• Human Infrastructure
  • Posts
  • Human Infrastructure 436: Determinism and LLMs, DCs In Space, Faster Than the Speed of Dijkstra

Human Infrastructure 436: Determinism and LLMs, DCs In Space, Faster Than the Speed of Dijkstra

AuthorAuthor

Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
February 19, 2026

LLMs ARE NOT DETERMINISTIC, BUT IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY

Wikipedia defines a deterministic algorithm thusly.

“In computer science, a deterministic algorithm is an algorithm that, given a particular input, will always produce the same output, with the underlying machine always passing through the same sequence of states.”

Here’s the thing. Large language models are not deterministic. If you ask an LLM the same question twice, you’ll get two different answers. Perhaps similar and semantically equivalent, but worded differently. LLMs are not designed to be staid & static, but to have variety in their responses so that they seem more human. In normal conversations, this is fine and even desirable.

As I’ve worked with various LLMs trained on production network data, I’ve found this troublesome, because some of that variety has resulted in inaccurate responses. Wrong numbers, for instance. Network engineering & operations require accurate responses—decisions are made on data. Hard numbers.

This issue is well-known to the networking community. The short answer is that language models can be tuned to result in somewhat more deterministic responses to questions. That doesn’t mean the problem’s gone, but it does mean a reduction in garbage answers.

Why bring this up? The non-deterministic nature of LLMs is something you need to be aware as you kick the tires on AI tooling for network operations. If an LLM or SLM is involved in a vendor’s AI solution, you should be asking the question, “How are you tuning your language model to make it deterministic?” If they have no idea what you’re talking about, I promise that someone in the vendor’s organization does. Ask to have a conversation with that person, and make them get specific until you’re satisfied with the answer. - Ethan

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Bruce Davie considers a new algorithm that’s faster than Dijkstra’s, the algorithm that’s famous in network engineering for its use in link state routing protocol shortest path calculations. You know, what OSPF and IS-IS use.

Bruce thinks there’s something to the claims of the new algorithm, and considers the implications for networking. He ponders scaling limits, practical use cases considering BFD, and ultimately decides that it’s unlikely this new algorithm will replace Djikstra’s anytime soon. Why? For one, Djikstra’s is easy to understand—and that matters. For another, a huge factor in routing convergence times isn’t the shortest path first calculation. It’s detecting the link state change in the first place—not a problem Djikstra’s solves.

Click through for much more nuance, some math, and perspective from Bruce. Well worth your time to read if the fundamentals of routing convergence at scale interest you. - Ethan

This post will help you understand how to best value yourself when negotiating a salary number with a prospective employer. We tend to undervalue ourselves, seeing things from our own point of view where we know our weak points. This blog helps you see things from the other side of the table, and should give you context & confidence to ask for more than you think you’re worth.

I’ve seen negotiations from both sides of the table, and a lot that was in here had me nodding my head. Good stuff. - Ethan

A PhD in Space Electronics explains why data centers in space aren’t gonna happen. TL;DR. It’s hard to get rid of heat. It’s hard to generate power. Radiation is hard on chips. Communicating with the ground is slow.

The conclusion? “I suppose this is just about possible if you really want to do it, but I think I've demonstrated above that it would firstly be extremely difficult to achieve, disproportionately costly in comparison with Earth-based datacenters, and offer mediocre performance at best.

If you still think this is worth doing, good luck, space is hard. Myself, I think it's a catastrophically bad idea, but you do you.”

If we do end up seeing some sort of space-based data centers (there are startups working on this), it’ll be interesting to see what the viable use cases turn out to be. After reading that article, I got nothing. Hat tip to Bruce Davie in the Systems Approach blog for the link. - Ethan

Drew stepping in here to add that I want starry-eyed people with deep pockets to work on these challenges. Not because I want orbiting data centers, but because I hope that a second-order effect will be more money going into making solar power more efficient and effective, which could spur a more robust solar industry here on Earth. I don’t actually care if orbital data centers ever take off—I just want good, cheap solar here on the ground. A data-centers-in-space race could be a vehicle to help us get us there. - Drew

This is an interesting post about how complex, self-correcting behaviors can emerge in systems in which individual actors (in this case, ants) operate with a set of simple instructions without the need for centralized control and orchestration. It’s a thought exercise for how to design agentic AI systems that don’t rely on a central conductor because centralization scales poorly. It’s a thought-provoking post, and there are good ideas here worth considering. 

