Dive into the complete episode list for Oxide and Friends. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
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25 Jul 2023
Books in the Box III
01:30:02
In an Oxide and Friends tradition, Bryan and Adam invite the community to share book recommendations.
We love Rust at Oxide, but the haters aren’t wrong: builds can be slow. Bryan and Adam are joined by Sean Klein, Rain Paharia, and Steve Klabnik to discuss techniques for analyzing and accelerating Rust builds.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
20 Sep 2024
Reflecting on Founder Mode
01:22:14
With some time passed, Bryan and Adam offer a non-hot take on Paul Graham's "Founder Mode" post. While there is plenty to quibble over, there's also the kernel of an important idea: how to balance experience, novel thinking, and limited time? Also stay tuned as they share a years old "ego con".
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
22 Feb 2022
Engineering Culture
01:44:08
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: February 21st, 2022
Engineering Culture
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for February 21st, 2022.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Alex Heath’s tweet on FB meeting about updated values: “meta, metamates, me”
[@4:44](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=284) Can an established company “change its values” in any sense?
[@8:43](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=523) Draw the owl > Twilio CEO: Yes, it was a meme, but it’s a great representation of our job. > There is no instruction book and no one is going to tell us how to do our work. > It’s now woven into our culture and used as a cheeky, but encouraging reply to > those who email colleagues at Twilio asking how to do something.
[@12:42](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=762) How do you establish engineering culture?
Copy-paste values?
[@20:44](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=1244) When are values set down in a company’s history?
Amazon’s brand image, expanding beyond books
Assessing values when hiring
[@27:51](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=1671) Principles vs values
Principles are absolutes, cannot be taken too far
Values are about relative importance, in balance with other values
Adam: Get it right first, but it’s not a lost cause if you don’t.
Bryan: Look for value alignment in organizations you might want to join, it’s tough to change course after the fact.
Matt: generous compensation has an effect on how closely one cares to scrutinize their organization’s values ¯_(ツ)_/¯
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
05 Oct 2021
Economics and Open Source
01:39:25
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 4th, 2021
Economics and Open Source
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 4th, 2021.
Gerald Ford inaugural address (including its most famous line, “our long national nightmare is over”) > I went in a Gerald Ford cynic, and came out a Gerald Ford super-fan
Roger’s “The Process File System and Process Model in UNIX System V” paper
[@7:43](https://youtu.be/85eApYSj3ic?t=463) “I am on a mission from God to make programs debuggable”
AVL trees and linked lists > Performance is the root of all evil.
[@11:37](https://youtu.be/85eApYSj3ic?t=697) > Roger made this incredible contribution about debugging infrastructure > being an attribute of a production system.
The German word that we’re seeking: Misappropriation-of-mechanism-in-a-seemingly-clever way-but-is-ultimately-a-disaster > ptrace is the x86 of system calls
[@16:45](https://youtu.be/85eApYSj3ic?t=1005) A long-coming apology..
Bryan’s 2007 Dtrace review, Google TechTalk ~80mins
[@48:07](https://youtu.be/85eApYSj3ic?t=2887) Dtrace language inspiration
Dtrace clones > It was all based on us exploring some phenomenon, > something being kind of a pain in the ass or impossible, > and inventing something that was easy to use.
Architectural review board: “This reminds us a lot of awk..” > What’s the most powerful one-liner you can crank out with awk?
Andres Freund joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details with Andres. We started by ranting about the coverage in the New York Times… coverage that explicitly refused to dig into the details! It’s all the more shocking because the big story here is how Andres’ penchant for digging into the details is what saved us all from what would have been a pervasive and damaging attack!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Recorded April 8th, 2024
21 Sep 2021
Theranos, Silicon Valley, and the March Madness of Tech Fraud
01:12:49
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 20th, 2021
Theranos, Silicon Valley, and the March Madness of Tech Fraud
Cole’s tweet linking to a ~5min video of a would-be Theranos competitor commenting on its collapse > The lone inventor is a dangerous impression to give people.
Related: Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman “The Myth of the Genius Programmer” 2009 talk ~55mins
[@9:47](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=587) Companies that drive scientific people nuts
uBeam “claims to be developing a wireless charging system to work via ultrasound. Scientists have strongly criticised the plausibility under physics of this proposal.”
uBiome > To innovate, you have to balance the world as it is with the world as it isn’t.
[@13:44](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=824) Theranos’ fantastical vision. European attitudes around business and innovation.
PCR Polymerase chain reaction invented 1983 by Kary Mullis.
[@18:39](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1119) Fake it till you make it?
Optative voice > The secrecy of Theranos should have been a red flag
[@23:57](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1437) Whistleblower Avie Tevanian. Smoke and mirrors, giving the board the run around.
[@29:05](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1745) “Everyone was relying on someone else to do their due diligence”
Inconsistency between board and leadership on what the coming milestones are
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
28 Nov 2023
OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl
01:10:26
So… OpenAI happened… and Bryan and Adam try it break it down with help from Steve Tuck and even more special guest Chuck McManis.
Fermat's Last Theorem (an + bn = cn only possible for n = 1 or n = 2) > I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain. - Fermat
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 30th, 2021
A brief history of talking computers
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 30, 2021.
Apple IIe computer and the Echo II speech synthesizer card.
[@4:15](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=255) The Echo ][ sound sample
Wargames computer: GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN. Listen > SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? > Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War? > … > Is this a game or is it real? > WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? > … > What’s it doing? > It’s learning… > … > A STRANGE GAME. > THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS > NOT TO PLAY.
[@1:15:25](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=4525) One of the most important settings a blind person will want to change in their speech synthesizer is how fast it talks.
Topical recent conference presentation: - Emily Shea (2019) Voice Driven Development video
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
17 Apr 2025
Character Limit with Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
01:27:09
Bryan and Adam have been gushing for months over Character Limit, the fantastic book by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac about Elon Musk's haphazard and disastrous takeover of Twitter. They're joined by the authors themselves to discuss the book, Musk, DOGE, and some of the Character Limit unreleased B-sides.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
16 Nov 2021
The Wrath of Kahn
00:59:13
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 15th, 2021
The Wrath of Kahn
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 15th, 2021.
[@53:15](https://youtu.be/oft5i5RzIC8?t=3195) Mat: The Dream Machine
M. Mitchell Waldrop (2001) “The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal” book
DARPA, private public research funding
[@56:57](https://youtu.be/oft5i5RzIC8?t=3417) The hero narrative sells well
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
25 Apr 2024
All we have to fear is FUD itself
01:21:01
The Oxide Friends have talked about the Hashicorp license change, the emergence of an open source fork of Terraform in OpenTofu, and other topics in open source. A few weeks ago both InfoWorld and Hashicorp (independently?) accused OpenTofu of stealing Terraform code—a serious claim that turned out to be fully unfounded. We (you!) have been lucky to avoid this topic with a couple of guests lined up to talk about the xz exploit discovery and founding the Oakland Ballers… but we ran out of distractions! Bryan and Adam talk about this FUD and FUD generally.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
28 Oct 2022
Let That Sink In! (Whither Twitter?)
01:43:18
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 27th, 2022
Let That Sink In! (Whither Twitter?)
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 27th, 2022.
George Cozma of Chips and Cheese joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about AMD's new 5th generation EPYC processor, codename: Turin. What's new in Turin and how is Oxide's Turin-based platform coming along?
dtrace.conf(24) -- The DTrace unconference, December 11th, 2024
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
21 Mar 2023
Does a GPT future need software engineers?
01:39:18
Bryan and Adam and the Oxide Friends take on GPT and its implications for software engineering. Many aspiring programmers are concerned that the future of the profession is in jeopardy. Spoiler: the Oxide Friends see a bright future for human/GPT collaboration in software engineering.
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from March 20th, 2023.
Wizord: the question is, when will it be in competition with people?
Wizord: copilot also can review code and find bugs if you ask it in a right way
ag_dubs: i suspect that a new job will be building tools that help make training sets better and i strongly suspect that will be a programming job. ai will need tools and data and content and there's just a whole bunch of jobs to build tools for AI instead of people
Wizord: re "reading manual and writing DTrace scripts" I think it's possible, if done with a large enough token window.
Wizord: (there are already examples of GPT debugging code, although trivial ones)
flaviusb: The chat here is really interesting to me, as it seems to miss the point of the thing. ChatGPT does not and can not ever 'actually work' - and whether it works is kind of irrelevant. Like, the Jaquard Looms and Numerical Control for machining did not 'work', but that didn't stop the roll out.
Columbus: Maybe it has read the dtrace manual 😉
JustinAzoff: I work with a "long tail" language, and chatgpt sure is good at generating code that LOOKS like it might work, but is usually completely wrong
clairegiordano: Some definite fans of DTrace on this show
ag_dubs: a thing i want to chat about is how GPT can affect the "pace" of software development
sudomateo: I also think it's a lot less than 100% of engineers that engage in code review.
Wizord: yes, I've had some good experience with using copilot for code review
ag_dubs: chatgpt is good at things that are already established... its not good at new things, or things that were just published
Wizord: very few people I know use it for the purpose of comments/docs. just pure codegen/boilerplayes
chadbrewbaker: "How would you write a process tree with dtrace?" (ChatGPT4)
TronDD: That's interesting as expensive, specialized code analysis tools have been varying level of terrible for a long time
JustinAzoff: I did an experiment before where I asked it to write me some php to insert a record into a database. so of course it generated code with sql injection
chiefnoah: It's ability seems to scale with how many times someone has done the exact thing you're trying to do before
JustinAzoff: but then I asked if sql injection was bad, which it explained that it was. then I asked if the code it wrote me was vulnerable to sql injection. it then explained it was
Columbus: It misses empirical verification; forming a hypothesis, testing it, and learning from the result. There have been some attempts to implement this by feeding back e.g. command output into the prompt
JustinAzoff: so then the crazy part, I asked if sql injection was bad, why did it give me code that was vulnerable to sql injection. It the went on to say that the first thing it gave me was just for example purposes
JustinAzoff: so no wonder people get into "prompt engineering" since it's clear that you need to do things like ask for code that does something, and is secure, high performance, does not have buffer overflows or sql injection vulns
MattCampbell: In my test case ("Write a Win32 UI Automation provider in C++"), all it did was produce plausible-sounding crap
ag_dubs: pattern matching over very very large data sets
clairegiordano: Bryan just said this and I wanted to write it down, re GPT-3: "the degree that it changes its answers when you tell GPT-3 to think like someone else"
JustinAzoff: or even just, "do that, but better"
ag_dubs: i think a lot of the awe of gpt is recognizing how simple our own strategies are instead of how complex the AI's strategy is
chadbrewbaker: "How would Bryan Cantrill re-write this script?" (ChatGPT4)
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
17 Jan 2024
Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison
01:33:19
Simon Willison joined Bryan and Adam to discuss a recent article maligning open source large language models. Simon has so much practical experience with LLMs, and brings so much clarity to what they can and can’t do. How do these systems work? How do they break? What are open and proprietary LLMs out there?
Recorded 1/15/2024
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording.
Simon posted a follow up blog article where he explains using MacWhisper and Claude to make his LLM pull out a few of his favorite quotes from this episode:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
01 Apr 2025
Raiding the Minibar
01:52:28
Much of the work at Oxide goes into hardware and software used to build and test the eventual product. Bryan and Adam were joined by Ian, Doug, and Nathanael to talk about "Minibar", a rig for connecting up an Oxide server (code name: Gimlet) for manufacturing and internal use. Triumphs and catastrophes including stabbing a connector with a guide pin and bringup mishaps!
Oxide Founder and CEO, Steve Tuck, joined Bryan, Adam, and Oxide Friend, Steve Klabnik, to talk about our recent announcements: general availability of the Oxide Cloud Computer, and raising $44m. The reception was (broadly) great! Bryan and Steve answered questions about the product, company, and launch.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
28 Feb 2023
Rack-scale Networking
01:34:27
Bryan and Adam are joined by a number of members of the Oxide networking team to talk about the networking software that drives the Oxide rack. It turns out that rack-scale networking is hard... and has enormous benefits!
Riking Line rate = As fast as the packets could possibly come. 1Gbit, 10Gbit, 100Gbit, etc
admchl Do you need ASICs to hit that speed? I assume x86_64 is not going to be fast enough for these specialised operations?
levon Yes, the Tofino 2 is the ASIC
bcantrill You need ASICs
bnaecker Yes, you really can't do these kinds of operations on a general purpose CPU.
rng_drizzt Yeah, you need specialized silicon here.
JustinAzoff Right, also often across all ports at the same time in both direction. a 48 port 10gbps switch will have a line rate of 960gbps (10 ** 48 ** 2)
duckman So the advantage is being able to offload compute to the switch?
bnaecker Yes, and specifically that you can separate the data plane (operations on the packets) from the control plane (decisions about what operations to allow or make).
ryaeng Sure beats logging into a number of Cisco switches and making changes at the console.
admchl This is my favourite episode in a long time, this is all really fascinating.
rng_drizzt the first Sidecar episode was nearly 1.5 years ago ü§Ø , right after we cut the first rev
levon That episode blew my mind
duckman This sounds like a big deal on the scale of ebpf
duckman Or bigger
bnaecker It is extremely useful for understanding the processing pipelines. As long as you only run single-packet integration tests üôÇ
od0 just want to go out and find things to write P4 code for
JustinAzoff <@354365572554948608> yeah one way to think about that sort of thing is that xdp can be used to run little programs on a nic, where p4 is kind of like that, but running on effectively a nic with 48+ ports
wmf So you have P4 and OPTE in the hypervisor at the same time?
bnaecker OPTE is in the host kernel.
arjenroodselaar The P4 runtime Ry described only exists in the test bed, where it high level simulates the switches. OPTE is part of the production environment.
arjenroodselaar The rough difference between P4 and OPTE is that P4 works on individual packets without much concept of a session (so it can't reason about TCP streams, packet order etc, so no firewall like functionality), while OPTE aims to operate on streams of packets.
JustinAzoff So you can run 100 VMs on a test system and wire them up to your virtual switch compiled by x4c?
rng_drizzt The Sidecar switch is actually just a PCIe peripheral to a Gimlet.
bnaecker The Gimlet managing the Sidecar is often called a "Scrimlet" for "Sidecar attached Gimlet"
Riking and "how do i reconfigure this giant network without hosing my ability to reconfigure this giant network"
ShaunO can identify with that - we seriously struggle to keep our own products inter-operating, let alone anyone else's
levon It can feel like a Sisyphean task.
a172 Setup a much smaller/simpler network in parallel that is accessible from "not your network" that gets you to the management interface.
levon It's a whole new world when you can look at the actual table definitions in P4
rng_drizzt Owning all the layers here is immensely beneficial
levon Those DTrace probes have been very helpful
bnaecker Those probes turned out to be everywhere. They are are in: SQL queries, HTTP queries, log messages, Propolis hypervisor state, virtual storage system, networking protocol messages, the P4 emulator, and probably more that I'm forgetting about.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
18 Apr 2023
Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?
01:22:16
The Rust Foundation caused a fracas with their proposed new trademark rules. Bryan and Adam were lucky enough to be joined by Ashley Williams, Adam Jacob, and Steve Klabnik for an insightful discussion of open source governance and communities--in particular as applied to Rust. Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from April 17th, 2023.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
02 May 2023
Blue Skies Over Mastodon (with Erin Kissane and Tim Bray)
01:41:29
Erin Kissane joins Bryan and Adam to talk the new social network "Bluesky" through the lens of her blog post "Blue Skies Over Mastodon". Long-time friends of Oxide and social-media aficionados Time Bray and Steve Klabnik also helped shed light on technical and social aspects of the net network. Blue Skies Over Mastodon (with Erin Kissane and Tim Bray)
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from May 1st, 2023.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
26 Apr 2022
Fail Whaling
01:42:01
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: April 25th, 2022
Fail Whaling
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for April 25th, 2022.
How could an alternative be built? What would it look like?
Bryan predicts: change of headquarters, "burning the flag"
Adam predicts: resale or IPO within 3 years
See also: Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill CTO vs VP Engineeringvideo ~45mins (audio is rough, content is good)
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
04 Jul 2023
Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!
02:02:53
On this week's show, Adam Leventhal posed questions from Hacker News (mostly) to Oxide founders Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck. Stick around until the end to hear about the hardest parts of building Oxide--great, surprising answers from both Bryan and Steve.
Congrats to the team, but after hearing about Oxide for literal years since the beginning of the company and repeatedly reading different iterations of their landing page, I still don't know what their product actually is. It's a hypervisor host? Maybe? So I can host VMs on it? And a network switch? So I can....switch stuff? (*)
A:
Steve: A rack-scale computer; "A product that allows the rest of the market that runs on-premises IT access to cloud computing."Bryan: agrees
[@8:46] Q:
It's like an on prem AWS for devs. I don't understand the use case but the hardware is cool. (*)I didn’t understand the business opportunity of Oxide at all. Didn’t make sense to me.However if they’re aiming at the companies parachuting out of the cloud back to data centers and on prem then it makes a lot of sense.It’s possible that the price comparison is not with comparable computing devices, but simply with the 9 cents per gigabyte egress fee from major clouds. (*)
A:
Bryan: "Elastic infrastructure is great and shouldn't be cloistered to the public cloud"; Good reasons to run on-prem: compliance, security, risk management, latency, economics; "Once you get to a certain size, it really makes sense to own"Steve: As more things move onto the internet, need for on-prem is going to grow; you should have the freedom to own
[@13:31] Q:
Somebody help me understand the business value. All the tech is cool but I don't get the business model, it seems deeply impractical.
You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this, but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud.
Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud, all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high cost to switch.
AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds, which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch.
Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to run everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues you would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is this? Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering questionable value here.
Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're not making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc). I am skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have not noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups.
So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to migrate out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever hardware they manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a time, who doesn't need any custom hardware, and is willing to put up with whatever off-the-beaten path difficulties are going to occur because of the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT is very low value for the customer. Who is this? Even the poster child for needing on prem, the CIA is on AWS now.I don't get it, it just seems like a bunch of geeks playing with VC money?(*)
A:
Bryan: "EE side quests" rant; you can't build robust, elastic infrastructure on commodity hardware at scale; "The minimum viable product is really, really big"; Example: monitoring fan power draw, tweaking reference desgins doesn't cut it Example: eliminating redundant AC power suppliesSteve: "Feels like I’m dealing with my divorced parents" post
[@32:24] Q (Chat):
It would be nice to see what this thing is like before having to write a big checkSteve: We are striving to have lab infrastructure available for test drives
[@32:56] Q (Chat):
I want to know about shipping insurance, logistics, who does the install, ...Bryan: "Next week we'll be joined by the operations team" we want to have an indepth conversation about those topics
[@34:40] Q:
Seems like Oxide is aiming to be the Apple of the enterprise hardware (which isn't too surprising given the background of the people involved - Sun used to be something like that as were other fully-integrated providers, though granted that Sun didn't write Unix from scratch). Almost like coming to a full circle from the days where the hardware and the software was all done in an integrated fashion before Linux turned-up and started to run on your toaster. (*)
A:
Bryan: We find things to emulate in both Apple and Sun, e.g., integrated hard- and software; AS/400Steve: "It's not hardware and software together for integration sake", it's required to deliver what the customer wants; "You can't control that experience when you only do half the equation"
[@42:38] Q:
I truly and honestly hope you succeed. I know for certain that the market for on-prem will remain large for certain sectors for the forseeable future. However. The kind of customer who spends this type of money can be conservative. They already have to go with on an unknown vendor, and rely on unknown hardware. Then they end up with a hypervisor virtually no one else in the same market segment uses.Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or harder sell here?Innovation budget can be a useful concept. And I'm afraid it's being stretched a lot. (*)
A:
Bryan: We can deliver more value with our own hypervisor; we've had a lot of experience in that domain from Joyent. There are a lot of reasons that VMware et al. are not popular with their own customers; Intel vs. AMDSteve: "We think it's super important that we're very transparent with what we're building"
[@56:05] Q:
what is the interface I get when I turn this $$$ computer on? What is the zero to first value when I buy this hardware? (*)
A:
Steve: "You roll the rack in, you have to give it power, and you have give it networking [...] and you are then off on starting the software experience"; Large pool of infrastructure reosources for customers/devs/SREs/... in a day or less; Similar experience to public cloud providers
[@01:02:06] Q:
One of my concerns when buying a complete so...
