Explore every episode of the podcast Oxide and Friends
Dive into the complete episode list for Oxide and Friends. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.
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Title
Pub. Date
Duration
RTO or GTFO
26 Sep 2024
01:39:35
With Amazon's return to office (RTO) mandate in the news, Bryan and Adam revisit the topic (it's been 2.5 years since last time!). Are in-office epiphanies real or is RTO fueled by nostalgia, fear... and finance? Stay tuned / we apologize for the exposition on in-office games.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Reflecting on Founder Mode
20 Sep 2024
01:22:14
With some time passed, Bryan and Adam offer a non-hot take on Paul Graham's "Founder Mode" post. While there is plenty to quibble over, there's also the kernel of an important idea: how to balance experience, novel thinking, and limited time? Also stay tuned as they share a years old "ego con".
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Musing with Changelog's Adam Stacoviak
17 Jun 2024
01:46:50
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!
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 Sidecar Switch
30 Nov 2021
01:14:45
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.
[@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!
Talking Turkeys
23 Nov 2021
01:18:54
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 22nd, 2021
Talking Turkeys
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 22nd, 2021.
[@1:12:28](https://youtu.be/U10SuAHV8kQ?t=4348) Bill: Fastest Fourier Transform in the West FFTW, and gnuplot > I’m thankful that everywhere I look there’s always something that hits my > sense of wonder. That’s the thing I love about working in this industry.
Adam appreciates spreadsheets as tools for analysis
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!
The Wrath of Kahn
16 Nov 2021
00:59:13
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 15th, 2021
The Wrath of Kahn
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 15th, 2021.
[@53:15](https://youtu.be/oft5i5RzIC8?t=3195) Mat: The Dream Machine
M. Mitchell Waldrop (2001) “The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal” book
DARPA, private public research funding
[@56:57](https://youtu.be/oft5i5RzIC8?t=3417) The hero narrative sells well
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Supercomputers, Cray, and How Sun Picked SGI's Pocket
09 Nov 2021
01:31:34
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 8th, 2021
Supercomputers, Cray, and How Sun Picked SGI’s Pocket
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 8th, 2021.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
On Code Review
02 Nov 2021
01:30:54
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 1st, 2021
On Code Review
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 1st, 2021.
[@1:05:21](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=3921) How do you scale quality code review in bigger teams?
Culture of code review at a company
[@1:07:15](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=4035) How to convince your team of the value of code review?
Review can catch bugs
Cross team knowledge, bus factor
Speed in the short term vs speed in the long term
[@1:14:39](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=4479) Ian on cultivating organizational review practices
[@1:16:32](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=4592) Austin’s story on assuaging management fears around new practices
Joshua: communication, writing, and accountability
What code don’t we review?
Code review as quality check
[@1:23:55](https://youtu.be/JZdXDyeSvtc?t=5035) Engineering product quality, not always obviously of benefit to the business
Skipping code reviews to show quality consequences
Adopting code review practices, incrementally
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Coder's Block
26 Oct 2021
01:20:48
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 25th, 2021
Coder’s Block
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 25th, 2021.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Dijkstra's Tweetstorm
19 Oct 2021
01:26:51
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 18th, 2021
Dijkstra’s Tweetstorm
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 18th, 2021.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Dijkstra’s 1975 “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” EWD 498tweet > PL/1 > belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offenceAPL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums - [@3:08](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=188) Languages affect the way you think It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. - [@4:33](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=273) Adam’s Perl story - The Camel Book, not to be confused with OCaml - “You needed books to learn how to do things” - CGI - [@9:04](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=544) Adam meets Larry Wall - [@11:59](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=719) Meeting Dennis Ritchie - “We were very excited; too excited some would say…” - [@15:04](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=904) Effects of learning languages, goals of a language, impediments to learning - Roger Hui of APL and J fame, RIP. - Accessible as a language value - Microsoft Pascal, Turbo Pascal - Scratch - LabVIEW - [@25:31](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=1531) Nate’s experience - Languages have different audiences - [@27:18](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=1638) Human languages - The Esperanto con-lang - Tonal langages - Learning new and different programming languages - [@37:06](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=2226) Adam’s early JavaScript (tweet) - <SCRIPT LANGUARE="JavaScript"> circa 1996 - [@44:10](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=2650) Learning from books, sitting down and learning by typing out examples - How do you learn to program in a language? - Zed Shaw on learning programming through spaced repetitionblog - Rigid advice on how to learn - ALGOL 68, planned successor to ALGOL 60 - ALGOL 60, was, according to Tony Hoare, “An improvment on nearly all of its successors” - [@50:41](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3041) Where does Rust belong in the progression of languages someone learns? Rust is what happens when you’ve got 25 years of experience with C++, and you remove most of the rough edges and make it safer? - “Everyone needs to learn enough C, to appreciate what it is and what it isn’t” - [@52:45](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3165) “I wish I had learned Rust instead of C++” - [@53:35](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3215) Adam: Brown revisits intro curriculum, teaching Scheme, ML, then Java - Adam learning Rust back in 2015 (tweet) “First Rust Program Pain (So you can avoid it…)” Tom: There’s a tension in learning between the people who hate magic and want to know how everything works in great detail, versus the people who just want to see something useful done. It’s hard to satisfy both. - [@1:00:02](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3602) Bryan coming to Rust - “Learn Rust with entirely too many linked lists” guide - Rob Pike interview Its concurrency is rooted in CSP, but evolved through a series of languages done at Bell Labs in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Newsqueak, Alef, and Limbo. - [@1:03:01](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3781) Debugging Erlang processes. Ryan on runtime v. language - Tuning runtimes. Go and Rust - [@1:06:42](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4002) Rust is its own build system - Bryan’s 2018 “Falling in love with Rust” post - Lisp macros, Clean, Logo, Scratch - [@1:11:27](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4287) The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity. - [@1:12:09](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4329) Oxide bringup updates - I2C Inter-Integrated Circuit - SPI Serial Peripheral Interface - iCE40
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Economics and Open Source
05 Oct 2021
01:39:25
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 4th, 2021
Economics and Open Source
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 4th, 2021.