That said, to my mind it glides over perpetual trouble-spots such as authentication and authorization. Also, this model seems feasible if all the actors within it have the same general goals that accrue to the common good, like ants in the same colony. In systems developed by humans, we have to deal with actors, even from within the same colony, that actively seek to disrupt, degrade, or exploit the colony for their own benefit. - Drew

Corey Quinn has built an AI agent with a personality disorder and put it to a useful purpose: to respond to tiresome, time-wasting emails with agent-written messages “that are technically professional but carry an undercurrent of menace.”  

This post tells why he built this, and also the architecture for it. I get a lot of the same kind of email that Corey does (and I suspect many of you do, too), so I admit I’m tempted to try something like this. - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

Most security content talks about best practices.

Cyber Confessionals is about what actually happens.   

Created by FireMon, this series shares real stories from the firewall policy trenches. The change windows that went sideways. The access that lingered too long. The rule nobody wanted to touch.   

Voices are disguised. The stories are not.

Season 1 includes:

  • Logging re-enabled on a PIX firewall that crashed and grounded 1,000 planes

  • Assumptions about visibility that turned out to be wrong

  • Access that quietly became a domain compromise A single firewall rule that unraveled everything

No slides. No vendor spin. Just practitioners walking through what broke, why it broke, and what they learned.

TECH NEWS 📣

When an open source project uses Vouch, contributors must be vouched before they can submit code. Other contributors can vouch or denounce you. You can vouch for yourself by explaining how you want to contribute.

The point of Vouch is to help combat AI slop submissions that have been overwhelming project maintainers. Seems like a pretty good idea. - Ethan

On last week’s earnings call, Cisco reported making less money than it has been recently because the price of memory is so dang high. Cisco stock promptly took a 12% hit, but CEO Chuck Robbins has a fix coming that you should be aware of. “Robbins said Cisco will raise prices, revise contracts and negotiate terms to account for the evolving component prices.”

We are hearing rumors about price increases from across networking vendor-land, but Cisco price increases specifically have come up several times recently in the Packet Pushers virtual hallway track. - Ethan

This piece summarizes the challenges of deploying Starlink in various Asian countries, including capacity, overall latency…and political concerns. For instance, at APRICOT 2026, “Geoff Huston pointed out that Starlink can’t always land traffic in countries where its service is available. He said the countries surrounding Mongolia – China and Russia – are hostile to Starlink, so the space ISP lands traffic for Mongolian users in Japan then uses terrestrial links to reach the central Asian country.”

That is, the issues with using LEO satellite constellation aren’t just about whether there are enough birds in the sky for your latitude. There are also issues of how to route your traffic even if you do have decent coverage. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

“Starting today, customers can create nested environments within virtualized Amazon EC2 instances. Previously, customers could only create and manage virtual machines inside bare metal EC2 instances. With this launch, customers can create nested virtual machines by running KVM or Hyper-V on virtual EC2 instances. Customers can leverage this capability for use cases such as running emulators for mobile applications, simulating in-vehicle hardware for automobiles, and running Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows workstations.

This capability is available in all commercial regions on C8i, M8i, and R8i instances. To learn more about enabling hardware virtualization extensions in your environment, see the Amazon EC2 nested virtualization documentation.”

I believe this might be interesting for network labbing as well. - Ethan

Legendary Pythonista Michael Kennedy designed Command Book to help with the following problem.

“Does this sound familiar? You open Terminal. Start your web server, a database, a background worker. You rename tabs so you can tell them apart. You arrange windows just right. Then Terminal crashes. Or you close the wrong tab. Or your Mac restarts.

Everything is gone. The commands, the output history, your careful organization -- lost. You rebuild from scratch, step-by-step. Every. Single. Time.

Introducing Command Book. Save your commands. Run them reliably. Monitor their output. Never rebuild your terminal setup again.”

Command Book is for macOS only at this time. There’s both a limited (but useful) free version, as well as a paid version. - Ethan

Christian Adell, a principal engineer with decades of networking experience, is working on a book about how to design for network automation. It’s a work in progress, but he’s sharing that progress via the site linked above. You can read it for free and offer feedback if you’re so inclined. - Drew 

This report, by an analyst who works with renewable energy companies, claims that Big Tech companies are misrepresenting the potential for AI to—eventually—find ways to reduce carbon emissions. In the meantime, these same companies are building data centers for generative AI that are increasing their output of greenhouse gases and derailing these companies’ stated goals of carbon neutrality. - Drew 

MORE RESOURCES

PACKET PUSHERS AUDIENCE SURVEY
One way you can support the Packet Pushers (besides listening to the podcasts, of course), is to fill out our annual audience survey. We collect data on listening habits, demographics, and other information that helps us communicate the value of Packet Pushers to sponsors.

As always, we don’t share any contact info or individual details with anyone, including sponsors. We only report aggregate data via our media kit. If you’ve got a little time to spare, please hit the link. Thank you so much! - Drew

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Forward Networks makes a digital twin. I mean digital twin here in the way you would naturally think the term to mean, as opposed to what some marketing departments have co-opted the term to mean.

Forward’s digital twin is a model of your network with awareness of a variety of network & security operating systems and builds a snapshot of your network periodically or on-demand. That snapshot includes actual network state, not just config, so Forward is aware of how your network is actually forwarding traffic. Use Forward’s model to validate changes before implementing them, find out what was going on at any point for which Forward has a snapshot, and otherwise investigate your network without having to mess with production.

With that background, it gets a lot easier to explain what Forward AI (the thing they announced) is all about. In a briefing with me, the Forward team demonstrated using Forward AI to get information out of the model by asking simple questions. Forward AI is agentic, meaning that a variety of AI agents can be dispatched as needed to answer your question. For example, if you need to interact with ServiceNow, there’s an agent for that. One of the demos went roughly like this.

  1. “Triage this ServiceNow ticket <ticket number>.”

  2. The agentic system put together a workflow.

    1. Read the ServiceNow ticket. (It was about trouble one host had connecting to another host via SSH.)

    2. Obtain host details. Trace the path between the hosts. Dig into device details of network gear along the path.

    3. Return the result showing the details of a firewall policy blocking SSH.

    4. Verify that if the firewall policy was updated, nothing else in the path would block the traffic.

    5. Show all the information that was gathered to get that result. (Basically, show your work—how the AI got the result it got.)

    6. Update the ticket with the diagnosis summary.

  3. From there, ask Forward AI to recommend a specific fix. The AI recommended a tweak to the firewall policy.

It’s worth pointing out that the agent knew that the firewall was a PANW firewall. The AI had been trained on PANW, and was able to parse the rulebase to know what policy was blocking the SSH connection. The AI was also able to suggest CLI commands to update the policy and permit this traffic.

There’s more from the briefing, such as the LLM (like any LLM) is not deterministic. So to get to reliable, predictable answers an engineer can rely on, the Forward team has done lots of tuning.

My take on Forward AI is that nascent tools like this are the future of network operations. As an industry, we’re going to resolve the determinism problem. We’re going to learn more about training and data normalization. Integrating our business systems with deep network knowledge will be table stakes.

Yes, there’s an expense to the agentic AI approach—not only in money & computing power but also in data preparation and operational change. But I believe there’s a payoff to this approach in a world where networks are increasingly complex, more network engineers are aging out of the field than are joining, and downtime is intolerable—even if inevitable—to business operations. - Ethan

Researchers at the endpoint security startup Koi have been scanning “skills” available in the ClawHub marketplace that OpenClaw users can download to teach their AI agent new tricks. In the most recent update to the post, out of the 10,700 skills analyzed, 824 were malicious. In many cases, the malicious skills do provide the function they advertise. But they also come with backdoors, malware payloads, or prompts that instruct the user downloading the skill to install a necessary “package” that’s actually a Trojan or some other malicious element.

To help address this issue, Koi has developed its own skill, called Clawdex, which OpenClaw bots can use to look up whether a skill is on the naughty or nice list. And BTW, Koi was just acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $400 million. - Drew 

OT, or Operational Technology, is a regular topic on the Packet Protector podcast I co-host with Jennifer Minella. Why? One reason is that OT and SCADA systems run critical infrastructure, including power and water systems, medical equipment, and manufacturing. These sensitive systems are prime targets for state-sponsored malicious actors and cybercriminals. For another reason, IT and OT operations are beginning to converge, which means IT folks need to understand, and get visibility into, the controllers, sensors, gauges, pumps, and other OT gear that makes up a network of things. NetBox, which provides source-of-truth software for network operations, is offering a ebook on how IT and OT teams can use NetBox for inventory, documentation, and other use cases. You have to sacrifice contact data to the Sales Gods (may they show you mercy) if you want the ebook. - Drew

Selector is a startup that offers an AI ops platform aimed at networking. It just raised $32 million in venture funding, the fourth investment since its founding. With this latest round, investors have poured a total of $98 million in the company. Selector says it is now valued at $375 million. As Ethan mentioned in his essay at the top of this newsletter, AI tools are being applied to networking, but users need to be able to trust that the output they’re getting from such tools is valid and accurate. Selector’s approach is to build what it calls a “Network Language Model” that has been fine-tuned to work with network-relevant structured and unstructured data. - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared on LinkedIn by Sharona.