Oxide and Friends

Former Sun Microsystems employee Todd Gamblin joins the hosts to discuss whether NVIDIA is following a trajectory similar to Sun during the Dot Com Bubble. Topics covered include comparisons between NVIDIA and Sun, technical discussions on IO completion ports and RISC architecture, the evolution of computer processor industry, and the importance of adaptation and innovation in the tech landscape.

Bryan and Adam chat with Adam Stacoviak from The Changelog, discussing topics like Changelog's history, Kubecon, social audio, and computer history. They also cover Twitter handle struggles, Ruby programming, podcast network dynamics, Silicon Valley references, Breakmaster Cylinder collaboration, and transitioning to Twitter Spaces.

Former Joyent team members reflect on a data center reboot gone wrong, discussing post-mortems, technical challenges, driver lineage, critical system failures, and the importance of transparency and collaboration in overcoming data center issues.

Real life biologist Greg Cost joins the hosts to discuss Philip Ball's book 'How Life Works.' Topics include RNA-DNA relationship, Xenobots, Alan Turing, AlphaFold2, limitations of metaphors in biology, and the opposition between life and machines.

The podcast discusses the Hashicorp license change, the emergence of OpenTofu as a Terraform fork, and accusations of code theft. They delve into FUD tactics in the tech industry, competition between Amdall and IBM, and legal implications in technology. The hosts explore challenges in open source, relationships between Estonia and Finland, and the evolution of software development strategies.

Join Bryan, Adam, Steve, and special guests Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel, co-founders of the Oakland Ballers, discussing founding a baseball team, special player moments, pioneer league, community engagement, and former player JT Snow's involvement in the project.

Andres Freund discusses his discovery of the xz backdoor, saving many from a damaging attack. They go deep into the details missed by the New York Times, emphasizing Andres' meticulous research. Topics include performance optimization in Postgres, uncovering unexpected system behaviors, navigating operating system vulnerabilities, and understanding abnormal system behaviors and security barriers.

Steve Klabnik, Oxide colleague, joins for a chat on cultural idiosyncrasies at Oxide. Topics include demo Fridays, no-meet Wednesdays, dog-pile debugging, RFDs, and eliminating performance reviews. The conversation touches on engineering culture, remote-friendly features, morning water-cooler meetings, and the value of praise. Additionally, they discuss the transition to a chat-first workplace culture, technology nostalgia, and the challenges of using metrics to assess engineering productivity.

Nicholas Carlini discusses adversarial machine learning, revealing how sequences of tokens can trick language models into ignoring restrictions. The hosts explore the peculiarities of C programming and delve into the surprising effectiveness of adversarial attacks on machine learning models, emphasizing the need for security-conscious approaches in ML development.

Charlie Park, Oxide colleague, shares his experience with data visualization. Topics include flame graphs, Minard / Tufte diagrams, DTrace aggregations, ParaView, Simpsons IMDb analysis, survivorship bias, and Kartlytics. The hosts also discuss gnuplot, OODA loop, and upcoming Oxide and Friends book club.