[@2:45](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=165) David Jacques Gerber (2015) The Inventor’s Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerberbook
[@7:21](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=441) Sidney Dekker (2011) Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systemsbook
[@13:08](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=788) Robert Buderi (1996) The Invention that Changed the World: The Story of Radar from War to Peacebook
[@26:52](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1612) Brian Dear (2017) The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculturebook
[@30:15](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1815) Randall Stross (1993) Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thingbook
[@32:21](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1941) Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock (2010) Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductorbook
[@33:06](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1986) Lamont Wood (2012) Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolutionbook
Charles Kenney (1992) Riding the Runaway Horse: The Rise and Decline of Wang Laboratoriesbook
Cole’s tweet linking to a ~5min video of a would-be Theranos competitor commenting on its collapse > The lone inventor is a dangerous impression to give people.
Related: Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman “The Myth of the Genius Programmer” 2009 talk ~55mins
[@9:47](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=587) Companies that drive scientific people nuts
uBeam “claims to be developing a wireless charging system to work via ultrasound. Scientists have strongly criticised the plausibility under physics of this proposal.”
uBiome > To innovate, you have to balance the world as it is with the world as it isn’t.
[@13:44](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=824) Theranos’ fantastical vision. European attitudes around business and innovation.
PCR Polymerase chain reaction invented 1983 by Kary Mullis.
[@18:39](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1119) Fake it till you make it?
Optative voice > The secrecy of Theranos should have been a red flag
[@23:57](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1437) Whistleblower Avie Tevanian. Smoke and mirrors, giving the board the run around.
[@29:05](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1745) “Everyone was relying on someone else to do their due diligence”
Inconsistency between board and leadership on what the coming milestones are
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Rebooting a datacenter: A decade later
30 May 2024
01:40:34
Back in May 2014 Joyent accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter (not just the handful of nodes as intended!). That incident--traumatic was it was--informed many aspects of the Oxide product. Bryan and Adam were joined by members of that former Joyent team to discuss, commiserate, and--perhaps--get some things off their chests.
a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Docker, Inc., an Early Epitaph
14 Sep 2021
01:11:34
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 13th, 2021
Steve’s take on commercialization > Bryan: There’s no question that they hit on something very big. > We saw a container as an operational vessel, but we failed to see > a container as a development vessel.
[@14:36](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=876) dotCloud (PaaS) struggles to find a buyer; ultimately open sources as last resort > All of a sudden a company that nobody had heard of, > was a company that everybody had heard of.
They took too much money.
[@17:40](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=1060) Pitfalls in raising money and scaling sales by imitating big companies
Clip ~1min with Jan the Man, Keith, and Doug (I’m shadowing Keith) > Everybody should be spending time arm in arm with customers understanding > how is this technology going to solve a problem > which they’ll want to pay to have a solution.
Tom: Was there actually a business anyways? Or was it just technology?
What if developers are attracted to those things they know cannot be monetized?
There was this belief that if a technology is this ubiquitous, it will be readily monetizable.
[@27:26](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=1646) Docker Swarm and Kubernetes > Hykes: We didn’t work at Google, we didn’t go to Stanford, > we didn’t have a PhD in computer science.
Stinemates: (The Kubernetes team) had strong opinions about the need for a service level API and Docker technically had its own opinion about a single API from a simplicity standpoint. We couldn’t agree.
DockerCon 2015: No mentioning Kubernetes!
Brendan Burns’ talk “The distributed system toolkit: Container patterns for modular distributed system design” was unfortunately made private by Docker sometime in the last two years. The internet archive only has this. Burns wrote a blog post about the topics from his talk.
[@36:11](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=2171) Docker coming to market
Enterprise teams wanted support
Initial support offerings were expensive and limited (no after hours, no weekends) > Bryan: I floated to Solomon in 2014: run container management as a service.
Tyler Tringas’ post about how small teams can create value with little outside investment, as a result of the Peace Dividend of the SaaS Wars.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Put the OS back in OSDI
07 Sep 2021
01:12:39
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 6th, 2021
Put the OS back in OSDI
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for September 6th, 2021.
[@37:02](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=2222) Open hardware and firmware
ARM Cortex-M0 > That’s why we land at incrementalism, we ossify at some boundary. > And it’s very hard to change things on either side without moving in lockstep.
Tom: The PC architecture was a great thing, but now the OS vendors have abdicated any knowledge of the hardware. Give us UEFI and we don’t care what happens beneath that.
Smart NICs only made sense in hyperscale server fleets > Josh: If you’re going to change the programming model, you have to blow the doors off on at least one axis
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
A brief history of talking computers
31 Aug 2021
01:33:23
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 30th, 2021
A brief history of talking computers
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 30, 2021.
Apple IIe computer and the Echo II speech synthesizer card.
[@4:15](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=255) The Echo ][ sound sample
Wargames computer: GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN. Listen > SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? > Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War? > … > Is this a game or is it real? > WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? > … > What’s it doing? > It’s learning… > … > A STRANGE GAME. > THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS > NOT TO PLAY.
[@1:15:25](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=4525) One of the most important settings a blind person will want to change in their speech synthesizer is how fast it talks.
Topical recent conference presentation: - Emily Shea (2019) Voice Driven Development video
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
The episode formerly known as ℔
24 Aug 2021
01:06:21
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 23rd, 2021
The episode formerly known as ℔
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 23rd, 2021.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Last week’s recording on “Showstopper” with author G. Pascal Zachary, and Jessamyn West.
Ashton-Tate history (there never was any Ashton, and dBASE II was the first version)
dBASE IV was “slow, buggy” and didn’t get fixed in a timely manner
Last week, Pascal mentioned that CEO Ed Esber “in a fit of insanity admitted to me (a journalist) he didn’t know how to use his company’s own product!”
Friday! personal information manager, and Sidekick from Borland (like Google calendar for DOS)
[@3:01](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=181) Phrasing: operating program (vs operating system)
Steve Jobs 1992 MIT Sloan talk ~72mins on consultants, hiring people and leaving Apple (see mit.edu summary) > Jobs: NeXTSTEP is not an operating system, it’s an operating environment
July 5th recording discussing NeXT. Randall Stross book: Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (1993) > Mac OSX focused on user capabilities of the desktop environment, but they considered it one and the same with the operating system
[@7:42](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=462) Windows NT had “multiple personalities” > Adam: I was instantly transported to the 90’s. > Bryan: I could hear Smashing Pumpkins playing on the radio.
See ACM ByteCast interview with Rashmi Mohan, Bryan tells the story ~3mins of coming to QNX after reading about it in the “Operating Systems Roundup” of Byte Magazine 1993 (see also Bryan’s blog post and remembering Dan Hildebrand)
There is very little (or no) dynamic memory allocation in Hubris.
Tock multitasking embedded OS, and Bryan’s “Tockilator: Deducing Tock execution flows from Ibex Verilator traces” video ~12mins
In Tock, dynamic program loading is central. Hubris functions as a security-minded service processor. The programs it will use are all known in advance; so dynamic loading (and the accompanying security concerns) can be left out.
Fit-to-purpose OSs
[@24:19](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=1459) ROPI/RWPI (aka “Ropy Rippy”) and the growing pains of RISC-V
OpenTitan, ARM Cortex-M > When we set out to write Hubris, we spent a lot of time reading > and learning what’s out there.
QNX vs monolithic systems. QNX was robust against module failure, so bugs in modules were tolerable. At Sun, faults in a module were system faults, so bugs were unacceptable.
Memory protection. Stack growing into (and corrupting) data segment, hard to debug.
Stack corruption, a hit and run.
[@32:39](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=1959) Humor: Oxide rustfmt bot is named Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” poem > LOOK UPON MY REFORMATTING YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR!
stale bot, open source maintainers, communicating bugs and issues
[@39:54](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=2394) Fun QNX bug story
QNX wrote their own POSIX utilities, they wrote their own AWK
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 16th, 2021
The Showstopper Show
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 16th, 2021.
[@0:46](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=46) “The endless debate of NT vs Unix.”
Bryan: My whole career was kind of defined by going where Windows wasn’t. I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I found was a real time capsule from software development in the 90’s.
[@2:46](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=166) Jessamyn: There was some familial impact (from developing DG Eclipse) that wasn’t mentioned in the book.
[@6:30](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=390) What was Kidder’s process? “He lived in my house!”
[@8:32](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=512) Zachary interviewed family members extensively. > People couldn’t leave, they were staying at the office all the time.
[@14:23](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=863) I do feel this is a time capsule. A time before two mega-trends hit: the Internet and open source.
[@17:33](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1053) Microsoft was kind of a joke software company in the early 90’s. > Dave Cutler was a force of nature.
[@19:59](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1199) No one understood why someone was good at coding. It was a mystery to everyone, why there was such a wide stratification of coders. > There were projects that never saw the light of day.
Ashton-Tate, dBase > There was a sense from Cutler and Perazzoli, that leadership of the team, > that these guys at Microsoft really didn’t get how serious the process > of building this battleship was.
I think the level of anguish did surprise me.
[@23:59](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1439) In “Soul of the New Machine,” the machine was the star, and people served it. East Coast vs West Coast attitudes. > On the West Coast, the personal computer were supposed to help you > actualize your counter-cultural values.
Ken Olsen of DEC > Computing is equivalent with IBM. There was no software industry > so long as IBM gave all the software away for free.
[@26:09](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1569) Crashes. > Wozniak dreamed of owning > his own PDP > computer, which cost as much as a house. So he was aware of the robustness > of the minicomputer, and by contrast, the puny power of a personal computer.
Thirtysomething > Dave Cutler was not cuddly. He was menacing, he could lose his temper. > And I tried not to get to close to him physically for that reason. > There were two looming father figures in Cutler and Gates. > And I think it created a lot of anxiety.
[@29:52](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1792) The stakes for NT at Microsoft were high.
Fred Brooks’ “The Mythical Man-Month” book > It was a watershed moment in the history of computing. > It was more like the last battleship, rather than the next frontier.
Bryan: I didn’t realize this, that Gates was arguing against memory protection with Cutler. From our perspective, shipping an operating system without memory protection, in an era when microprocessors supported it, is malpractice.
[@33:14](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1994) Cutler’s vendetta against Unix. > Conflict was at the heart of innovation at Microsoft at that time.
Mitch Kapor of Lotus. > These early personal computer innovators were dismissed and sometimes > humiliated by mainstream big iron people of the 60’s and 70’s.
Bill Gates’ “The Road Ahead” book doesn’t mention the internet.
Zachary’s “Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century” book > Computers on the West Coast were seen as extensions of your creativity, > and a tool for liberation. And for a long time that dominated the horizons.
In 2005 Gates and Ballmer don’t want to do cloud computing. “Who’s gonna want to put their stuff in the cloud?” We’ve found that computing is a collective experience.
[@38:28](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2308) Email and personal messaging
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s “The UNIX time-sharing system” paper > Unix was an experiment in collaboration.
RSX-11 for the PDP-11. And VMS for the VAX. > The attitude of looking down on Unix (as undesigned, academic) is > carried forward by Microsofties today.
Tom: You can forgive Cutler’s misgivings, because Unix pretty much stole the thunder out of VMS.
[@42:24](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2544) Interviews for the book. Family members perspective on workplace behavior.
Betty Shanahan, Society of Women Engineers. Brief Q&A
EAGLE (Eclipse Appreciation and Gratitude for Lonely Evenings) award > Betty’s husband got an award for having to do his own laundry…
Jessamyn’s “Women in Early Tech” blog entry about Shanahan
Agile + 20
27 Jul 2021
01:11:31
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 26, 2021
Agile + 20
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 26, 2021.
From the Agile Manifesto history > The only concern with the term agile came from Martin Fowler > (a Brit for those who don’t know him) who allowed that > most Americans didn’t know how to pronounce the word ‘agile’.
[@6:25](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=385) > The problem with agile is when it became so prescriptive that it > lost a lot of its agility.
[@8:06](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=486) > There’s so much that is unstructured in the way we develop software, > that we are constantly seeking people to tell us how to do it. > The answer is it’s complicated.
Steve Yegge’s Good Agile, Bad Agile > So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at > a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: > “This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where > the real money is at? You start your own religion.” > And that’s how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born.
[@9:15](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=555) Edward Yourdon
“Decline and Fall of the American Programmer” book
[@10:26](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=626) “The principles are not all wrong. Some today even feel obvious.” > There’s also a lack of specificity, which gives one lots of opportunity > for faith healers to come in.
[@14:43](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=883) “Something I found surprising about Agile was how rigid it became.”
Dan’s perils of personal tracking methodology
Sun’s engineers connecting directly with customers
[@20:48](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=1248) “I think we overly enshrine schedule estimation. If there are any unknowns it becomes really hard.” > I think there’s a Heisenberg principle at work with software: > you can tell what’s in a release or when it ships, but not both.
[@23:25](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=1405) Tom Killalea talks to success stories he’s seen with Agile
Building S3 at AWS
[@28:31](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=1711) Sprint planning and backlogs
Big work chunks, responding to changing priorities
[@33:39](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=2019) Success or failure of an Agile team?
“Do demos and retrospectives”
Unknowns in software development make estimation hard
Agile is more like a guideline than a target to hit.
Consistent team composition over time
“Soul of a New Machine”: trust is risk
The answer can’t be “you’re doing it wrong.”
How do you know if it’s working for your team?
(Did we miss anything? PRs always welcome!)
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!
NeXT, Objective-C, and contrasting histories
06 Jul 2021
01:11:18
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 5, 2021
NeXT, Objective-C, and contrasting histories
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 5, 2021.
[@4:42](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=282) The SPARCstation 1 and the Sun-4c (campus) architecture > The hardware was not competitive, but dammit they sure looked good!
[@9:15](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=555) It’s nuts how much time and energy they spent on the look of it. > They were building a huge factory, just about the time people were > starting to outsource everything.
Sun was doing incremental things, and Steve was going for the 100 yard pass.
Apple Lisa computer > NeXT refused to interoperate with anything. > They had this idea that a NeXT customer is going to buy all NeXT machines.
[@13:20](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=800) NeXT was a really proprietary company, contrasted with Sun, a really open company. > Bill Gates volunteers that he would gladly urinate on a NeXT machine.
They are attempting to reinvent absolutely everything, so they need all software to be written from scratch, effectively.
Jobs does this over and over again at NeXT. He does things to make NeXT look bigger than it is.
[@16:23](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=983) Jobs blows off important meeting with IBM
[@18:56](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1136) Mathematica went whole hog on NeXT
[@20:55](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1255) “Steve Jobs yells at your dad a lot?”
[@22:22](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1342) Story of Jobs trying to sell NeXT machines to Brown’s CS dept > “Your product looks great, I’m just not sure your company is > going to be around for as long as we need it to be.” > Then Steve Jobs calls him an a**hole and storms out.
[@23:35](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1415) NeXT spent very freely. Lavish offices, catering, etc > He did not take VC money. He had weird money from beginning to end. > Ross Perot thought Jobs was a total genius. Then realized that whether > he was a genius or not, he wasn’t selling any computers.
The 80’s were all about fear of Japan.
Ultimately they had to pivot away from hardware.
[@26:38](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=1598) In contrast to Sun
Bryan’s tweet from July 3 > Measured by most any yardstick one could choose, Sun was one of > the most successful stories of the 1980’s for all of industrial America.
[@54:08](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=3248) Objective-C and Swift are mandated. If it were an open ecosystem, would they be significant? > There was a feeling that the hardware didn’t matter. > You shouldn’t trouble yourself with any details.
[@57:46](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=3466) Secrecy at NeXT and Apple
NDAs signed per project > Secrecy is a lot of work.
It was all about being able to walk on stage, and dramatically drop something that was going to be life changing.
It seems like the secrecy was being used to manipulate people.
[@1:03:13](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=3793) x86 port at Apple
[@1:05:34](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=3934) Jobs tells them to make it great, because it’s currently sh*t.
[@1:08:04](https://youtu.be/2H9XQBdLB0Y?t=4084) Is Objective-C being used anywhere today outside the Apple ecosystem?
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
What's a bug? What's a debugger?
22 Jun 2021
01:06:13
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: June 21, 2021
What’s a bug? What’s a debugger?
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 21, 2021.
MDB Modular Debugger > Adam: I think people are using cargo-cult debugging, rather than getting to the root cause > of these things, or being satisfied until they get to the root cause. > Bryan: I think with software systems, it’s really hard to know what they’re actually doing.
“Runtime Performance Analysis of the M-to-N Scheduling Model” (pdf) 1996 undergrad thesis (Brown CS dept website)
[@6:29](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=389) Threadmon website and 1997 paper (a retooling of the ’96 paper) > When I built that tooling, it revealed this thing > is not doing at all what anyone thought it was doing.
TNF Trace Normal Form > Part of the problem with debuggers… debuggers are historically written by compiler folks, > and not system folks. As a result, debuggers are designed to debug the problem that > compiler folks have the most familiarity with, and that’s a compiler. > Debuggers are designed for reproducible problems, way too frequently.
I view in situ breakpoint debugging as one sliver of debugging that’s useful for one particular and somewhat unusual class of bugs. That’s actually not the kind of debugger I want to use most of the time.
[@11:59](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=719) > libdis was my intern project in 2000. The idea was to take the program text, > and interpret it in some structural form, and try to infer different things about the program.
Volatility: the memory forensics framework Adam couldn’t quite remember.
[@14:59](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=899) I meant this question earnestly, what is a debugger?
The first bug > The term is somewhat regrettable… It implies a problem, when there may not be a problem. > It may just be I want to understand how the system is operating, independent of whether > it’s doing it badly.
Oxide’s embedded OS and companion debugger: Hubris and Humility
[@19:01](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=1141) Using DTrace to help customers understand their systems. > If you strings the DTrace binary, > you’re not gonna find any mention of raincoats.
[@22:13](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=1333) Cardinal rule of debuggers: Don’t kill the patient! (see also: Do No Harm) > Not killing the patient is really important, > this was always an Ur principle for us.
The notion that the debugger has now become load bearing in the execution of the program, is a pretty grave responsibility.
[@26:54](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=1614) Post-mortem debugging > It is a tragedy of our domain that we do not debug post-mortem, routinely.
Heisenbug (when the act of observing the problem, hides the problem)
[@31:11](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=1871) > What’s going on in the system? It’s not crashing, there’s no core dump. > But the system is behaving in a way I didn’t expect it to, and I want to know why.
[@33:51](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=2031) Pre-production reliability techniques > All of our pre-production work has gotten way better than it was, and I think that’s > compensation for the fact we can’t understand these systems when we deploy them.
[@37:58](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=2278) > The move to testing has in fact obviated some of the need for > what we consider traditional debuggers. > (Bryan audibly cringes)
[@39:08](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=2348) Automated and Algorithmic Debugging conference AADEBUG 2003
HOPL History of Programming Languages > There was a test suite of excellence when it comes to automated program debugging. > And it was some pile of C programs with known bugs, and you would throw your new > paper at it, and it would find 84% of the bugs, and there would be a lot of > slapping each other on the back on that. Really focused on the simplest of simple bugs.
[@43:15](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=2595) Bryan’s Postmortem Object Type Identification paper > Who is my neighbor in memory? Because my neighbor just burned down my house basically.
mdb’s ::kgrep > I need to pause you there because it’s so crazy, and I want to emphasize that > he means what he’s saying. We look for the 64 bit value, and see where we find it. > This is a game of bingo across the entire address space.
We can follow the pointers and propagate types.
[@48:49](https://youtu.be/UOucW3F7nCg?t=2929) printf/println debugging – everyone’s doing it > I think it’s a mistake for people to denigrate printf debugging. > If you’ve got a situation that you ca...
Barracuda 7200.11: broken firmware is broken software!
08 Jun 2021
00:57:03
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: June 7, 2021
Barracuda 7200.11: broken firmware is broken software!
[@54:04](https://youtu.be/qisoAIx8EE8?t=3244) Sans firmware?
FPGA to ASIC transition article 2011. (aside: treat yourself to this amazing vintage mouse-themed site announcing the same) > It’s when microprocessors show up that all the trouble starts.
(Did we miss anything? PRs always welcome!)
Our next Twitter Space will be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time. Join us; we always love to hear from new speakers!
[@1:25](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=85) Bryan: Have you listened to the Reply All episode “Is the Facebook Microphone On?”
The truth is actually scarier, Facebook doesn’t need the mic to be on … to read your mind.
Silicon Cowboys
[@2:46](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=166) The 2016 documentary “Silicon Cowboys” follows the rise of the Compaq computer company. (IMDb) (Watch the trailer ~3mins)
I was trying to watch “Halt and Catch Fire” with my kid … and there’s a lot of spontaneous sex breaking out…Fastest to one billion in revenue… fastest to Fortune 500… a meteoric rise
Open by Canion
[@7:05](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=425) The 2013 book “Open” by Rod Canion (cofounder and CEO of Compaq): “How Compaq Ended IBM’s PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing.”
[@10:02](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=602) Steve: Ben Rosen was the venture capitalist who wrote the first check to Compaq, really got them off the ground. On the board for 20 years.
Their timing was right. The way they did the company was right. And they executed really really well.To go from zero to 50 thousand units, of almost anything, in the time span they did, is incredible.
[@14:40](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=880) Tom: The thing that really put them on the map was having the portable when nobody else did. And being 100% compatible.
Those portables were barely luggable, they were huge!Back in a time when there was no network. Being able to pick up your computer and take it to a place, was your network.
[@16:47](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=1007) Steve: A big catalyst for their success was the channel. People were able to pick it up and go, they didn’t need special training.
[@19:25](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=1165) Dad used to bring home the luggable so I could play Space Invaders, and he would work on spreadsheets.
Portable before Compaq
[@20:49](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=1249) There were portable solutions before Compaq, but for timesharing.
