Oxide and Friends

Latest Episodes:

CrowdStrike BSOD Fiasco with Katie Moussouris Jul 25, 2024

Show notes

Bryan and Adam were joined by security expert, Katie Moussouris, to discuss the largest global IT outage in history. It was an event as broadly impactful as it will be instructive; as Bryan noted, you can see all of computing from here, from crash dumps to antitrust.

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

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!

Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri Jul 18, 2024

Show notes

Raja Koduri joined Bryan and Adam to answer a question sent in from a listener: what's are the differences between a CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC? And after a walk through history of hardware, software, their intersection and relevant companies, we ... almost answered it!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Raja Koduri.

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

Innovation Tokens with Charity Majors Jul 11, 2024

Show notes

Charity Majors joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the idea of "innovation tokens"--a fixed budget for, so called, "innovative" projects. When is boring better and when is innovation the safer approach? Is Oxide issuing innovation tokens in some sort of hyper-inflationary cycle!?

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

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

Is NVIDIA like Sun from the Dot Com Bubble? Jun 27, 2024

Show notes

Every so often we like to give our Oxide and Friends hot takes (or as Adam puts it "Bryan getting trolled on Twitter"). This time, a viral tweet suggests that NVIDIA is on the same trajectory as Sun Microsystems on its ascent during the Dot Com Bubble. From two alumni of Sun's rise and fall: maaaaybe not.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Todd Gamblin.

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

The Tweet!
OxF: Innovation Stagnation? -- wherein we forgot to read the tweet
Framework laptop RISC-V mainboard
Tadpole SPARCbook
OxF: A Requiem for SPARC with Tom Lyon -- we're RISC dead-enders
Acquired on NVIDIA: part I, part II, part III, Jensen
RIVA 128
OxF: Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing

Musing with Changelog's Adam Stacoviak Jun 17, 2024

Show notes

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!

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

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

Rebooting a datacenter: A decade later May 30, 2024

Show notes

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.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Josh Clulow, Brian Bennett, Robert Mustacchi, and Steve Tuck.

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

Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball May 22, 2024

Show notes

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!

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

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

Bryan's reading notes

Central themes

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...

All we have to fear is FUD itself Apr 25, 2024

Show notes

The Oxide Friends have talked about the Hashicorp license change, the emergence of an open source fork of Terraform in OpenTofu, and other topics in open source. A few weeks ago both InfoWorld and Hashicorp (independently?) accused OpenTofu of stealing Terraform code—a serious claim that turned out to be fully unfounded. We (you!) have been lucky to avoid this topic with a couple of guests lined up to talk about the xz exploit discovery and founding the Oakland Ballers… but we ran out of distractions! Bryan and Adam talk about this FUD and FUD generally.

Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.

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

A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel Apr 17, 2024

Show notes

Bryan, Adam, Steve, and the Oxide Friends are joined by the founders of the Oakland Ballers, the continuation of a long history of baseball in Oakland. There turns out to be a plenty in common between founding a computer company and founding a baseball team--and we both have our fans supporting us!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by very special guests Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel as well our somewhat-special boss, Steve Tuck.

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

Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund Apr 10, 2024

Show notes

Andres Freund joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details with Andres. We started by ranting about the coverage in the New York Times… coverage that explicitly refused to dig into the details! It’s all the more shocking because the big story here is how Andres’ penchant for digging into the details is what saved us all from what would have been a pervasive and damaging attack!

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

Our research for this episode: