Oxide and Friends

Latest Episodes:

Cultural Idiosyncrasies Apr 03, 2024

Show notes

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...

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

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

Bryan: Engineering a culture
Matt: It's Free Real Estate
Cliff: Who killed the network switch?
OxF: Engineering Culture
Demo Day
Jujutsu
Covid as a catalyst for remote-friendly features
Watercooler morning meeting
No-meet Wednesday
OtM: Jeff Rothschild
No (formalized) review process
The non-zero-sum value of praise
Positive Coaching Alliance
Chat as the apple of discord (and remember email?! Or jabber??!!)
DORA
Oxide RFDs
RFD 68: Partnership as Shared Values
Matthew Sanabria: Observability Companies to Watch in 2024
"Chat"
"Rock and stone"

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 Mar 27, 2024

Show notes

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.

Data Visualization Mar 15, 2024

Show notes

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 Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide Colleague, Charlie Park.

(00:00) - Intro
(13:39) - OODA
(22:30) - Back to Bryan
(24:27) - Flame Graphs
(28:58) - Statemap
(32:39) - Minard / Tufte
(44:53) - thingskatedid
(46:39) - DTrace aggregations
(56:06) - ParaView
(01:03:08) - Simpsons IMDb
(01:05:16) - Survivorship Bias
(01:15:03) - Kartlytics
(01:18:15) - Kartlytics sample group
(01:19:11) - Wrapping up
(01:22:02) - OxF book club

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

Bryan's rad gnuplot
- GitHub PR with Bryan's visualizations
Tufte
- Pronunciation of "Tufte" is /ˈtʌfti/
Flame Graphs
flamegraph-rs
OODA
This American Life: A Little Bit of Knowledge
Statemaps
Minard's diagram
https://twitter.com/thingskatedid/status/1386077306381242371
- plot.awk
- Visualizing regular expressions and BNF grammars with Graphviz
- Example implementations of isvg and idot
DTrace aggregations
Rust crate ratatui
Programs and libraries for plotting and other data visualizations:
Simpsons IMDB visualization
Abraham Wald and the airplane diagram with red bullet holes – here’s the origin story
Kartlytics
How Life Works by Philip Ball

Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service Feb 14, 2024

Show notes

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 hit them:

Innovation Stagnation? Feb 07, 2024

Show notes

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:

Helios Feb 01, 2024

Show notes

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:

What's taking so long?! Jan 24, 2024

Show notes

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 them:

Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison Jan 17, 2024

Show notes

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.

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

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

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:

Talking about Open Source LLMs on Oxide and Friends

Predictions 2024! Jan 10, 2024

Show notes

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!

AMD's MI300 and the Future of Accelerated Compute Dec 11, 2023

Show notes

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 and Adam Leventhal, speakers included George Cozma, Jordan Ranous, and :Josh Clulow.

PRs to show notes are a great way to help out the show!

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