On the next Oxide and Friends, @ahl we will be joined by folks who were at Joyent a decade ago, both to recall the fateful outage and to reflect on its ramifications, both at Joyent and beyond. Join us, Monday, 5p Pacific:
The next Oxide and Friends is on May 13th, when @ahl and I will joined by molecular biologist Greg Cost to discuss @philipcball's extraordinary book, How Life Works. Read the book and bring your comments and questions -- or join just to listen to the discussion! On Discord on May 13th at 5p Pacific:
Recently, we saw an embarrassingly ham-handed (and false!) allegation against OpenTofu. While the specifics were new, the tactic is nearly as old as computing: this is FUD -- the "fear, uncertainty and doubt" made famous by IBM when used against the upstart Amdahl. Today on Oxide and Friends, @ahl and I are going to talk about this latest FUD -- as well as FUD's storied history in our industry. Bring your own examples, and join us today, 5p Pacific!
Oxide has been called "a startup on hard mode", but today on Oxide on Friends, we are going to talk to co-founders of the Oakland Ballers, a startup that is not only on hard mode, but is doing a speed run. Join @ahl, @sdtuck and me, 5p Pacific:
Those who happen to like both baseball and startups will naturally love this (@timbray, @sogrady: looking at you!), but I think this story is ALSO incredible if you haven't ever enjoyed baseball -- or even sports. Join us!
Recently, the software world was rocked by the discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils. The backdoor represents many stories, but behind all of them is the story of a single Postgres developer, vexed by a relatable problem: "why is it taking so long to login?!"
On the next Oxide and Friends, @ahl and I are thrilled to be joined by that developer, @AndresFreundTec, the discoverer of the XZ backdoor. Join us on April 8th at 5p Pacific to hear this extraordinary story!
In the conversation @ahl and I had with @simon in January, he mentioned work on adversarial attacks on LLMs that proved surprisingly universal. On today's Oxide and Friends, we will be joined by Nicholas Carlini, one of the authors of "Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models" to talk not only about this specific work, but about adversarial machine learning in general -- and how it guides thinking on LLMs. Join us, 5p Pacific!
This is not just brazenly racist, it is factually wrong: the people to blame for Boeing,'s decline are the McDonnell executives that destroyed its engineer-driven culture, starting with Harry Stonecipher.
@hyc The software that makes our offerings work is written -- and open sourced -- by us. For the bedrock on which we depend (e.g., Rust and illumos) we are active and responsible members of the community.
Nate Silver trolled the internet last week with an inane tweet about the putative stagnation in the pace of innovation -- and @ahl and I are apparently incapable of not spending an episode discussing it. Join us, 5p Pacific today!
@bcantrill@ahl Damn, now I wish I was there for yesterday's program so I could participate in the chat. Unfortunately, I was a guest on a different live audio program at the same time.
@bcantrill@ahl You talked about horizontal scaling. But I think it's also worth noting one hardware innovation that made horizontal scaling unnecessary in many cases, that we're perhaps starting to take for granted: fast, high-capacity flash storage, a.k.a. SSDs. David Heinemeier Hansson said in a RailsConf keynote several years ago that the Basecamp team never actually had to shard their DB thanks to SSDs.
In the conversation that @ahl and I had with @jmc last week, we talked quite a bit about RFD 26, which explains the rationale for Helios and Propolis, our illumos-based host OS and bhyve-based hypervisor, respectively. By popular demand, we have made that RFD public:
Open source AI is the hottest of hot topics -- with a recent IEEE Spectrum op-ed calling it "uniquely dangerous" -- but what is it, exactly? Today on @oxidecomputer and Friends @ahl and I will be joined by @simon, one of the leading practitioners in showing what open source LLMs can (and can't!) do. You can read Simon's end-of-2023 AI roundup here:
Over on the birdsite, a long-time Microsoft exec and now venture capitalist has tagged me into anti-AMA/pro-Russian agitprop, and I feel I'm getting what I deserve, really