Oxide and Friends

Paul Frazee joins Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the inner workings of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Paul and the Bluesky team have been working on decentralized systems for years and years--very cool to see both the next evolutionary step in those ideas and their successful application in Bluesky!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included our special guest, Paul Frazee, and slightly-less-special guest, Steve Klabnik.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:ScuttlebuttBluesky FirehoseBluesky JetstreamBluesky and the AT ProtocolBluesky Feed: Quiet PostersBluesky's bot invasion: AI accounts argue with everything you postAI Imagery labeleratprotoOxide starter packIf 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 Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady to talk about conferences in tech. A lot has changed in the past couple of decades about the impetus for conferences and what makes it worthwhile to attend.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady.The lightly edited live chat from the show:ellie.idb: 2005, huh? y’all met when i was 2goodjanet: yea i was younger than 10 loljgrillo_: I was just thinking I feel very young because I was a junior in high school but not anymore lolaka_pugs: my first conference - 1975ellie.idb: oxide appeals to the youthjbk1234: my first one was LISA in 05 or 06... mostly because it took a near act of god because my director didn't believe in sending his people to conferencesjgrillo_: "before software ate the world" is what I usually call "when the internet was still fun"ellie.idb: my earliest memory was, uhhh, Google I/O 2008 when they gave every attendee that android phoneellie.idb: i don’t recall which one it was, but i do remember playing with it when i was 5 hahahahataitomagatsu: I've only been to one tech conference in person, and it was a very tame SIGGRAPH that happened in Santiago, CL (I live in Chile). It was a lot about animation. I wanted it to have talks on image processing like the ones over on the US x3 but oh well, beggars can't be choosersgoodjanet: I've never been to a tech conferencedevdsp2175: The Germans know how to run a conference. The chaos communications congress is wild.ellie.idb: same!! never actually attended one as an adult hahahataitomagatsu: Have you attended one remotely?goodjanet: nope, closest is just watching recorded talks after the facttaitomagatsu: I attended the rustconf of 2 years ago remotely. It was amazing and I was soooo tired by the end of it. Brain got depleted of juice for the daynetwork2501: looking forward to in person dtrace conference with a dedicated zball roomahl0003: more of a trade show, but I went to the MacWorld conference in the late '90sahl0003: I still have some BeOS install CDs from thengoodjanet: im so thankful for recorded talksahl0003: this is kind of wild: I went with my brother who was 12 or so and we met a guy at Be... my brother would go on to work with him 30 years later!ellie.idb: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid the OG droid with the flip up keyboard and everythingtocococa: ISCA this year was just around the corner from Santiago in Buenos Aires and it was pretty cool, and CARLA took place this year in Santiago tooblacksmithforlife: Since I can never get a conference approved from work, I live off recorded conference videos on YouTubenetwork2501: best momdevdsp2175: The shade! Sending hugs to Bryan's inner child.taitomagatsu: daaaaaamn, I didn't know about either! I might keep an eye on ISCA, maybe I can go next year ❤️devdsp2175: You can't record the hallway track...jh179: Bryan's talk for Papers We Love on the History of Containers is how I found out about him, Oxide and all the rest. Had an incredible tangent about jails...zeanic: Conference idea: all hallway tracksdevdsp2175: YouTube keeps recommending Bryan's talks on running containers on the metal at Joyant.devdsp2175: And I keep watching them!ellie.idb: wow, ISCA had some really fucking cool talks this yearellie.idb: damn. i’m adding this to my watch list too!!! i’ll try and see if i can get funding for next year hahahatocococa: yeah, 100%, but my brain was melted after every daynahumshalman: Bryan has the luxury of working on OSS. I think the point that Theo was making is that Surge (I only attended the very last one) was a space where you could be open about proprietary stuff. Talking about failure in a safe space, etc.nahumshalman: Ah, Theo is now making that point.taitomagatsu: Does ISCA have any sort of official YT channel?taitomagatsu: Because I might... have a handful of talks to watchgoodjanet: 18 years ago isnt that long ago?network2501: 18 years ago is almost 3 generations of lives/eras agoellie.idb: what HPC conferences are going on? i need to hear about the deets going on with CXLjgrillo_: although 18yr is ~half my life it doesn't feel very long ago..tocococa: I am not sure, I know that all keynotes were recorded, but I don´t know where they might beellie.idb: 21 years ago i was not alive 😅network2501: What if the second time you do the talk it's even better than the last? Like book revisions?ahl0003: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i1OK4y9x0wtaitomagatsu: I've found a channel that has older ISCA videos https://www.youtube.com/@acmsigarch2299, imma keep looking for one that might have the 2024 oneblacksmithforlife: Working in government, watching "old" conference videos is great because they're "cutting edge" for where my organization is at currently. Case in point, we are just now going to the cloud and doing micro servicestaitomagatsu: https://xkcd.com/979/ahl0003: https://craft-conf.com/2025srockets: That’s why I liked !!con so much. No one tries to sell you anything.jgrillo_: I've never owned a car newer than 20yo, that's kind what it's like when you look at the car ads from its eradevdsp2175: Are you also doing an "Agile Transformation" which is neither transformative nor optimising for agility?ahl0003: https://monktoberfest.com/srockets: (Also, Ghent had better bike racing than Budapest)srockets: But worse weatherbcantrill: https://youtu.be/stMEuZJJDck?list=PLvsKqlNNP3R8JKE97pwewsDmZdcO5MEWVdrkellyannfitz: Here are the talks from this year: https://redmonk.com/?series=monktoberfest-2024blacksmithforlife: What does "hallway track" mean?zeanic: Cr...

Holy Sh**! Pat Gelsinger announced his "retirement" leaving a rudderless Intel without a captain. How did Intel get here? Some of the cultural problems may be deep in the DNA. Bryan and Adam have some ideas for what happens next, and who might be the next CEO.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Ian Grunert.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Intel announces the retirement of Pat GelsingerAndy Jassy/Pat Gelsinger re:Invent 2018 premises/premise supercutAcquired: Adapting Episode 3: IntelCHM: Pat Gelsinger Oral HistoryWins Above Replacement (WAR)Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy GroveLarrabeeCannon LakeOxF: RIP OptaneXsight's X2NervanaIntel GaudiSpring HillInvest Like the Best: Redefining Semi-conductor ProgressIf 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 authors of the forthcoming book "Writing for Developers", Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop, to talk about blogging--for Bryan and Adam, it's been 20 years since they started blogging at Sun. The Oxide Friends were also joined by Tim Bray and Will Snow who kicked off blogging at Sun.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Tim Bray (BlueSky), Will Snow, Cynthia Dunlop and Piotr Sarna.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Writing for Developers50% off (!) with code OXIDE50ongoing by Tim BrayTim Bray on blogs.sun.comScobleizerBryan: Blogging through the decadesBryan: Remembering Charles BeelerAdam: APFS in Detail: ConclusionsBeastie Boys Book: Live & DirectAdam: AWS Outposts by the Numbers: A Far-Too-Deep Dive Into PricingAdam: I Love Go; I Hate GoAdam: I am not a resourceAdam: First Rust Program Pain (So you can avoid it...)Bryan: Falling in love with RustAdam: On Blogging (Briefly)Bryan: The Power of a PronounAdam: DTrace "Scobleized"Appendix: Cool Technical BlogsCrowdsourced by the Oxide Friends:Nova - in the writer's words, "a JavaScript apologist's exploration of how JavaScript could be good"The Pragmatic EngineerTigerBeetleFaster than Lime - a very humane and deep dive into all sorts of technology, with special focus on tools and infrastructure. Recommended article: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild RideHillel Wayne - tons of formal methods talk. Also about quality assurance in the world of software, in general.Reid Atcheson - down the rabbit hole of computational math; this person is a floating point savant.Computational Complexity Blog - what it says on the tin. It might be the best blog-like resource on computational complexity.Without boatsBonus technical articles from chat and beyond:Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY - Saagar JhaShip Shape: How Canva does hand-drawn shape recognition in the browserRust after the honeymoon - Bryan CantrillRedpanda vs. Kafka: A performance comparison25% or 6 to 4: the 11/6/23 authentication outage - DiscordMeta: From zero to 10 million lines of KotlinSun almost bought Apple in 1996If 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 4th installment of the Oxide and Friends book recommendation series. After a brief(ish) diversion into Crimson Twins, Tomax and Xamot, Bryan and Adam are joined by several Oxide Friends to discuss their favorite recent reads.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Nick Gideo, Josh, Ian Grunert, Tom Lyon, Zander, and Oliver Herman.Tomax and XamotRecommendations:Into the Raging Sea - SladeThe Making of Prince of Persia - Jordan MechnerThe Big Score - MaloneCHM: Oral History of Hector RuizAMD Founder Jerry Sanders Rare Interview (video)Chip War - MillerCHM: Morris Chang, in conversation with Jen-Hsun Huang (video)Acquired: TSMC (audio)Creativity Inc. - Catmull and WallaceHardcore Software - SinofskyOxF: The Showstopper ShowExploding the Phone - LapsleyThe Cuckoo's Egg - StollInside the Hidden World of Elevator Phone PhreakingThe Last BookstoreThe MouseDriver Chronicles - Lusk, HarrisonHatching Twitter - BiltonCharacter Limit - Conger, MacThe Maniac - LabatutShift Happens - WicharyThe Last Philosopher in Texas - ChaconThe Idea Factory - GertnerObservability Engineering - Majors, Fong-Jones, MirandaRed Cloud at Dawn - GordinBiohazard - AlibekMore Money than God - MallabyRemembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War - CarlsonIBM and the Holocaust - BlackBryan's blog on the topicDEC is Dead, Long Live DEC - Schein, DeLisi, Kampas, SonduckOxF: The Rise and Fall of DECBonus recommendations from chatNot the End of the World - RitchieThe Man Who Broke Capitalism - GellesChildren of Time (series) - TchaikovskyThe Murderbot Diaries (series) - WellsOrganizational Behavior Real Research for Real Managers - PearceHacking: The Art of Exploitation - EricksonTakeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power Hardcover - RybackSuccessful Aging - Levitin (felt like maybe a dig at Adam and Bryan?)Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft - Quittner, SlatallaCreative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs - KociendaIf 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 of Chips and Cheese joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about AMD's new 5th generation EPYC processor, codename: Turin. What's new in Turin and how is Oxide's Turin-based platform coming along?In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest George Cozma, as well as Oxide colleagues Robert Mustacchi, Eric Aasen, Nathanael Huffman, and the quietly observant Aaron Hartwig.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Chips and Cheese: AMD's Turin: 5th Gen EPYC LaunchedEnd of the Road: An Anandtech FarewellCentaur TechnologyAVX-512Zen5's AVX512 Teardown + More...Thermal Power Design (TDP)OxF: Rack Scale Networking (use of p4)P4AGESAOxF: The Network Behind the Network (Oxide server recovery)openSILphoronix: openSILPCB backdrillingOxF: AMD's MI300 (APUs)dtrace.conf(24) -- The DTrace unconference, December 11th, 2024If 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 Oxide colleague, Ben Naecker, to talk about OxQL--the Oxide Query Language we've developed for interacting with our metrics system. Yes, another query language, and, yes, we're DSL maximalists, but listen in before you accuse us of simple NIH!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Oxide colleague, Ben Naecker.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:RFD 463: The Oxide Query LanguageGenAI podcast on the OxQL RFDRFD 125: Telemetry requirements and building blocksInfluxDBClickHouseSimon Willison: SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQLOxide CLI timeseries docsOxide CLI timeseries dashboard codeOxQL source codeRust peg crateGorillaClickhouse paperOxF: Whither CockroachDB?ANTLRACM Queue 2009: Purpose Built LanguagesIf 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 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 teamsOxF: The Future of WorkAmazon leadership principlesNathanael's blog: Building Big Systems with Remote Hardware TeamsIf 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 ModeBryan Reflecting on Founder ModeTim O'Reilly How I FailedCamille Fournier Founder Create ManagersBryan Chesky interview we mentionOxF: on Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big ThingSeagull ManagementHow to Castrate a Bull NOT AN ENDORSEMENT; DO NOT READThe ego con: Non-Stop HitzIf 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, GermanyOxide RFD siteRFD 1: Requests for DiscussionA Tool for Discussion (Oxide blog post from Ben)Sun PSARC casesThe Queen's DuckThe Hairy ArmJoyent RFDsRFC-3AsciiDocJoyent RFD 77OxF: Hiring Processes with Gergely OroszOxide 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 RFDsIf 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 payKelsey's TweetOxide RFD 53: Control plane data storage requirementsOxide RFD 110: CockroachDB for the control plane databaseOxide RFD 508: Whither CockroachDBJoyent blog post on the outage due to postgres autovacuumJepsenDave's CRDB exploration repoChronyOxF: A Debugging Odyssey -- debugging an issue that manifested in CRDBThe Liberation of RethinkDBIf 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 McCaffreyOxide RFD 107: Workflows EngineStenochat: "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 paperchat: "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 testingOxide RFD 289: Steno UpgradeFeral Concurrency Control paper from Berkeley and the University of SydneyEliza's PRSteno's description of its divergence from Distributed SagasAWS "constant work" blogchat: "Now, migrate the owl."OxF on formal methodsA complex bug with sagas: "tl;dr there's TWENTY steps in 5042 that leads to an accounting bug"Oxide RFD 373: Reliable Persistent WorkflowsEliza's novella on updating an instanceIf 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 GroupSurge 2011 ~ Closing Plenary ~ Theo SchlossnagleMicrosoft's Tay chatbotCurb Your Enthusiasm: Larry vs. SiriSal Khan on LLMsGoogle's awful AI adGoogle pulls adIf 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 Campbell3dfxOpenGLGlideDirect3DCUDADennard scalingVLIWGPGPUAMD APUEnergy Efficiency and AI HardwarePRs 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 TokensCharity's Twitter ThreadOxF: Let That Sink In! (Whither Twitter?) with CharityDruidScuba whitepaperOxide RFD 68: Partnership as Shared ValuesGood Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard RumeltDropshot and ProgenitorOxF: The Pragmatism of HubrisOxF: HeliosIf 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 tweetFramework laptop RISC-V mainboardTadpole SPARCbookOxF: A Requiem for SPARC with Tom Lyon -- we're RISC dead-endersAcquired on NVIDIA: part I, part II, part III, JensenRIVA 128OxF: Steve Jobs & the Next Big ThingIf 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 ChangelogChangelog: 23 years of Ruby with MatzSWOTBachmanity InsanityStraight outta KubeconBreakmaster CylinderAdam Stac on githubChangelog Dance Party by BMCComputer History Museum: Oral HistoriesBryan's talk on social audioIf 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 node 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 centerBryan's talk: Debugging Under FireOxide and Friends on the Oakland BallersThe Ur AgentJoyent post-mortemPRs 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 patternRNA as a precursor to DNAXenopus frogXenobotsAnton computerBryan's reading notesCentral themesPower and limitations of metaphor – especially mechanical onesThe fundamental, diametrical opposition between life and machines. (Nature does not use simulations!)Rejecting the neo-Darwinian paradigmPassages 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 computationp. 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.” WTAFp. 326: “The positioning of our organs on the correct side is controlled by stirring!” Mutants goes into this as wellp. 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...