11 Oct 2022
Holistic Boot
01:31:16
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 10th, 2022
Holistic Boot
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 10th, 2022.
11 Jul 2023
Tales from Manufacturing: Shipping Rack 1
01:24:13
Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide operations team to discuss the logistics of actually assembling the first Oxide Rack, crating it, shipping it... and all the false starts, blind alleys, and failed tests along the way.
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from July 10th, 2023.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
24 Oct 2023
Open Source and Capitalism with Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob
01:39:40
Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob joined Adam and Bryan to continue their panel discussion with Bryan following up his p99conf talk revisiting open source anti-patterns. Notably, open source has accelerated the distribution of value… without clarity on how contributors can capture that value. Has open source accelerated unequal distribution?
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
10 Jan 2024
Predictions 2024!
01:56:39
Bryan and Adam are joined by MIT Research Scientist, Michael Cafarella, for our annual predictions episode where we check in on past predictions and gaze 1-, 3-, and 6- years into the future. No surprise: there were a lot of AI-related predictions. Big surprise: many of them came from Bryan … and with unabashed optimism!
Recorded 1/8/2024
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal were your hosts. Additional speakers--and predicters--are listed below with their predictions. (If you made predictions, please submit a PR to add or clarify yours)
PRs needed!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
23 Aug 2022
Bringup Lab Chronicles: A Measurement Two Years in the Making
01:34:55
The Oxide electrical engineers share their experience bringing up a 100Gb link--it's got everything from a purpose-built probing station to a 100Ω resistor that proved to be the difference between life and death (of the company)
27 Sep 2022
Losing the Signal with Sean Silcoff
01:08:29
Bryan and Adam interview Sean Silcoff, co-author of "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry"... Soon to be a major motion picture! Losing the Signal with Sean Silcoff (The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry)
Fire and brimstone, had a pocket veto, spoke with the voice of the CEOs
Co COOs!
Carriers were afraid of becoming dumb pipes, so were anti-app store
Blackberry didn't care about doing an app store, then AT&T bent to Apple and allowed them to have an app store
RIM did not believe that Silicon Valley would be let in the front door at the carriers
RIM would talk about Apple as "the toy company" while being actively devoured
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
01:13:11
Bryan, Adam, Steve, and the Oxide Friends are joined by the founders of the Oakland Ballers, the continuation of a long history of baseball in Oakland. There turns out to be a plenty in common between founding a computer company and founding a baseball team--and we both have our fans supporting us!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
(Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
We recorded the space, but we had some challenges, and we lost the recording when the first Twitter Space died at around 5:30p. We recorded the second half though; the recording is here.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
[@4:40](https://youtu.be/8tJEwCvZWsg?t=280) Lionizing Unix > 7th edition is amazing, incredible, a break through.. > and it’s also kind of a shitty engineering artifact that needed a lot of work.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
17 May 2022
Debugging Methodologies
01:30:24
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 16th, 2022
Debugging Methodologies
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for May 16th, 2022.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
11 Jan 2022
Flying Blind with Peter Robison
01:29:43
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: January 10th, 2022
Flying Blind with Peter Robison
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for January 10th, 2022.
Boeing 777 > Bryan: The things I am the most proud of are the things I’ve worked with other people on, > when a team does something that feels beyond an individual’s grasp.
[@12:25](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=745) Peter’s history covering aerospace
[@53:19](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=3199) “Blood on the seats”
[@58:48](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=3528) Matt asks about “fly-by-wire” and MCAS. “Optional” safety features
[@1:08:04](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=4084) Testing safety, lack of technical scrutiny
[@1:12:31](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=4351) Simeon asks about the FAA’s relationship with Boeing
[@1:15:05](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=4505) Bryan: what are the lessons for other disciplines?
Peter: Valuing employee views. Tolerating bad news.
Adam: The engineering culture at Boeing was so arduous to build, and so quick to corrode
[@1:18:39](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=4719) Matt: relationship to F-35? Military vs commercial
[@1:23:23](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=5003) Gene Kim: CEO congressional testimony
[@1:26:22](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=5182) Passing certifications, alternatives to MCAS
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
16 Jan 2025
Crates We Love
01:33:13
Love Rust? Us too. One of its great strengths is its ecosystem of crates. Rain, Eliza, and Steve from the Oxide team join Bryan and Adam to talk about the crates we love.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
25 Jul 2024
CrowdStrike BSOD Fiasco with Katie Moussouris
01:41:56
Bryan and Adam were joined by security expert, Katie Moussouris, to discuss the largest global IT outage in history. It was an event as broadly impactful as it will be instructive; as Bryan noted, you can see all of computing from here, from crash dumps to antitrust.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
07 Nov 2023
Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
01:45:02
Bryan and Adam were joined by Gergely Orosz, the Pragmatic Engineer, to talk about Oxide's hiring process, the experiences that led to that process, and hiring generally. There's a lot there for anyone interested in hiring or being hired... and especially for anyone who's considered applying to Oxide!
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Gergely Orosz. The "Litter Box" is what we call the recording studio... thus named for reasons best left to the imagination
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
24 Feb 2025
A Half-Century of Silicon Valley with Randy Shoup
01:57:20
Randy Shoup joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to look at the history of Silicon Valley through the lens of Randy's 50 years--as the child of graphics legend, Dick Shoup; an intern at Intel; aspiring diplomat; engineering leader; and father to the next generation of Shoup engineers.
29 Mar 2022
Time, Timezones, Metric Time, Losing and Saving
01:05:47
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: March 28th, 2022
Time, Timezones, Metric Time, Losing and Saving
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for March 28th, 2022.
transistor.fm launch point, has links to Spotify, Google, Amazon etc players
Laura Abbott (23 March 2022) Another vulnerability in the LPC55S69 ROMwrite up
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
14 Feb 2023
Memory Safety with Yael Grauer
01:17:52
Yael Grauer joined Bryan, Adam, Steve Klabnik, and the Oxide Friends to talk about her recent Consumer Reports article on memory safety and memory safe languages. How do we inform the general public? How do we persuade practitioners and companies? Thanks for joining us, Yael!
DanCrossNYC: People who still want to treat C as a high-level assembler are saying the same stuff the PL/I people were saying when I was young.
Eric Likness - carpetbomberz.com: In support of Yael, Ralph Nader wasn't/isn't an automotive engineer and he could still argue for lowering safety risks to car buyers. It's advocacy.
drew: Rigorous definitions of “unsafe code” just wont cut it ig
ig: 40% less direct pointer arithmetic than the leading brand of operating systems
a172: How does principle based accounting even work? Like, how do you define if something violates the principle or not, without just turning it back into rules based?
Eden: Checkboxes are meaningful for operational checklists. Aviation and medicine use them pretty heavily. Not so meaningful for systemic work like developing a new aircraft or a new surgery.
Eden: So I guess a rules-based approach works for lines of code, but breaks down for project-level decisions such as which language to use.
Saethlin: The S in IoT is for security
benstoltz: ifixit repairability score for HW should have an analog for SW/FW.
DanCrossNYC: That's precisely what the pl/i folks acted like 25 years ago.
sam801: c++ will live on thru carbon, cppfront, and val.
DanCrossNYC: Prediction: carbon is doa.
Saethlin: I'll believe it once anyone uses those
ig: I think the other part is there's some really important pieces of software that everyone uses daily which use memory unsafe languages. Our web browsers, and our operating systems.
AaronW: I live in a condo and I still unplug expensive electronics during a thunderstorm. Maybe it's because I had many electronics fried when I was young, and my first language was C++.
Eric Likness - carpetbomberz.com: Same with answering a landline during a thunderstorm.
DanCrossNYC: Had to stop training during thunderstorms in the Marines.
Eden: My day job is security. 😉 I rail against compliance checklists on a regular basis because a lot of auditors insist on the checkbox rather than proper security consideration. For example, PCI-DSS requires password rotation, which everyone has known for decades leads to users picking worse passwords.
a172: Google and Mozilla are making pretty good strides in migrating their browser to Rust. Still a ton of work to go, but entire systems have been moved to Rust.
DanCrossNYC: Rust requires a bit of humility. For veteran C programmers, that can be a gut punch.
srockets: “Compiler says no” is something that Haskell was proud of, but Rust is the first language I’ve seen that managed to get popular despite of it
Steve’s take on commercialization > Bryan: There’s no question that they hit on something very big. > We saw a container as an operational vessel, but we failed to see > a container as a development vessel.
[@14:36](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=876) dotCloud (PaaS) struggles to find a buyer; ultimately open sources as last resort > All of a sudden a company that nobody had heard of, > was a company that everybody had heard of.
They took too much money.
[@17:40](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=1060) Pitfalls in raising money and scaling sales by imitating big companies
Clip ~1min with Jan the Man, Keith, and Doug (I’m shadowing Keith) > Everybody should be spending time arm in arm with customers understanding > how is this technology going to solve a problem > which they’ll want to pay to have a solution.
