Oxide and Friends

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, pleas...

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 Cant...

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 h...

Sometimes Bryan gets trolled by a tweet and brings it to Adam and the Oxide Friends. This was a well-crafted troll: is innovation slowing? Are the most interesting problems solved. In a word: no. For many more words, listen in! In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal , we were joined by Steve Klabnik. Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: The Tweet Nate Silver Secul...

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 h...

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 th...

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 hou...

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. Addition...

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 an...

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...

So… OpenAI happened… and Bryan and Adam try it break it down with help from Steve Tuck and even more special guest Chuck McManis. In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal , we were joined by variously special guests Steve Tuck and Chuck McManis . Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: Hacker News: OpenAPI's board has fired Sam Altman Employee Letter to OpenAI's Board...

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...

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 Klab...

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...

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 Bif...

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 th...

Bryan and Adam reminisce about the DTrace journey 20 years after first integrating the code into Solaris back in September 2003. In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal , we were joined by Josh Clulow . Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: Hungry Jack's Bryan's other online dating profile The Sun E10000 (E10k) , the world's worst router Leventhal's Conundrum DTrace...

Kelsey Hightower joined Bryan and Adam to revisit a topic Bryan had spoken about a decade ago: corporate open source anti-patterns. Kelsey brought his typical sagacity to a complex and fraught topic. We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from August 28th, 2023 . In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal , we w...

On August 10th, HashiCorp made the controversial decision to re-license some of the popular, formerly-open source project under the Business Source License (BUSL). Bryan and Adam spoke with founders of the OpenTF project, an effort to keep Terraform operating in the open. In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal , speakers on August 21st included Josh Padnick , Malcolm Matalka , and Cory O...

Bryan and Steve Klabnik discuss Fred Brooks' essay "No Silver Bullets"--ostensibly apropos of nothing!--discussing the challenges to 10x (or 100x!) improvements in software engineering. In addition to Bryan Cantrill speakers on included Steve Klabnik , Ian Grunert , and Tom Lyon . Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks Sub-podcasting (it's a th...

In an Oxide and Friends tradition, Bryan and Adam invite the community to share book recommendations. In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal , speakers on included Steve Klabnik , Tom Lyon , Ian Grunert , Owen Anderson , phillipov, makowski, and saethlin. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!) Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: Elon Jet High Noo...

Bryan and Adam were joined by Justin and David from the Oxide team to talk about their work on the Oxide Console--the frontend to the Oxide computer. The rigor they've brought to all aspects of the frontend--client/server type safety, test automation, a11y--it's astounding! We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from...

Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide operations team to discuss the logistics of actually assembling the first Oxide Rack, crating it, shipping it... and all the false starts, blind alleys, and failed tests along the way. We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from July 10th, 2023 . In addition to Bryan...

On this week's show, Adam Leventhal posed questions from Hacker News (mostly) to Oxide founders Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck . Stick around until the end to hear about the hardest parts of building Oxide--great, surprising answers from both Bryan and Steve. They were also joined by Steve Klabnik . Questions for Steve and Bryan: [@6:38] Q: Congrats to the team, but after hearing about Oxide for li...

Bryan and Adam offer a rebuttal to the AI doomerism that has been gaining volume. And--hoo-boy--this one had some range. Heaven’s Gate, ceteris paribus, WWII, derpy security robots, press-fit DIMM sockets, async Rust, etc. And optimistic as always: the hardware and systems AI doomers imagine are incredibly hard to get right; let’s see AIs help us before we worry about our own obsolescence! On this...