Welcome to the Fediverse @ACM_SIGCOMM
https://discuss.systems/@ACM_SIGCOMM/114712683199775193

Time for an #Introduction. We are the Special Interest Group (SIG) focussed on all aspects of computer networking, part of the @ACM professional computing society. We host multiple conferences each year, including our flagship annual conference; publish a quarterly newsletter (Computer Communications Review); give awards in a number of categories; and generally support researchers and practitioners in computer networking. More details at our web site:
https://www.sigcomm.org

The main reason I am on the fediverse is because if JD Vance ever turned up here, he would instantly be eaten by angry furries

Nothing quite like eight ornery Aussies in the audience chorusing “that’s a comment what’s the question mate” under their breaths at a talk. It’s giving me life 🤩😅🤣✨

@cstross Carbon composite is showing itself to be impressively versatile. Whether your application calls for a catastrophic implosion, or a catastrophic explosion, carbon composite has got you covered.

#GiftArticle

Bizarre

They Asked an #AI #Chatbot Questions.
The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.

#GenerativeAI #chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes & endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the #technology can deeply distort reality.

Mr. Torres, 42, an accountant in Manhattan, started using #ChatGPT last year to make financial spreadsheets & to get legal advice.

#MediaLiteracy #tech #health #PublicHealth #MentalHealth
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html?unlocked_article_code=1.P08.q54v.5I9Hb7nYzpyW&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Got asked to review a book proposal for "A Guide to Prompt Engineering".

More accurate title: "A Guide to Poking at the Environmentally Disastrous Racist Pile of Linear Algebra Trained on Stolen Data and Exploitative Labor Practices to Produce Outputs You're Too Lazy to Learn to Evaluate"

Among all the excitement we still managed to get a newsletter out the door:

https://systemsapproach.org/2025/06/16/a-middle-ground-for-ai/

And of course we were pretty happy that @Drbruced joined co-founder Larry Peterson on the list of SIGCOMM lifetime achievement award winners, evening up a longstanding imbalance in our organisation.
https://www.sigcomm.org/awards/sigcomm-award-recipients

You can read about P4 applications in our SDN book:
https://systemsapproach.org/books-html/#sdnbook

And we covered Batfish in one of our earlier newsletters:
https://systemsapproach.org/2021/08/30/verified-networks/

It's a big week for awards in the networking community. We're excited to see two software projects that we've been involved in received the Networking Systems award:

🏆 Batfish: An Open-source Network Configuration Analysis and Verification Platform
Developed by researchers at Microsoft and UCLA, Batfish revolutionizes network assurance by enabling proactive verification, enhancing reliability, security, and operational efficiency in complex network environments. Congratulations to the individuals recognized: Matt Brown, Ari Fogel, Dan Halperin, Victor Heohiardi, Ratul Mahajan, Todd Millstein, Corina Miner, Samir Parikh, and Spencer Reardon.

🏆 The Barefoot Tofino Programmable Switch Chips and the P4 Programming Language
Tofino and P4 have transformed network device programming, proving that fully programmable switches can achieve high-speed line-rate switching. This innovation has significantly influenced both research and industry. Congratulations to the individuals recognized: Anurag Agrawal, Antonin Bas, Mor Ben Asher, Mihai Budiu, Pat Bosshart, Calin Cascaval, Ed Doe, Chris Dodd, Andy Fingerhut, Nate Foster, Glenn Gibb, Martin Izzard, Changhoon Kim, Dan Lenoski, Nick McKeown, Fabian Ruffy, Dan Talayco, and Han Wang.

@ycor well, that somewhat depends on what spectrum of opinions we’re talking about. While they show that the claims that AI can apply “reasoning” to solve hard problems are likely overstated, they are hardly in the “AI is a nothing burger of hype” camp either. But we agree that it is a paper that’s making a single point, not an effort to explore the middle ground.

Google Cloud caused outage by ignoring its usual code quality protections

Promises operational change - and improvements to customer comms when it crashes Google Cloud has explained the massive outage it created last week and, as has happened many times previously, admitted that it broke itself.…
#theregister #IT
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/06/16/google_cloud_outage_incident_report/

A Middle Ground for AI

I sometimes feel like my career has been a long series of efforts to stake out the middle ground between extremes, with the result that I have irritated people on both sides of a technical argument more often than I can count. For example, when I was at Bellcore in the 1990s, many people from the Internet community hated ATM…

https://systemsapproach.org/2025/06/16/a-middle-ground-for-ai/

Congratulations to @Drbruced for receiving the SIGCOMM 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award! https://www.sigcomm.org/awards/sigcomm-award-recipients

No AI was used in the production of this book. We are artisanal authors and publishers.

This week is exciting:

Going to two different cricket matches at the Oakland Colesium!!

And the cricket stuff is sponsored by BART! And they’re going to make Oakland-specific merch

Of all places in the Bay Area, I didn’t think the first place to have a professional cricket game would be Oakland, but it makes me so happy.

https://bartable.bart.gov/featured/major-league-cricket-now-bartable

New book day - sort of. We have just issued a 2nd printing of "Edge Cloud Operations: A Systems Approach" since there have been enough changes in the last 3 years to warrant an update. Available direct from us or various online and physical store options https://systemsapproach.org/books-html/#opsbook

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

Further details are in the newsletter:
https://systemsapproach.org/2025/06/02/the-power-of-out-of-scope/ /FIN