Episodios

  • Rebooting a datacenter: A decade later

    Rebooting a datacenter: A decade later
    May 30 2024

    Back in May 2014 Joyent accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter (not just the handful of node 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:

    • The Register: Fat-fingered admin downs entire Joyent data center
    • Bryan's talk: Debugging Under Fire
    • Oxide and Friends on the Oakland Ballers
    • The Ur Agent
    • Joyent post-mortem
    • 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!
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    1 h y 41 m
  • Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball

    Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball
    May 22 2024
    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:The Turing patternRNA as a precursor to DNAXenopus frogXenobotsAnton computerBryan's reading notesCentral themesPower and limitations of metaphor – especially mechanical onesThe fundamental, diametrical opposition between life and machines. (Nature does not use simulations!)Rejecting the neo-Darwinian paradigmPassages 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 ...
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    1 h y 51 m
  • All we have to fear is FUD itself

    All we have to fear is FUD itself
    Apr 25 2024

    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:

    • Infoworld: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork
    • OpenTofu response
    • 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!
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    1 h y 21 m
  • A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel

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

    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:

    • The Oakland Ballers
    • Bryan and Adam at Manaea's no-no
    • The Munson-Nixon line
    • The Pioneer League
    • Baseball's longest game
    • Adam's neighbor, Bill George, scorer of the longest game
    • Yolo Highwheelers
    • BART's sponsorship of the Ballers
    • J.T. Snow joins the Ballers
    • J.T. saves Dusty's son

    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!
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    1 h y 13 m
  • Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund

    Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
    Apr 10 2024

    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:

    • Andres' initial public disclosure
    • New York Times: Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? by Kevin Roose
    • Kevin Roose
    • New York Times front page from April 4th, 2024
    • How I got started as a developer with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas | Path To Citus Con Ep08
    • The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind | WIRED
    • How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide - The Verge
    • Linux backdoor was a long con, possibly with nation-state support, experts say - Nextgov/FCW
    • research!rsc: Timeline of the xz open source attack
    • Brian Krebs thread on mastodon
    • Xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained
    • A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects
    • Risky Business #743 -- A chat about the xz backdoor with the guy who found it (podcast)
    • Risky Biz News: F-Droid narrowly avoided XZ-like incident in 2020 (podcast)
    • What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world | Ars Technica
    • Everything I know about the XZ backdoor
    • LINUX Unplugged 556: The xz Backdoor Exposed 🚨 (podcast)

    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!

    Recorded April 8th, 2024
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    1 h y 37 m
  • Cultural Idiosyncrasies

    Cultural Idiosyncrasies
    Apr 3 2024

    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!
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    1 h y 27 m
  • Adversarial Machine Learning

    Adversarial Machine Learning
    Mar 27 2024

    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, 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!
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    1 h y 24 m
  • Data Visualization

    Data Visualization
    Mar 15 2024

    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:
      • gnuplot
      • Matplotlib
      • ggplot2
      • ParaView
      • GLVis
    • 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

    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!
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    1 h y 26 m