Oxide and Friends

Oxide and Friends

Oxide Computer Company

Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour.

1 hour 21 minutes

All we have to fear is FUD itself
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:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
25 April 2024, 2:08 pm
1 hour 13 minutes

A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
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:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
17 April 2024, 2:09 pm
1 hour 37 minutes

Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
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:
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
10 April 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 27 minutes

Cultural Idiosyncrasies
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!
3 April 2024, 2:15 pm
1 hour 23 minutes

Adversarial Machine Learning

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!

27 March 2024, 2:33 pm
1 hour 25 minutes

Data Visualization
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:
- 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!
15 March 2024, 3:41 pm
1 hour 38 minutes

Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service
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:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
14 February 2024, 3:45 pm
1 hour 44 seconds

Innovation Stagnation?
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:
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!
7 February 2024, 3:45 pm
1 hour 47 minutes

Helios
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:
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!
1 February 2024, 3:45 pm
1 hour 35 minutes

What's taking so long?!
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:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
24 January 2024, 3:00 pm
1 hour 33 minutes

Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison
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:
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!
17 January 2024, 4:00 pm
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About Oxide and Friends

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