Oxide and Friends

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included friend of the pod, Matt Amdur, and Chris.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Strengthening our culture and teams
• OxF: The Future of Work
• Amazon leadership principles
• Nathanael's blog: Building Big Systems with Remote Hardware Teams

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!

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".

Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Paul Graham Founder Mode
• Bryan Reflecting on Founder Mode
• Tim O'Reilly How I Failed
• Camille Fournier Founder Create Managers
• Bryan Chesky interview we mention
• OxF: on Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing
• Seagull Management
• How to Castrate a Bull NOT AN ENDORSEMENT; DO NOT READ
• The ego con: Non-Stop Hitz

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!

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:

• We're sorry, Germany
• Oxide RFD site
• RFD 1: Requests for Discussion
• A Tool for Discussion (Oxide blog post from Ben)
• Sun PSARC cases
• The Queen's Duck
• The Hairy Arm
• Joyent RFDs
• RFC-3
• AsciiDoc
• Joyent RFD 77
• OxF: Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
• Oxide RFD API
• ... with it's CLI generated by progenitor
• ... which we talked about some on OxF here and here
• "Own your strategic weirdness"
• RFD 113: Engineering Determination, or how we close out RFDs

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Dave Pacheco.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• TechCrunch: Cockroach Labs shakes up its licensing to force bigger companies to pay
• Kelsey's Tweet
• Oxide RFD 53: Control plane data storage requirements
• Oxide RFD 110: CockroachDB for the control plane database
• Oxide RFD 508: Whither CockroachDB
• Joyent blog post on the outage due to postgres autovacuum
• Jepsen
• Dave's CRDB exploration repo
• Chrony
• OxF: A Debugging Odyssey -- debugging an issue that manifested in CRDB
• The Liberation of RethinkDB

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!

The Oxide control plane coordinates multiple services to do complex, compound operations. Early on, we knew we wanted to provide a robust structure for these multi-part workflows. We stumbled onto Distributed Sagas and built our own implementation in Steno. Bryan and Adam are joined by several members of the Oxide team who built and use Steno to drive the complex operation of the control plane.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Dave Pacheco. Eliza Weisman, Andrew Stone, Greg Colombo, and James MacMahon.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices - Caitie McCaffrey
• Oxide RFD 107: Workflows Engine
• Steno
• chat: "the trouble with other people's workflow engines, somehow with all the yaml in the world they're never quite extensible enough"
• Not our first bit of background noise on OxF (trombone)
• SAGAS paper
• chat: "when i hear sagas i think "transaction semantics enforced at the application layer" and when i hear workflow i hear "a dsl that doesn't have a for loop""
• Automated saga testing
• Oxide RFD 289: Steno Upgrade
• Feral Concurrency Control paper from Berkeley and the University of Sydney
• Eliza's PR
• Steno's description of its divergence from Distributed Sagas
• AWS "constant work" blog
• chat: "Now, migrate the owl."
• OxF on formal methods
• A complex bug with sagas: "tl;dr there's TWENTY steps in 5042 that leads to an accounting bug"
• Oxide RFD 373: Reliable Persistent Workflows
• Eliza's novella on updating an instance

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!

Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his terrific blog post on his many pragmatic uses of LLMs to solve real problems. He has great advice about when to use them (often!) and what kinds of problems they handle well. LLMs aren't great at many things, but used well they can be an amazing tool.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest, Nicholas Carlini as well as by listeners Mike Cafarella, p5commit, and chrisbur.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Nicholas' blog: How I Use "AI"
• The McLaughlin Group
• Surge 2011 ~ Closing Plenary ~ Theo Schlossnagle
• Microsoft's Tay chatbot
• Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry vs. Siri
• Sal Khan on LLMs
• Google's awful AI ad
• Google pulls ad

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Katie Moussouris.

• 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!

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!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Raja Koduri.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• 3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell
• 3dfx
• OpenGL
• Glide
• Direct3D
• CUDA
• Dennard scaling
• VLIW
• GPGPU
• AMD APU
• Energy Efficiency and AI Hardware
• 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!

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!?

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Charity Majors.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Glyph: Against Innovation Tokens
• Charity's Twitter Thread
• OxF: Let That Sink In! (Whither Twitter?) with Charity
• Druid
• Scuba whitepaper
• Oxide RFD 68: Partnership as Shared Values
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
• Dropshot and Progenitor
• OxF: The Pragmatism of Hubris
• OxF: Helios

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!

Every so often we like to give our Oxide and Friends hot takes (or as Adam puts it "Bryan getting trolled on Twitter"). This time, a viral tweet suggests that NVIDIA is on the same trajectory as Sun Microsystems on its ascent during the Dot Com Bubble. From two alumni of Sun's rise and fall: maaaaybe not.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Todd Gamblin.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• The Tweet!
• OxF: Innovation Stagnation? -- wherein we forgot to read the tweet
• Framework laptop RISC-V mainboard
• Tadpole SPARCbook
• OxF: A Requiem for SPARC with Tom Lyon -- we're RISC dead-enders
• Acquired on NVIDIA: part I, part II, part III, Jensen
• RIVA 128
• OxF: Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing

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!

Bryan and Adam were joined by The Changelog’s Adam Stacoviak for a … wide ranging conversation! Something for everyone—especially fans of HBO’s Silicon Valley!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Adam Stacoviak.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Bryan on Changelog

• Changelog: 23 years of Ruby with Matz
• SWOT
• Bachmanity Insanity
• Straight outta Kubecon
• Breakmaster Cylinder
• Adam Stac on github
• Changelog Dance Party by BMC
• Computer History Museum: Oral Histories
• Bryan's talk on social audio

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Josh Clulow, Brian Bennett, Robert Mustacchi, and Steve Tuck.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• The Register: Fat-fingered admin downs entire Joyent data center
• Bryan's talk: Debugging Under Fire
• Oxide and Friends on the Oakland Ballers
• The Ur Agent
• Joyent post-mortem
• 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!

The long-awaited Oxide and Friends bookclub! Bryan and Adam were joined by special guest--and real life biologist--Greg Cost to discuss Philip Ball's terrific book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Spoiler: Alan Turing makes a very expected appearance!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Greg Cost.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• The Turing pattern
• RNA as a precursor to DNA
• Xenopus frog
• Xenobots
• Anton computer

Bryan's reading notes

Central themes

• Power and limitations of metaphor – especially mechanical ones
• The fundamental, diametrical opposition between life and machines. (Nature does not use simulations!)
• Rejecting the neo-Darwinian paradigm

Passages of note:

• p. 91: “of the common SNPs seen in human populations, fully 62 percent are associated with height” … “the most common genomic associations for complex traits like this are in the noncoding regions” What is cognition? p. 137: “Life is, as biologist Michael Levin Jeremy Gunawardenaand philosopher Daniel Dennet have argued, ‘cognition all the way down’” AlphaFold2 p. 148 “AlphaFold does not so much solve the infamously difficult protein-folding problem as sidestep it. The algorithm makes no predictions about how a polypeptide chain folds, but simply predicts the end result based on the sequence.”
• p. 156: allostery refers to how a
• 🤯 p. 160: “The popular view that science is the process of studying what the world is like needs to be given an important qualification: science tends to be the study of what we can study.”
• p. 166: “The misfolding pathology of PrPs (prion proteins) is the price paid for the benefits of disorder. … Disordered proteins can increase the complexity and versatility of our regulatory networks, but at the cost of increased risk of toxic aggregates formed from misfolded proteins.”
• p. 181: “The [training] analogy is far from perfect, not least because proteins don’t need to be ‘trained’ to acquire their roles.” Ball himself loves to use computing a metaphor, even when it is inapt or imperfect!
• p. 189: “What you’re really looking at here is a diagram not of a molecular event but of a failed paradigm.”
• p. 201: Clifford Brangwynne: “Many of the textbooks and even our language conveys this kind of factory-floor image of what goes on inside the cell. But the reality is that the computational logic underlying life is much more soft, wet and stochastic than anyone appreciates.” To which I would add: the information machine is MUCH more deterministic than anyone appreciates!
• p. 205: “Because the binding of BMPs to BMP receptors can be altered by other molecules, the BMP pathway can interact with other pathways to create crosstalk between cells during development.” Mike Olson’s observation of everything working through side-effect. 🤯 p. 212: “It seems likely that metazoans have evolved this evolvability. One of the odd features of transcription factors that bind to DNA is that, in eukaryotes, the base sequences that they recognize are often surprisingly short – perhaps six or so base pairs long. … But there’s no reason the selectivity has to be this approximate; in prokaryotes the binding sites are longer and therefore more specific. It seems that eukaryotes have, so to speak, chosen this sloppiness – probably because it allows new regulatory pathways to develop.”
• p 217: “While causal emergence seems to be a general design principle for life, it is rarely evident in our own technologies.” Disagree with: “...maybe the better computers of the future will be more causally emergent.” We can’t even get asynchronous systems working!
• 🤯 p. 222: “Is there, after all, really such an obvious advantage to being multicellular? If so, we don’t know what it is.” … “If [evolutionary biologist Michael] Lynch is right, the implication is humbling: we are here not because the multicellular lifestyle of metazoans like us is superior or even advantageous, but because chance mutations created possibilities for new regulatory and multicellular behaviors that natural selection merely found no reason to eliminate.”
• p. 226: “If we want to understand the mechanisms behind some key evolutionary shifts – for example, the emergence of complex body shapes and lifestyles in the Cambrian explosion, the emergence of nervous systems and of new modes of cognition, and the divergence of mammals and other vertebrates – genomes are the wrong place to look.”
• p. 245: “The switching of cell states often happens gradually rather than by abrupt switching at a sharply defined fork in the landscape.”
• p. 248: “One of the most useful pieces of advice I heard from Nature’s biology editor many years ago was that the answer in biology is always ‘yes’”
• p. 258: “Such leveraging of noise, the researchers suggested, might represent ‘a central and unifying principle underlying the properties of stem and progenitor cells that are central to the evolution of metazoan life.’ Noisiness helps to keep all the cell-fate options open.”
• p. 263: “In short, says biologist Dennis Bray, the cells circuitry (if that is even a good metaphor at all) ‘is a long way from a silicon chip or any circuit a human would design.’ The more we learn about living systems, Bray writes, ‘the more we realize how idiosyncratic and discontinuous they are’ relative to computers.”
• p. 267: “Planarians challenge our notions of what life can be.”
• p. 276: “Lewis Wolpert is said to have once claimed, ‘It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.’”
• p. 291: “The heart drives and shapes its own formation, bootstrapping itself into existence by virtue of its very function.”
• p. 293: “If there’s a central feature of how life works, it is surely in this ability to create outcomes that are neither arbitrary nor wholly prescribed.”
• p. 295: “The plasticity of form shown by living organisms might be not only a good way but the only way of making entities as complex as us”, but goes onto to liken us to universal computation
• p. 296: “But what really is ‘normal’? … There are many types of benign skin growths; I’ve had a lipoma on my upper arm throughout my adult life.”
• 🤔 p. 297: “Conjoined twins like the Hensels are the result of an incomplete separation.” I think this is wrong? Certainly, it is odds with Mutants by by Armand Marie Leroi.
• 😡 p. 309: “Once a relatively obscure figure, Turing is now widely hailed as a visionary genius, thanks in part to the 2014 biopic The Imitation Game and the decision to feature him on the British fifty-pound note.” WTAF
• p. 326: “The positioning of our organs on the correct side is controlled by stirring!” Mutants goes into this as well
• p. 331: “Hsp90 acts as a kind of ‘capacitor for morphological evolution,’ storing up variation of form that might be released in times of stress”
• p. 333: “It seems that the exploration of shape in the early Cambrian was excessively profligate: some of the body plans found in the fossil record of that time soon vanished. How could they have been selected for, only then to be so rapidly selected a...