Tom: Was there actually a business anyways? Or was it just technology?
What if developers are attracted to those things they know cannot be monetized?
There was this belief that if a technology is this ubiquitous, it will be readily monetizable.
[@27:26](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=1646) Docker Swarm and Kubernetes > Hykes: We didn’t work at Google, we didn’t go to Stanford, > we didn’t have a PhD in computer science.
Stinemates: (The Kubernetes team) had strong opinions about the need for a service level API and Docker technically had its own opinion about a single API from a simplicity standpoint. We couldn’t agree.
DockerCon 2015: No mentioning Kubernetes!
Brendan Burns’ talk “The distributed system toolkit: Container patterns for modular distributed system design” was unfortunately made private by Docker sometime in the last two years. The internet archive only has this. Burns wrote a blog post about the topics from his talk.
[@36:11](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=2171) Docker coming to market
Enterprise teams wanted support
Initial support offerings were expensive and limited (no after hours, no weekends) > Bryan: I floated to Solomon in 2014: run container management as a service.
Tyler Tringas’ post about how small teams can create value with little outside investment, as a result of the Peace Dividend of the SaaS Wars.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
19 Oct 2021
Dijkstra's Tweetstorm
01:26:51
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 18th, 2021
Dijkstra’s Tweetstorm
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 18th, 2021.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Dijkstra’s 1975 “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” EWD 498tweet > PL/1 > belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offenceAPL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums - [@3:08](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=188) Languages affect the way you think It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. - [@4:33](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=273) Adam’s Perl story - The Camel Book, not to be confused with OCaml - “You needed books to learn how to do things” - CGI - [@9:04](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=544) Adam meets Larry Wall - [@11:59](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=719) Meeting Dennis Ritchie - “We were very excited; too excited some would say…” - [@15:04](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=904) Effects of learning languages, goals of a language, impediments to learning - Roger Hui of APL and J fame, RIP. - Accessible as a language value - Microsoft Pascal, Turbo Pascal - Scratch - LabVIEW - [@25:31](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=1531) Nate’s experience - Languages have different audiences - [@27:18](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=1638) Human languages - The Esperanto con-lang - Tonal langages - Learning new and different programming languages - [@37:06](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=2226) Adam’s early JavaScript (tweet) - <SCRIPT LANGUARE="JavaScript"> circa 1996 - [@44:10](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=2650) Learning from books, sitting down and learning by typing out examples - How do you learn to program in a language? - Zed Shaw on learning programming through spaced repetitionblog - Rigid advice on how to learn - ALGOL 68, planned successor to ALGOL 60 - ALGOL 60, was, according to Tony Hoare, “An improvment on nearly all of its successors” - [@50:41](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3041) Where does Rust belong in the progression of languages someone learns? Rust is what happens when you’ve got 25 years of experience with C++, and you remove most of the rough edges and make it safer? - “Everyone needs to learn enough C, to appreciate what it is and what it isn’t” - [@52:45](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3165) “I wish I had learned Rust instead of C++” - [@53:35](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3215) Adam: Brown revisits intro curriculum, teaching Scheme, ML, then Java - Adam learning Rust back in 2015 (tweet) “First Rust Program Pain (So you can avoid it…)” Tom: There’s a tension in learning between the people who hate magic and want to know how everything works in great detail, versus the people who just want to see something useful done. It’s hard to satisfy both. - [@1:00:02](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3602) Bryan coming to Rust - “Learn Rust with entirely too many linked lists” guide - Rob Pike interview Its concurrency is rooted in CSP, but evolved through a series of languages done at Bell Labs in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Newsqueak, Alef, and Limbo. - [@1:03:01](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3781) Debugging Erlang processes. Ryan on runtime v. language - Tuning runtimes. Go and Rust - [@1:06:42](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4002) Rust is its own build system - Bryan’s 2018 “Falling in love with Rust” post - Lisp macros, Clean, Logo, Scratch - [@1:11:27](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4287) The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity. - [@1:12:09](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4329) Oxide bringup updates - I2C Inter-Integrated Circuit - SPI Serial Peripheral Interface - iCE40
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
11 Jul 2024
Innovation Tokens with Charity Majors
01:26:24
Charity Majors joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the idea of "innovation tokens"--a fixed budget for, so called, "innovative" projects. When is boring better and when is innovation the safer approach? Is Oxide issuing innovation tokens in some sort of hyper-inflationary cycle!?
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
06 Jul 2021
NeXT, Objective-C, and contrasting histories
01:11:18
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 5, 2021
NeXT, Objective-C, and contrasting histories
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 5, 2021.
[@4:42](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=282) The SPARCstation 1 and the Sun-4c (campus) architecture > The hardware was not competitive, but dammit they sure looked good!
[@9:15](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=555) It’s nuts how much time and energy they spent on the look of it. > They were building a huge factory, just about the time people were > starting to outsource everything.
Sun was doing incremental things, and Steve was going for the 100 yard pass.
Apple Lisa computer > NeXT refused to interoperate with anything. > They had this idea that a NeXT customer is going to buy all NeXT machines.
[@13:20](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=800) NeXT was a really proprietary company, contrasted with Sun, a really open company. > Bill Gates volunteers that he would gladly urinate on a NeXT machine.
They are attempting to reinvent absolutely everything, so they need all software to be written from scratch, effectively.
Jobs does this over and over again at NeXT. He does things to make NeXT look bigger than it is.
[@16:23](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=983) Jobs blows off important meeting with IBM
[@18:56](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1136) Mathematica went whole hog on NeXT
[@20:55](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1255) “Steve Jobs yells at your dad a lot?”
[@22:22](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1342) Story of Jobs trying to sell NeXT machines to Brown’s CS dept > “Your product looks great, I’m just not sure your company is > going to be around for as long as we need it to be.” > Then Steve Jobs calls him an a**hole and storms out.
[@23:35](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1415) NeXT spent very freely. Lavish offices, catering, etc > He did not take VC money. He had weird money from beginning to end. > Ross Perot thought Jobs was a total genius. Then realized that whether > he was a genius or not, he wasn’t selling any computers.
The 80’s were all about fear of Japan.
Ultimately they had to pivot away from hardware.
[@26:38](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1598) In contrast to Sun
Bryan’s tweet from July 3 > Measured by most any yardstick one could choose, Sun was one of > the most successful stories of the 1980’s for all of industrial America.
[@54:08](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=3248) Objective-C and Swift are mandated. If it were an open ecosystem, would they be significant? > There was a feeling that the hardware didn’t matter. > You shouldn’t trouble yourself with any details.
[@57:46](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=3466) Secrecy at NeXT and Apple
NDAs signed per project > Secrecy is a lot of work.
It was all about being able to walk on stage, and dramatically drop something that was going to be life changing.
It seems like the secrecy was being used to manipulate people.
[@1:03:13](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=3793) x86 port at Apple
[@1:05:34](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=3934) Jobs tells them to make it great, because it’s currently sh*t.
[@1:08:04](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=4084) Is Objective-C being used anywhere today outside the Apple ecosystem?
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
17 Mar 2023
On Silicon Valley Bank with Eric Vishria
00:59:24
Eric Vishria of Benchmark and Oxide CEO, Steve Tuck, join Bryan and Adam to talk about Silicon Valley Bank, its role in the startup ecosystem, and the short- and long-term effects of its collapse.
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from March 17th, 2023.
ewen: 'The teller looks at the paper, then looks at me, then looks back at the paper, then asks ""Are you the HashiCorp guy?"" ' 😮 (Definitely agree that post looks relevant, and is worth reading; thanks for sharing. There's quite the impedance mismatch between ""traditional banking"" and ""startup"" approaches to things. Which I suspect in part explains how SVB was so widely used by startups.)"
antranigv: Question: Are there any reasons why the US is behind in these banking things? all countries in the EU and developing countries have solved these problems decade(s) ago.
statuscalamitous: my personal, barely informed take: we built this infra earlier, so we have more legacy
a172: It sounds like what SVB was providing that was so rare was a kind of business as a service.
statuscalamitous: my favorite "scare a developer" story: the way ACH payments work. that's right, SFTP!
antranigv: I think you mean FTPS? did they move to SFTP? 😄
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
18 Jul 2024
Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri
01:54:19
Raja Koduri joined Bryan and Adam to answer a question sent in from a listener: what's are the differences between a CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC? And after a walk through history of hardware, software, their intersection and relevant companies, we ... almost answered it!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
08 Mar 2022
The Future Of Work
01:57:36
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: March 7th, 2022
The Future Of Work
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for March 7th, 2022.
[@44:30](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=2670) Dan’s question: remote employees “pilgrimage” back to home often, how often?
[@50:23](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=3023) Disadvantages to full remote?
[@56:15](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=3375) Jake’s experience, asynchronous work style
Meetings as unprepared group think sessions, not valuable as decision making
Requests for discussion, as decision making tools
[@1:02:29](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=3749) Jason: service delivery vs product delivery
Class devision between “the desked” and “the un-desked”
[@1:07:17](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=4037) Is “back to office” about command and control?
Other factors: big tech companies receive substantial local subsidies
[@1:14:00](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=4440) Timon on working in different timezones
Recorded meetings/discussions as valuable content
Pandemic boosted remote work tool quality
[@1:23:32](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=5012) Difficulties with remote?
Building rapport, judging emotions and nuanced communication
Organic, unplanned communications with in-person office spaces (watercooler)
[@1:33:24](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=5604) Matt: remote work as cost savings?