You had the T.I. Silent 700, in the 70’s, you could tote that home and plug it into the modem.
Osborne Effect
[@22:41](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=1361) Tom: They killed their company with the famous Osborne Effect
Bryan and Steve (clearly excited): What was the Osborne Effect!? Tom: Pre-announcing the next machine.Telling customers: man, if you love the Osborne 1, just wait till the Osborne 2… So they did!
[@24:40](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=1480) Bryan: Something I found surprising about the history of Compaq was the different organizational approach that they had.
Early on, before even thinking about what to go do, they were talking about the kind of company they wanted to build.
PBS Silicon Valley
[@26:14](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=1574) The 2013 PBS documentary “Silicon Valley” tells the story of Fairchild Semiconductor. (Watch chapter one ~17mins)
[@28:14](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=1694) We ask people, when they apply to Oxide, when they’ve been most unhappy in their careers. And it all boils down to people not feeling listened to, not having agency.
IBM’s role
[@29:41](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=1781) How much of Compaq’s success is just pure mis-execution from IBM? IBM inadvertently creates this pseudo open architecture, and makes exactly the wrong move in trying to reproprietarize it with the PS/2 and Micro Channel architecture; which is an absolute disaster.
In many ways the story of Compaq is as much the story of the failed PS/2.It was such a mis-execution to do this analysis on the market and say: we need to grab our existing customers and lock them in, before they slip through our fingers, and in doing so, just hasten their departure. And Compaq was in the right spot to pick up the pieces.
[@33:22](https://youtu.be/faY7kWHQuNE?t=2002) We were ripping out a bunch of ISA and EISA drivers..
I am a sacrificial sheep, I can’t possibly go. You are a sacrificial lamb.The machines themselves are anemic, if you want any functionality you go to a third party.. There were magazines filled with advice on which sound-generating card you should buy.
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!
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...
Gerald Ford inaugural address (including its most famous line, “our long national nightmare is over”) > I went in a Gerald Ford cynic, and came out a Gerald Ford super-fan
Roger’s “The Process File System and Process Model in UNIX System V” paper
[@7:43](https://youtu.be/85eApYSj3ic?t=463) “I am on a mission from God to make programs debuggable”
AVL trees and linked lists > Performance is the root of all evil.
[@11:37](https://youtu.be/85eApYSj3ic?t=697) > Roger made this incredible contribution about debugging infrastructure > being an attribute of a production system.
The German word that we’re seeking: Misappropriation-of-mechanism-in-a-seemingly-clever way-but-is-ultimately-a-disaster > ptrace is the x86 of system calls
[@16:45](https://youtu.be/85eApYSj3ic?t=1005) A long-coming apology..
Bryan’s 2007 Dtrace review, Google TechTalk ~80mins
[@48:07](https://youtu.be/85eApYSj3ic?t=2887) Dtrace language inspiration
Dtrace clones > It was all based on us exploring some phenomenon, > something being kind of a pain in the ass or impossible, > and inventing something that was easy to use.
Architectural review board: “This reminds us a lot of awk..” > What’s the most powerful one-liner you can crank out with awk?
(Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
We recorded the space, but we had some challenges, and we lost the recording when the first Twitter Space died at around 5:30p. We recorded the second half though; the recording is here.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
[@4:40](https://youtu.be/8tJEwCvZWsg?t=280) Lionizing Unix > 7th edition is amazing, incredible, a break through.. > and it’s also kind of a shitty engineering artifact that needed a lot of work.
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. In addition to [@bcantrill](https://twitter.com/bcantrill) and [@ahl](https://twitter.com/ahl), speakers included special guest Tom Lyon plus Joshua Clulow, Dan McDonald, Dan Cross, Tom Killalea, Theo Schlossnagle, Antranig Vartanian, and [@perlhack](https://twitter.com/perlhack).
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
[@2:06](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=126) SPARC 30th anniversary dinner > SPARC was an amazing achievement for its time, > but there were some nasty trade-offs made.
[@2:56](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=176) illumos announcement on the end of SPARC support
[@8:51](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=531) Register windows > Most people don’t know, about that first SPARC, > there was no integer multiply or divide.. > It would trap on the instructions.
I feel so decadent, I’ve just been sprinkling multiplications around my code for years.
[@9:55](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=595) popc instruction (also called Hamming Weight)
Henry Warren’s 2002 Hacker’s Delight Ch. 5 shows a ~20 instruction algorithm (no branches, only adds/shifts/masks by constants) > Warren: According to computer folklore, the population count function is important to the > National Security Agency. No one (outside of NSA) seems to know just what they use it for, > but it may be in cryptography work or in searching huge amounts of material.
According to Agner Fog, Ice Lake performs popcnt with a 3 cycle latency, and Zen 3 with just 1 cycle latency.
Phil Bagwell’s 2001 Ideal Hash Trees depend on pop count > Bagwell: Note that the performance of the algorithm is seriously impacted > by the poor execution speed of the POPCT emulation in Java, a problem > the Java designers may wish to address.
Persistent versions of Bagwell’s trees are used for the built-in hash maps of Clojure, and in libraries for Scala etc.
[@11:39](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=699) This was the debate between Roger Faulkner and Jeff Bonwick: register windows
[@12:35](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=755) Register fishing: Bryan’s version and Adam’s version > When you want to know the state of some other process, you have to flush > those register windows to memory to be able to recover the stack trace.
[@14:30](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=870) Delay slot > We sat around the lunch table talking about how crazy it would > be to have a branch that executed right after a branch.
DCTI couple (delayed control transfer instruction)
[@15:31](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=931) “Well, the instruction set doesn’t allow that..” story > Bedlam. As far as Solaris kernel discussions go, bedlam.
