Social media services have largely become a marketplace designed to capture and hold your attention, rather than places where people share information and talk to one another. A large part of this is because they are hosted on large-scale platforms that must be paid for by large, centralized companies. NOSTR is taking a different direction, creating a protocol and system that can be hosted by anyone, anywhere, to build a social network. Wouter Constant joins Tom and Russ to explain what NOSTR is, and how it’s different.
 
You can learn more about NOSTR here.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-324.mp3
 
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Who should be held liable when AI fails? Who is liable when an AI system “breaks into” a network or system, causing a major breach? Listen in as Tom and Russ discuss two articles covering these topics on this roundtable episode of the Hedge.

The two articles discussed in this episode are available here and here.

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Network engineers do not need to become full-time coders to succeed–but some coding skills are really useful. In this episode of the Hedge, David Barrosso (you can find David’s github repositories here), Phill Simonds, and Russ White discuss which programming skills are useful for network engineers.

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Just about everyone is watching the financial markets, either wondering how much better they can get, or when the AI financing bubble is going to crash. Dough Dawson, from POTs and PANs, joins Tom and Russ to talk about the logic of a coming crash, and consider where engineers should be looking for potential future career fields to weather the storm.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-322.mp3
 
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There are many “unsung technologies” in the Internet. While we often think of TCP/IP, various models, Ethernet, and DNS, we don’t often think about the lowly socket interface. What is the history of the socket, and why is it important in the world of the Internet? George Michaelson joins Colin Doyle and Russ White to discuss the history and importance of sockets.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-321.mp3
 

Over time, services like DNS and email have been centralized, leaving the Internet itself much more centralized. In this episode of the Hedge, Doug Jacobson joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss centralization and service consolidation.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-320.mp3
 
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AI is everywhere. While there are many questions about whether AI is a bubble, the ethics of AI, and the cultural impact of AI, in this episode of the Hedge Mike Bushong joins Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to talk about how network engineers can use AI. Are some use cases better than others? Are there pitfalls network engineers should avoid? Listen in and find out.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-319.mp3
 
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It’s time for Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to gather round the hedge and talk about various items of interest. In this roundtable, we consider what we can learn about product development from Bastiat, and the various ins and outs of Parkinson’s Law.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-318.mp3
 
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How effective are AI tools–even agentic AI tools placed into a system–at building and testing software? Derick Winkworth and Donald Sharp Join Russ to discuss various projects they’ve worked on using AI tools, lessons they’ve learned, and how developers can make effective use of AI.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-317.mp3
 
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Deploying AI for AI Ops, or even just for general use in your network, is very simple–but we often forget that these kinds of new technologies need to be governed. From privacy through cost, operators need to decide how to govern their AI deployments to control costs, ensure accuracy, measure productivity, and make certain these systems are being used effectively. Colin Cosgrove joins Russ and Tom to look at AI governance.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-316.mp3
 
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This episode was published with a link to the wrong audio file. I’ve updated it to the corrected filed.

Strong opinions loosely held? This is probably not as good of an idea as it seems. Instead of producing confidence, it might produce overconfidence. Michael Natkin joins Tom and Russ to discuss the problems with this mantra.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-017.mp3
 
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