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Oxide Computer Company

Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form.
Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB
Subscribe to our calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/c_318925f4185aa71c4524d0d6127f31058c9e21f29f017d48a0fca6f564969cd0%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Oxide and Friends

Bryan and Adam were joined by Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady to talk about conferences in tech. A lot has changed in the past couple of decades about the impetus for conferences and what makes it worthwhile to attend.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady.

The lightly edited live chat from the show:

ellie.idb • : 2005, huh? y’all met when i was 2
goodjanet • : yea i was younger than 10 lol
jgrillo_ • : I was just thinking I feel very young because I was a junior in high school but not anymore lol
aka_pugs • : my first conference - 1975
ellie.idb • : oxide appeals to the youth
jbk1234 • : my first one was LISA in 05 or 06... mostly because it took a near act of god because my director didn't believe in sending his people to conferences
jgrillo_ • : "before software ate the world" is what I usually call "when the internet was still fun"
ellie.idb • : my earliest memory was, uhhh, Google I/O 2008 when they gave every attendee that android phone
ellie.idb • : i don’t recall which one it was, but i do remember playing with it when i was 5 hahahaha
taitomagatsu • : I've only been to one tech conference in person, and it was a very tame SIGGRAPH that happened in Santiago, CL (I live in Chile). It was a lot about animation. I wanted it to have talks on image processing like the ones over on the US x3 but oh well, beggars can't be choosers
goodjanet • : I've never been to a tech conference
devdsp2175 • : The Germans know how to run a conference. The chaos communications congress is wild.
ellie.idb • : same!! never actually attended one as an adult hahaha
taitomagatsu • : Have you attended one remotely?
goodjanet • : nope, closest is just watching recorded talks after the fact
taitomagatsu • : I attended the rustconf of 2 years ago remotely. It was amazing and I was soooo tired by the end of it. Brain got depleted of juice for the day
network2501 • : looking forward to in person dtrace conference with a dedicated zball room
ahl0003 • : more of a trade show, but I went to the MacWorld conference in the late '90s
ahl0003 • : I still have some BeOS install CDs from then
goodjanet • : im so thankful for recorded talks
ahl0003 • : this is kind of wild: I went with my brother who was 12 or so and we met a guy at Be... my brother would go on to work with him 30 years later!
ellie.idb • : 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid • the OG droid with the flip up keyboard and everything
tocococa • : ISCA this year was just around the corner from Santiago in Buenos Aires and it was pretty cool, and CARLA took place this year in Santiago too
blacksmithforlife • : Since I can never get a conference approved from work, I live off recorded conference videos on YouTube
network2501 • : best mom
devdsp2175 • : The shade! Sending hugs to Bryan's inner child.
taitomagatsu • : daaaaaamn, I didn't know about either! I might keep an eye on ISCA, maybe I can go next year ❤️
devdsp2175 • : You can't record the hallway track...
jh179 • : Bryan's talk for Papers We Love on the History of Containers is how I found out about him, Oxide and all the rest. Had an incredible tangent about jails...
zeanic • : Conference idea: all hallway tracks
devdsp2175 • : YouTube keeps recommending Bryan's talks on running containers on the metal at Joyant.
devdsp2175 • : And I keep watching them!
ellie.idb • : wow, ISCA had some really fucking cool talks this year
ellie.idb • : damn. i’m adding this to my watch list too!!! i’ll try and see if i can get funding for next year hahaha
tocococa • : yeah, 100%, but my brain was melted after every day
nahumshalman • : Bryan has the luxury of working on OSS. I think the point that Theo was making is that Surge (I only attended the very last one) was a space where you could be open about proprietary stuff. Talking about failure in a safe space, etc.
nahumshalman • : Ah, Theo is now making that point.
taitomagatsu • : Does ISCA have any sort of official YT channel?
taitomagatsu • : Because I might... have a handful of talks to watch
goodjanet • : 18 years ago isnt that long ago?
network2501 • : 18 years ago is almost 3 generations of lives/eras ago
ellie.idb • : what HPC conferences are going on? i need to hear about the deets going on with CXL
jgrillo_ • : although 18yr is ~half my life it doesn't feel very long ago..
tocococa • : I am not sure, I know that all keynotes were recorded, but I don´t know where they might be
ellie.idb • : 21 years ago i was not alive 😅
network2501 • : What if the second time you do the talk it's even better than the last? Like book revisions?
ahl0003 • : 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i1OK4y9x0wtaitomagatsu • : I've found a channel that has older ISCA videos 
https://www.youtube.com/@acmsigarch2299 • , imma keep looking for one that might have the 2024 one
blacksmithforlife • : Working in government, watching "old" conference videos is great because they're "cutting edge" for where my organization is at currently. Case in point, we are just now going to the cloud and doing micro services
taitomagatsu • : 
https://xkcd.com/979/ahl0003 • : 
https://craft-conf.com/2025srockets • : That’s why I liked !!con so much. No one tries to sell you anything.
jgrillo_ • : I've never owned a car newer than 20yo, that's kind what it's like when you look at the car ads from its era
devdsp2175 • : Are you also doing an "Agile Transformation" which is neither transformative nor optimising for agility?
ahl0003 • : 
https://monktoberfest.com/srockets • : (Also, Ghent had better bike racing than Budapest)
srockets • : But worse weather
bcantrill • : 
https://youtu.be/stMEuZJJDck?list=PLvsKqlNNP3R8JKE97pwewsDmZdcO5MEWVdrkellyannfitz • : Here are the talks from this year: 
https://redmonk.com/?series=monktoberfest-2024blacksmithforlife • : What does "hallway track" mean?
zeanic • : Cr...

Conferences in Tech

Paul Frazee joins Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the inner workings of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Paul and the Bluesky team have been working on decentralized systems for years and years--very cool to see both the next evolutionary step in those ideas and their successful application in Bluesky!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included our special guest, Paul Frazee, and slightly-less-special guest, Steve Klabnik.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

ScuttlebuttBluesky FirehoseBluesky JetstreamBluesky and the AT ProtocolBluesky Feed: Quiet PostersBluesky's bot invasion: AI accounts argue with everything you postAI Imagery labeleratprotoOxide starter pack
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!

Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Bryan and Adam look back on the year of Oxide and Friends episodes, reflecting on favorite shows, moments, and (at length) cover images.

Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Oxide and Friends 2024 in ImagesOxF: Musing With Changelog's Adam StacoviakOxF: I know this!OxF: What's taking so long?XKCD: DependencyOxF: Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres FreundMaking the background imageOxF: Open Source LLMs with Simon WillisonOxF bonus blather 9/16/2024OxF: Cultural IdiosyncrasiesOxF: Technical BloggingOxF: RFDs: the Backbone of OxideOxF: RTO or GTFOOxF: Unshrouding TurinOxF: Adversarial Machine LearningOxF: Innovation StagnationOxF: Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri
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!

OxF 2024 Wrap-Up

The annual predictions tradition returns for 2025! Bryan and Adam were joined by Simon Willison, Mike Cafarella, Steve Tuck, and Steve Klabnik to review past predictions and look 1-, 3-, and 6-years into the future.

See the table of predictions on GitHub.

Predictions 2025

Love Rust? Us too. One of its great strengths is its ecosystem of crates. Rain, Eliza, and Steve from the Oxide team join Bryan and Adam to talk about the crates we love.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Rain Paharia, Eliza Weisman, and Steve Klabnik.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

prettypleasewinnowBlessed.rs crate listAdam's codegen templatemietteeliza_errorserde_path_to_errorratatui • Ratatui episode on January 27th!
modular-bitfieldlexoptloomOxF: Software VerificationpaloozaCDSCHECKER: Checking Concurrent Data Structures Written with C/C++ AtomicsThe Postcard Wire FormatpostcardBBQueue Explained • [video]
petgraphU2MatrixGraph in petgraph::matrix_graphWhat does ## (double hash) do in a preprocessor directive? - Stack Overflowsamitbasu/rhdl: A Hardware Description Language based on the Rust Programming LanguagehttpmockcaminoOxF: The episode formerly known as ℔OxF: Dijkstra's Tweetstorm - YouTubeevmapbuf-list
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!

Crates We Love

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague, Robert Mustacchi.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Experiences Porting KVM to SmartOSMeltdown and SpectreRobert's "Big Theory Statement" for MACRobert's "Big Theory Statement" for cpuidAGESAOxF: Put the OS back in OSDIOxide RFD 63: Network ArchitectureOxide RFD 82: Motivations and Principles for the Design of Operator FacilitiesOxide RFD 88: Chassis Management Responsibility Allocation
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!

Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi

DeepSeek was a disruptive surprise at the start of 2025--an open weights model trained at a fraction of the cost of previous models. Bryan and Adam were joined by Andy Hock and James Wang from Cerebras, whose wafer-scale silicon executes these models faster than is possible with any number of GPUs.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Andy Hock, and James Wang, both of Cerebras.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

interactive inference with Cerebras100x Defect Tolerance: How Cerebras Solved the Yield ProblemTweet from Eric MeijerOuroborusQuine RelaySimon Willison’s Weblog when DeepSeek fell from spaceTweet from Naveen Rao
BONUS

MST3K archive
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!

AI Disruption: DeepSeek and Cerebras

Ratatui is a Rust framework for building rich--and incredible--UIs in the terminal. Bryan and Adam were joined by Orhun Parmaksız, who leads the project, to discuss the glory--as well as the ubiquity and utility!--of TUIs.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Orhun Parmaksız. We were also joined by slightly-less-special guests Andrew Stone, Rain Paharia, and Josh Clulow.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

RatatuiOrhun's blog • Orhun's FOSDEM 2025 talk 
(YT) • or 
(fosdem.org) with slides link etc.MinitelMinitel rust stackratatui on MinitelSpotify player tuiDiscord TUIOrhun: tui-rs to ratatui transition blog postOxF: Oxide's ratatui based configurationtui-rsOxF: Describing the Oxide management networkRatzillaTerminal Collectivetui web bub / artratatui testing with snapshotsrizzuptui-realmAsterion • (game)

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!

Textual UIs with Orhun Parmaksız

Randy Shoup joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to look at the history of Silicon Valley through the lens of Randy's 50 years--as the child of graphics legend, Dick Shoup; an intern at Intel; aspiring diplomat; engineering leader; and father to the next generation of Shoup engineers.

A Half-Century of Silicon Valley with Randy Shoup

The value of transparency in engineering can have huge benefits--nothing can compare to the momentum of an enthusiastic community! Bryan and Adam discuss the value of transparency at the hardware/software interface with Oxide colleague, Ryan Goodfellow. Transparency can be scary--especially in the hardware domain where secrecy is the norm--but once we knock down some of those fears, the business benefits start to emerge.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague, Ryan Goodfellow.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Oxide RFD 552: Transparency in Hardware/Software InterfacesBelling the catopenSILKerckhoff's principle • 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!

Transparency in Hardware/Software Interfaces

Late in 2024, an economics paper captured the attention of the world. AI, it claimed, had a tremendous impact on materials research, disproportionally benefitted the most productive, and--sadly--reduced job statisfaction. It now appears that the results are entirely fabricated! Ben Shindel joins Bryan and Adam to discuss.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Ben Shindel.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Ben's blog: AI, Materials, and Fraud, Oh My!OxF: Theranos, Silicon Valley, and the March Madness of Tech FraudTopic • [@M:SS](link into recording) 
Leventhal's Conundrum • 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!

AI, Materials, and Fraud with Ben Shindel

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