alt.hn

5/10/2026 at 11:02:31 PM

How Fast Does Claude, Acting as a User Space IP Stack, Respond to Pings?

 https://dunkels.com/adam/claude-user-space-ip-stack-ping/

by adunk

5/11/2026 at 11:47:20 AM

There was a security engineer at my work doing something similar to this. He wanted to use LLMs as an IDS. I begged him to use BPF and stop wasting sprint cycles trying to reinvent a shittier slower wheel.

by cyberjerkXX

5/11/2026 at 11:49:35 AM

An elliptical wheel, at most. A square one without an axle, most probably.

by pfortuny

5/11/2026 at 5:38:30 PM

When I first saw this comment, it was downvoted into gray. But I can't imagine why. Apropos, and likely pretty accurate.

by jagged-chisel

5/11/2026 at 1:25:34 PM

For reference Adam Dunkels is the developer of lwIP and uIP ip-stacks , as well as the C64 "Contiki" OS that used the latter to do networking.

by whizzter

5/11/2026 at 11:18:38 AM

How fast can Claude do branch predictions in CPU?

by amelius

5/11/2026 at 6:06:25 PM

Value prediction's where the most gains are to be had. Of course, the irony of using an LLM to execute an LLM is delicious.

by nxobject

5/11/2026 at 3:01:01 AM

Wouldn't this be faster with an agent skill that has code?

/skill-creator [or /create-skill] Write an agent skill with code script(s) that use an existing user space IP library that works with your agent runtime, to [...]

ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills: https://github.com/ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills

anthopics/skills//skill-creator/SKILL.md: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/skill-...

/.agents/skills/skill-name/SKILL.md, scripts/{script_name.py,__init__.py}

https://agentskills.io/what-are-skills

by westurner

5/11/2026 at 3:19:52 AM

Well, yeah, of course it would be.

Even faster would just to be use code in the first place!

by trollbridge

5/13/2026 at 2:47:33 AM

But why would you use tokens instead of using the LLM to call code for this?

The minimum overhead to doing it with the LLM is the useful question

by westurner

5/11/2026 at 2:27:17 AM

That's why LLM will eventually be used only for initial interaction between the user in their language, to prepare the data to a specialized model.

Imagine face recognition to work like a text chat, where the PC gets the frame from the camera and writes in the chat: "Who's that? Here's the RGB888 image in hex: ...".

by ValdikSS

5/11/2026 at 6:09:00 AM

That's actually how vision language models already work, pretty much.

by FeepingCreature

5/11/2026 at 9:19:52 AM

And there's a reason nobody uses them for face recognition

Vision language models are an incredible achievement in the generality and usability. But they pay a hefty price in fidelity and speed

by wongarsu

5/11/2026 at 6:28:29 AM

Huh? The images are tokenized in the same way language is and it’s just fed into one single model. Not multiple smaller expert models.

Image gets rasterized into smaller pieces (eg 4x4 pixels) and each of those is assigned a token, similarly how text is broken up into tokens. And the whole thing is fed into a single model.

by stingraycharles

5/11/2026 at 7:51:29 AM

Yes I'm saying

> Imagine face recognition to work like a text chat, where the PC gets the frame from the camera and writes in the chat: "Who's that? Here's the RGB888 image in hex: ...".

that's p much how it works.

by FeepingCreature

5/11/2026 at 9:05:58 AM

But that isn’t a specialized model like the grandparent claimed, but rather a single, multi-modal model.

by stingraycharles

5/11/2026 at 10:10:20 AM

Yes, the "imagine" was showcasing the opposite of a specialized model to call it a bad idea.

by Dylan16807

5/11/2026 at 6:15:29 AM

Do you know that MoE is a thing?

by stingraycharles

5/11/2026 at 6:36:25 AM

The experts in MoEs aren't specialized in any meaningful task sense. From level of what we would think as tasks MoEs are selected essentially arbitrarily per token and per block.

by jampekka

5/11/2026 at 6:56:13 AM

It’s unsupervised, yes, but “unspecialized in any meaningful task sense” is incorrect, that’s the whole point. It’s just not in the sense of “this is a legal expert, this is a software developer”.

by stingraycharles

5/11/2026 at 12:37:19 PM

Optimal expert separation depends on the goal and can be pretty arbitrary, for example DeepSeek v4 separates them more or less by domain if I remember correctly.

by orbital-decay

5/11/2026 at 5:38:29 AM

think about how much faster it would've been with a small local model!

by fouc

5/11/2026 at 9:35:04 AM

This is cool, let aside the token usage, perhaps it can help analyze tcp throughput by redirect wire shark/to dump result

by mintflow

5/11/2026 at 10:13:06 AM

Opus 4.6 is already very good at troubleshooting all kinds of network problems if it has access to the command line tshark tool and the pcap files.

by fl7305

5/11/2026 at 3:41:00 PM

Agreed it’s pretty pro at deciphering logs, it figured out some weird NAT thing for me.

by pram

5/11/2026 at 6:40:36 AM

Modulo Anthropic messing with the model for load mitigation, I wonder how stable this result is.

1,000 pings, how many correctly ponged?

by twoodfin

5/11/2026 at 1:02:24 PM

is pong an actual term? If so I might've found a CS term better than wyde (2 bytes)

by mghackerlady

5/11/2026 at 3:17:06 PM

I've heard people use that a lot, but the original metaphor was sonar not table tennis. So it is more appropriately an echo reply (which is what the ICMP return packet is called in the RFC).

by technothrasher

5/12/2026 at 11:50:55 AM

I'll give you another one: In Japanese there is the (unserious) term "enbug" which is the opposite of debug.

by johnwalkr

5/11/2026 at 2:03:50 PM

Yes, very much so. A ping is a request, a pong a response.

by coldcity_again

5/11/2026 at 2:13:25 PM

2 bytes is a short…

by dymk

5/11/2026 at 3:21:29 PM

2 bytes is a wyde. Because, to quote knuth, "two bytes makes one wyde"

by mghackerlady

5/11/2026 at 7:28:24 AM

How quickly claude responds when it acts like a user space LLM chatbot?

by ShinyLeftPad

5/11/2026 at 2:41:14 PM

African or European?

by baq

5/11/2026 at 5:40:58 PM

Doesn't matter, the point is inception!

by ShinyLeftPad

5/11/2026 at 9:36:03 AM

>Fun? Oh yeah!

I think this author and I have different definitions of fun.

by ForHackernews

5/11/2026 at 3:51:16 PM

Was not expecting to see Adam in an AI post!

For me, he is the opposite of slop (AI or otherwise). This is the kind of guy that writes an operating system for your toaster and leaves enough resources free to run DOOM.

by throwa356262

5/11/2026 at 10:41:53 AM

If you wonder why your Copilot subscription has new limits that you hit every few days, it's because of PhDs like Adam.

Could Adam use a local model hosted on his own box? Probably yes. But he preferred to waste the service we all use just to produce a weak blog post that introduces absolutely no knowledge and serves no other purpose than to tell everyone that the author likes to waste resources and calls it "fun".

> Ridiculous? Yes. Wasteful of tokens? Sure. Fun? Oh yeah!

Do you really think it's fun to be one of these people who are the reason why the rest of us gets more limits?

by self_awareness

5/11/2026 at 10:45:08 AM

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

by mystifyingpoi

5/11/2026 at 11:02:49 AM

No.

In our lives, the game we play, we can do whatever we like. There are consequences for some things, but generally we can do lots of things.

We can kill people and get away with it. We can also help them.

Should we hate life because it's possible to do really shitty things in life? I don't think so. We should hate the "players" who actually do shitty things.

by self_awareness

5/11/2026 at 12:37:32 PM

Ok but hating a guy playing with an LLM is a bit extreme. These things are in many ways still just toys (toys that are becoming increasingly useful).

People almost certainly send dumber stuff to Claude than this, and just don’t write blog posts about it.

You could try other providers if Anthropic is too slow/limited, there’s some good alternatives.

(And your anger should probably be directed at Anthropic who hasn’t put in “better controls”, not the masses for not using the tool in the way you think they should. Hating rarely leads to anything productive.)

by wolttam

5/11/2026 at 12:45:54 PM

I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. Hating is just terminology I've used to reply to the parent poster. Personally I don't think hating anything will solve any problem.