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.

Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Infoworld: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork
• OpenTofu response
• 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!

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!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by very special guests Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel as well our somewhat-special boss, Steve Tuck.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• The Oakland Ballers
• Bryan and Adam at Manaea's no-no
• The Munson-Nixon line
• The Pioneer League
• Baseball's longest game
• Adam's neighbor, Bill George, scorer of the longest game
• Yolo Highwheelers
• BART's sponsorship of the Ballers
• J.T. Snow joins the Ballers
• J.T. saves Dusty's son

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!

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!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Andres Freund.

Our research for this episode:

• Andres' initial public disclosure
• New York Times: Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? by Kevin Roose
• Kevin Roose
• New York Times front page from April 4th, 2024
• How I got started as a developer with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas | Path To Citus Con Ep08
• The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind | WIRED
• How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide - The Verge
• Linux backdoor was a long con, possibly with nation-state support, experts say - Nextgov/FCW
• research!rsc: Timeline of the xz open source attack
• Brian Krebs thread on mastodon
• Xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained
• A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects
• Risky Business #743 -- A chat about the xz backdoor with the guy who found it (podcast)
• Risky Biz News: F-Droid narrowly avoided XZ-like incident in 2020 (podcast)
• What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world | Ars Technica
• Everything I know about the XZ backdoor
• LINUX Unplugged 556: The xz Backdoor Exposed 🚨 (podcast)

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

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...

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague Steve Klabnik.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Bryan: Engineering a culture
• Matt: It's Free Real Estate
• Cliff: Who killed the network switch?
• OxF: Engineering Culture
• Demo Day
• Jujutsu
• Covid as a catalyst for remote-friendly features
• Watercooler morning meeting
• No-meet Wednesday
• OtM: Jeff Rothschild
• No (formalized) review process
• The non-zero-sum value of praise
• Positive Coaching Alliance
• Chat as the apple of discord (and remember email?! Or jabber??!!)
• DORA
• Oxide RFDs
• RFD 68: Partnership as Shared Values
• Matthew Sanabria: Observability Companies to Watch in 2024
• "Chat"
• "Rock and stone"

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!

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?!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Nicholas Carlini.

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide Colleague, Charlie Park.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (13:39) - OODA
• (22:30) - Back to Bryan
• (24:27) - Flame Graphs
• (28:58) - Statemap
• (32:39) - Minard / Tufte
• (44:53) - thingskatedid
• (46:39) - DTrace aggregations
• (56:06) - ParaView
• (01:03:08) - Simpsons IMDb
• (01:05:16) - Survivorship Bias
• (01:15:03) - Kartlytics
• (01:18:15) - Kartlytics sample group
• (01:19:11) - Wrapping up
• (01:22:02) - OxF book club

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Bryan's rad gnuplot
  • GitHub PR with Bryan's visualizations
• Tufte
  • Pronunciation of "Tufte" is /ˈtʌfti/
• Flame Graphs
• flamegraph-rs
• OODA
• This American Life: A Little Bit of Knowledge
• Statemaps
• Minard's diagram
• https://twitter.com/thingskatedid/status/1386077306381242371
  • plot.awk
  • Visualizing regular expressions and BNF grammars with Graphviz
  • Example implementations of isvg and idot
• DTrace aggregations
• Rust crate ratatui
• Programs and libraries for plotting and other data visualizations:
  • gnuplot
  • Matplotlib
  • ggplot2
  • ParaView
  • GLVis
• Simpsons IMDB visualization
• Abraham Wald and the airplane diagram with red bullet holes – here’s the origin story
• Kartlytics
• How Life Works by Philip Ball

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!

Bryan and Adam are joined by members of the Oxide storage team--Josh, Alan, James, and Matt--to talk about Crucible, the service that provides block storage for VM instances running in the Oxide Rack.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues Josh Clulow, Alan Hanson, James MacMahon, and Matt Keeter.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Hyper-converged infrastructure
• Fibre Channel
• ZFS
• Introduction to Flexible Data Placement: A New Era of Optimized Data Management
• Storage Architecture Considerations
• Ceph
• RFD 60: Storage Architecture Considerations
• RFD 177: Implementation of Data Storage
• RFD 444: Crucible Upstairs Refactoring
• RFD 445: Crucible Upstairs Backpressure

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!

Sometimes Bryan gets trolled by a tweet and brings it to Adam and the Oxide Friends. This was a well-crafted troll: is innovation slowing? Are the most interesting problems solved. In a word: no. For many more words, listen in!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Steve Klabnik.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• The Tweet
• Nate Silver
• Secularity
• Secular stagnation
• Angela Collier: physics progress in the last 70 years?
• Haber process
• CRISPR gene editing
• Book: Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
• Leonhard Euler
• Dijkstra's algorithm
• Raft
• Antibiotic
• Acquired: TSMC
• EUV lithography

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!

Bryan and Adam are joined by Oxide colleagues Josh Clulow, Patrick Mooney, and Steve Klabnik to discuss Helios, the operating system that runs on the Oxide Rack. Helios is a distro of illumos (derived from OpenSolaris, derived from Solaris, etc.). What's a distro? Why did Oxide choose illumos? Plenty of cross-generational appeal in this episode!

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• The Helios github repo
• Hacker News thread its release
• OmniOS
• Rust Tier 2 support
• Bryan's talk on holistic boot
• Oxide and Friends: Holistic Boot
• Oxide and Friends: Shipping Rack 1
• The Quality Death Spiral
• Oxide's "St. Louis" branch of illumos
• Bryan's sleeper bug from 1991
• illumos books (How's this for some SEO?!)

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Sean Klein, Rain Paharia, and the illustrious Steve Klabnik.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• go forth and vibe in this minecraft paradise I seeded
• Dinosaur book
• Roslyn
• --timings
• Steve's "outlining" example
• Rain's cargo-hakari
• Rain speeding up Omicron builds
• Blog post on many of these topics
• Sean's fix to u32 overflow bug
• miniserde
• mold
• David Tolnay on pre-compiled macros in wasm
• Buck2
• Build Systems à la Carte

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Simon Willison.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• IEEE Spectrum: Open-Source AI Is Uniquely Dangerous
• Newsroom Robots with Simon Willison
• OxF: Another LPC55 ROM Vulnerability
• Simon Willison: Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023
• llama.cpp
• Mistral AI
• France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round at a $260M valuation to take on OpenAI
• Simon again: The AI trust crisis
• Reply All: Is Facebook Spying on You?
• Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models
• New York Times Sues OpenAI
• Lycos
• ChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure Why

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:

• Talking about Open Source LLMs on Oxide and Friends

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!

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!

George Cozma from Chips and Cheese and Jordan Ranous from Storage Review joined Adam, Bryan, and the Oxide Friends to discuss AMD’s recent MI300 announcement and the implications to accelerated to compute. The MI300A particularly caught our eye--CPU and GPU chiplets on in the same package! Bryan pronounced ML "the biggest thing since the spreadsheet!"... we'll see!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included George Cozma, Jordan Ranous, and :Josh Clulow.

PRs to show notes are a great way to help out the show!

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!

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!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Nirav Patel, founder and CEO of Framework Computer.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Framework
• r/spicypillows
• Framework expansion cards
• Framework-based gaming console from the community
• Optima Braille laptop
• Oxide and Friends: A brief history of talking computers
• Acer Ferrari 3400 c. 2004 -- 6.6lb favorite of Solaris Kernel engineers

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!

So… OpenAI happened… and Bryan and Adam try it break it down with help from Steve Tuck and even more special guest Chuck McManis.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by variously special guests Steve Tuck and Chuck McManis.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Hacker News: OpenAPI's board has fired Sam Altman
• Employee Letter to OpenAI's Board
• Who Controls OpenAI? by Matt Levine, the G.O.A.T.
• Axios: Who is Larry Summers, the controversial pick to join OpenAI's board
• Mike Olsen: What is a Board of Directors For?
• 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
• Homer vs. Fermat
• IBM and the Holocaust

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

• Oxide Hiring Process
• The Pragmatic Engineer
• Oxide and Friends: Tech Layoffs (Nov. 8, 2022)
• The Oxide RFD process
• The Psychopath Test
• Oxide Principles and Values
• Adam's detente with the American Hockey League
• Leventhal's conundrum - there is a performance pathology, find the butterfly that caused the hurricane.
• Compensation as a Reflection of Values
• Light's Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of GE
• Gergely's new book The Software Engineer's Guidebook

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Steve Tuck and Steve Klabnik.

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!

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?

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by friends of the show Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Bryan's Talk, Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns: A Decade Later by Bryan Cantrill, Oxide
• Subsequent panel with Adam J. and Ashley
• Oxide and Friends: Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower from August 28th, 2023
• Oxide and Friends: Docker, Inc., an Early Epitaph from September 13th, 2021

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Conor Hoekstra and Oxide colleague Cliff Biffle.

Adam and the Oxide Friends follow Bryan on Mr. Nagle's Wild Ride as he investigates performance anomalies. Bryan used all manner of tool from gnuplot to DTrace-inspired bpftrace! If you have ever or plan to ever care about the latency of network-borne protocols, you won't want to miss this!

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 October 2nd, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Tom Lyon, James Tucker, Eliza Weisman, and Dan Ports.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Latency Art: X marks the spot
• Latency Art: Rainbow Pterodactyl
• Nagle on Nagle
• Dan's tweet on Nagle
• Eliza's tweet on Nagle
• TCP_NODELAY or TCP? No, delay!
• Dr. Angela Collier on violin plots
• 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!

Bryan and Adam reminisce about the DTrace journey 20 years after first integrating the code into Solaris back in September 2003.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Josh Clulow.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Hungry Jack's
• Bryan's other online dating profile
• The Sun E10000 (E10k), the world's worst router
• Leventhal's Conundrum
• DTrace as Half-Life 3, eternal vaporware
• More on SPARC, its TLB, the %npc, and dtrace_fish from OxF May 2021
• Solaris 9 was the completion of the Solaris 2.0 vision
• DTrace Kernel Technical Discussion (2002)
• Mr. Sparkle
• Firefox? Mozilla? Firebird!
• Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems, Usenix 2004
• Graydon on DTrace in Rust
• Rust USDT crate
• DTrace on Windows
• Adam's blog: DTrace on macOS
• Adam's blog: DTrace for OEL
• PSARC cases from 2003

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!

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.

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 August 28th, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Kelsey Hightower.

Here is the (lightly edited) live chat from the show:

• xxxxbubbler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm8P4oCIY3g here is Bryan's talk from 1 decade ago, for reference
• rolipo.li: web3 is going great
• rolipo.li: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
• 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. 🙈
• quasarken: I love that bit about community Adam
• blacksmithforlife: https://www.linux.com/news/us-government-opens-access-federal-source-code-codegov/
• 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...
• ahl0003: Great point!
• blainehansen: The open source cooperative idea is the best I can come up with to solve the problem
• blacksmithforlife: What is dev rail?
• bcantrill: Developer relations
• ahl0003: developer relations
• jbk: dev rel(ations)?
• bcantrill: JYNX
• blacksmithforlife: Never heard that term before
• 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:

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on August 21st included Josh Padnick, Malcolm Matalka, and Cory O'Daniel.

Our condolences to the friends, family, and loved ones of Kris Nóva

Ominous figure squeezing a fish that is vomiting gold coins

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• OpenTF
• HashiCorp BUSL announcement
• HashiCorp BUSL FAQ
• Squeezefish "Interview" (image)
• Cory's blog post
• CNCF issue for tracking Hashicorp license change

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill speakers on included Steve Klabnik, Ian Grunert, and Tom Lyon.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks
• Sub-podcasting (it's a thing!) this
• video: Fred Brooks speaking on No Silver Bullet
• Ruby on Rails demo (2005)
• Future of coding podcast
• Amdahl's law
• FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
• Knuth and McIlroy Approach a Problem

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!

In an Oxide and Friends tradition, Bryan and Adam invite the community to share book recommendations.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on included Steve Klabnik, Tom Lyon, Ian Grunert, Owen Anderson, phillipov, makowski, and saethlin. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Elon Jet
• High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems by Southwick, Karen
• Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology by Paul Rabinow
• Sun Labs vs. SunSoft Water Fight 1992
• Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town Hardcover by Stacy Horn
• Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster's Inevitable Bust Kindle Edition by Alan Payne
• A History of Silicon Valley - Vol 1: The 20th Century Paperback by Piero Scaruffi
• H-E-B
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Arion Press)
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
• Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
• Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro
• If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future Hardcover by Jill Lepore
• UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election
• NPR: The Night A Computer Predicted The Next President
• Doom Guy: Life in First Person by John Romero
• From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting by Judith Brett
• Bryan had a reading list for his wedding?! (his wife confirms)
  • The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
  • Harp in the South by Ruth Park
  • Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
  • Death of the Lucky Country by Donald Horne
  • 30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey
  • Leviathan by John Birmingham
• The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding by Robert Hughes
• Barbarians Led by Bill Gates by Jennifer Edstrom and, Marlin Eller
• Murray Sargent's account of how his Scroll Screen Tracer got Windows to work in protected mode
• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan
• DeviceScript
• Washington: A Life by Chernow
• California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What It Means for America's Power Grid
• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
• Acts of the Apostles: Mind over Matter: Volume Blue by John F.X. Sundman
• Thunder Below!: The USS Barb Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II by Eugene B. Fluckey
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman
• The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street by Thomas A. Bass
• The Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took On Las Vegas by Thomas A Bass

Some of the other books mentioned in the Discord channel:

• Herr aller Dinge/Lord of All Things by Andreas Eschbach
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
• The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon
• California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt
• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution Hardcover by Gregory Zuckerman
• The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street by Thomas A. Bass
• The Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took On Las Vegas by Thomas A Bass
• Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Bryan and Adam were joined by Justin and David from the Oxide team to talk about their work on the Oxide Console--the frontend to the Oxide computer. The rigor they've brought to all aspects of the frontend--client/server type safety, test automation, a11y--it's astounding!

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 17th, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues David Crespo, and Justin Bennett.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Justin's podcast: devtools.fm
• David's talk: Folding Time with Signals in Elm
• Oxide and Friends where we mentioned Elm
• Playwright
• Kent C. Dodds
• Dropshot web framework
• Oxide Typescript SDK
• Oxide console repo
• Oxide docs site

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Kate Hicks, Kirstin Neira, CJ Mendez, Erik Anderson, Josh Clulow, Nathanael Huffman and Aaron Hartwig.

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!

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.

They were also joined by Steve Klabnik.

Questions for Steve and Bryan:

[@6:38] Q:

A:

[@8:46] Q:

A:

[@13:31] Q:

• 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.

A:

[@32:24] Q (Chat):

[@32:56] Q (Chat):

[@34:40] Q:

A:

[@42:38] Q:

A:

[@56:05] Q:

A:

[@01:02:06] Q:

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!

On this episode Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal were on a rant; but we welcome others on-stage!

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• How we got here: Tweet from Liron Shapira
• Comet Hale-Bopp
• Heaven's Gate
• Cross price supply elasticity of copper and molybdenum markets
• Ceteris paribus -- Bryan's exit from economics
• Chris Dixon's book releasing in March 2024 (NOT AN ENDORSEMENT)
• British to American translation guide
• "It's not just human-level extinction... it's like potential destruction of all value in the light cone" - Emmett Shear
• Vingian Singularity
• Oxide and Friends: Tales from the bringup lab
• Oxide and Friends: More tales from the bringup lab
• Bullying self-driving cars
• AI Resistance Reservists: "For the Lightcone!"
• Samsung security robots
• Oxide and Friends: Does a GPT future need software engineers?
• "I for one welcome our new AI overlords"

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!

Greg and Rain from the Oxide team joined Bryan and Adam to talk about powerful methods of verifying software: formal methods in the form of TLA+ and property-based testing in the form of the proptest Rust crate. If you care about making software right, don't miss it!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues Greg Colombo and Rain Paharia.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Distributed Sagas
• Steno -- Oxide's implementation of distributed sagas
• Learn TLA+
• Hillel Wayne talks
• Hillel Wayne on Alloy 6
• Quickcheck Paper (2000)
• Proptest docs
• Rain's example code

• buf-list crate
• guppy crate
• ... and stay tuned for an upcoming episode revisiting async/await in Rust

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague Jordan Hendricks.

The (lightly edited) live chat from the show:

• DanCrossNYC: The TSC ticks at a fixed rate now days, regardless of voltage scaling on the CPU.
• jbk: just x86 doesn't provide a consistent want to determine what the rate is
• jbk: (I guess some chips will tell you via CPUID, but I've yet to actually encounter such chips)
• jbk: some hypervisors will tell you via an MSR
• zorg24: Looks the Linux kernel docs have some documentation on the x86 TSC and PIT https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/virt/kvm/x86/timekeeping.html
• DanCrossNYC: CPUID or an MSR, but yeah, most systems sample over a fixed interval (determined by another time source) to figure it out.
• jbk: no, versus some other present component that allows you to measure the frequency
• DanCrossNYC: No, the PIT or HPET or something.
• jbk: https://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/uts/i86pc/os/tscc_pit.c?r=236cb9a8
• jbk: is how it uses the PIT
• jbk: (the HPET code needs to improve it's accuracy, so it's only used when the PIT isn't there at the moment)
• jbk: some Intel NUCs have no PIT
• jbk: so HPET is the only option
• bcantrill: https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commit/717646f7112314de3f464bc0b75f034f009c861e
• DanCrossNYC: Two big ones: system maintenance without disturbing guest workloads, and also load balancing across a rack.
• "Sevan: ah, thanks.
• https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/717646f7112314de3f464bc0b75f034f009c861e/usr/src/test/bhyve-tests/tests/common/common.c#L166"
• bcantrill: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/tsc-simulator/tree/master
• 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.
• ahl: https://github.com/dtolnay/case-studies/blob/master/autoref-specialization/README.md
• ahl: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/propolis
• 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.
• jhendricks: a bit belated, but the propolis side of these changes: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/propolis/commit/7ed480843d3b5cfd9fd07dce41772f8eac4e9171
• saethlin: The calvalry??
• saethlin: Are we just going to let that slide
• saethlin: Is this a pronunciation situation again
• zorg24: not the first time I've heard it pronounced that way 🤷
• saethlin: Well maybe it's me learning this time
• DanCrossNYC: Calvary
• DanCrossNYC: That's the religious thing.
• ahl: https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/0c5967db436935325af441af2b27d337f4e64af5/usr/src/uts/common/os/cyclic.c#L44
• zooooooooo: thought this was rust typescript at first 😳
• DanCrossNYC: Dunno... I missed it. 🙂
• ahl:

• aka_pugs: Bryan's TSC is overflowing.
• DanCrossNYC: That's Tom.
• DanCrossNYC: Riding in with the cavalry.
• aka_pugs: Good session.
• ahl: Thanks...

Bryan and Adam are joined by Ashley Williams to talk about open source governance... and the recently, and various stumblings of the Rust project leadership.

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!

Bryan and Adam are joined by Oxide colleagues Arjen, Matt, John, and Nathaneal to talk about the management network--the brainstem of the Oxide Rack. Just as it ties together so many components, this episode ties together many many (many!) topics we've discussed in other episodes.

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 8th 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues Arjen Roodselaar, Matt Keeter, John Gallagher, and Nathanael Huffman.

This built on work described in many previous episodes:

• Cabling the Backplane Prior to going all-in on a cabled backplane with blind-mated server sleds (i.e. no plugging, unplugging, mis-plugging network cables). We (Bryan) espoused an "NC-SI or bust" mantra... at least in part to avoid doubling the cable count. With the cabled backplane, the reasons for NC-SI disappeared (which let the many reasons against truly shine).
• The Pragmatism of Hubris in which we talk about our embedded operating system, Hubris (and it's companion debugger, Humility). Hubris runs on the service processors that are the main endpoints on the management network. Matt's work controlling the management network switch (the VSC7448) is in the context of Hubris, as is John's work communicating with the sleds over the management network.
• The Power of Proto Boards showed and told about the many small boards we've used in development. Several of those were purpose built for controlling and simulating parts of the management network.
• The Oxide Supply Chain Kate Hicks joined us to talk about the challenges of navigating the supply chain. Mentioned here in the context of "supply-chain-driven design": we designed around the parts we could procure! Tip: stay away from "automotive-quality" parts when the auto industry is soaking them all up.
• Holistic Boot in which we talked about how (uniquely!) Oxide boots from nothing to its operating system and services. Over the management network, we can drive server recovery by piping in a RAMdisk over the network and then (slowly) through the UART to the CPU.
• Get You a State Machine for Great Good Andrew joined us to talk about his work on a state-machine driven text-UI and its companion replay debugger. We mentioned this in the context of John replaying the long upload process in seconds rather than hours to fix a UI bug.

Major components of the management network

Matt's VSC7448 dev kit

Matt's remote tuning setup via webcam

Management network debugging
Management network debugging

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Erin Kissane and long-time acquaintances of the show Tim Bray and Steve Klabnik.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Erin's blog post Blue Skies Over Mastodon
• Mastodon blog (5/1) A new onboarding experience on Mastodon]
• Tim's blog post from November Bye Twitter
• "Buy the rumor, sell the news"
• Hellthread
• "Skeet" is to "Tweet" is to "Toot" (aka "Publish")
• skyline.gay
• Bluesky blog Composable Moderation
• Lobsters
• Phanpy
• So you've been publically shamed by Jon Ronson

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Ashley Williams, Adam Jacob, and Steve Klabnik.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Succession
• The Simpsons (explaining the title of this episode)
• The Wire
• The Wire at 20 Podcast
• The Register: Rust Foundation Apologizes for Trademark Policy
• Jomboy (our aspiration)
• Ice Weasel
• Pamela Chestek
• Bryan's talk from Node Summit 2017: Platform as a Reflection of Values
• Linux Foundation form 990
• Rust Foundation Board
• Rust Foundation participation rules

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!

Bryan and Adam are joined by Doug Wibben and Robert Keith to talk about the mechanical design of the cabled backplane of the Oxide rack that allows for "blind-mated" server sleds--no network and power cables to plug, unplug, and mis-plug! Watch the chapter art for relevant pictures.

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 3rd, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague, Robert Keith, and special guest, Doug Wibben.

00:00

03:02

09:52

11:09

12:16

12:58 ...

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:

• tui-rs
• Crossterm
• The reedline crate
• Episode about the "Sidecar" switch
• Elm time-travel debugging
• Replay.io
• Devtools.fm episode on Replay.io
• AADEBUG conference
• California horse meat law

The (lightly) edited live chat from the show:

• MattCampbell: I'm gathering that this is more like the fancy pseudo-GUI style of TUI, which is possibly bad for accessibility
• ahl: we are also building with accessibility in mind, stripping away some of the non-textual elements optionally
• MattCampbell: oh, cool
• ahl: Episode about the "Sidecar" switch: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/oxide-and-friends/blob/master/2021_11_29.md
• MattCampbell: ooh! That kind of recording is definitely better for accessibility than a video.
• uwaces: Were you inspired by Elm? (The programming language for web browsers?)
• bcantrill: Here's Andrew's PR for this, FWIW: oxidecomputer/omicron#2682
• uwaces: Elm has a very similar model. They have even had a debugger that let you run events in reverse: https://elm-lang.org/news/time-travel-made-easy
• bch: I’m joining late - 1) does this state-machine replay model have a name 2) expand on (describe ) the I/o logic separation distinction?
• ahl: http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2015/06/22/first-rust-program-pain/
• 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
• ig: At that point you could turn the recording into an “expect test”. https://blog.janestreet.com/the-joy-of-expect-tests/
• we're going to the zoo: TOFU but for tests 🥰
• 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).
• ahl: https://docs.rs/serde/latest/serde/#data-formats
• ahl: SHOW NOTES Bryan as "semi-elderly" engineer
• MattCampbell: didn't Bryan write a blog post on this?
• MattCampbell: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/16/on-modalities-and-misadventures/
• uwaces: https://www.replay.io
• ahl: https://devtools.fm/episode/9
• ahl: e.g. https://altsysrq.github.io/proptest-book/intro.html
• we're going to the zoo: https://github.com/AFLplusplus/LibAFL
• 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: https://github.com/dubzzz/fast-check
• Riking: Property-based testing tends to be structured differently in philosophy, while fuzzers are more aligned to "give you a bag of bytes"
• nickik: http://www.quviq.com/products/erlang-quickcheck/
• endigma: yeah I can tell its a different structure, but the overall goal seems similar
• we're going to the zoo: they are nonexclusive approaches to testing
• papertigers: I think Kelly was doing a bunch of tests at Joyent based on quick check and prop test. First time I encountered it
• we're going to the zoo: libafl provides a #[derive(Arbitrary)] macro that will provide the correct values for a struct
• uwaces: Lots of stuff in Rust existed first in Haskell (build.rs, quote!, Derive macros, Traits, ect….)…
• nixinator: https://tenor.com/view/%C3%B3culos-escuro-exterminador-terminator-arnold-schwarzenegger-gif-14440790
• 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?
• ahl: https://dl.acm.org/conference/aadebug
• ig: I mean, Haskell is an academic rese...

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on MM DD included Josh Clulow, Keith Adams, Ashley Williams, and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Live chat from the show (lightly edited):

• ahl: John Carmack's tweet
• ahl: ...and the discussion
• Wizord: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1636797265317867520 (the $1M bet on BTC, I take)
• dataphract: "prompt engineering" as in "social engineering" rather than "civil engineering"
• Grevian: I was surprised at how challenging getting good prompts could be, even if I wouldn't quite label it engineering
• TronDD: https://www.aiweirdness.com/search-or-fabrication/
• MattCampbell: I tested ChatGPT in an area where I have domain expertise, and it got it very wrong.
• TronDD: Also interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhJbKBuNnA
• 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)

• antranigv: that's pretty hit on!
• chiefnoah: Yup. Most people are not doing things that haven't been done before. A significant portion of software is just building blocks of libraries
• Wizord: intelligence is compression, in some sense.
• dataphract: "critique the epoll API as though you are Bryan Cantrill"
• ag_dubs: a brain would be much stranger!!
• Wizord: the ability to reduce a large dataset to a coherent set of rules
• antranigv: "Explain the issues of epoll, write as if it's a Bryan ...

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined special guests Eric Vishria and Steve Tuck.

(Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Curated chat log from the show:

• davidf: Sharing this here because I loved every bit of it: My Startup Banking Story by Mitchell Hashimoto
• 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? 😄
• drkamoz: I think the opposite is also true, without the infra, Africa’s been very early to adopt mobile banking https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20131217-east-africa-a-mobile-banking-hub
• drkamoz: Can you explain sweep funds?
• Eric Likness - carpetbomberz.com: 6 months of runway some place else. Not what Peter Thiel was telling people.
• antranigv: What was his response?
• arjenroodselaar: Eject! Eject!
• ahl: this was a fun summary: https://svbhallofshame.wordpress.com/
• ahl: https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2023/pr23016.html
• antranigv: This Venture Debt is intriguing, specially for startups who have a good background but are having a hard time... kinda? I guess?
• ahl: Acquired: Benchmark Part I
• ahl: Acquired: Benchmark Part II: The Dinner

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!

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!

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 February 27th, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Ryan Goodfellow, Levon Tarver, Ben Naecker, and Arjen Roodselaar.

Links

• Intel Tofino Series
• P4 (programming language) - Wikipedia
• p4lang/p4c: P4_16 reference compiler
• oxidecomputer/p4: A P4 compiler
• The quote crate: Rust quasi-quoting
• RIFT WG - Routing In Fat Trees | IETF Community Wiki

Here's (much of) the live chat from the show:

• ahl https://github.com/oxidecomputer/oxide-and-friends/blob/master/2021_11_29.md
• ahl That's the Sidecar switch episode
• bcantrill https://p4.org/
• admchl What does "at line rate" mean?
• 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).
• tahnok What's TCAM?
• levon Ternary Content Addressable Memory
• bnaecker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory#Ternary_CAMs
• 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
• bcantrill https://github.com/oxidecomputer/p4
• SyntheticGate sidecar is the "codename" of our switch box
• SyntheticGate "gimlet" is our server sled
• bcantrill https://github.com/oxidecomputer/propolis
• 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?
• arjenroodselaar Correct.
• bcantrill OPTE == Oxide Packet Transformation Engine
• admchl Gimlet?
• rng_drizzt Compute server
• 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.
• levon For those unfamiliar with the DTrace tool, or the rationale behind leveraging DTrace over other tracing / debugging tools: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall05/cos518/papers/dtrace.pdf
• bcantrill https://github.com/oxidecomputer/progenitor
• ahl some notes on rust codegen: https://github.com/ahl/codegen-template
• arjenroodselaar DDM! Bring us home!
• a172 it astonishes me how many "cloud" type architectures are built on v4 only or v4 first.
• a172 IPv6 is older than Wi-Fi
• a172 It solves real problems. PLEASE use it.
• nyanotech yessss fina...

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!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Yael Grauer, and Steve Klabnik.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them (experiment in turning the show live-chat into notes):

• Nahum: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ if anyone wants to read up on the 3-2-1 Backup strategy. 👅
• Cyborus: can we get a link to the talk?
• Nahum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9s2NxILBK8
• Nahum: https://digital-lab-wp.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Memory-Safety-Convening-Report-.pdf via https://digital-lab-wp.consumerreports.org/2023/01/23/new-report-future-of-memory-safety/
• Nahum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
• Cyborus: "can we talk" => "hey. you. have a panic attack. anyways i got a cool sandwich"
• AaronW: "of course we should have seatbelts" 😄
• MattCampbell: but then you've got the C die-hards who say that Rust itself is too complex
• AaronW: https://twitter.com/markrussinovich/status/1571995117233504257?s=46
• DanCrossNYC: People used to say the same thing about PL/I and recently the COBOL people have been saying the same thing. Nothing new under the sun.
• statuscalamitous: https://blog.yossarian.net/2023/02/11/The-unsafe-language-doom-principle
• 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.
• cdaringe: As an ocaml user, i was hoping revery would take off https://github.com/revery-ui/revery
• statuscalamitous: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174952/the-tyranny-of-metrics
• Saethlin: Wake up babe, new 0xide reading assignment dropped
• AaronW: Labelled like a can of pringles -- "20% more malloc() free()!"
• Nahum: Relevant to rules based accounting: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/hacking-the-tax-code.html
• 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.
• alilleybrinker: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec22summer_alexopoulos.pdf
• statuscalamitous: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-languages-in-android-13.html
• 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.
• JamesBrock: "Lindy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
• statuscalamitous: https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-android-platform.html
• DanCrossNYC: Another issue with C/C++ in particular is that UB causes latent bugs to surface years later.
• alilleybrinker: In the paper linked above, the average lifetime looks to have been about 3.5 years.
• Saethlin: I learned Rust faster than C++
• alilleybrinker: Related, you might be interested in EPSS: https://www.first.org/epss/
• 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
• alilleybrinker: Humility also requires a lot of Rust https://github.com/oxidecomputer/humility
• Eden: I do like the checklist item that every change must be...

Members of the Oxide team join Bryan and Adam to talk about our journey through compliance (spoiler: we passed!). 

Oxide and Friends: February 6th, 2023 

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 February 6th, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on February 6th included Arjen Roodselaar, Nathanael Huffman, Robert Keith, Eric Aasen, and Josh Clulow,

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!

Oxide and Friends: January 23rd, 2023

Revisiting Unikernels

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 January 23rd, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on January 23rd included Steve Klabnik, Dan Cross, and others.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Bryan's 2016 blog post Unikernels are unfit for production

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!

Give feedback

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 January 16th, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Nathanael Huffman, Cliff Biffle, Rick Altherr, Matt Keeter, Eric Aasen, and Dan Cross.

Check out the show notes on github to browse the images.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (11:42) - Gemini
• (18:33) - Root of Trust (RoT) carrier
• (20:53) - Power
• (23:41) - Trimmed Power
• (28:11) - SPI MUX
• (29:38) - SPI MUX rework
• (33:14) - Gimletlet
• (41:10) - Gimletlet NIC
• (46:28) - DIMMlet
• (56:39) - Gimletlet mk2
• (58:27) - Adapters
• (59:54) - Adapters zoom
• (01:01:47) - Ignition (FPGA)
• (01:04:40) - Gimletlet peripherals
• (01:06:12) - Gimletlet with management switch (1/2)
• (01:07:22) - Gimletlet with management switch (2/2)
• (01:09:21) - Kludge.2 (K.2)
• (01:16:23) - Donglet
• (01:25:49) - RoT carrier carrier
• (01:26:17) - Tranceiver load tester
• (01:29:06) - Load slammer for Tofino 2
• (01:31:30) - Power (improved)
• (01:32:08) - Part Toaster
• (01:33:28) - K.2r2

Images of each proto board:

• @11:42 Gemini
• @18:33 Root of Trust (RoT) carrier
• @20:53 Power
• @23:41 Trimmed Power
• @28:11 SPI MUX

See github for the list of predictions (and add your own!)

Break it down with Ian Brown

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 December 26th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Ian Brown.

A Debugging Odyssey

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 December 19th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Dave Pacheco. 

Oxide and Friends: December 12th, 2022

Podcasts for Podcast-Lovers

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 December 12th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on MM DD included XXX, and YY. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Podcasts mentioned on the show

• Ziade&Ford Advisors
• Brady Heywood
• EconTalk
  • Lamorna Ash on Dark, Salt, Clear
• The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast
• Tools & Craft
• Resilient web design
• Software Defined Talk
• Kubernetes: The Documentary part 1 and part 2
• devtools FM
• Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur
• As the Ice Cream Churns
• Lost Terminal
• Let's Make A Sci-Fi
• Invest Like the Best: Shane Battier
  • New York Times: The No-Stats All-Star
• Mark and Carrie
• NerdOut@Spotify: Open Source Work Is Work
• The Flop House
• The Moth
• It Could Happen Here
• Playdate Podcast
• The Chernobyl Podcast
• Behind the Bastards
• Behind the Police
• Terrorism Bad
• Guys We F****d
• How Did This Get Made: Holy Matrimony
• Startup: How Not to Pitch a Billionaire
• Boom / Bust HQ Trivia
• Acquired: TSMC
• The Pitch Show
• Bad Bets

Tools

• Embedded.fm
• Huff Duffer

Other links from the audience

• BSD Now
• Hardcore History
• EMCrit Podcasthttps://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9lbWNyaXQub3JnL2ZlZWQvcG9kY2FzdC8?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwiIuNvvuPX7AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ&hl=en
• https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id1651876897
• The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week
• https://99percentinvisible.org/about/the-show/
• https://intel.com/aipodcast
• https://nextcloud.com/podcast/
• https://gzmshows.com/shows/listing/the-big-fib/
• http://wandb.com/podcast
• https://feeds.captivate.fm/gradient-dissent/
• https://blart.libsyn.com/
• https://darknetdiaries.com/
• https://theretrohour.com/
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPxHg4192hLDpTI2w7F9rPg
• https://reasonablysound.com
• https://www.youtube.com/@NoBoilerplate
• https://www.youtube.com/@Namtao
• https://signalsandthreads.com/
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads
• https://darknetdiaries.com/
• https://blog.mainframe.dev/
• https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revolutions/id703889772
• https://gimletmedia.com/shows/mystery-show
• https://mast.hpc.social/@freemin7
• https://feeds.megaphone.fm/uncivil
• https://open.spotify.com/episode/4cJ7NqRen0OSJ2a4Wg4uaO?si=XYNwryI0Sc6MeYRboeUcgA
• https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram
• https://open.spotify.com/episode/5EUBBoQVZtQMkhTjfSIvzu?si=j9wcHSKGSfCiP2khHsWBug
• http://www.autonocast.com
• https://risky.biz
• https://share.transistor.fm/s/7809611e

Oxide and Friends: November 28th, 2022

Leaving Twitter with 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 November 28th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Tim Bray. Other speakers on November 28th included Adam Jacob, Toasterson, and raggi. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Bye, Twitter by Tim Bray
• jwz: PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet
• jwz: Mastodon stampede "Federation" now apparently means "DDoS yourself."
• Tim Bray On Algorithms
• On terrible Twitter ads: @intelnews: "Moore’s Law only stops when innovation stops.”
• 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!

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 14th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Kris Nova. Other speakers on November 14th included XXX, and YY. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

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!)

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 31st, 2022

Open Source Firmware

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 31st, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests were Christian Walker and Philipp Deppenwiese. 

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.

In this special, breaking news edition of Oxide and Friends, Bryan Cantrill was joined by Joshua M. Clulow, Charity Majors, mick, Rishi Desai, linear cannon, ignaloidas, Craig Traynor, Cargo Occultist, and Aaron David Goldman.

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 24th, 2022

Open Source Inside Baseball

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 24th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was dear friend-of-Oxide, Stephen O'Grady. 

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• For non-American and/or non-baseball fans "inside baseball" is an idiom meaning "an expert's take or opinion"
• Also, Stephen, Bryan, and Adam love actual baseball so there was quite a bit of that as well...
• For the baseball fans, the Bryce Harper at bat we were so excited about
• The main event: Stephen's The Dead End

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.

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)

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 26th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our esteemed guest was one of the authors of Losing the Signal, Sean Silcoff.

Not many links, mostly anecdotes from Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, the book Sean co-wrote with Jacquie McNish

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• @05:01 The aha moment for BBM
• @09:42 Ruffled feathers from partner interactions
  • Bell South thought they had an exlusive deal and they didn't
  • Years later, people didn't seem to hold it against them
• @12:40 Brian's anecdote about a meeting with Balsillie and Lazaridis
• @15:30 Lost opportunities to course-correct
  • The touch screen button
• @20:00 The Blackberry Storm
  • Potentially rushed to market when it was not up to standards
  • RIM's own testing lab found serious problems but shipped it anyway
  • RIM was a great innovator and a terrible follower, some have said that of Apple, though
• @25:40 Lazaridis as the product guy
  • This I get (keypad), this I don't get (touchscreen)
  • Story on the way up is as important as on the way down
• @30:20 Parallels with DEC
  • Amazing rise
  • Failure to pass control
  • co-CEO model at RIM - worked really well until it didn't
• @34:19 NTP Patent case
  • Case brief
  • Jury selection was weighed incredibly far towards lay folks with very little technical understanding
  • Technical demonstration goes sideways
• @45:10 Trusting the other co-CEO and the option backdating scandal
  • Lazaridis didn't really understand the options stuff and felt Balsillie had put the company at risk
  • Kept their fights private, but people could tell "mom and dad weren't getting along"
  • Is it right or wrong if everyone was doing it?
  • They left an extensive digital paper trail making it easy to make a case
  • Thanks to Tom for the clarification - options backdating was okay, failing to report it was not
• @52:50 Larry Conlee
  • 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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests were Steve Klabnik and Luqman Aden. Other speakers included Dan Cross, Tim McNamara, and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• @0:27 let_chains are stable in Rust 1.64
  • Adam's tweet
  • The stabilization PR, with the full saga leading up to stabilization
  • As Steve mentions, the feature dates all the way back to 2017 and extends the Swift-inspired if let expressions Rust has had for a while
  • Some Rust features, like async functions in traits, are huge rabbit holes
  • 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")
  • Discussion about Ruby also taking stability seriously: flip-flops weren't removed in Ruby 2.0 in part because of this pretty incredible snippet from Yusuke Endoh
  • Quines and variations, Yusuke Endoh's Qlobe (reproduced here), their infamous quine-relay, and their other projects
  • The G-Portugol programming language
  • The unstable features mechanism in Rust ("first class support for experimental features") and how this allows for user experimentation
  • Exclusive range patterns in Rust and some of their perils, specifically in tock
  • Contrasting the Rust unstable feature mechanism with Haskell language pragmas: the former requires a nightly compiler to use, the latter does not
• @18:20 Discussion about the Rust process; going from RFC to stable Rust
  • The Rust inline assembly feature (tracking issue)
  • The Rust RFC repo
  • The Generic Associated Types (GATs) Rust RFC
  • hubris is on nightly Rust but with an allow list of features
  • Naked functions in Rust (tracking issue), Destructuring assignments, #[cmse_nonsecure_entry]
  • 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]]

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 11th, 2022

Integrating Hardware and Software Teams

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 11th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our esteemed guest was Jon Masters. Other speakers included Nathaneal Huffman, Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Rick Altherr, Matt Keeter, Peter Corless, Timon, Siddharth Joshi, Bob Mader, Aaron David Goldman, Simeon Miteff, Remy Goldschmidt, and MattSci. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• @4:32 Fostering of mutual hatred between hardware and software people
  • Huge difference in cost of errors in both time and money
• @9:38 Dealing with perishable pre-preg material Tachyon 100G
  • Tachyon 100G
• @15:06 The black magic that is DDR
  • DIMM training demo
• @21:58 Open source tooling for EEs
  • Open FPGA tooling
  • Open RISC
  • RISC V
  • Zero to ASIC course
  • Linux from scratch
  • Ben Eater's 8bit computer
  • Phil's lab, KiCad 6 PCB design walkthough
  • Phil's lab, Altium Designer PCB design walkthough
• @33:18 Matt Keeter's take on ECAD tools
  • Eagle CAD
  • Smaller breakout boards made with KiCad for unit testing
• @36:55 Timon's take on EE curriculum
  • Math-heavy electrical engineering curriculum
  • Arts of Electronics
  • Knowing at least basics of adjacent disciplines goes a long way
• @49:03 Software shouldn't pierce abstractions in order to work reliably, but people should to deepen their knowledge
• @1:04:54 Making microchips at home
  • Sam Zeloof, maskless-photolithography
  • Jeri Elseworth, making microchips at home
• @1:06:05 Oxide gets a Pick'n'Place machine?
  • Open Hardware Pick'n'Place machine
• @1:09:40 Bob's take on silos
  • SMM, System Management Mode
• @1:22:15 Vintage gaming as an intro into embedded software
  • WiFi Game Boy Cartridge
• @1:26:14 Fabs at UNI
• @1:29:40 Intel Tofino (TM) Series Programmable Ethernet Switch ASIC
  • Intel Tofino
• @1:31:13 Google's open source high level synth. (HLS) tool XLS
  • XLS
  • Bluespec
  • Chisel

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 June 27th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Scott Johnson. Other speakers included XX and YY. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• @2:00 Beautiful C++
• @13:45 DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC
• @15:00 Almost Perfect
• @17:20 The Friendly Orange Glow
• @18:10 Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing
• @18:50 The Soul of a New Machine
• @36:08 Reinventing the Wheel
• @38:13 Creative Capital

pending

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on June 13th included Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Tim Bray, Ian Grunert, and XXX. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Pronunciation and mispronunciation
• Bryan's DEC reading list:
  • The Ultimate Entrepreneur by Glenn Rifkin, George Harrar
  • Learn, Earn & Return - My Life as a Computer Pioneer by Harlan Anderson
  • High-tech Ventures: The Guide For Entrepreneurial Success by C. Gordon Bell, John McNamara
  • Computer engineering: A DEC view of hardware systems design by C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, John McNamara
  • Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital by Spencer E. Ante
  • DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation by Edgar H. Schein, Paul J. Kampas, Michael M. Sonduck, Peter S. Delisi
• @1:29:05 Ian mentions Computer History Museum's oral history program prompting strong recommendations:
  • Ian: Bernie Lacroute
  • Adam: Pierre Lamond
  • Bryan: Dave Cutler

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!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 23rd, 2022

Surviving the Dot-Com Bust

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 23rd, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on May 23rd included Dan McDonald, Dan Cross, Joshua Clulow, Steve Tuck, Matt Campbell and Theo Schlossnagle. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• @1:37 Pick and shovels story circulating at Sun
  • Oakes Ames "King of Spades", pbs article, wiki
  • boo.com wiki
  • pets.com wiki
• @11:00 IPOs and public exposure
  • theGlobe.com wiki
• @18:20 "The Correction"
  • Feasting like 19th century robber barons
  • Nov 2000, free fall
  • Trilogy, Inc wiki
• @28:49 Students looking for placement
  • Clarity of the bust
• @36:35 Billboards on the 101
  • garden.com, cnn blurb
• @39:13 Theo's story, roulette at Trilogy
• Expansion and contraction of CS student enrollment
• @46:20 Matt's memories
  • AllAdvantage wiki
  • Excite@Home wiki
• John Talbott "The Fall of Silicon Graphics" article
• Fucked Company wiki
• Camaraderie over watching your companies imploding
• @53:39 Looking towards the looming housing bubble
  • During Oxide raise, race against time for VC funding
• Pandemic
  • Hot venture environment, over-valued companies
  • Stimulus, spending on non-essentials, exacerbating income inequality
• @58:56 Differences from the dot-com era, more defined revenue models?
  • Food delivery services, harbingers of bust?
  • Steve anecdote: Dellionaires, margin call day, layoffs
• @1:08:12 Dan's second startup experience
  • Windows on the World wiki
• @1:10:15 Matt's question: can Oxide weather a tech bust?
  • Adam: downturn can motivate seeking value, looking away from (stable, pricey) incumbents to (riskier, cheaper) new offerings
  • Bryan: dot com bust pushed us toward open-source, for economic reasons.
• @1:15:51 Are we headed for a bust? How deep?
  • How does a company survive the lean times?
  • Negative human consequences
  • mammon (money, material wealth) wiki
  • Advice for practitioners?
• Dan McDonald: controlling inflation, starting companies
• Theo: downturn will hit industries differently, concerns over global supply chain
• Adam: don't forget about helping others, looking out for other people, for the future of our world.
• Dan Cross: if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests on May 16th were Jordan Hendricks and Luqman Aden. Other speakers included jasonbking, Rick Altherr and Ben Kimock. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Green Room wiki
• NVMe wiki (Non-Volatile Memory. PCI Express)
• @3:38 Jordan's story
  • Jordan's thorough bug write-up, (reported by Josh Clulow as "nvme_quiesce() can hang preventing reboot")
  • Non-maskable interrupt wiki
  • @8:04 Adam interrupts a box with a kitchen knife
  • kmdb man page and page in the mdb book
  • @14:11 Josh recites a poem about timeouts
  • Avoiding getting stuck, experimenting
  • @20:10 A previous encounter with NVMe/PCIe issues (see also: Jordan's NVMe Hotplug discussion video ~26mins)
  • mdb format character "j" (for Jordan!) (and jazzed-up) feature
  • @26:50 Normal and abrupt shutdown notification, breakthrough, writing up a narrative
• @32:27 Luqman's story
  • The blog post "Achievement Unlocked: rustc segfault"
  • dtrace usdt
  • cscope, rust analyzer
• @43:50 Inspecting LLVM IR, RustC MIR
  • async blocks, inline assembly
  • boiling down reproducible cases
  • making quality write-ups, telling a story, teaching debugging
  • popular on Hacker News
  • dead reproducible?
• @1:03:02 Bugs: psychotic, non reproducible
  • Debugging mindset
  • Different tools and methodologies for different problems
  • anonymous tracing book page, speculative tracing page
• @1:10:03 Jason: number literal formats with underscores, now in mdb
• @1:12:35 Ben prompts a debugging story, checking conditions in debug, program abort on error
  • ud2 instruction
  • Rick describes the Oxide boot loader
  • XMODEM wiki
  • Triple fault wiki
  • Rust "heapless" crate

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Jason Hoffman. Other speakers included Joshua Clulow, Matt Campbell and Ian. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Debugging Rails
• Jason walks chain of events leading to "twttr"
• @10:46 The first mock up, SMS
• @13:42 Twitter goes live, early days
  • Tcl, Mongrel, LiteSpeed
• @19:30 First problems
  • Bryan's debugging story, exceptions and backtraces, index out of bounds
  • Discovery of the problem was not met with gratitude
• @29:53 Jason tells another problem story, production directories full of junk test files
• @38:30 Story of the first Hadoop cluster
• @42:22 Matt's comment on directory limits
• @46:35 Companies growing up, on-prem and cloud infrastructure
• @49:26 The Fail Whale
  • Ruby runtime, Ryan Dahl
  • Moved to Java, Scala eventually
  • DTrace and dynamic languages
  • Raku, Parrot VM, MoarVM
• @59:53 Changing language and hardware landscapes, video presentation sharing, short social media handles, ahl, getting into hockey
• @1:12:30 Billionaire's playground?
  • Quick diversion, history trivia bet
  • @1:18:43 Moderation
  • Microsoft Tay bot (shutdown 16 hours after launch)
  • Can anything kill Twitter?
  • @1;29:26 Matt: what replaces Spaces?
  • 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 Engineering video ~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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by members of the Oxide team: Arjen Roodselaar, Nathaneal Huffman, Robert Mustacchi, Aaron Hartwig, Steve Tuck, Matt Keeter, Eric Aasen, Rick Altherr, and RFK.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• @2:25 Overview of upcoming themes related to the bringup lab
• @4:28 Defining the different terms and code-names of the hardware in development at oxide
• @4:40 Gimlet, the compute node
• @5:10 Sidecar, a board based on a switching ASIC from Intel
• @7:24 Arjen's twitter thread with details related to the bringup and Eric's description of the challenges in designing the PDN (Power Delivery Network) ATT
• @15:34 The load-slammer, an electronic load to simulate the power draw of an ASIC / BGA-part LS
• @19:06 Bouncing supply cables on load steps
• @22:27 FPGA that controls everything on the Sidecar board
• @24:05 TOML's unstable table order made the team pop a couple ICs off the board searching for bugs
• @31:41 Brown-out in the hotel during first bringup session from a blown bus duct
• @33:45 Debugging ground bounce issues while testing the PDN with the load-slammer (phantom over/undershoot)
• @40:15 Hardware team pranks the management during a meeting with a potential investor
• @43:20 Chonky heat sink that weighs 8 pounds / moment arm crisis
• @48:19 First time powering up, checking temperature with thermal camera, learning about "puppy dog warm"
• @52:12 Matt talks about the second, "lesser" network switch on the Sidecar board
• @57:28 Secret 8051 cores, slew-rate woes: impedance missmatch on SPI traces that manifested in unreliable communication in full bandwidth mode of the SPI/GPIO driver
• @1:03:19 PLL config issues and Matt's verbose config tool to fix them
• @1:04:26 Load-bearing dongles
• @1:06:37 Debugging PCIe link, Arjen's Frankenstein PCIe analyzer/exerciser
• @1:22:36 Gimlet, stumbling blocks found in January
• @1:30:08 Arjen's big breakthrough on the Sidecar, shouting at the T6
• @1:32:08 Cursed pull-downs, Rick's remote hardware debugging support by incrementally breaking his T6 boards to find issue with the DUT
• @1:36:24 T6 finally comes out of reset, "we're gonna live! we're gonna live!"
• @1:41:06 Rick reworks gnarly footprint error, on multiple ICs, to verify design for Rev. B - dead bug style.
• @1:53:12 Sidecar progress continuation, cable oupsi, off-by-one error
• @1:59:42 Dedicated support by IC vendor with very understanding wives
• @2:01:20 Summary and parting thoughts

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!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: April 4th, 2022

Another LPC55 ROM Vulnerability

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 4th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Laura Abbott.

Other speakers on April 4th included Ian, jasonbking, Todd Gamblin?, Ben ?, MattSci, jasonbking and Evan?. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Jonathan Goldstein's Heavyweight podcast
• Oxide and Friends podcast
  • transistor.fm launch point, has links to Spotify, Google, Amazon etc players
• Laura did talk about the first LPC55 vulnerability in the May 3, 2021 space, but the recording for that day missed it.
  • Laura Abbott (30 April, 2021) Exploiting Undocumented Hardware Blocks in the LPC55S69 write-up
    • And DEF CON talk with Rick Altherr
• @4:01 Today's topic: Laura Abbott (23 March 2022) Another vulnerability in the LPC55S69 ROM write up
  • How do you brick a chip?
• @7:20 The spreadsheet, ROM patch after boot
  • Company dismisses or downplays vulnerabilities
  • Sees CVEs as optional??
• @15:19 CVEs as more software focused. What does a CVE for hardware even mean?
  • NXP doesn't want to open their software
• "Even though we are not believers in security by obscurity, the product specific ROM code is not open to external parties except for approved test labs for vulnerability reviews"
• @19:43 The story of the current vulnerability
  • Ghidra
• @27:26 Picking apart the code
  • Bounds checks, writing outside the bounds of the buffer
  • DICE by Trusted Computing Group
  • Request for Discussion
  • Evaluating potential chips when building a product
• @41:09 Secure hardware, work around potential pitfalls
  • Open source would help
• @45:37 Disclosed to NXP, more receptive this time
  • Discussion on HN
  • @54:21 Security review industry
• @57:11 Ian: building up your own (open) documentation on LPC55?
• @1:01:31 Jason: questionable definitions of "open" source
  • Access to source as building confidence in the product
• @1:05:20 Todd: securing supply chain for code in large scale projects with lots of contributors
  • Vulnerabilities can occur so easily
• @1:08:54 Ben: custom setups abound. Hard to trust a whole stack of assembled pieces
• @1:12:16 Matt: what is the ROM doing? Assembly or C? Could the provider's hands be tied as far as releasing proprietary code?
• @1:17:19 Jason: X.509 parsing as a good place to look for vulnerabilities?
• @1:18:25 Evan: encouragement around fuzzing X.509
• Next time: more tales from the bringup lab!

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on March 28th included Tom Lyon, jasonbking, Matt Campbell, Akshay Kumar, Aaron Goldman and Simeon Miteff. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• [@8:07](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=487) Y2K, leap years 
  • The Staff of Ra
  • “at” command
• [@15:28](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=928) Matt’s stories 
  • elm email
• [@23:29](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=1409) Jason: daylight saving time in Indiana 
  • “Time in Indiana” wiki
• [@26:31](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=1591) Time zone database 
  • John Bemelmans Marciano (2014) Whatever Happened to the Metric System? How America Kept Its Feet book
  • Geopolitical aspects of time
  • Eastman plan calendar
• [@32:23](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=1943) Aaron’s stories, setting clocks back, Leap Day
• [@35:54](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=2154) Akshay: Ken Thompson’s six day work week?
• Leap seconds 
  • Time of day hardware bug
• [@48:54](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=2934) 2038 - the end of time 
  • Y2K problems
  • GPS week number rollover wiki
• [@57:58](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=3478) Matt: Cory Doctorow’s “Epoch” short story podcast commissioned by Mark Shuttleworth
• [@1:00:28](https://youtu.be/BHtfqleSHAs?t=3628) Ultimate, penultimate, antepenultimate
• Oxide and Friends podcast!! 
  • transistor.fm launch point, has links to Spotify, Google, Amazon etc players
• Laura Abbott (23 March 2022) Another vulnerability in the LPC55S69 ROM write 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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on March 21st included Antranig Vartanian, Dan Cross, Ian, jasonbking, Jason Ozolins, Ken and Drew Vogel. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

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
• The Dropout series, premiered March 2022
• [@31:26](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=1886) Jason O: praising ability vs effort, negative effects
• [@34:55](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=2095) 30 under 30, and such things
• Empathy, learning to compromise, learning from being a parent
• [@41:04](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=2464) How venture views human capital 
  • Student loans, (some predatory lenders)
  • Does making a young person comfy lead to their best work?
  • Taking a share of future earnings, kinda demotivating. Misaligned incentives
  • Lambda school, coding bootcamps. Fixed costs and incoming sharing
• [@50:17](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=3017) Sourcing these kids? 
  • “You’re a baseball card for someone” story, why are these kids at this party??
• [@57:40](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=3460) Sometimes kids who are extremely comfortable aren’t terribly motivated to put in the hours
• [@59:25](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=3565) Drew: Income sharing and other schemes to pay for education 
  • Ken: doesn’t feel like kids would be set up for success
• [@1:04:07](https://youtu.be/WrEef_bsWas?t=3847) Background beef leading to this hairy scheme 
  • Some entrepreneurs have trouble seeing the role of luck in their success
  • Thiel Fellowship wiki

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!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: March 14th, 2022

Ukraine

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Andrey Akselrod.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• If you’re interested in donating to support Ukrainians, Andrey recommends Nova Ukraine
• [@1:52](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=112) Andrey introduces himself, background in computing
• [@11:20](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=68) Andrey talks about where he lived in Ukraine, Dnipro
  • Confluence of cultures
  • Moves to New York
• [@22:53](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=1373) Events of 2014, family and coworkers in Ukraine 
  • Crimea
• [@29:12](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=1752) Earlier disputed regions (Crimea, Donbas) and relations to current events 
  • Ukrainian national identity
• [@38:21](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=2301) Armed forces, self governance 
  • Business as usual, life goes on
• [@44:45](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=2685) Characterizing Ukraine as European democracy, and economic functions/trade 
  • Nuclear reactors
• [@49:12](https://youtu.be/EdJU8mSWzQk?t=2952) Invasion 
  • Leadership disconnect with reality
• [@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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on March 7th included Lucas Ives, Dan McDonald, Steve Tuck, Ian, Matt Campbell, MattSci, Jim Rybarski, Austin, Aaron Goldman, Jake Demarest-Mays, Jason Ozolins, Tom Lyon, Timon, Matthew Amdur, jasonbking, and Horace. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• [@8:15](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=495) Lucas’ story
• Remote before pandemic, comparisons
• [@16:29](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=989) Sidebar chat, backchannel
• [@22:49](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=1369) Pre-recorded talks, speaker commenting in chat engaging with questions 
  • Multitasking during meetings, different from in-person single-threaded meetings
  • Recording meetings for later review
  • Holding onto a thought may detract from fully listening to another’s point
• [@34:40](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=2080) Oxide’s full team meetup, what did they focus on?
• [@38:01](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=2281) Austin’s remote experience
• [@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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on February 21st included Tom Lyon, Tom Killalea, Ian, Antranig Vartanian, Matt Campbell, Simeon Miteff, Matt Ranney and Aaron Hartwig. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

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
  • ACM Code of Ethics
  • Relative importance of values. Can some values be learned, while others cannot?
• [@45:11](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=2711) “Turn-around CEOs”, trying to change an established company culture
• [@47:39](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=2859) Sun culture, early days
• [@54:32](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=3272) Connection between values and business model 
  • Urgency in context, requires nuance
• [@1:03:37](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=3817) Values on the wall. When are values simply ignored? 
  • Jack Handey wiki, Deep Thoughts recurring SNL short sketches, eg Thanksgiving ~30secs
  • “Sharpen fast”
• [@1:13:49](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=4429) What are the important things to get set early? 
  • Bryan and Adam on Joyent and Delphix
• [@1:22:05](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=4925) Matt Ranney on his time at Uber 
  • Trying to shape an established culture
  • Leadership’s values vs engineers
  • Business ethics
• [@1:35:47](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=5747) GE
• Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann (2020) Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric book
• [@1:37:03](https://youtu.be/w9MQJbC26h4?t=5823) Conclusions 
  • 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!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: February 14th, 2022

Breakthroughs Delayed

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 14th, 2022

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on February 14th included Chris DiBona, Tom Lyon, Ian, MattSci, Jeff Nickoloff, Ahmed, Tim Burnham and vint serp. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Adam’s tweet
• Steven Johnson (2021) Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer book
• [@6:00](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=360) Pasteurization 
  • 1850’s swill milk scandal wiki
• [@10:25](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=625) Automotive safety 
  • Three-point seat belt wiki
  • Windshield safety glass wiki
  • Ralph Nader (1965) Unsafe at Any Speed book
• [@16:25](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=985) Bryan proposes a rubric, are multiple teams racing? 
  • Walter Isaacson (2021) The Code Breaker book
  • Edward Jenner, 1796 smallpox vaccine
• [@24:32](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=1472) DTrace 
  • Compact C Type Format CTF
• [@27:25](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=1645) Docker 
  • OverlayFS
  • Bryan’s Papers We Love talk on Jails and Zones video ~100mins
  • 1963 Honeywell H200 wiki
  • Bryan on harware virtualization history video ~10mins, also here
• [@37:22](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=2242) The Greate Stirrup Controversy wiki
• Steve Kemper (2005) Reinventing the Wheel: A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition book
• Jevons paradox wiki
• [@47:51](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=2871) Wikipedia 
  • Bryan gets worked up at a dinner party
  • Cliff Clavin (Cheers character) wiki
  • [@52:54](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=3174) Hello Chris!
  • [@57:23](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=3443) Wordle trolling 
    • [@57:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyGgkBxz-mg&t=3460s) Audio editing
• [@1:01:03](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=3663) JSON
• [@1:02:22](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=3742) Chris on HBO Silicon Valley
• [@1:07:05](https://youtu.be/MyGgkBxz-mg?t=4025) Antikythera mechanism wiki

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on February 7th included MattSci, Ian, Matt Ranney and Ken. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Calendly tweet context
• [@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
• [@27:35](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=1655) E-cache parity error
• [@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 Sting movie
  • 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!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: January 24th, 2022

Taxonomy of Hype

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 24th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on January 24th included MattSci, Todd Gamblin, Aaron Goldman and Tom Lyon. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• The tweet about the topic: Johannes Klingebiel’s (2022) The five Levels of Hype taxonomy
• [@8:24](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=504) Roko’s Basilisk (slate.com)
• [@10:21](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=621) Cloud Computing
• [@12:09](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=729) Mobile, Wi-Fi (introduced in 1997) 
  • Adam broke his hand, but can still type dtrace with one hand
• [@15:14](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=914) Java 
  • Write once run anywhere
  • Cross platform graphical interfaces
• Windows NT
• [@17:47](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=1067) Storage technology 
  • Dedup
  • ZFS copies setting and redundant_metadata
  • InfiniBand, iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP)
• [@26:15](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=1575) 3D XPoint (Intel Optane) wiki
  • HP Memristor FAQ
  • HP “The Machine” 
    • HP research’s pure hype marketing pitch
    • The (absolutely incredible) Star Trek crossover ad > I’m gonna provide you the emotion of a revolution, but not the technical detail to > support it, not yet, but it’s coming.
• [@31:02](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=1862) Segway (wiki) 
  • Dean Kamen wiki
  • Decoder Ring podcast (June 2021) Who Killed the Segway? ~40mins slate.com, Apple podcasts
  • 2001 Good Morning America Segway unveiling, Diane Sawyer is underwhelmed > I’m tempted to say “that’s it??” (nervous laughter) > But that can’t be it!?
• [@34:29](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=2069) Maglev, Cold fusion
  • Walter Isaacson (2021) The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race book
  • Human Genome Project wiki
  • Hype booms and busts
  • Todd’s story on working on fusion at a national lab, and the nature of gaining funding for large projects
• [@45:30](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=2730) Rust
• [@48:43](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=2923) DTrace
• [@52:14](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=3134) Nanotechnology 
  • K. Eric Drexler wiki
  • Expert Systems, AR/VR
• [@56:23](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=3383) Chatbots 
  • Dan Olson (Jan 2022) Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs ~2hr video (worth every minute)
• [@59:11](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=3551) Serverless 
  • Itanium IA-64, Very long instruction word VLIW
  • Fibre Channel over Ethernet FCoE, ATA over Ethernet AoE > A solution in search of a problem
• [@1:06:50](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=4010) Taligent wiki
  • Tom Hormby (2014) Pink: Apple’s First Stab at a Modern Operating System post
  • Be Inc wiki
    • Bryan’s Be whiteboard story
• [@1:13:47](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=4427) Docker 
  • Monetizing open source
• [@1:20:28](https://youtu.be/qrWgmkBfn9s?t=4828) 5G

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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Peter Robison.

Other speakers on January 10th included MattSci and Simeon Miteff. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• [@5:02](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=302) Peter on Japan Air Lines Flight 123
• 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 
  • McDonnell Douglas
• [@15:53](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=953) Jack Welch, corporate culture 
  • Investors over customers
  • John Godson 1975 The Rise and Fall of the DC-10 book
• [@24:12](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=1452) Questionable morals from execs
• John Newhouse 1982 The Sporty Game book
• [@27:41](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=1661) When did it become clear that the 737 MAX was problematic? 
  • Lion Air Flight 610
  • Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System MCAS
  • Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302
  • Shifting blame, public messaging vs behind closed doors opinion forming
• [@36:31](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=2191) Why pilots had no training (or knowledge of) the MCAS system
• [@39:23](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=2363) Angle of Attack indicator
• [@48:48](https://youtu.be/q6i9NPslfE4?t=2928) MCAS software, writing safety critical computer code 
  • [@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!

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest on January 3rd included was tech prediction expert and noted Red Sox fan Steven O’Grady.

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. <...

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on December 13th included special guests Cliff Biffle and Steve Klabnik as well as Laura Abbott, Rick Altherr, James Tucker, Simeon Miteff and MattSci. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Hubris and Humility context tweet
• Cliff’s written version of his Hubris talk
• Hubris Fervently Anticipated Questions FAQ
• [@8:07](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=487) Prehistory of Hubris, Cliff’s story
• Project Loon wiki
• [@14:23](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=863) Did Cliff know what he wanted to build at Oxide?
• Tock embedded OS
• QNX Unix-like real-time OS
• [@17:55](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=1075) Laura on evaluating existing OS options
• [@22:03](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=1323) Alignment of values and goals with other projects 
  • Bryan’s 2017 Platform as a Reflection of Values video ~30mins
• [@25:00](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=1500) Steve: convincing low-level people that they are allowed to have nice things
• RISC-V ROPI/RWPI Specification (Embedded PIC)
  • Position-independent code wiki
• [@28:59](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=1739) Secure FPGAs?
• Laura Abbott’s Exploiting Undocumented Hardware Blocks in the LPC55S69 write-up
  • And DEF CON talk with Rick Altherr
• [@32:20](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=1940) Early implementation, journal club
• Jonathan Shapiro 2003 Vulnerabilities in synchronous IPC designs paper
• Heiser and Elphinstone’s L4 Microkernels: The Lessons from 20 Years of Research and Deployment paper
• [@37:20](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=2240) Microkernels. Mach
  • L4 microkernel family wiki
  • Jochen Liedtke
  • Bryan decides not to go to graduate school
  • Fuchsia OS
• [@51:09](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=3069) Origin of Humility. Debugging 
  • Tockilator
  • Semihosting
• [@1:03:15](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=3795) Archive files, self-descriptive binaries, debugging
• [@1:10:33](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=4233) CORRECTION Windows does have a package manager: Windows Package Manager was released May 13, 2020
• [@1:14:15](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=4455) Build tools and build systems 
  • cargo xtask
• [@1:18:59](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=4739) DWARF 
  • Ada language
• [@1:25:01](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=5101) Tock: Rust kernel, C userspace 
  • IDL
  • Ozymandias
• [@1:32:28](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=5548) build.rs build scripts 
  • Simeon’s story, code generation
  • Software-hardware codesign
  • [@1:52:14](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=6734) Conway’s law
• [@1:54:30](https://youtu.be/cypmufnPfLw?t=6870) Diagnosing problems, failing tasks, formatting error messages
• 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!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: December 6th, 2021

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 December 6th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on December 6th included special guests Nathanael Huffman, Eric Aasen, as well as Rick Altherr, MattSci, Dan Cross and Steve Tuck. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• [@5:57](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=357) Lay of the land
• [@6:58](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=418) Power
• [@11:14](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=674) Matt: what goes in the middle of the board?
• [@14:32](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=872) iCE40 FPGA
• [@21:20](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=1280) Taking meticulous notes
• [@25:41](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=1541) Power-on sequencing 
  • Using service processor flash to store FPGA bitstream
  • Solder rework
  • include_bytes
• [@32:37](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=1957) “Zombie board” 
  • Flying probe video ~2mins
  • Thermal cameras
• [@46:41](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=2801) Main chip power-on 
  • Level shifters, I2C
  • Googly Eye of Sauron
  • [@55:24](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=3324) SPI wiggles (Serial Peripheral Interface) 
    • Precious cargo in a rented minivan
  • [@1:02:00](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=3720) Value of record keeping
  • Power management
• [@1:09:49](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=3720) “Valley of despair”, infinite reset loop 
  • SP3 socket
  • Magnet wire connecting to a pin, see picture with dime for scale > Book on ENIAC quote: when things wouldn’t work, frustrated workers > referred to the machine as the MANIAC.
• [@1:24:10](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=5050) Eric’s big breakthrough > Boom! SPI wiggles
• [@1:30:59](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=5459) “The next day we had a demo!” 
  • Yet another hurdle..
  • DuPont wire
• [@1:39:39](https://youtu.be/lhji-kP3Lhk?t=5979) “These are the stories that don’t get told..”

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!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 29th, 2021

The Sidecar Switch

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 29th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Arjen Roodselaar; other speakers on November 29th included Rick Altherr, Simeon Miteff, MattSci, Jason Ozolins, Thomas and Edwin Peer. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• [@3:04](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=184) Arjen’s announcement about the rack switch
• Cadence Allegro PCB editor
• [@11:35](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=695) Should we do our own switch? 
  • “We’re just going to tweak existing designs…”
• Intel Tofino 2 page
  • Barefoot Networks wiki
  • P4 language wiki
• [@24:07](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=1447) What makes this chip a beast?
• [@33:24](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=2004) Cable backplane, sleds
• [@37:11](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=2231) Sidecar
• [@38:52](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=2332) Management network (out of band) 
  • NC-SI network controller sideband interface wiki > Rick: A lot of the BMC style management functionality just > kinda got tacked on to PC systems.
• [@48:36](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=2916) SDN software-defined networking wiki
  • NCI National Computational Infrastructure (Australia) wiki
  • Network function virtualization wiki
• [@55:12](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=3312) The tofino simulator
• [@59:51](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=3591) Trust model, root of trust, service processor
• [@1:02:31](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=3751) Can the switch run independent of the PCIe host?
• [@1:08:35](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=4115) The journey. The time scale of these signaling components. Heat sinks and practice boards
• Happy Hanukkah!

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!