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Building my own network stack

blog.lyc8503.net

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Re: Building my own network stack

#91

Post by utopiah »

convolvatron wrote: post #72
utopiah wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> far from feature complete, but it did work well that's the trick. If you look at implementing a Web browser or a physics engine you instantly give up, and you are right about it, it's just too hard. If instead you write a partial HTTP client which can display some text from a URL or have a 3D scene and in it an object Y coordinates get smaller each millisecond then suddenly in terms of the essence of each, you are…

I used to implement these things professionally and to write an IP + TCP + HTTP is certainly less than a year with experience. would I ship that and expect people to use it without a lot of burnin? no..but to say that its a lifetime of work is off by at least a factor of 10.

Maybe not an HTTP client but a modern browser with its JavaScript engine, encryption support, CSS engine, etc I think for most people really is a lot of work. If one does rely on the right libraries it's a weekend of fun (and pain) so I would argue between few hours and a lifetime, depending on how much you implement.

My point is that the essence, the core mechanism, is typically a 1-liner, but only with a pedagogical context, not a production (in the sense of anybody else using it reliably in realistic situations) context.

Re: Building my own network stack

#92

Post by znnajdla »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #74
znnajdla wrote: post #55

This article might be a bit tongue-in-cheek but it's actually something I've been thinking seriously about for a while. I can imagine a future where every country and company writes their own operating system and that might actually be a very good thing. There is a security advantage in not using popular technology stacks and rebuilding everything public-facing in-house. Because with Mythos-level AI capabilities, it…

This is the same erroneous reasoning as historical claims that FOSS was less secure due to being public. That has been disproven many times over by now. The only way it might hold here is if no one with access to the cutting edge models bothers to run your code through one while an adversary does. That seems highly unlikely, particularly for any well funded organization. That said I agree that monoculture is bad. Vul…

AI has changed everything. Mythos/Cyber has made the Linux virtual machine sandbox useless: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/08/26/vms-wont-contain-cyb...

> The only way it might hold here is if no one with access to the cutting edge models bothers to run your code through one while an adversary does. That seems highly unlikely, particularly for any well funded organization.

But since AI models are non-deterministic and the harness matters a lot, simply "running your code through one" doesn't guarantee you'll find all the zero days. An attacker can simply run a few more iterations or use a slightly more advanced harness, or increase the temperature level and they are likely to find zero days which the maintainers didn't.

Re: Building my own network stack

#95

Post by intrasight »

diath wrote: post #84
intrasight wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graduated and figured I should get a job. Honestly wasn't enthusiastic about the idea. Saw an ad in the paper. It may have mentioned C programming. I went and interviewed with two senior engineers. All they asked was do I know how to do TCP/IP. I said that I did and was working the next week. Honestly the coolest job I've had in my career. Colleagues were all engineers - mostly nuclear.

Huh. Boomers really did live their lives on tutorial mode.

"tutorial mode"? Not familiar with phrase. Also, not a boomer.

Re: Building my own network stack

#96

Post by GPerson »

austhrow743 wrote: post #80
GPerson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with aspiring to do any or even all of those things? Those sound like nice things.

Where's the time left to actually live your life?

Living my life is just everything I do? If I did all those things I’d live an extremely rich life, a lot better than what I’m currently doing, which is some mix of being addicted to the internet and watching all the interesting things get taken away by AI.

Re: Building my own network stack

#97

Post by GPerson »

p-e-w wrote: post #53
GPerson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with aspiring to do any or even all of those things? Those sound like nice things.

The pursuit is performative and pretentious, in much the same way as body culture on Instagram. It’s about collecting achievements in an imaginary social game, and then bragging about it, while insisting that it’s not like that at all but some modern pathway to enlightenment. To be clear, I’m not saying that people don’t genuinely achieve many of these things; they do. Many Instagram models also genuinely have specta…

It sounds like you’re fixated on people on the internet. Lots of people do great things in private.

Re: Building my own network stack

#98

Post by p-e-w »

GPerson wrote: post #97
p-e-w wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pursuit is performative and pretentious, in much the same way as body culture on Instagram. It’s about collecting achievements in an imaginary social game, and then bragging about it, while insisting that it’s not like that at all but some modern pathway to enlightenment. To be clear, I’m not saying that people don’t genuinely achieve many of these things; they do. Many Instagram models also genuinely have specta…

It sounds like you’re fixated on people on the internet. Lots of people do great things in private.

We’re on an Internet forum, so that framing is logical when discussing here.

Re: Building my own network stack

#99

Post by psd1 »

dromologist wrote: post #3

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.

Humanity is a Type I civilisation. It has energy constraints. AI coding runs at hundreds of watts, and more capable agents consume more. That is paid, today, from capex, provided by the biggest bubble in human history. I can deliver your fantasy by running a space heater while i download a docker image.

Re: Building my own network stack

#100

Post by fc417fc802 »

znnajdla wrote: post #92
fc417fc802 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same erroneous reasoning as historical claims that FOSS was less secure due to being public. That has been disproven many times over by now. The only way it might hold here is if no one with access to the cutting edge models bothers to run your code through one while an adversary does. That seems highly unlikely, particularly for any well funded organization. That said I agree that monoculture is bad. Vul…

AI has changed everything. Mythos/Cyber has made the Linux virtual machine sandbox useless: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/08/26/vms-wont-contain-cyb... > The only way it might hold here is if no one with access to the cutting edge models bothers to run your code through one while an adversary does. That seems highly unlikely, particularly for any well funded organization. But since AI models are non-deterministic…

> But since AI models are non-deterministic and the harness matters a lot, simply "running your code through one" doesn't guarantee you'll find all the zero days.

The exact same line of reasoning applies to human security researchers and pen testers as well. The only difference is that automated testing via frontier models is affordable even for individuals.

The VM comment is total nonsense. That's only going to be the case for an extremely short period here until the major projects all adapt their release procedures to include automated security audits. I imagine the kernel as a whole and KVM in particular will begin receiving a huge amount of such attention. I also expect increasing amounts of such load bearing code to be formally verified as the primary barrier to that has always been the amount of human time required.

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