True, people send dumber stuff to LLM, but some of them have the decency not to brag about it. But if they brag, then the common sense I imagine would be to tell them they are currently conducting a shitty thing. Yet on HN over 100 people told him that it's a cool idea. Also you seem to also be one of the "if the system allows it, then we all should do it" mentality people.

I mean you could argue that buying stuff and immediately throwing it to trash is perfectly fine, and if I'm mad about it, then it's my problem because "the person doesn't use the thing the same way I would imagine it to be used", but this argument just sounds silly to me. I know I'm right.

We have brains for a reason. We should use our free will, not offload any thinking to the system we live in.

Unless we don't have free will. I believe some of us don't have it, based on what I read.

by self_awareness

5/11/2026 at 2:32:30 PM

Talking about "We have brains and don't offload your thinking" while admonishing someone because you think you would have used their tokens better is wild.

by tekno45

5/12/2026 at 6:12:41 AM

You've literally just used the same argument from the previous poster which was even addressed by me in my parent reply. Talking about not thinking!

by self_awareness

5/12/2026 at 3:05:37 AM

excuse me? this is a cop out used to justify heinous things done under capitalism

by cybercatgurrl

5/11/2026 at 8:06:02 AM

Now do the equivalent of just in time compilation. Claude sees that we need to respond to a lot of pings and writes a program to compute it instead of thinking about each one.

by bot403

5/11/2026 at 3:29:57 PM

I eagerly await the publication of your RFC for IP over Slop Generators.

by kmeisthax

5/11/2026 at 2:17:50 PM

[flagged]

by Aegis_Labs

5/11/2026 at 10:58:15 AM

[dead]

by iluvcommunism

5/11/2026 at 10:16:00 AM

[dead]

by Ozzie-D

5/11/2026 at 2:38:35 AM

Next up: Claude replacement to handle simdjson processing.

by brcmthrowaway

5/11/2026 at 4:47:23 AM

Perhaps one day, all network services will be provided by LLMs natively. Truly, that would be a day in the future.

by jeremyjh

5/11/2026 at 7:04:40 AM

You could read about that in 1992 "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge. There is prompt injection in communication, in the book certain protocols for information communication can not be deterministic so if someone is too smart you get hacked.

by pastage

5/11/2026 at 8:21:38 AM

"Perhaps" doing enough lifting to participate in a bodybuilder contest, in that sentence

by lionkor

5/11/2026 at 5:48:01 AM

why? We already have more efficient specialized hardware.

by vrighter

5/11/2026 at 4:49:04 AM

I mean, we did decades of JavaScript, so... I mean... anything is possible, right? :)

by codezero

5/11/2026 at 2:22:34 PM

I’m sorry people aren’t getting it, or are so committed to downvoting humor here they’re tagging the good stuff.

by twoodfin

5/11/2026 at 10:14:13 AM

Do some people still claim "LLMs are just dumb auto completers"?

Because this seems to disprove that claim pretty convincingly?

by fl7305

5/11/2026 at 11:00:36 AM

It proves that code, specifically any code in the form of bytes, is, too, language.

by AlienRobot

5/11/2026 at 2:08:37 PM

I like that. And if poetry can be defined as succinct use of language (perhaps a dubious assertion), then code can be poetry.

by coldcity_again

5/11/2026 at 10:46:49 AM

Oh, they are. It's just that the harness around it is able to pick up the commands it "autocompletes" and runs them for you. LLM can't run anything, it never could.

by mystifyingpoi

5/12/2026 at 10:55:55 AM

What do you mean that the "harness ran the commands"?

It looks to me like the LLM "executed" the logic in pure output tokens, not by using any kind of external tool calls?

by fl7305

5/12/2026 at 11:56:36 AM

Right, I mean that the logic of creating the packet was in the output tokens, sure. But the actual sending of the packet was done by bash command.

by mystifyingpoi

5/13/2026 at 10:15:35 AM

Sure, we agree there.

But it seems to me that if the LLM can effectively "execute" the instruction of how to take an input IP packet and generate a response IP packet based on a set or rules, then that's effectively a general purpose processor. And not an "auto completer", right?

by fl7305

5/11/2026 at 10:21:37 AM

[dead]

by huflungdung