Oxide and Friends

By Oxide Computer Company

What's Oxide and Friends about?

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. These are the recordings in podcast form.

Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB

Subscribe to our calendar: https://sesh.fyi/api/calendar/v2/iMdFbuFRupMwuTiwvXswNU.ics

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Oxide and Friends episodes:

04.25.2024
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...
04.17.2024
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...
04.10.2024
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…...
04.03.2024
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...
03.27.2024
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...
03.15.2024
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....
02.14.2024
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...
02.07.2024
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!...
02.01.2024
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.)....
01.24.2024
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...
01.17.2024
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...
01.10.2024
Predictions 2024!
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...
12.12.2023
AMD's MI300 and the Future of Accelerated Compute
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...
12.05.2023
Framework Computer with Nirav Patel
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...
11.28.2023
OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl
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...
11.07.2023
Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
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...
10.31.2023
Launching the Cloud Computer
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...
10.24.2023
Open Source and Capitalism with Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob
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...
10.17.2023
Settling Beef
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...
10.03.2023
Mr. Nagle's Wild Ride
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...
09.12.2023
DTrace at 20
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...
08.29.2023
Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower
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...
08.22.2023
Fork in the road for Terraform?
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...
08.15.2023
No Silver Bullets
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...
07.25.2023
Books in the Box III
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...
07.18.2023
The Frontend of the Computer
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...
07.11.2023
Tales from Manufacturing: Shipping Rack 1
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....
07.04.2023
Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!
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...
06.27.2023
Okay, Doomer: A Rebuttal to AI Doom-mongering
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...
06.20.2023
Software Verificationpalooza
Greg and Rain from the Oxide team joined Bryan and Adam to talk about powerful methods of verifying software: formal methods in the form of TLA+ and property-based testing in the form of the proptest Rust crate. If you care...
06.13.2023
Virtualizing Time
Jordan Hendricks joined Bryan and Adam to talk about her work virtualizing time--particularly challenging when migrating virtual machines from one physical machine to another! We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and...
05.30.2023
Open Source Governance
Bryan and Adam are joined by Ashley Williams to talk about open source governance... and the recently, and various stumblings of the Rust project leadership.
05.16.2023
Building Together: Oxide and Samtec
Bryan and Adam are joined by Jonathan and Jignesh from Samtec to discuss working together to build the Oxide Rack. We've all seen bad vendors--what does it mean to be a great partner? Also: silicon photonics are (still!) just 18...
05.09.2023
The Network Behind the Network
Bryan and Adam are joined by Oxide colleagues Arjen, Matt, John, and Nathaneal to talk about the management network--the brainstem of the Oxide Rack. Just as it ties together so many components, this episode ties together many many (many!) topics...
05.02.2023
Blue Skies Over Mastodon (with Erin Kissane and Tim Bray)
Erin Kissane joins Bryan and Adam to talk the new social network "Bluesky" through the lens of her blog post "Blue Skies Over Mastodon". Long-time friends of Oxide and social-media aficionados Time Bray and Steve Klabnik also helped shed light...
04.18.2023
Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?
The Rust Foundation caused a fracas with their proposed new trademark rules. Bryan and Adam were lucky enough to be joined by Ashley Williams, Adam Jacob, and Steve Klabnik for an insightful discussion of open source governance and communities--in particular...
04.04.2023
Cabling the Backplane
Bryan and Adam are joined by Doug Wibben and Robert Keith to talk about the mechanical design of the cabled backplane of the Oxide rack that allows for "blind-mated" server sleds--no network and power cables to plug, unplug, and mis-plug!...
03.28.2023
Get You a State Machine for Great Good
Andrew Stone of Oxide Engineering joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his purpose-built, replay debugger for the Oxide setup textual UI. Andrew borrowed a technique from his extensive work with distributed systems to built a UI...
03.21.2023
Does a GPT future need software engineers?
Bryan and Adam and the Oxide Friends take on GPT and its implications for software engineering. Many aspiring programmers are concerned that the future of the profession is in jeopardy. Spoiler: the Oxide Friends see a bright future for human/GPT...
03.17.2023
On Silicon Valley Bank with Eric Vishria
Eric Vishria of Benchmark and Oxide CEO, Steve Tuck, join Bryan and Adam to talk about Silicon Valley Bank, its role in the startup ecosystem, and the short- and long-term effects of its collapse. We've been hosting a live show...
02.28.2023
Rack-scale Networking
Bryan and Adam are joined by a number of members of the Oxide networking team to talk about the networking software that drives the Oxide rack. It turns out that rack-scale networking is hard... and has enormous benefits! We've been...
02.14.2023
Memory Safety with Yael Grauer
Yael Grauer joined Bryan, Adam, Steve Klabnik, and the Oxide Friends to talk about her recent Consumer Reports article on memory safety and memory safe languages. How do we inform the general public? How do we persuade practitioners and companies?...
02.07.2023
Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries
Members of the Oxide team join Bryan and Adam to talk about our journey through compliance (spoiler: we passed!). Oxide and Friends: February 6th, 2023 We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour,...
01.24.2023
Revisiting Unikernels
Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends revisit a 7 year old blog post from Bryan regarding unikernels.
01.17.2023
The Power of Proto Boards!
Bryan and Adam are joined by members of the Oxide hardware team to talk about proto boards--smaller boards, rapidly designed and delivered that have been instrumental to building the larger boards and the product generally.
01.10.2023
Predictions 2023!
Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends review last year's predictions and look ahead 1, 3, and 6 years into the future. What's in store for Rust? Will ChatGPT boom or bust? Will Bryan's prediction of the demise of the term...
12.27.2022
Breaking it down with Ian Brown
On December 20th, former Tweep, Ian Brown, joined a Twitter Space about Twitter's architecture. He was surprised when the head Tweep himself joined.. and more surprised when Elon responded to his questions about a proposed rewrite by calling Ian a...
12.19.2022
A Debugging Odyssey
Oxide colleague, Dave Pacheco, joins Adam and Bryan to talk about an epic debugging journey. Everyone had something to learn from the struggle to find random data corruption in the Go allocator--Dave included!
12.13.2022
Podcasts for Podcast-Lovers
The Oxide Friends bring their podcast recommendations. PCBs, game consoles, sci-fi, business failures, to bad movies--there was a lot of range.
11.29.2022
Leaving Twitter with Tim Bray
Tim Bray joins the Oxide Friends to talk about leaving Twitter as a user as Bryan and Adam host their first live show on Discord (adios, Twitter Spaces!).

What's Oxide and Friends about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Oxide and Friends episodes:

All we have to fear is FUD itself

A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel

Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund

Cultural Idiosyncrasies

Adversarial Machine Learning

Data Visualization

Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service

Innovation Stagnation?

Helios

What's taking so long?!

Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison

Predictions 2024!

AMD's MI300 and the Future of Accelerated Compute

Framework Computer with Nirav Patel

OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl

Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz

Launching the Cloud Computer

Open Source and Capitalism with Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob

Settling Beef

Mr. Nagle's Wild Ride

DTrace at 20

Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower

Fork in the road for Terraform?

No Silver Bullets

Books in the Box III

The Frontend of the Computer

Tales from Manufacturing: Shipping Rack 1

Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!

Okay, Doomer: A Rebuttal to AI Doom-mongering

Software Verificationpalooza

Virtualizing Time

Open Source Governance

Building Together: Oxide and Samtec

The Network Behind the Network

Blue Skies Over Mastodon (with Erin Kissane and Tim Bray)

Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?

Cabling the Backplane

Get You a State Machine for Great Good

Does a GPT future need software engineers?

On Silicon Valley Bank with Eric Vishria

Rack-scale Networking

Memory Safety with Yael Grauer

Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries

Revisiting Unikernels

The Power of Proto Boards!

Predictions 2023!

Breaking it down with Ian Brown

A Debugging Odyssey

Podcasts for Podcast-Lovers

Leaving Twitter with Tim Bray