[@22:17](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=1337) Praise for SPARC
SPARC address space identifiers > When we were porting Solaris to x86, and deciding what fraction of the > address space would belong to the kernel vs the user, it felt disgusting to me.
[@25:26](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=1526) Software-filled TLB > They just didn’t have the room to cram a hardware page table walk into the chip.
MIPS would give you a trap on a VAC conflict (virtual address cache)
[@27:34](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=1654) It was slow, it was late, and it had a lot of problems, it was wrong.
UltraSPARC-III, code-named “Cheetah” > It’s weird, I compile this thing over and over, and every 80th time when > I compile and run it, it’s 40x slower..
[@32:17](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=1937) Does the Viking I-cache bug ring a bell?
SuperSPARC, code-named “Viking” > You’d have to DC balance the I-cache. If you had too many zeros, > they’d start flipping to ones.
E-cache parity error > It was due to everything but high energy particle strikes.
Radioactive boron in our SRAM manufacturing process
[@38:52](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=2332) “Move it further from the tube” story > When you’re going to have a customer do something, you have to remember there’s > a human being on the other end of that. You cannot have them chasing your theories. > You need to be transparent and honest with them.
[@42:25](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=2545) Micron DRAM story
[@44:38](https://youtu.be/79NNXn5Kr90?t=2678) High priced consultants and cosmic rays > They literally lined the roof with lead.. and it didn’t change the error rat...
Mr. Leventhal, Come here I want to see you
04 May 2021
00:31:05
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 3, 2021
Mr. Leventhal, Come here I want to see you
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for May 3, 2021.
[@1:24](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=84) So formal correctness is something that I think we are all very sympathetic with. > It’s very laudable, it’s also very hard.
From L3 to seL4 What Have We Learnt in 20 Years of L4 Microkernels? (paper)
Who guards the guards? Formal validation of the Arm v8-m architecture specification (paper) > Hardware architecture is an area where formal verification is more tenable, > a level you can readily reason about.
Our challenge is how can we satisfy our need for formalism without getting too pedantic about it. You don’t want to lose the forest for the trees. A system we never deliver doesn’t actually improve anyone’s lives, that’s the challenge.
[@5:20](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=320) Journal club experiences
Bootstrapping Trust in Modern Computers (book) > [@9:45](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=585) > We’ve tried to build a culture of looking to other work that’s been done. > Not because everything’s been done before, but because you don’t want to have to > relearn something that someone has already learned and talked about. > If you can leverage someone’s wisdom, that’s energy well spent.
[@11:46](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=706) When systems repeat mistakes, engineers feel deprived of agency: “I suffered for nothing.” > Engineering is this complicated balance between seeing the world as it could be, > and accepting the world as it is. > As you get older as an engineer, it’s too easy to no longer see what could be, > and you get mired in the ways the world is broken. You can become pessimistic.
Caitie McCaffrey on Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices (video ~45min)
[@14:17](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=857) It’s dangerous to live only in the future, detached from present reality. Optative voice
[@16:45](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1005) At Oxide, we ask applicants “when have you been happiest and why? Unhappiest?” Interesting to see that unhappy is all the same story: we were trying to do the right thing and management prevented it. > When I was younger and maybe more idealistic and willing to charge at the windmills, > I stayed too long with a company. > All the developers that interviewed me were gone by the time I got there. > I should have walked out the door, but I was too young and didn’t know better.
[@18:43](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1123) “How do you and your cofounder resolve conflicts?” > I don’t want to hear about how you don’t have conflicts, tell me about how you resolve them.
Folks aren’t able to walk away, they’ve got this commitment both to the work and to their colleagues. I’ve been a dead-ender a couple of times, I’ll go down with the ship.
[@20:28](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1228) In “Soul of a New Machine” (wiki) Tom West says he wants to trust his engineers, but that trust is risk. > I just love that line: that trust is risk. > That’s part of the reason some of these companies > have a hard time trusting their technologists, > they just don’t want to take the risk.
People are so not versed in how to deal with conflict, and there’s nothing scarier than salary negotiation.
They need you, that’s why you’re here, you’ve made it all the way through the interview to this point, you’ve got leverage, now’s the time to use it.
[@23:04](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1384) Oxide: Compensation as a Reflection of Values > It takes the need for negotiation out, > because it replaces it with total transparency.
Sometimes it’s not about what you’re getting paid, it’s about what the other person is getting paid. Not wanting to get taken advantage of.
It’s a social experiment for sure.
[@28:07](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=1687) Steve Jobs famously tried this at NeXT: pay was transparent but not equal.
History of compensation at NeXT (wiki) (quora post) > I think that’s the worst of both worlds, a recipe for disaster.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
All we have to fear is FUD itself
25 Apr 2024
01:21:01
The Oxide Friends have talked about the Hashicorp license change, the emergence of an open source fork of Terraform in OpenTofu, and other topics in open source. A few weeks ago both InfoWorld and Hashicorp (independently?) accused OpenTofu of stealing Terraform code—a serious claim that turned out to be fully unfounded. We (you!) have been lucky to avoid this topic with a couple of guests lined up to talk about the xz exploit discovery and founding the Oakland Ballers… but we ran out of distractions! Bryan and Adam talk about this FUD and FUD generally.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
17 Apr 2024
01:13:11
Bryan, Adam, Steve, and the Oxide Friends are joined by the founders of the Oakland Ballers, the continuation of a long history of baseball in Oakland. There turns out to be a plenty in common between founding a computer company and founding a baseball team--and we both have our fans supporting us!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
10 Apr 2024
01:37:17
Andres Freund joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details with Andres. We started by ranting about the coverage in the New York Times… coverage that explicitly refused to dig into the details! It’s all the more shocking because the big story here is how Andres’ penchant for digging into the details is what saved us all from what would have been a pervasive and damaging attack!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Recorded April 8th, 2024
Cultural Idiosyncrasies
03 Apr 2024
01:27:17
The Oxide Friends talk about about cultural idiosyncrasies--turns out we have a lot of them at Oxide! Some might even sound good enough for you to try out! Demo Fridays, morning water-cooler, no-meet Wednesdays, recorded meetings, dog-pile debugging (aka CSPAN for debugging), RFDs (requests for discussion), no performance review process...
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Adversarial Machine Learning
27 Mar 2024
01:23:30
Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his work with adversarial machine learning. He's found sequences of--seemingly random--tokens that cause LLMs to ignore their restrictions! Also: printf is Turing complete?!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Data Visualization
15 Mar 2024
01:25:52
Data visualization is an important--and overlooked!--tool in the software engineer's tool belt. Bryan describes a recent journey with gnuplot while Oxide colleague, Charlie Park, shares his own experience with data visualization and Adam offers a visual analysis of Simpsons episodes. Stay tuned to the end to find out about the Oxide and Friends book club coming up in May.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service
14 Feb 2024
01:38:40
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.
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: The Backbone of Oxide
30 Aug 2024
01:42:09
RFDs--Requests for Discussion--are how we at Oxide discuss... just about everything! Technical design, hardware component selection, changes in process, culture, interview systems, (even) chat--we have RFDs for all of these, over 500 in a bit under 5 years. Bryan and Adam were joined by Oxide colleagues instrumental to RFDs, from their most prolific author to those making them more consumable.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Robert Mustacchi, David Crespo, Ben Leonard, and Augustus Mayo.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Innovation Stagnation?
07 Feb 2024
01:00:44
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!
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!
Helios
01 Feb 2024
01:47:50
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!
What's taking so long?!
24 Jan 2024
01:35:10
We love Rust at Oxide, but the haters aren’t wrong: builds can be slow. Bryan and Adam are joined by Sean Klein, Rain Paharia, and Steve Klabnik to discuss techniques for analyzing and accelerating Rust builds.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison
17 Jan 2024
01:33:19
Simon Willison joined Bryan and Adam to discuss a recent article maligning open source large language models. Simon has so much practical experience with LLMs, and brings so much clarity to what they can and can’t do. How do these systems work? How do they break? What are open and proprietary LLMs out there?
Recorded 1/15/2024
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording.
Simon posted a follow up blog article where he explains using MacWhisper and Claude to make his LLM pull out a few of his favorite quotes from this episode:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Predictions 2024!
10 Jan 2024
01:56:39
Bryan and Adam are joined by MIT Research Scientist, Michael Cafarella, for our annual predictions episode where we check in on past predictions and gaze 1-, 3-, and 6- years into the future. No surprise: there were a lot of AI-related predictions. Big surprise: many of them came from Bryan … and with unabashed optimism!
Recorded 1/8/2024
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal were your hosts. Additional speakers--and predicters--are listed below with their predictions. (If you made predictions, please submit a PR to add or clarify yours)
PRs needed!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
AMD's MI300 and the Future of Accelerated Compute
12 Dec 2023
01:14:01
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!
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!
Framework Computer with Nirav Patel
05 Dec 2023
01:07:16
Nirav Patel, CEO and founder of Framework Computer, join Bryan and Adam to talk about building a new computer company (yes! another new computer company!) focused on making laptops repairable and open. It turns out, there are a bunch of shared lessons between building a 3lb laptop and a 2,500lb cloud computer!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl
28 Nov 2023
01:10:26
So… OpenAI happened… and Bryan and Adam try it break it down with help from Steve Tuck and even more special guest Chuck McManis.
Fermat's Last Theorem (an + bn = cn only possible for n = 1 or n = 2) > I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain. - Fermat
Bryan and Adam were joined by Gergely Orosz, the Pragmatic Engineer, to talk about Oxide's hiring process, the experiences that led to that process, and hiring generally. There's a lot there for anyone interested in hiring or being hired... and especially for anyone who's considered applying to Oxide!
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Gergely Orosz. The "Litter Box" is what we call the recording studio... thus named for reasons best left to the imagination
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Launching the Cloud Computer
31 Oct 2023
01:34:22
Oxide Founder and CEO, Steve Tuck, joined Bryan, Adam, and Oxide Friend, Steve Klabnik, to talk about our recent announcements: general availability of the Oxide Cloud Computer, and raising $44m. The reception was (broadly) great! Bryan and Steve answered questions about the product, company, and launch.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Whither CockroachDB?
21 Aug 2024
01:34:07
Lots of engineering decisions get made on vibes. Popularity, anecdotes—they can lead to expedient decisions rather than rigorous ones. At Oxide, our choice to go with CockroachDB was hardly hasty! Dave Pacheco joins Bryan and Adam to talk about why we choose CRDB… and how Cockroach Lab’s recent switch to a proprietary license impacts that.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Open Source and Capitalism with Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob
24 Oct 2023
01:39:40
Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob joined Adam and Bryan to continue their panel discussion with Bryan following up his p99conf talk revisiting open source anti-patterns. Notably, open source has accelerated the distribution of value… without clarity on how contributors can capture that value. Has open source accelerated unequal distribution?
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Settling Beef
17 Oct 2023
01:39:06
Recently, a clip from Oxide and Friends was played by another podcast as something of a punching bag. Adam was called "uneducated" and Bryan, it was observed accurately, "hadn't used C++ since the '90s". Well, Conor Hoekstra from the ADSP pod joined us to settle the beef.