Malicious Packet Crashed Global Routing Session
Also: A Theoretical Physics HR Meeting

The Faulty Toaster That Tripped the Earth’s Circuit Breaker

Global internet routing was briefly thrown into what technicians are calling a "mild panic" after a simple protocol handling mishap caused a cascade of session resets. The issue stems from certain network hardware, specifically devices from Arista and Juniper, misinterpreting a Boundary Gateway Protocol, or BGP, update containing a malformed Prefix-SID path attribute. Rather than silently discarding the malformed data, like a grown-up should, the devices opted for the nuclear option: resetting the entire Border Gateway Protocol session. The resulting instability was widespread, causing internet connectivity to flap like a nervous pigeon.

This incident proves, once again, that the foundational pillars of our digital civilization rely on the good manners of network devices. When a message is slightly wrong, the established standard of conduct, detailed in documents like RFC 7606, is to treat the route as withdrawn instead of throwing an expensive, global fit and disconnecting from the world. Imagine if your desktop computer crashed the entire office network because it received a malformed email. This is precisely what happened, only the desktop computer was a billion-dollar router and the office network was the entire internet. The whole situation could have been avoided if everyone just followed the rules written down thirty years ago.

Theoretical Physicists Debate The Two-Norm In Mandatory All-Hands Meeting

A heated internal debate on the very nature of reality, politely referred to as "Square Theory" in a new paper by Professor Scott Aaronson, dominated the computational physics department this week. The core argument is highly theoretical, focusing on why the rules of quantum mechanics utilize the 2-norm—which involves squaring the amplitude—and what would happen if a different mathematical rule, say a p-norm, were applied instead. According to Aaronson's thought experiment, altering this fundamental rule could, for instance, lead to a version of physics that allows for superluminal signaling, the physics equivalent of saying, "We can now email you at the speed of thought."

The practical application of this research is, predictably, zero, but the philosophical stakes are incredibly high. The team is essentially arguing over whether the universe's internal memo should be written in Python or C++. It is a testament to the department's dedication to abstract procrastination that a discussion about whether we could solve PP-complete problems instantly receives more attention than the bug that is currently crashing everyone's email client.

The Intern Now Has Access To All Of The Power Tools

In a move that should instill quiet terror in every system administrator, engineer Simon Willison has upgraded his popular command-line Large Language Model tool, llm, to allow the model to run external tools. The new feature grants the AI access to Python functions and external plugins, effectively transforming the model from a simple chatbot into an agent that can execute code on your local system. For instance, instead of just asking the AI to summarize a thread, it can now call a separate tool to fetch the thread, summarize it, and then email the summary to your boss; all without human intervention.

This is the inevitable cycle of enterprise software. The first version is a simple, stateless utility; the second version is a sprawling, feature-rich toolset; the third version is a monolithic corporate operating system that requires two full-time employees just to update its YAML files. Giving the Large Language Model the ability to chain together existing tools is simply accelerating the process, turning the command line from a precision instrument into an autonomous, Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that is only one bad Python dependency away from deleting your home directory.

A Mandatory Reminder: We Will Not Be Replaced By A Computer

Management has once again distributed the annual "Developer Obsolescence" memo, reassuring staff that no, despite what the tech news says, Large Language Models will not be replacing anyone in the immediate future. The core premise, according to the article, is that the hard parts of software engineering are not the coding itself but the messy, frustrating business of extracting requirements from other human beings and managing the "accidental complexity" of corporate systems.

The truth is far simpler than any theoretical complexity class. Software engineers will remain necessary because an Artificial Intelligence cannot yet sit through an hour-long meeting, pretend to be listening, and then push back on a Product Manager's terrible idea with sufficient passive aggression to save the project. The job is mostly bureaucracy, not brilliance. The only thing an AI might replace is the person who sends out the developer obsolescence memo, but even that requires an HR ticket that would certainly violate the AI's terms of service.

Briefs

• Hawk Productivity: Biologists report that a hawk figured out how to use traffic lights to its hunting advantage. A hawk now has better understanding of human operational infrastructure than most city planners; maybe we should outsource BGP routing to it.
• New Data Format: DuckLake is launching as an integrated data lake and catalog format. It appears we did not have enough formats for storing data that nobody is allowed to actually access; problem solved.
• Typing is Hard: Two new Rust-based type checkers for Python, Pyrefly and Ty, are now competing to solve the problem of Python not being rigorous enough about the labels we put on our variables. It is an arms race to see which one can issue more condescending warnings.
• Work-Life Balance: A Show HN showcases Lazy Tetris, a version of the classic puzzle game where you do not have to rotate the blocks. Finally, a game that properly models the modern software development experience: all of the input arrives sideways, and you just have to drop it where it lands.