Value of “down time” communication, unstructured
[@1:43:50](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=6230) Starting career, making connections, in all-remote world
[@1:47:58](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=6478) Future of remote work since pandemic
[@1:51:30](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=6690) Horace’s experience with remote work
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
06 Feb 2025
AI Disruption: DeepSeek and Cerebras
01:31:20
DeepSeek was a disruptive surprise at the start of 2025--an open weights model trained at a fraction of the cost of previous models. Bryan and Adam were joined by Andy Hock and James Wang from Cerebras, whose wafer-scale silicon executes these models faster than is possible with any number of GPUs.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
06 Sep 2022
Potpourri: Product, Platform, Paravirtualization
01:49:07
22 Aug 2023
Fork in the road for Terraform?
01:20:17
On August 10th, HashiCorp made the controversial decision to re-license some of the popular, formerly-open source project under the Business Source License (BUSL). Bryan and Adam spoke with founders of the OpenTF project, an effort to keep Terraform operating in the open.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
19 Apr 2022
More Tales from the Bringup Lab
02:07:10
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: April 18th, 2022
More Tales from the Bringup Lab
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for April 18th, 2022.
@5:10Sidecar, a board based on a switching ASIC from Intel
@7:24Arjen's twitter thread with details related to the bringup and Eric's description of the challenges in designing the PDN (Power Delivery Network)ATT
@15:34The load-slammer, an electronic load to simulate the power draw of an ASIC / BGA-partLS
@22:27FPGA that controls everything on the Sidecar board
@24:05TOML's unstable table order made the team pop a couple ICs off the board searching for bugs
@31:41Brown-out in the hotel during first bringup session from a blown bus duct
@33:45Debugging ground bounce issues while testing the PDN with the load-slammer (phantom over/undershoot)
@40:15Hardware team pranks the management during a meeting with a potential investor
@43:20Chonky heat sink that weighs 8 pounds / moment arm crisis
@48:19First time powering up, checking temperature with thermal camera, learning about "puppy dog warm"
@52:12Matt talks about the second, "lesser" network switch on the Sidecar board
@57:28Secret 8051 cores, slew-rate woes: impedance missmatch on SPI traces that manifested in unreliable communication in full bandwidth mode of the SPI/GPIO driver
@1:03:19PLL config issues and Matt's verbose config tool to fix them
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
14 Dec 2021
The Pragmatism of Hubris
02:03:39
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: December 13th, 2021
The Pragmatism of Hubris
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for December 13th, 2021.
Joe Rozner and Rick Altherr getting Hubris and Humility running on a STM32, tweet from Dec 1, and video ~2hrs
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
30 Dec 2024
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
01:33:54
Bryan and Adam look back on the year of Oxide and Friends episodes, reflecting on favorite shows, moments, and (at length) cover images.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
28 Feb 2025
Transparency in Hardware/Software Interfaces
01:48:52
The value of transparency in engineering can have huge benefits--nothing can compare to the momentum of an enthusiastic community! Bryan and Adam discuss the value of transparency at the hardware/software interface with Oxide colleague, Ryan Goodfellow. Transparency can be scary--especially in the hardware domain where secrecy is the norm--but once we knock down some of those fears, the business benefits start to emerge.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
24 Aug 2021
The episode formerly known as ℔
01:06:21
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 23rd, 2021
The episode formerly known as ℔
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 23rd, 2021.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Last week’s recording on “Showstopper” with author G. Pascal Zachary, and Jessamyn West.
Ashton-Tate history (there never was any Ashton, and dBASE II was the first version)
dBASE IV was “slow, buggy” and didn’t get fixed in a timely manner
Last week, Pascal mentioned that CEO Ed Esber “in a fit of insanity admitted to me (a journalist) he didn’t know how to use his company’s own product!”
Friday! personal information manager, and Sidekick from Borland (like Google calendar for DOS)
[@3:01](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=181) Phrasing: operating program (vs operating system)
Steve Jobs 1992 MIT Sloan talk ~72mins on consultants, hiring people and leaving Apple (see mit.edu summary) > Jobs: NeXTSTEP is not an operating system, it’s an operating environment
July 5th recording discussing NeXT. Randall Stross book: Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (1993) > Mac OSX focused on user capabilities of the desktop environment, but they considered it one and the same with the operating system
[@7:42](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=462) Windows NT had “multiple personalities” > Adam: I was instantly transported to the 90’s. > Bryan: I could hear Smashing Pumpkins playing on the radio.
See ACM ByteCast interview with Rashmi Mohan, Bryan tells the story ~3mins of coming to QNX after reading about it in the “Operating Systems Roundup” of Byte Magazine 1993 (see also Bryan’s blog post and remembering Dan Hildebrand)
There is very little (or no) dynamic memory allocation in Hubris.
Tock multitasking embedded OS, and Bryan’s “Tockilator: Deducing Tock execution flows from Ibex Verilator traces” video ~12mins
In Tock, dynamic program loading is central. Hubris functions as a security-minded service processor. The programs it will use are all known in advance; so dynamic loading (and the accompanying security concerns) can be left out.
Fit-to-purpose OSs
[@24:19](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=1459) ROPI/RWPI (aka “Ropy Rippy”) and the growing pains of RISC-V
OpenTitan, ARM Cortex-M > When we set out to write Hubris, we spent a lot of time reading > and learning what’s out there.
QNX vs monolithic systems. QNX was robust against module failure, so bugs in modules were tolerable. At Sun, faults in a module were system faults, so bugs were unacceptable.
Memory protection. Stack growing into (and corrupting) data segment, hard to debug.
Stack corruption, a hit and run.
[@32:39](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=1959) Humor: Oxide rustfmt bot is named Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” poem > LOOK UPON MY REFORMATTING YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR!
stale bot, open source maintainers, communicating bugs and issues
[@39:54](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=2394) Fun QNX bug story
QNX wrote their own POSIX utilities, they wrote their own AWK
Kelsey Hightower joined Bryan and Adam to revisit a topic Bryan had spoken about a decade ago: corporate open source anti-patterns. Kelsey brought his typical sagacity to a complex and fraught topic.
ahl0003: Last time Kelsey joined us for predictions
blainehansen: "Governance orgies" happen when the governance mechanisms aren't well-designed ha. If they are well-designed then governance is good!
jbk: opsware maybe? or tivoli?
uptill3: hp openview was one as well
sevanj: "they've got us working for trinkets"
sevanj: this was mentioned on the bugzilla anouncement regarding funded staff being pulled from working on project in the last 3 years.
blainehansen: All open source problems are secretly public goods problems haha
carpetbomberz.com: Hashicorp DID do a "thing"
blacksmithforlife: Just like taxes fund roads, we should have a internet usage tax that then funds these open source projects that everyone finds value in. The person taxed should get to decide which open source project gets the money
kaliszad: The problem is, you can help other people, but first you have to sustain yourself. 🙂
aarondgoldman: Too boring to be evil
rolipo.li: too busy to be evil?
aarondgoldman: Angular never got budget even when Inbox used it and had millions of users
blainehansen: Most open source projects are probably not best led/governed by a for-profit company ha
aarondgoldman: HP had a huge repair service business when their hardware got much more reliable it almost killed the company
geekgonecrazy: Never actually considered using CNCF membership as a qualification for using a tool
ahl0003: it's the nintendo seal of quality!
geekgonecrazy: It’s an interesting thought now that I’ve heard it 🙈 especially for any sort of core utility like this
saone: On the topic of patterns that seem to be working, Docker Desktop's license requiring subscriptions for larger organizations for use of their product and focusing on providing a really good developer experience seems to be a really good spot for them to be
goodjanet: The term freeloading comes up only when there's a "problem" (usually fiscal in a company/group), the rest of the time the exact same actions are fine or often encouraged
mrdanack: I disagree, there are freeloaders. Multi-billion companies like IBM and Oracle have benefited from the PHP project for multiple decades and really haven't contributed even a modest amount back.
geekgonecrazy: Anytime hitting CLA I always use that as clue to take hesitation and think about contributing. 🙈
blainehansen: Sometimes a community of passionate contributors is more a burden than a gift. Every project is different, not every project can be supported by many well-paid engineers at vc-funded incentive-aligned companies. I don't think the BUSL is smart or good, but there's a funding/support problem here that legitimately needs to be solved, and the existing open source social contract hasn't solved it. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/burden-open-source-maintainer
blacksmithforlife: Disclaimer: I'm a federal employee who tried to get more software open source while I was working at various agencies. For the most part it was soundly ignored and the agencies just claimed it was too hard and they didn't have enough funding to do it, which in my opinion is just false
blacksmithforlife: But, if you want it, just do a FOIA, then they have to give it to you
saone: There's a great deal of fear at my company that software being open sourced must be carefully vetted to avoid potential embarassment so the hurdles to open source anything are very high
girgias: The French government has released code which was pure garbage, and I don't think one can do worse than the APB code
geekgonecrazy: That sucks. 😬I can totally see individual developers being afraid. I’ve faced that with my team. Weird to think org would be especially if trusting engineers
northrup: Adam to your point though - I don't see how that's any different than other open source projects that aren't corporate backed. No open source projected is obligated to honor your issue to drive a project in a direction, or accept your PR to add a feature or function...
geekgonecrazy: Curious at what scale you think devrel is needed vs the engineers in company directly involved
geekgonecrazy: I’ve often wondered if doesn’t create unnecessary barrier between engineers and community. Especially at certain size
quasarken: Dev Rel seems a lot like community solutions engineering
geekgonecrazy: I’ve personally seen some companies use devrel as sole tie to open source and “community” in place of more of company getting involved
rolipo.li: devrel as a service. now it's a consulting firm?
northrup: When I worked at GitLab in the early days, some of my most favorite experiences were going to conferences and hanging out in the GitLab booth to answer questions and talk with / help users. SOO much great feedback, clear "oh wow!" edge cases brought forward, and amazing feedback of "yeah, you made this feature, but that wasn't what we needed"
ahl0003: I remember liking this book on devrel:
15 Mar 2025
A Happy Day For Rust
01:20:21
Recently, a change to a utility in the Rust toolchain changed behavior in a way that impacted users. Rather than being a story of frustration and aspersions, it was a story of a community working... and working well together! Bryan and Adam were joined by Dirkjan Ochtman (of the rustup team) and Steve Klabnik to discuss.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
17 Oct 2023
Settling Beef
01:39:06
Recently, a clip from Oxide and Friends was played by another podcast as something of a punching bag. Adam was called "uneducated" and Bryan, it was observed accurately, "hadn't used C++ since the '90s". Well, Conor Hoekstra from the ADSP pod joined us to settle the beef.
