Inspired by the incentives at Google that apparently promote launching--but not sustaining--new products, Bryan, Adam and the Oxide Friends discuss the efficacy of various incentives... and the incentives that can lead to unintended and negative outcomes.

Bryan and Adam interview Sean Silcoff, co-author of "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry"... Soon to be a major motion picture! Losing the Signal with Sean Silcoff (The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry)We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for September 26th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our esteemed guest was one of the authors of Losing the Signal, Sean Silcoff.Not many links, mostly anecdotes from Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, the book Sean co-wrote with Jacquie McNishSome of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:@05:01 The aha moment for BBM@09:42 Ruffled feathers from partner interactionsBell South thought they had an exlusive deal and they didn'tYears later, people didn't seem to hold it against them@12:40 Brian's anecdote about a meeting with Balsillie and Lazaridis@15:30 Lost opportunities to course-correctThe touch screen button@20:00 The Blackberry StormPotentially rushed to market when it was not up to standardsRIM's own testing lab found serious problems but shipped it anywayRIM was a great innovator and a terrible follower, some have said that of Apple, though@25:40 Lazaridis as the product guyThis I get (keypad), this I don't get (touchscreen)Story on the way up is as important as on the way down@30:20 Parallels with DECAmazing riseFailure to pass controlco-CEO model at RIM - worked really well until it didn't@34:19 NTP Patent caseCase briefJury selection was weighed incredibly far towards lay folks with very little technical understandingTechnical demonstration goes sideways@45:10 Trusting the other co-CEO and the option backdating scandalLazaridis didn't really understand the options stuff and felt Balsillie had put the company at riskKept their fights private, but people could tell "mom and dad weren't getting along"Is it right or wrong if everyone was doing it?They left an extensive digital paper trail making it easy to make a caseThanks to Tom for the clarification - options backdating was okay, failing to report it was not@52:50 Larry ConleeFire and brimstone, had a pocket veto, spoke with the voice of the CEOsCo COOs!Carriers were afraid of becoming dumb pipes, so were anti-app storeBlackberry didn't care about doing an app store, then AT&T bent to Apple and allowed them to have an app storeRIM did not believe that Silicon Valley would be let in the front door at the carriersRIM would talk about Apple as "the toy company" while being actively devouredIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

A problem has been eating at Adam: we use async/await in many languages and yet we're not so good at explaining the moving parts. Bryan and the Oxide Friends therapeutically explore the space.

Kate Hicks from Oxide operations joins to talk about the supply chain meltdown, war stories from the past, and the innovative ways she and her team have charted a steady course through these turbulent waters

The Oxide electrical engineers share their experience bringing up a 100Gb link--it's got everything from a purpose-built probing station to a 100Ω resistor that proved to be the difference between life and death (of the company)

Bryan, Adam, and Steve consider nuggets of conventional wisdom that turn out to be turds.

The Oxide Friends pour one out for Optane, Intel's great hope that never managed to find traction.

Seth Winterroth and Ian Rountree join Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about investing in deep tech / hard tech.

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 18th, 2022Across the Chasm with RustWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 18th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests were Steve Klabnik and Luqman Aden. Other speakers included Dan Cross, Tim McNamara, and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:@0:27 let_chains are stable in Rust 1.64Adam's tweetThe stabilization PR, with the full saga leading up to stabilizationAs Steve mentions, the feature dates all the way back to 2017 and extends the Swift-inspired if let expressions Rust has had for a whileSome Rust features, like async functions in traits, are huge rabbit holesDiscussion about Rust's commitment to stability and how it's enforced with things like craterAs an example of the process leading to burnout in programming language communities: Guido stepping down as BDFL after PEP 572 (Assignment Expressions, "the walrus operator")Discussion about Ruby also taking stability seriously: flip-flops weren't removed in Ruby 2.0 in part because of this pretty incredible snippet from Yusuke EndohQuines and variations, Yusuke Endoh's Qlobe (reproduced here), their infamous quine-relay, and their other projectsThe G-Portugol programming languageThe unstable features mechanism in Rust ("first class support for experimental features") and how this allows for user experimentationExclusive range patterns in Rust and some of their perils, specifically in tockContrasting the Rust unstable feature mechanism with Haskell language pragmas: the former requires a nightly compiler to use, the latter does not@18:20 Discussion about the Rust process; going from RFC to stable RustThe Rust inline assembly feature (tracking issue)The Rust RFC repoThe Generic Associated Types (GATs) Rust RFChubris is on nightly Rust but with an allow list of featuresNaked functions in Rust (tracking issue), Destructuring assignments, #[cmse_nonsecure_entry]Talking about LWN-style reports and curation as a way to lessen the pain of using Zulip style chat platforms for discussionLWN is hiring, looking for someone to keep up with Rust development, among other things[[partial notes]]