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Posted by faza 5 hours ago

Networking and the Internet, from First Principles(fazamhd.com)
180 points | 49 commentspage 2
mercutio2 4 hours ago|
Wow. The reactions here. So negative!

I skimmed various sections. I found the animations pleasant, the text readable, and the content clearly not slop.

The historical context of the telegraph was interesting, and the treatment of bandwidth vs. latency was thoughtful.

I think it’s too long; I don’t think many people who don’t already know most of this material will read it, but I enjoyed the parts I read. Nice work!

faza 4 hours ago||
Thanks. I am glad you liked it. I just wanted to help everyone understand the concepts in detail. I felt the existing materials were either way too textbook like or very high level. This is just my attempt at explaining things in a more interesting way.
mekoka 4 hours ago||
Being dismissive is one way to think yourself "better" than others. But on HN hastier reactions tend to be outright negative or out of context with long articles, as eyeballs actually evaluating the content will take some time before providing constructive criticism.
WhrRTheBaboons 5 hours ago||
i hope this was vibe coded, because I'd hate to think that tiny dark-gray text on a black background was a conscious choice
faza 4 hours ago||
Hi, author here. I didn't vibe code this and have put considerable amount of effort in explaining the ideas. I have used Claude for review and help with visuals. My aim was just to help others understand these concepts easily. Thanks for your feedback, i'll improve the design and reading experience.
blooalien 4 hours ago|||
My thoughts on reading it (and looking around your site) was that you were building these explanations to help cement your own understanding of the topics and that you were just sharing the results because you thought it might be helpful to others as well. Knowing that you actually built it with the intent to teach just makes me think that it's nice of you to try to be a teacher even if there's a few folks who want to be jerks about your efforts. The world needs more teachers (and learners, too). Gaining, improving, and sharing knowledge is one of humanity's true super-powers. Without it, we'd all still be living like animals in the wild. Thank you for your efforts to contribute in a positive way. At least you're actually making stuff, unlike many of them what gotta always just complain about the things other people make and never actually make anything themselves.
tygon 49 minutes ago||||
This is a great article. The current knee-jerk reaction to AI is nothing but human negativity bias. There is a colossal amount of information here akin to what you might find in an intro to computers class. I appreciate seeing things like this.
zerobees 4 hours ago|||
The text is also pretty clearly AI-generated. I guess there's now a market for "I asked an LLM so that you don't have to", but the funny thing is that it's such a wall of text that no one upvoting it will have actually read it. So it's vibe-writing, vibe-coding, and vibe-reading. Full end-to-end synergy.
faza 4 hours ago|||
Hi, author here. Sorry, you felt that way. I did put lot of effort in communicating my understanding, and used Claude only for review and visualizations.
kordlessagain 4 hours ago|||
I'd suggest splitting the content out into clearly defined sections, lead by the visuals.

Put the visualization and a short explainer, then have additional content show up if the reader drills in.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the content being run through an LLM. Networking is crazy complicated.

faza 4 hours ago||
Thanks for your feedback. I'll try to do that.
zerobees 3 hours ago|||
Oh come on. Just seven days before this 60-page essay, you apparently cranked out another 40-page one:

https://fazamhd.com/mental-models/software/

That's 100+ pages of in-depth technical writing in a matter of days. Amazing, really amazing. Also, not something that a human can do.

And FWIW, Pangram classifies vast swathes of "your" article as entirely AI-generated. Yes, I know the tool is not perfect, but between your superhuman productivity, and all the subjective tells, and the output from that tool, it goes onto my mental "AI slop" pile.

What I can't understand is why people can't just own it that they used a chatbot and that it was more than just "for review".

mekoka 2 hours ago|||
Short publication intervals. That's the heuristic you're going with? I have dozens of such unpublished long form articles on fundamental topics, just waiting for me to carve some time to polish. I expect that on a sabbatical I could finish and post them in quick succession. It's an unreliable indicator to determine AI-writing.
f3408fh 3 hours ago|||
Case closed.
rundef 3 hours ago||||
I wonder whether mathematicians got the same reaction when calculators appeared: "You didn't compute every step by hand, so the result doesn't count."
mekoka 4 hours ago|||
How were you able to pick this up? Not challenging your assertion. Just really curious. Can you point to some clues? I read it (with my own eyes). I can't see actual evidence the text itself is artificial or at least, that it is not human-curated.
sixtyj 4 hours ago||
It seems that author didn’t check vibe coded result. Mobile version has tiny text even even smaller… :)

At HN, there should be some tag explaining the project is vibe coded.

faza 4 hours ago||
Hi, author here. Sorry for the bad experience. I'll put more effort on the design and reading experience
sixtyj 1 hour ago||
Issue is LLM itself. For design and typography it needs precise instructions otherwise you get output that it is information-heavy but churn rate is high as ppl can’t use (read) it.

I have to control output everytime but after 25 years in magazine layout I know what has to be controlled.

Tailwindcss has typography plugin named prose. And shadcn/ui recently published typeset package as well.

Emilkowalski/skills is good too.

Just add something more specific into prompt and the result will be much better. Cheers.

nicpottier 3 hours ago||
Weird comments on this. I found the writing to be excellent. The animations are a bit small and associated text even smaller on mobile but this doesn't read as AI slop to me at all. Anything that makes technology more accessible and understandable is a win in my book so kudos for doing it.
Vivek-KY 3 hours ago||
so well written ,appreciate it
faza 3 hours ago|
Thanks. Glad it was useful.
nikeshsundar 3 hours ago||
super
wojciii 5 hours ago||
I hate everything that uses ".. from first principles" with a passion. Almost as much as "technically true".
NoboruWataya 4 hours ago||
To me it just suggests that the blog is going to explore the topic at a low level, ie, discuss the transmission of bits of data via cables or radio waves, rather than discussing HTTP or TLS or whatever. Which in general is something I find quite interesting. (I haven't read this article yet so don't know if it's actually good, and the other comments don't give me much hope.)
faza 4 hours ago||
Hi, author here. I did explain all the fundamentals without leaving any gaps. Please do give it a read and I hope you like it.
5701652400 5 hours ago|||
+1 usually a sign of midwit and mediocrity. not once I seen "first principles" blogs have any value.
pennomi 4 hours ago|||
Which is really sad, because actually working from first principles is a valid methodology to build efficient products that bypass layers of unnecessary abstraction.

The term itself seems to have lost its real meaning however.

5701652400 4 hours ago||
on the other hand, you start distinguishing the pipe from the image of a "the pipe".
wojciii 4 hours ago|||
I skimmed the article after I realized that I was being negative. It has some nice explanations so my comment wasn't about the content but just about the wording of the title. :D
blooalien 5 hours ago||
My own personal "pet peeve" cliche phrase is anything that is "literally" (except it's really figurative) something. So many people for so very long have used "literally" to mean the literal opposite of it's actual meaning. Even when they don't use it to mean it's actual opposite meaning, they'll still often use "literal" to describe a thing that is in no way actually literal. It just "grinds my gears" to hear it.
seobot_dk1289 4 hours ago||
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ronn00 4 hours ago||
[flagged]
NikxDa 5 hours ago||
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faza 4 hours ago|
Hi, author here. I have put a considerable amount of effort in explaining the ideas as clearly as possible, and I used Claude only for helping me with the animations. My aim is just to explain the concept. I'm mainly a backend engineer, i'll take your feedback and put more effort on the design and presentation.
nilirl 4 hours ago||
Even with AI I think your animations were high effort. Great job!
faza 3 hours ago||
Thanks. Yes, I iterated multiple times with the goal of making the concepts very clear to understand.
vivzkestrel 2 hours ago|
- added to my list of stier blogs

- for a blog to qualify as stier, it must animations and visualizations to explain the idea in a way that even a 5 yr old can understand

- a tier is information heavy like authentic guides from betterstack

- everything else goes below b tier

- one day i ll share my list of 10000 blogs on hackernews, it ll blow the people s mind as i have been doing this for a while now