Data visualization is an important--and overlooked!--tool in the software engineer's tool belt. Bryan describes a recent journey with gnuplot while Oxide colleague, Charlie Park, shares his own experience with data visualization and Adam offers a visual analysis of Simpsons episodes. Stay tuned to the end to find out about the Oxide and Friends book club coming up in May.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
14 Dec 2024
Conferences in Tech
01:30:09
Bryan and Adam were joined by Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady to talk about conferences in tech. A lot has changed in the past couple of decades about the impetus for conferences and what makes it worthwhile to attend.
jgrillo_: I was just thinking I feel very young because I was a junior in high school but not anymore lol
aka_pugs: my first conference - 1975
ellie.idb: oxide appeals to the youth
jbk1234: my first one was LISA in 05 or 06... mostly because it took a near act of god because my director didn't believe in sending his people to conferences
jgrillo_: "before software ate the world" is what I usually call "when the internet was still fun"
ellie.idb: my earliest memory was, uhhh, Google I/O 2008 when they gave every attendee that android phone
ellie.idb: i don’t recall which one it was, but i do remember playing with it when i was 5 hahahaha
taitomagatsu: I've only been to one tech conference in person, and it was a very tame SIGGRAPH that happened in Santiago, CL (I live in Chile). It was a lot about animation. I wanted it to have talks on image processing like the ones over on the US x3 but oh well, beggars can't be choosers
goodjanet: I've never been to a tech conference
devdsp2175: The Germans know how to run a conference. The chaos communications congress is wild.
ellie.idb: same!! never actually attended one as an adult hahaha
taitomagatsu: Have you attended one remotely?
goodjanet: nope, closest is just watching recorded talks after the fact
taitomagatsu: I attended the rustconf of 2 years ago remotely. It was amazing and I was soooo tired by the end of it. Brain got depleted of juice for the day
network2501: looking forward to in person dtrace conference with a dedicated zball room
ahl0003: more of a trade show, but I went to the MacWorld conference in the late '90s
ahl0003: I still have some BeOS install CDs from then
goodjanet: im so thankful for recorded talks
ahl0003: this is kind of wild: I went with my brother who was 12 or so and we met a guy at Be... my brother would go on to work with him 30 years later!
tocococa: ISCA this year was just around the corner from Santiago in Buenos Aires and it was pretty cool, and CARLA took place this year in Santiago too
blacksmithforlife: Since I can never get a conference approved from work, I live off recorded conference videos on YouTube
network2501: best mom
devdsp2175: The shade! Sending hugs to Bryan's inner child.
taitomagatsu: daaaaaamn, I didn't know about either! I might keep an eye on ISCA, maybe I can go next year ❤️
devdsp2175: You can't record the hallway track...
jh179: Bryan's talk for Papers We Love on the History of Containers is how I found out about him, Oxide and all the rest. Had an incredible tangent about jails...
zeanic: Conference idea: all hallway tracks
devdsp2175: YouTube keeps recommending Bryan's talks on running containers on the metal at Joyant.
devdsp2175: And I keep watching them!
ellie.idb: wow, ISCA had some really fucking cool talks this year
ellie.idb: damn. i’m adding this to my watch list too!!! i’ll try and see if i can get funding for next year hahaha
tocococa: yeah, 100%, but my brain was melted after every day
nahumshalman: Bryan has the luxury of working on OSS. I think the point that Theo was making is that Surge (I only attended the very last one) was a space where you could be open about proprietary stuff. Talking about failure in a safe space, etc.
nahumshalman: Ah, Theo is now making that point.
taitomagatsu: Does ISCA have any sort of official YT channel?
taitomagatsu: Because I might... have a handful of talks to watch
goodjanet: 18 years ago isnt that long ago?
network2501: 18 years ago is almost 3 generations of lives/eras ago
ellie.idb: what HPC conferences are going on? i need to hear about the deets going on with CXL
jgrillo_: although 18yr is ~half my life it doesn't feel very long ago..
tocococa: I am not sure, I know that all keynotes were recorded, but I don´t know where they might be
ellie.idb: 21 years ago i was not alive 😅
network2501: What if the second time you do the talk it's even better than the last? Like book revisions?
taitomagatsu: I've found a channel that has older ISCA videos https://www.youtube.com/@acmsigarch2299, imma keep looking for one that might have the 2024 one
blacksmithforlife: Working in government, watching "old" conference videos is great because they're "cutting edge" for where my organization is at currently. Case in point, we are just now going to the cloud and doing micro services
blacksmithforlife: What does "hallway track" mean?
zeanic: Cr...
04 May 2021
Mr. Leventhal, Come here I want to see you
00:31:05
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 3, 2021
Mr. Leventhal, Come here I want to see you
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for May 3, 2021.
[@1:24](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=84) So formal correctness is something that I think we are all very sympathetic with. > It’s very laudable, it’s also very hard.
From L3 to seL4 What Have We Learnt in 20 Years of L4 Microkernels? (paper)
Who guards the guards? Formal validation of the Arm v8-m architecture specification (paper) > Hardware architecture is an area where formal verification is more tenable, > a level you can readily reason about.
Our challenge is how can we satisfy our need for formalism without getting too pedantic about it. You don’t want to lose the forest for the trees. A system we never deliver doesn’t actually improve anyone’s lives, that’s the challenge.
[@5:20](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=320) Journal club experiences
Bootstrapping Trust in Modern Computers (book) > [@9:45](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=585) > We’ve tried to build a culture of looking to other work that’s been done. > Not because everything’s been done before, but because you don’t want to have to > relearn something that someone has already learned and talked about. > If you can leverage someone’s wisdom, that’s energy well spent.
[@11:46](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=706) When systems repeat mistakes, engineers feel deprived of agency: “I suffered for nothing.” > Engineering is this complicated balance between seeing the world as it could be, > and accepting the world as it is. > As you get older as an engineer, it’s too easy to no longer see what could be, > and you get mired in the ways the world is broken. You can become pessimistic.
Caitie McCaffrey on Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices (video ~45min)
[@14:17](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=857) It’s dangerous to live only in the future, detached from present reality. Optative voice
[@16:45](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1005) At Oxide, we ask applicants “when have you been happiest and why? Unhappiest?” Interesting to see that unhappy is all the same story: we were trying to do the right thing and management prevented it. > When I was younger and maybe more idealistic and willing to charge at the windmills, > I stayed too long with a company. > All the developers that interviewed me were gone by the time I got there. > I should have walked out the door, but I was too young and didn’t know better.
[@18:43](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1123) “How do you and your cofounder resolve conflicts?” > I don’t want to hear about how you don’t have conflicts, tell me about how you resolve them.
Folks aren’t able to walk away, they’ve got this commitment both to the work and to their colleagues. I’ve been a dead-ender a couple of times, I’ll go down with the ship.
[@20:28](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1228) In “Soul of a New Machine” (wiki) Tom West says he wants to trust his engineers, but that trust is risk. > I just love that line: that trust is risk. > That’s part of the reason some of these companies > have a hard time trusting their technologists, > they just don’t want to take the risk.
People are so not versed in how to deal with conflict, and there’s nothing scarier than salary negotiation.
They need you, that’s why you’re here, you’ve made it all the way through the interview to this point, you’ve got leverage, now’s the time to use it.
[@23:04](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1384) Oxide: Compensation as a Reflection of Values > It takes the need for negotiation out, > because it replaces it with total transparency.
Sometimes it’s not about what you’re getting paid, it’s about what the other person is getting paid. Not wanting to get taken advantage of.
It’s a social experiment for sure.
[@28:07](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1687) Steve Jobs famously tried this at NeXT: pay was transparent but not equal.
History of compensation at NeXT (wiki) (quora post) > I think that’s the worst of both worlds, a recipe for disaster.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
15 Aug 2023
No Silver Bullets
01:17:48
Bryan and Steve Klabnik discuss Fred Brooks' essay "No Silver Bullets"--ostensibly apropos of nothing!--discussing the challenges to 10x (or 100x!) improvements in software engineering.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Supercomputers, Cray, and How Sun Picked SGI's Pocket
01:31:34
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 8th, 2021
Supercomputers, Cray, and How Sun Picked SGI’s Pocket
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 8th, 2021.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for March 14th, 2022.
[@1:02:28](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=3748) Family still in Dnipro
Electronic communications
Kids understanding of what’s happening
[@1:07:59](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=4079) How to help?
[@1:16:50](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=4610) Andrey’s coworkers and team members remaining in Ukraine > Yes it’s war, but, the economy needs to continue to be healthy.
[@1:21:24](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=4884) Where is this going?
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
21 Nov 2024
Technical Blogging
01:40:27
Bryan and Adam were joined by authors of the forthcoming book "Writing for Developers", Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop, to talk about blogging--for Bryan and Adam, it's been 20 years since they started blogging at Sun. The Oxide Friends were also joined by Tim Bray and Will Snow who kicked off blogging at Sun.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
30 Aug 2024
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
01:42:09
RFDs--Requests for Discussion--are how we at Oxide discuss... just about everything! Technical design, hardware component selection, changes in process, culture, interview systems, (even) chat--we have RFDs for all of these, over 500 in a bit under 5 years. Bryan and Adam were joined by Oxide colleagues instrumental to RFDs, from their most prolific author to those making them more consumable.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Robert Mustacchi, David Crespo, Ben Leonard, and Augustus Mayo.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
28 Sep 2021
The Books in the Box
01:17:18
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 27th, 2021
[@2:45](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=165) David Jacques Gerber (2015) The Inventor’s Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerberbook
[@7:21](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=441) Sidney Dekker (2011) Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systemsbook
[@13:08](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=788) Robert Buderi (1996) The Invention that Changed the World: The Story of Radar from War to Peacebook
[@26:52](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1612) Brian Dear (2017) The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculturebook
[@30:15](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1815) Randall Stross (1993) Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thingbook
[@32:21](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1941) Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock (2010) Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductorbook
[@33:06](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1986) Lamont Wood (2012) Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolutionbook
Charles Kenney (1992) Riding the Runaway Horse: The Rise and Decline of Wang Laboratoriesbook
Steven Levy (1984) Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolutionbook
[@42:32](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2552) Paul Halmos (1985) I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathographybook
Paul Hoffman (1998) The Man Who Loved Only Numbers about Paul Erdős book
1981 text adventure game for the Apple II by Sierra On-Line, “Softporn Adventure” (wiki)
[@49:16](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2956) Douglas Engelbart The Mother of All Demoswiki
John Markoff (2005) What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industrybook
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Latebook
1972 Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharingdocumentary ~26mins (wiki) included big names like Corbató, Licklider and Bob Kahn.
Gordon Moore (1965) Cramming more components onto integrated circuitspaper and Moore’s Law wiki
[@52:3...
02 Aug 2022
Deep Tech Investing
01:15:01
Seth Winterroth and Ian Rountree join Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about investing in deep tech / hard tech.
02 Nov 2021
On Code Review
01:30:54
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 1st, 2021
On Code Review
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 1st, 2021.
[@1:05:21](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=3921) How do you scale quality code review in bigger teams?
Culture of code review at a company
[@1:07:15](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=4035) How to convince your team of the value of code review?
Review can catch bugs
Cross team knowledge, bus factor
Speed in the short term vs speed in the long term
[@1:14:39](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=4479) Ian on cultivating organizational review practices
[@1:16:32](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=4592) Austin’s story on assuaging management fears around new practices
Joshua: communication, writing, and accountability
What code don’t we review?
Code review as quality check
[@1:23:55](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=5035) Engineering product quality, not always obviously of benefit to the business
Skipping code reviews to show quality consequences
Adopting code review practices, incrementally
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
13 Jun 2023
Virtualizing Time
01:05:38
Jordan Hendricks joined Bryan and Adam to talk about her work virtualizing time--particularly challenging when migrating virtual machines from one physical machine to another!
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from June 12th, 2023.
DanCrossNYC: The guest may well be running NTP itself.
iangrunert: I assume you could also check that NTP is alive / has synced recently before doing a migration right?
aka_pugs: Do people use IEEE 1588/PTP in datacenters? Maybe finance wackos?
zorg24: also it might be tricky to check if NTP synced recently if it is happening in usermode
iangrunert: Might've missed this - is it just the hypervisor that has to run NTP recently or the VM as well?
saone: I believe it was just the hypervisor
DanCrossNYC: The host.
DanCrossNYC: A guest may or may not; that's up to the guest.
jbk: but IIUC, if the guest IS running NTP, then the host definitely needs it to avoid any time warps
DanCrossNYC: Yup.
DanCrossNYC: Fortunately, there's a bit of an out for the blackout window during migration: SMM mode can effectively pause a machine for an indefinite period of time.
DanCrossNYC: We don't USE SMM anywhere, but robust systems software kinda needs to handle the case where the machine goes out to lunch for a minute.
zorg24: 🙌 hooray for hardware with no SMM use
DanCrossNYC: We have done everything we can to turn it off.
earltea: it worked so well I almost thought the VM didn't migrate 😅
saone: It's easy to forget that there's a world outside the cloud, but edge deployments that have physical peripherals hooked up need to maintain those connections to peripherals; migrating those peripherals to cloud environments and managing that integration has been a big challenge for my group.
iangrunert:https://signalsandthreads.com/clock-synchronization/ Good listen about clock synchronization and PTP in the ""finance weirdos"" world. MiFID 2 time sync requirements require timestamping key trading event records to within 100 microseconds of UTC.
zooooooooo: thought this was rust typescript at first 😳
DanCrossNYC: Dunno... I missed it. 🙂
ahl:
* Starting in about 1994, chip architectures began specifying high resolution
* timestamp registers. As of this writing (1999), all major chip families
* (UltraSPARC, PentiumPro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha) have high resolution
* timestamp registers, and two (UltraSPARC and MIPS) have added the capacity
* to interrupt based on timestamp values. These timestamp-compare registers
* present a time-based interrupt source which can be reprogrammed arbitrarily
* often without introducing error. Given the low cost of implementing such a
* timestamp-compare register (and the tangible benefit of eliminating
* discrete timer parts), it is reasonable to expect that future chip
* architectures will adopt this feature.
aka_pugs: Bryan's TSC is overflowing.
DanCrossNYC: That's Tom.
DanCrossNYC: Riding in with the cavalry.
aka_pugs: Good session.
ahl: Thanks...
16 May 2023
Building Together: Oxide and Samtec
01:20:23
Bryan and Adam are joined by Jonathan and Jignesh from Samtec to discuss working together to build the Oxide Rack. We've all seen bad vendors--what does it mean to be a great partner? Also: silicon photonics are (still!) just 18 months away!
13 Feb 2025
Textual UIs with Orhun Parmaksız
01:32:55
Ratatui is a Rust framework for building rich--and incredible--UIs in the terminal. Bryan and Adam were joined by Orhun Parmaksız, who leads the project, to discuss the glory--as well as the ubiquity and utility!--of TUIs.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
19 Jul 2022
Across the Chasm with Rust
01:44:23
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 18th, 2022
Across the Chasm with Rust
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 18th, 2022.
Discussion about Rust's commitment to stability and how it's enforced with things like crater
As an example of the process leading to burnout in programming language communities: Guido stepping down as BDFL after PEP 572 (Assignment Expressions, "the walrus operator")
Talking about LWN-style reports and curation as a way to lessen the pain of using Zulip style chat platforms for discussion
LWN is hiring, looking for someone to keep up with Rust development, among other things
[[partial notes]]
26 Oct 2021
Coder's Block
01:20:48
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 25th, 2021
Coder’s Block
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 25th, 2021.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
22 Mar 2022
Trolltron, Assemble!
01:10:48
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: March 21st, 2022
Trolltron, Assemble!
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for March 21st, 2022.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
[@9:23](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=563) I was learning from people who were further down the track than I was
Startups can have problems when founders fail to learn from the experiences of others
[@12:43](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=763) Dan: hubris of youth is an age old problem, see middle ages nobility
For some “child wonders”, their childhood is effectively sacrificed because their adulthood arrives too early
[@16:22](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=982) When I went to school, there was a math prodigy..
Challenging operating system course
[@25:44](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=1544) Ian: for early accelerated learners, the work is easy until it isn’t. They didn’t need to spend long hours studying, so they didn’t practice it. > You have to take that youthful ego, and gently massacre it. Then build them up
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
04 Jan 2022
Predictions 2022
02:06:17
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: January 3rd, 2022
Predictions 2022
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for January 3rd, 2022.
Below is a table of the oracles and their predictions: (If you made predictions, please submit a PR to add or clarify yours)
Futurist 1 year 3 year 6 year | @openlabbott 47:15 | Discord are going to annoy their userbase. | We’ll finally get a RISC V server in a datacenter, in some shape or form. | Email goes the way of the landline. | @MattSci2 1:10:05 | The framework laptop company will be unsuccessful. Existing laptops are not substantially different; with some retooling. | One major FPGA vendor will have a completely open toolchain for high end FPGAs. | At least 1 RISC-V supercomputer in the Top 500. | @tomk_ 1:16:45 | At least one of the hyperscalers will become startlingly good at partnering. | Stablecoins will become regulated. | The biggest datacenter server provider (outside the hyperscalers) will be a company that hasn’t yet shipped its first server. | @tinco 1:18:57 | Multiple companies will have demonstrated a AGI (one shot machine learning system). It’s not gonna be useful for anything, but I think the problem is less hard than many critics think it is and several companies/organizations are actually going to be showing the first versions of these systems. | Drones autonomously flying around private properties will be a common thing. Factory managers, powerlines inspectors, large building sites etc. will have commonly available and affordable options to inspect or patrol their properties. | Web3 will actually happen, but not in the way it’s currently being talked about. In 6 years time bots will have improved to the point that they can not be warded off the major platforms (or any platforms) and will make the web absolutely unusable due to them disrupting all established crowd funded moderation systems. A new paradigm will have to emerge that fundamentally changes how we use the web (thus web3), so that we can still derive value from it. | Ben Stoltz 1:24:40 | Smart glasses become a viable alternative for computer monitors youtube. People who used to look away from their phones to have their own thoughts, and are now using smart glasses in real life situations, are subjected to an ads vs. attention “Tragedy of the commons”. As costs per unit decrease leading to ubiquity, this forces a modern-day “Highway Beautification Act” to legislate Ad Blocking. | A significant percentage of commercial office space will be converted to housing. | The best AIs have emotional problems. We don’t really know how they work. AI specialists are more therapists than programmers. | @kelseyhightower 1:29:30 | This year will be more of the same, competition to define the new normal as the pandemic winds down. | Pandemic-era solutions will backfire; crypto-currencies will give governments an excuse to track all actual spending. “We will give you the transparency, but not the kind you wanted.” | Technology will be recognized as sovereignty like money and land used to be. Governments will be wary of using technology from weak allies or competitors. Local hardware manufacturing, growth of local university training, etc. Possibly manifesting as national protectionism, or a reprise of the space-race. Open source will be the default model. | @orangecms 1:53:45 | a major OS from China emerges | high performance computing from Europe | ARM no longer as relevant | @ahl 1:58:00 | web3 is done; we’re not talking about it, it’s not a thing, we don’t use the term and we only vaguely recall what it was supposed to mean. | Productivity per watt becomes a highly important metric in computing. Tools tell us about our power use. We spin workloads up and down depending on power cost and availability. | AWS offers RISC-V instance types. | @AaronDGoldman 1:07:14 | Single-node computing: people will realize that that distributed computing has a lot of overhead and that one server can do a lot of work. This will lead people to people doing business analytics jobs by pulling all their data to a single a computer and doing the calculation, getting the result 100x faster than splitting data over many computers. | Microservices inlining: taking a lot of microservices and statically linking them together. This will enable calling functions without network overhead, making things run 100x faster. | We will start do scaling properly. Instead of thinking “how can I make this big data and scale up to infinity”, we will try to get the most out of single node. Only once a single node has been pushed to its limit will we scale up to first a rack, then a datacenter, and then the world. | @dancrossnyc 2:01:10 | Major workplace changes due to the pandemic will amplify and accentuate the wealth gap and disparity. Only some industries are privileged enough to be able to work from home. This will create social problems. | Regulation of social media in the aftermath of widespread political unrest, particularly after the US 2024 political season. | The effects of climate change will be sufficiently apparent that people will get serious about retooling around compute and power efficiency. | @iangrunert 56:06 | No one year prediction. | CCPA copycat laws in other states, perhaps US federal legislation, plus changing global regulatory environment lead to GDPR-like protections to no longer be geo-fenced by bigger players. This’ll also have impacts on SaaS adoption - spreading data around makes right to amendment and right to deletion harder. | RISC-V chip in mainstream phone (likely Samsung). Previously moving target, but longer upgrade times and slower pace of improvements will cause Samsung to chase RISC-V for high volume phones due to better unit economics. Will have prior experience in RISC-V fab for other applications. <...
08 Jun 2021
Barracuda 7200.11: broken firmware is broken software!
00:57:03
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: June 7, 2021
Barracuda 7200.11: broken firmware is broken software!
[@54:04](https://youtu.be/qisoAIx8EE8?t=3244) Sans firmware?
FPGA to ASIC transition article 2011. (aside: treat yourself to this amazing vintage mouse-themed site announcing the same) > It’s when microprocessors show up that all the trouble starts.
(Did we miss anything? PRs always welcome!)
Our next Twitter Space will be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time. Join us; we always love to hear from new speakers!
16 Aug 2022
Surviving Conventional Wisdom
01:21:39
Bryan, Adam, and Steve consider nuggets of conventional wisdom that turn out to be turds.
30 May 2024
Rebooting a datacenter: A decade later
01:40:34
Back in May 2014 Joyent accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter (not just the handful of nodes as intended!). That incident--traumatic was it was--informed many aspects of the Oxide product. Bryan and Adam were joined by members of that former Joyent team to discuss, commiserate, and--perhaps--get some things off their chests.
a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
21 Aug 2024
Whither CockroachDB?
01:34:07
Lots of engineering decisions get made on vibes. Popularity, anecdotes—they can lead to expedient decisions rather than rigorous ones. At Oxide, our choice to go with CockroachDB was hardly hasty! Dave Pacheco joins Bryan and Adam to talk about why we choose CRDB… and how Cockroach Lab’s recent switch to a proprietary license impacts that.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
27 Jun 2023
Okay, Doomer: A Rebuttal to AI Doom-mongering
01:11:21
Bryan and Adam offer a rebuttal to the AI doomerism that has been gaining volume. And--hoo-boy--this one had some range. Heaven’s Gate, ceteris paribus, WWII, derpy security robots, press-fit DIMM sockets, async Rust, etc. And optimistic as always: the hardware and systems AI doomers imagine are incredibly hard to get right; let’s see AIs help us before we worry about our own obsolescence!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
08 Nov 2022
Tech Layoffs
01:39:39
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 7th, 2022
Tech Layoffs
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 7th, 2022.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on November 7th included XXX, and YY. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
07 Sep 2021
Put the OS back in OSDI
01:12:39
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 6th, 2021
Put the OS back in OSDI
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for September 6th, 2021.
[@37:02](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=2222) Open hardware and firmware
ARM Cortex-M0 > That’s why we land at incrementalism, we ossify at some boundary. > And it’s very hard to change things on either side without moving in lockstep.
Tom: The PC architecture was a great thing, but now the OS vendors have abdicated any knowledge of the hardware. Give us UEFI and we don’t care what happens beneath that.
Smart NICs only made sense in hyperscale server fleets > Josh: If you’re going to change the programming model, you have to blow the doors off on at least one axis
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
14 Jun 2022
The Rise and Fall of DEC
01:51:54
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: June 13th, 2022
The Rise and Fall of DEC
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for June 13th, 2022.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
04 Oct 2022
Engineering Incentives... and Misincentives
01:05:32
Inspired by the incentives at Google that apparently promote launching--but not sustaining--new products, Bryan, Adam and the Oxide Friends discuss the efficacy of various incentives... and the incentives that can lead to unintended and negative outcomes.
27 Mar 2024
Adversarial Machine Learning
01:23:30
Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his work with adversarial machine learning. He's found sequences of--seemingly random--tokens that cause LLMs to ignore their restrictions! Also: printf is Turing complete?!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
03 Apr 2024
Cultural Idiosyncrasies
01:27:17
The Oxide Friends talk about about cultural idiosyncrasies--turns out we have a lot of them at Oxide! Some might even sound good enough for you to try out! Demo Fridays, morning water-cooler, no-meet Wednesdays, recorded meetings, dog-pile debugging (aka CSPAN for debugging), RFDs (requests for discussion), no performance review process...
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
26 Sep 2024
RTO or GTFO
01:39:35
With Amazon's return to office (RTO) mandate in the news, Bryan and Adam revisit the topic (it's been 2.5 years since last time!). Are in-office epiphanies real or is RTO fueled by nostalgia, fear... and finance? Stay tuned / we apologize for the exposition on in-office games.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
08 Feb 2022
I Know This! (Purpose-built systems with general-purpose guts)
01:20:38
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: February 7th, 2022
I Know This! (Purpose-built systems with general-purpose guts)
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for February 7th, 2022.
[@11:47](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=707) Hacker News post
[@18:15](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=1095) James Garfield shooting
[@21:29](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=1289) Adam’s story about customers taking on heroic interventions themselves, learning the value of logging all commands, and digging through email chains for paydirt
Developed “three strikes” rule, focus on fixing the proximate issues (and defer general health boosters for another time) so as not to lose the faith of the customer
[@33:38](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=2018) Support personnel remaining calm in the face of unknown damage
[@41:22](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=2482) Outages, postmortem, software as a service and public cloud providers
Vendor transparency or lack thereof
[@48:28](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=2908) Ken: transparency as part of legal compliance?
MITRE CVE List of publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities
[@52:45](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=3165) Adventures in shady pay to play industry events
Fixed raffles
[@1:01:30](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=3690) “We never lost anyone’s data but it took some long vacations”
Incident where someone corrupted kernel data structures
Adam pulls a fast one
Paul Newman and Robert Redford in (1973) The Stingmovie
Different ways to structure support contracts
mdb -kw, the w is load bearing
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
05 Dec 2023
Framework Computer with Nirav Patel
01:07:16
Nirav Patel, CEO and founder of Framework Computer, join Bryan and Adam to talk about building a new computer company (yes! another new computer company!) focused on making laptops repairable and open. It turns out, there are a bunch of shared lessons between building a 3lb laptop and a 2,500lb cloud computer!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
28 Mar 2023
Get You a State Machine for Great Good
01:08:22
Andrew Stone of Oxide Engineering joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his purpose-built, replay debugger for the Oxide setup textual UI. Andrew borrowed a technique from his extensive work with distributed systems to built a UI that was well-structured... and highly amenable to debuggability. He built a custom debugger "in a weekend"!
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
zk: RE: logic separation in consensus protocols: the benefit of seperating out the state machine into a side-effect free function allows you to write a formally verified implementation in a pure FP lang or theorem prover, and then extract a reference program from the proof.
we're going to the zoo: lol i’m a web dev && we do UI tests via StorybookJS + snapshots of each story + snapshots of the end state of an interaction
uwaces: Are you at all worried that you are replicating the horror that is the IBM 3270 terminal? — I have personal history programming on z/OS where the only interface is a graphical EBCDIC 3027 interface — the horror is that people write programs to interact with graphical window (assuming a certain size).
ig: Are you using proptest, quickcheck, or something else?
nickik: This really started with Haskell https://hackage.haskell.org/package/QuickCheck Its also cool that it does 'narrowing' meaning it will try to find an error, and then try to generate a simpler error case.
endigma: how different is something like this from what go calls "fuzzing"
Riking: Fuzzing does also have a minimization step
we're going to the zoo: “what do these means” depends on who you ask lol
we're going to the zoo: fast-check is 🔥 for TypeScript
endigma: if the tested function is deterministic and the test is testing arbitrary input and testing against the result to be derivative in some way of the input function by some f(x), don't you end up re-implementing the tested function to provide the expected result? how does the author choose what properties of a system to test without falling into a "testing the test" pit?
we're going to the zoo: Rust: “Here comes the Haskell plane!”
nixinator: Isn’t rust == oxidation
endigma: yes
endigma: in a scientific sense
nixinator: Iron oxide 🙂 lol
nixinator: Very good!
GeneralShaw: Is prop test a way of formal verification? Is it same/different?
A problem has been eating at Adam: we use async/await in many languages and yet we're not so good at explaining the moving parts. Bryan and the Oxide Friends therapeutically explore the space.
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