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  • Human Infrastructure 412: We Need an AI Crash, Wiresharking ICMP Messages, and More

Human Infrastructure 412: We Need an AI Crash, Wiresharking ICMP Messages, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
August 14, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

The transition from individual contributor to manager is often difficult; technical skills suddenly take a back seat to the tricky job of dealing with people. Pat Allen shares what he’s learning as he takes on a new role leading a network engineering team. He writes about fighting the impulse to fix technical problems himself, a calendar jammed with meetings, and having to adapt his troubleshooting skills to people management. He shares useful tips for new managers, an action plan, gotchas to avoid, and more. This is good stuff! - Drew 

Chris makes a strong argument that an AI crash will leave behind a foundation of infrastructure that underpins a new growth phase for the tech industry. And I think he’s right.

Chris cites historical precedents where new technologies boomed and then busted (railroads, canals, fiber optic buildouts); yes, investors lost money and companies went bankrupt, but new businesses and new industries emerged to take advantage of the infrastructure that had been built.

Some big questions about the AI crash remain, such as when the bubble will burst; how much collateral damage the broader economy might suffer from it; and what effects (good and bad) a new AI Age will have on society, politics, work, and the environment.

Speaking of historical precedent, you also have to wonder what the robber barons of the AI Age will do with their fortunes and their compute power. - Drew 

Johannes shares a video of, and slides from, his presentation  “Unveiling Network Errors – A Deep Dive into ICMP ‘Destination Unreachable’ Messages”. While network engineers are likely familiar with ICMP tools, he notes that there’s a range of features that are underused. The session digs into the ‘Destination Unreachable’ message to show how you can get more insights into network errors. - Drew 

Keith set out to build a custom GTP trained on his own datasets: his blogs, his newsletter, and other sources. But it was missing sources due to a problem in the RAG pipeline. Keith uses this episode, along with an anecdote about some ambitious but perhaps ill-advised home carpentry, to draw parallels with the role of good technical leadership and the value of proof-of-concept testing. Good technical leaders can anticipate problems that an enthusiastic engineer might not have considered, and PoCs can help to spot wobbly products before they hit production. - Drew  

Jordan gets to the heart of the vibecoding problem in this concise post. He points out that LLMs might get you to an answer faster, but you still need to know what’s going on. Yup. That. - Ethan

I point this piece out mostly to highlight Gary Marcus as someone worth following if you’re trying to separate AI fact from fiction. He’s a long-standing AI expert who keeps it real. When warranted, he doesn’t hesitate to voice rational, balanced cynicism backed by facts. A sharp pin pricking the AI hype bubble. - Ethan

MORE BLOGS

Lightyear is the only AI-driven ISP management platform built for Network Engineers. Automate and digitize the entire telecom lifecycle — from procurement to inventory to expense management.

No more manual ISP sourcing. No more network service spreadsheets.

  • Cut procurement time by over 70% through an automated RFP process driven by global ISP serviceability data to identify optimal providers (1,200+ vendors)

  • Save 20–30%+ on telecom costs using real-time pricing intelligence (1M+ price points)

  • Track 30+ data points per service in a digital system of record (circuit IDs, static IPs, contract terms & more)

  • Maintain 100% visibility across all vendors, sites, and services

  • Automate every step of the telecom lifecycle — including MACD ticketing, disputes, and renewals — in one closed system

With Lightyear, 400+ enterprises and 5,000+ network professionals, including those at Palo Alto Networks, Okta, Five Guys, Alo Yoga, and Teladoc, are simplifying telecom procurement, circuit implementations, network inventory management, bill payment, and more.

TECH NEWS 📣

YAML is hard. KYAML might make YAML easier for K8s admins. KYAML might make it into the 1.34 release.

“KYAML is a strict subset of YAML. All KAYML files are also valid YAML, and they can be used to write manifests and Helm charts, with no additional flags for K8s.

If included in Kubernetes 1.34 (still being finalized), KYAML will work with kubectl Kubernetes command line, which will output in KYAML with a special flag (i.e., kubectl get -o kyaml).

Here are the additional rules for KYAML.

  • Double-quotes are value strings.

  • Keys are unquoted unless potentially ambiguous.

  • Mappings (associative arrays) use braces {}.

  • Lists use brackets [].

These rules mimic JSON, though unlike JSON, KYAML supports comments and trailing commas and doesn’t need quoted keys.

Also, KYAML is not sensitive to white space.” - Ethan

After the Windsurf drama around their failed funding round and rumored sale to OpenAI, “one bigger question remains: If the startup was growing that fast and attracting VC interest, why would it sell at all? Insiders tell TechCrunch that for all the popularity and hype around AI coding assistants, they can actually be massively money-losing businesses. Vibe coders generally, and Windsurf in particular, can have such expensive structures that their gross margins are “very negative,” one person close to Windsurf told TechCrunch. Meaning it cost more to run the product than the startup could charge for it.” - Ethan

AIOps agents “can be tricked by bogus analytics data into taking harmful remedial actions, including downgrading an installed package to a vulnerable version.” Of course they can. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Anton

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

A quiz that shows you some YAML, then asks you what the result will be via multiple choice. The answers are explained. I don’t live and breathe YAML, so I learned a lot sampling these 22 questions. Well…I was exposed to a lot. I can’t say I’ve learned this material as yet. YAML parsing is a dark art. - Ethan

A gateway to Juniper APIs, Junos, Apstra, Paragon and Mist repos, and other developer resources such as the Junos YANG Data Model Explorer. - Ethan

Fasterdata - Energy Sciences Network
https://fasterdata.es.net

From the landing page. “An Expert Guide for End-to-End Performance Tuning, Tools and Techniques.

The Fasterdata Knowledge Base provides proven, operationally sound methods for troubleshooting and solving performance issues. Since 1986 ESnet has operated an advanced research network with the goal of enabling the highest levels of performance for the Department of Energy (DOE) scientific community. During this time, our engineers have identified a common set of issues that hinder performance. We share our experiences and findings in this knowledge base.” - Ethan

From the README. “Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. It can operate even with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth. Reticulum allows you to build wide-area networks with off-the-shelf tools, and offers end-to-end encryption and connectivity, initiator anonymity, autoconfiguring cryptographically backed multi-hop transport, efficient addressing, unforgeable delivery acknowledgements and more.

The vision of Reticulum is to allow anyone to be their own network operator, and to make it cheap and easy to cover vast areas with a myriad of independent, inter-connectable and autonomous networks.” - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

  1. Yaak API Client (Postman alternative) - mountain-loop via GitHub

5 things you haven’t considered (but should) before upgrading to Windows 11

Windows 11 comes with more than just new UI — it's a whole new set of rollout variables. From hardware requirements and Copilot+ PCs to shifting support timelines and end-user readiness, the migration path is packed with hidden wildcards (and budget busters).

We’ll walk through 5 overlooked considerations that catch teams off guard. You’ll get practical guidance on how to adjust your planning, testing, and user prep to stay ahead.

Join SmartDeploy on Wednesday August 20th. Sign up here!
There are words here.

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Platform9 provides software, called Private Cloud Director, to help you turn your on-prem infrastructure into a private cloud. The latest release of Private Cloud Director includes an update to its vJailbreak migration tool. According to the press release, vJailbreak “now has the ability to convert entire VMware vSphere clusters in place, keeping services online and minimizing business disruption while automating large-scale VM migrations.” If you’re looking to get off the VMware train, this may be your stop. - Drew 

NetAutomate’s platform NetOrca gets AI via the NetOrca Pack. In this < 15 minute video, founder Scott Rowlandson sets up a common but complicated scenario with F5 and Palo Alto Networks gear to request & deploy a specific configuration via agentic AI. He works through the models in use, prompt, configuration push, testing, and tweaking with the AI got wrong, as well as making configuration changes. Scott’s an engineer, and he wastes no time in this well-executed demo. You’ll get to see a balanced demo of an AI function most of us have a use case for—config generation. - Ethan

Analyst firm Dell’Oro Group is forecasting a healthy WLAN market this year, with global revenues estimated to grow 12% in 2025, with Wi-Fi 7 leading the revenue charge. Dell’Oro is also looking ahead to Wi-Fi 8, which is expected to roll into the enterprise market in 2028. - Drew 

This is a concise, exacting technical description of the Multiple Resource Unit (MRU) feature in Wi-Fi 7. From excised interfered spectral segments to punctured RUs to tone groupings, prepare to be bonked on the head with some serious wireless lingo. Myself, I’m going to bookmark this post in case I ever need some techno-jargon for dialouge in a story.  : )  - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared on the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj