Oxide and Friends

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 forkOpenTofu responsePRs 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 BallersBryan and Adam at Manaea's no-noThe Munson-Nixon lineThe Pioneer LeagueBaseball's longest gameAdam's neighbor, Bill George, scorer of the longest gameYolo HighwheelersBART's sponsorship of the BallersJ.T. Snow joins the BallersJ.T. saves Dusty's sonIf 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 disclosureNew York Times: Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? by Kevin RooseKevin RooseNew York Times front page from April 4th, 2024How I got started as a developer with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas | Path To Citus Con Ep08The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind | WIREDHow one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide - The VergeLinux backdoor was a long con, possibly with nation-state support, experts say - Nextgov/FCWresearch!rsc: Timeline of the xz open source attackBrian Krebs thread on mastodonXz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation ExplainedA Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projectsRisky 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 TechnicaEverything I know about the XZ backdoorLINUX 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 cultureMatt: It's Free Real EstateCliff: Who killed the network switch?OxF: Engineering CultureDemo DayJujutsuCovid as a catalyst for remote-friendly featuresWatercooler morning meetingNo-meet WednesdayOtM: Jeff RothschildNo (formalized) review processThe non-zero-sum value of praisePositive Coaching AllianceChat as the apple of discord (and remember email?! Or jabber??!!)DORAOxide RFDsRFD 68: Partnership as Shared ValuesMatthew 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 gnuplotGitHub PR with Bryan's visualizationsTuftePronunciation of "Tufte" is /ˈtʌfti/Flame Graphsflamegraph-rsOODAThis American Life: A Little Bit of KnowledgeStatemapsMinard's diagramhttps://twitter.com/thingskatedid/status/1386077306381242371plot.awkVisualizing regular expressions and BNF grammars with GraphvizExample implementations of isvg and idotDTrace aggregationsRust crate ratatuiPrograms and libraries for plotting and other data visualizations:gnuplotMatplotlibggplot2ParaViewGLVisSimpsons IMDB visualizationAbraham Wald and the airplane diagram with red bullet holes – here’s the origin storyKartlyticsHow Life Works by Philip BallIf 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 infrastructureFibre ChannelZFSIntroduction to Flexible Data Placement: A New Era of Optimized Data ManagementStorage Architecture ConsiderationsCephRFD 60: Storage Architecture ConsiderationsRFD 177: Implementation of Data StorageRFD 444: Crucible Upstairs RefactoringRFD 445: Crucible Upstairs BackpressureIf 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 TweetNate SilverSecularitySecular stagnationAngela Collier: physics progress in the last 70 years?Haber processCRISPR gene editingBook: Code Breaker by Walter IsaacsonLeonhard EulerDijkstra's algorithmRaftAntibioticAcquired: TSMCEUV lithographyIf 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 repoHacker News thread its releaseOmniOSRust Tier 2 supportBryan's talk on holistic bootOxide and Friends: Holistic BootOxide and Friends: Shipping Rack 1The Quality Death SpiralOxide's "St. Louis" branch of illumosBryan's sleeper bug from 1991illumos 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 seededDinosaur bookRoslyn--timingsSteve's "outlining" exampleRain's cargo-hakariRain speeding up Omicron buildsBlog post on many of these topicsSean's fix to u32 overflow bugminiserdemoldDavid Tolnay on pre-compiled macros in wasmBuck2Build Systems à la CarteIf 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 1/15/2024We'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 DangerousNewsroom Robots with Simon WillisonOxF: Another LPC55 ROM VulnerabilitySimon Willison: Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023llama.cppMistral AIFrance’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round at a $260M valuation to take on OpenAISimon again: The AI trust crisisReply All: Is Facebook Spying on You?Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language ModelsNew York Times Sues OpenAILycosChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure WhySimon 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 FriendsIf 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 1/8/2024Bryan 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:Frameworkr/spicypillowsFramework expansion cardsFramework-based gaming console from the communityOptima Braille laptopOxide and Friends: A brief history of talking computersAcer Ferrari 3400 c. 2004 -- 6.6lb favorite of Solaris Kernel engineersIf 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 AltmanEmployee Letter to OpenAI's BoardWho Controls OpenAI? by Matt Levine, the G.O.A.T.Axios: Who is Larry Summers, the controversial pick to join OpenAI's boardMike 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. - FermatHomer vs. FermatIBM 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 imaginationOxide Hiring ProcessThe Pragmatic EngineerOxide and Friends: Tech Layoffs (Nov. 8, 2022)The Oxide RFD processThe Psychopath TestOxide Principles and ValuesAdam's detente with the American Hockey LeagueLeventhal's conundrum - there is a performance pathology, find the butterfly that caused the hurricane.Compensation as a Reflection of ValuesLight's Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of GEGergely's new book The Software Engineer's GuidebookIf 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, OxideSubsequent panel with Adam J. and AshleyOxide and Friends: Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower from August 28th, 2023Oxide and Friends: Docker, Inc., an Early Epitaph from September 13th, 2021If 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 spotLatency Art: Rainbow PterodactylNagle on NagleDan's tweet on NagleEliza's tweet on NagleTCP_NODELAY or TCP? No, delay!Dr. Angela Collier on violin plotsPRs 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!