to learn it.

Does this make sense ?

Could totally be the case, that, as I wrote in the very first sentence, I am holding it wrong.

But I am not saying LLMs are impotent - the other week Claude happily churned me ~3500 lines of C code that allowed to implement a prototype capture facility for network packets with flexible filters and saving the contents into pcapng files. I had to fix a couple of bugs that it made, but overall it was certainly at least 5x-10x productivity improvement compared to me typing these lines of code by hand. I don’t dispute that it’s a pretty useful tool in coding, or as a thinking assistant (see the last paragraph of my comment).

What I challenged is the submissive self deprecating adoration across the entire spectrum.

Very strange. Either the author uses some magic AI, or I am holding it wrong. I used LLMs since a couple of years, as a nice tool.

Besides that:

I have tried using LLMs to create cartoon pictures. The first impression is “wow”; but after a bunch of pictures you see the evidently repetitive “style”.

Using LLMs to write poetry results is also quite cool at first, but after a few iterations you see the evidently repetitive “style”, which is bland and lacks depth and substance.

Using LLMs to render music is amazing at first, but after a while you can see the evidently repetitive style - for both rhymes and music.

Using NotebookLM to create podcasts at first feels amazing, about to open the gates of knowledge; but then you notice that the flow is very repetitive, and that the “hosts” don’t really show enough understanding to make it interesting. Interrupting them with questions somewhat dilutes this impression, though, so jury is out here.

Again, with generating the texts, they get a distant metallic taste that is hard to ignore after a while.

The search function is okay, but with a little bit of nudge one can influence the resulting answer by a lot, so I wary if blindly taking the “advice”, and always recheck it, and try to make two competing where I would influence LLM into taking the competing viewpoints and learn from both.

Using the AI to generate code - simple things are ok, but for non-trivial items it introduces pretty subtle bugs, which require me to ensure I understand every line. This bit is the most fun - the bug quest is actually entertaining, as it is often the same bugs humans would make.

So, I don’t see the same picture, but something close to the opposite of what the author sees.

Having an easy outlet to bounce the quick ideas off and a source of relatively unbiased feedback brought me back to the fun of writing; so literally it’s the opposite effect compared to the article author…

Ah. Apparently I didn’t use that crate, so happily missed that footgun, thanks for the info! That is an unfortunate case.

Though I suspect it’s fair to say the entire settlement is built of glass houses here :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43798312

I suppose if one wants absolutely no surprises, they will need to lock the entire toolchain as well, regardless of the language…

A piece of anecdata: my Rust code from 8 years ago still compiles fine, though compiler complains about not having the defined edition set.

Absolutely true about focusing too much on tech solutions, it’s often a very tricky problem that is best solved at non-technical layer.

To your other points: I find that people who are addicted never heed the warnings, they just get annoying. Just occurred to me: wonder if the addiction is to some extent internalization of the habit; so that fighting the habit becomes fighting oneself….

About HN being less addictive than the others: that is arguable :-) though it is much less driven by pure emotions than the other forms of exchange, indeed !

I am ex-smoker for more than 12 years after smoking between half a pack and a pack a day for 15 years, and I went through the process which may be similar to what you describe. So I thought to write here some of my self-observations - maybe they could be useful for you or anyone else reading this.

Cigarettes for me combined many aspects that are psychological and social rather than physical:

- the sucking reflex. Same calming mechanism as the babies with the pacifier

- the comfort of routine, where they support the familiar (the first cig with a coffee, a morning or evening cigarette)

- the social interactions (smokers areas are a great place for a conversation and there is no hierarchy)

- last but not least - physical effect of calming

- the very strong associative effect caused by movies with smoking scenes

- the nice feeling of appetite reduction caused by cigarettes/nicotine

What helped me was:

0) for the routines - replacing with a different ones that do not need cigarettes.

1) to not set the goal to quit outright, but rather to reduce, and then when it went to zero it was “temporarily stop, I can always restart if I consciously find it worth it”.

2) make every cigarette subject of a conscious decision after a discussion with yourself. Do not prohibit it outright - it only heats up the impatience for it. Make it a conscious decision.

3) Look at adjacent habits, like alcohol. My last infrequent routine, which persisted irregularly for some years after I stopped, was to have a cigarette sometimes socially when I had a drink. After I reduced the drinking to almost zero, I once had tried social smoking and didn’t like how it tasted at all, and had a headache the next day. Which was remarkable as I never had this before. No social impulse felt anymore.

4) take up some sport for half an hour a day, preferably aerobic (I do cycling on a stationary bike). If you manage to go for a streak without cigarettes/alcohol, the difference in performance and feeling will be very apparent which will help at (2).

5) watch out for potential weight gain after stopping smoking. Was hard for me (I gained more than 20 kilos), eventually I lost weight because I moved for half a year to another city where I led a much more active lifestyle.

6) the company of smokers at work. This may be hard but super important if you can tackle it. Eventually I started going for the “breath breaks” but just having a chat rather than smoke, but since this strongly triggers the “routine” programming, this is something I could do only 2 years into stopping.

It is a different journey for everyone, but hopefully some of the above may ring true for you and be useful in your journey. Good luck!

Potentially. However, anecdotally a lot of service providers treat UDP to stricter rate limiting than TCP because it’s unauthenticated nature, so there is a back-pressure factor there.

Also: RFC9000 for QUIC is almost 50% longer than RFC9293 that is the new one for TCP - so, I would expect the implementation would be probably more complex ?

In the absence of that, everything will go over HTTP :-)

If they blocked you, evidently you didn’t clear the bar for them, and even if it was some completely lunatic reason - you have to respect their right to not talk to you, however lunatic it looks for you.

Now, if their blocklists were popular - either they weren’t lunatics or there was a crowd of lunatics. Now, why would you worry about not talking with a crowd of lunatics ?

But, regardless - again - nobody is entitled to an interaction with those that don’t want it, directly or by proxy.

Baffles me, why is it so hard to understand this ?

Nice! That’s the beautiful part - everyone can shape it according to how they like, and be comfortable with that.

I find the algorithmic topical feeds nicely solve the problem of discovery for me. There’s a lot of people who are experts in their fields, totally different to mine (e.g. astronomy, physics, photography etc) which makes it interesting for me.

I can not argue about the values of people I do not know personally. I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience, which I shared.

“Free markets” is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without corruption.

Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully interacts with the other aspects of my life. When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.

As for the hierarchy: it had always existed and for better or worse the humans and other animals are wired for it. Likewise, they are wired for maintaining the total perceived fairness of the system - so the system eventually autocorrects the extreme imbalance. Often brutally, though.