Adam Leventhal
Appearances
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Skylake is what did that. But you also had this problem on Broadwell with AVX2 and the others. And it's actually worse than just running an instruction. If you actually just leave the AVX save state bit such that Intel thinks it's modified in the register state, that's enough to trigger this slowdown sometimes. Oh, man. You might not remember this. We had a nasty bug back at Joyent.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
where we had a guest in windows and we just weren't properly clearing one part of the save state in the initial state. So the initial state basically was like, you know, like the two 56 bit op masks are the two physics, but register state YMM state is valid. It's like, okay, I'm going to no longer boost.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. I mean, basically just that one for, it was just for it, but it was just, that's, I think that to me is kind of the even more telling, but even if you just leave the state in the save state, then you're, you're toast.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Sure, yeah, we can go a bunch of different places. I think the starting place is really actually going back to Milan.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Because actually like 64 core Milan, like the 7713P, or even if you go up a little bit, getting that in 225 watts or 240 watts, that was actually really nice. Really nice, yeah. That was really nice. Performance per watt on Milan is really pretty great.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Uh, yeah, I mean, I definitely, I mean, when you get, you know, it's hard to compare to the, you know, 192 Zen five C cores, uh, in, in that range. But, um,
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Once you kind of get to Zen 5, I mean, I still miss that there's no 225-watt, 64-core part, but I think this is where you're going to see this from our end, trying to think about how do we get a little more flexibility, leverage the fact that you have base DRAM has increased in capacity without going to 3D-stacked RDMs, just because that part of the balance and price equation starts getting...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
really thorny. So the fact that you have 128 gig RDIMS, um, is useful, especially when you start looking at the fact that two DPC stops making, gets challenging, uh, fast, uh, there. So I think there's a bunch of different skews you can kind of start to look at. You know, I think one thing I've been keeping my eye on is actually the 160 core, um, Zen five C, uh, as one thing to look at.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Cause like that kind of keeps you below 400 Watts, uh, So I think it's still like a group E CPU as opposed to a group G in the IRM. So do you want to describe a little bit of those terms? When you say the Group G versus Group E, what are those things?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, when AMD creates a new socket, they put out what they call an infrastructure roadmap or IRM, and then they basically are predefining different TDP ranges into these groups. So, for example, Group E probably has some range off the top of my head from like 320 to 400 watts. Um, these new 500 watt, uh, CPUs, I sometimes joke are group G guzzlers, uh, just cause they, they definitely take a lot.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Um, but you can design your platform to different TDP kind of thresholds, uh, these kinds of different infrastructure ranges, and then you'll get different kind of CPU and core counts. So like, I think if we look at, um, there's like three or four different 64 core CPUs. I think there's like the 95, 35, uh, which is kind of like the, uh, you know, almost 300 watt, uh, 64 core.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
It's like, that'll be like a group a CPU. Yeah. And that kind of gives you what the tells you kind of what the TDP range and what you as the platform designer can kind of tweak, uh, from what the min to max is on there.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Um, whereas like the others will come to group E or some of these even smaller ones, um, like some of the 32 and 16 cores, if they're not getting cranked up for frequency might even be in like group B, uh, And related.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, that's a good point. So I think a lot of what we do is a bunch of work that we do with actually Eric, who's also on here. We're trying to figure out, hey, what's the right balance of how many stages, how many components do we need to kind of reach what kind of what power group?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So, for example, if we designed when we did SP three, we designed what they called Group X, which was the group they added later for the 3D V cache and like max frequency skews. Maybe it's like a 240 or 280 watt max. But then we ran kind of a 225 watt CPU in there the entire time, giving us plenty of margin, plenty of headroom, which meant that, you know, our power subsystem was very clean.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So here we kind of are saying, hey, let's let's you know, we said, hey, we're going to start with group B as our target. We're going to see what does it cost us to fit group G? You know, does it actually cost us more stages, more inductors, more? more other parts. And, you know, then the first question of, can we cool, can you air cool 500 plus Watts, which is a different question entirely.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
I mean, right now we've done all of our, our worst case studies, which is basically saying, assume the CPU is going 500 Watts, right? All the dims are going at their maximum. You've got every SSD going at its maximum. and the NIC, and some amount of loss, you're paying some amount of loss for all the stages, we still think we can cool that.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And then practically speaking, even though the CPUs with turbo boosting have a good way to eat up the rest of your power, you're usually not getting all of those devices maxed out all at the same time.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
They've also gotten a lot more clever about how they do all the hashing across stims.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, I mean, the P4 programmable nature of it for us is something that's actually really powerful. We leverage that in our switching silicon a lot and have been looking for something to get that into the NIC. The big challenge is just, I think where we're a little different is a lot of the DPUs have been designed to basically be like, we're the compute, the DPU is the computer in charge.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And Hey, you big, big CPU. That's like running guests over there. Like, uh, you're subordinate to me. So like, yeah, you don't, you don't, you know, you exist, but like only at my pleasure. Uh, and we were not quite as, uh, split brain, uh, there slash we're not trying to sell the entire server.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So like, you know, it just gets thorny when it's like, okay, that, that device also needs its own DDR five.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Uh, some questions around like, Oh, but yeah,
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Totally. Yeah. So when we end up designing for kind of not absolute density, but trying to get the best density in a fixed power budget, which because, you know, unlike the hyperscalers, we're not basically building a power plant next to every new DC. Yeah. that that's where it gets a little more challenging.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And so we're trying to work with folks to figure out, you know, Hey, if I don't need, say all of the arm cores that show up there, or let's say I didn't run with DDR five, you know, where can I, what can I get? What can I, can I still get out of there? You know, how can we kind of change this from, you know, some of these parts are, and I don't remember what this one was, you know, or 50, 75 Watts.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And, you know, that's that, or, you know, maybe I, I play games and I say, um, you know, I've got a lot of SSDs, but maybe I don't need all of the IOPS, all those SSDs. So I can double up, you know, capacity instead.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And that gets me back some of the power and I can send that to the neck, but it's definitely, uh, we're not in a, you know, even with just increasing power for the CPU, I'm already trying to think about like, well, what do I do for folks who don't have all that power? If I've got 32 sleds, how do I, uh,
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
But yeah, overall, really good, really nice to see, excited to see that kind of P4 continue there and hoping someday we can find a way to make it make sense for us. But I think there's a lot of other folks who it does make a lot of sense for.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Sure, I'll see if I can do it justice. Effectively, the way I think about P4 is it basically is a programming language that you can use to compile a program that operates on the Nix data plane. And I think this is an important part because for a lot of these things, the value is to actually run at line rate.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So you've got 100 gig, 200 gig, 400 gig, especially with all these 112 gig 30s coming along. You basically can't necessarily treat that as a general purpose program that's coming in, DMAing everything back to normal, you know, to a normal core's memory and processing it and sending it back out. But instead, this kind of lets it process the packets kind of in line in that hardware receive path.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Actually, George, this is the pitch I've tried to make to them. Just because to me, it's like if you actually look at NVIDIA and what they've done with NVLink and basically buying Mellanox, at the end of the day, to really be able to you know, deal with that, what they're doing with ultra ethernet, it feels like you have a P4 engine. Yes. It's going to be a big change.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Take it from, you know, the Nick kind of two cert, you know, two port form factor to, you know, a switch ASIC and kind of dealing with power. But I think that if you really want to do well in that space, you can't rely on just like, hey, I'm going to convince Broadcom to let me pass through, you know, XGMI, you know, through my switch.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Or whatever they're calling that Infinity Fabric transport these days.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Right. So yeah. So, so yeah, I think it's like, it's good that you have that consortium and you'll be able to push some stuff there. But I also feel like at the end of the day, you know, where you see a lot of value from Nvidia is that they are building, you know, where they've been successful because they have vertically integrated a whole lot of that stuff. Yes.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, I think actually we've been talking about PCIe a bit. So I actually think one of the things that I find has been both fun and sometimes a little vexing, but is ultimately good for the platform, not always as fun for us in how the register numbers sort themselves out, is that they've actually increased the number of IOMS entries in there.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So basically in the past where you had a group of 32 PCIe lanes, which are basically two X16 cores, They were consolidated into one connection to the data fabric. Actually, one of the more interesting things is that we've seen that in Turin, each X16 group is connected to the data fabric independently through its own kind of IOMS slash IOHC, which are all, I guess, internal data items.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Or those are core-ish? I mean... Yeah, I don't know how much. I'm sure there's a Z80 hidden in everything, or an 8051. So I'm sure everything's a core at the end of the day. But actually, if you just kind of look at it, this part is less hidden. Because if you just look at, hey, show me the PCI devices on Turin, you'll see, hey, there's eight AMD root complexes where there used to be four.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, that would be my theory is that basically it's getting you more because there's more data fabric ports that you can have just more transactions in flight to different groups of devices.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely it. Otherwise, it's Milan to Genoa was more. There are more changes than Genoa to Turin. Interesting. In kind of some of the lower level stuff. Some of these kind of bits like how do you do PCIe initialization, hot plug have stayed more the same. From Genoa. From kind of Genoa to Turin. Yeah. They have some different firmware blobs that you talk to. So like...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
The SMU interfaces stay the same across these, but they moved to a new what they call MPIO framework, which is what goes and programs the DXIO crossbar. PCIe device training is kind of a collaborative effort between that core and X86 cores.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. So there's, there's two different pieces here. So if you see AMD, first off, when they sell, you know, in their, all their makers say, Hey, we've got 128 PCIe lanes, which is great. Uh, But the first thing you have to figure out is, well, actually, how do those work on the board? I've got, are these X16 slots? Are they X4 slots that are actually connected to an SSD?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
What's their size and width, and how do they actually fit across the board? So one of the first things that everyone has to do is they kind of will tell the AMD's firmware, hey, here's how this is actually connected. you know, these logical, these physical fives, you know, I've got an X 16 slot. I've got, you know, in our case, we've got 10, uh, X four slots for basically every front facing you.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Dot two, right. You know, an X 16 slot for a Nick. Um, you'll have other things for other folks. Or if you have a kind of like a board, like showed up in the chat, you know, you've got some number of X 16 slots that map to things, some, some probably M dot two slot. So you have to tell it what is all, you know, what all is there.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So it can basically go and reprogram the internal crossbar to say, okay, these lanes should be PCIe. You know, George mentioned earlier that when you have a two-processor configuration, you know, some of those lanes are being used for that. So that's part of it. If you use SATA, which I, you know... getting less and less common.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Uh, you know, some of those lanes are come from those same PCIe lanes. So, um, that's the first step is you're kind of doing that. Then the next phase is after you've done that is, uh, if you open up the PCI, uh, base specification and, in like chapter two is a very long state machine. It has a lot of different states and a lot of different phases.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Obviously, what does it mean to basically have a PCIe device end up at the other end and have both sides be able to talk? Um, and so device training is basically going through that process, discovering, is there even a device there? Right. And from there trying to say, okay, let's start talking to one another, figure out how we can talk, then what speed we can talk at.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Once we're good at, you know, a certain speed, then they'll increase, um, to additional speeds, sending these things called ordered sets and training sets and lots of different acronyms that you hope generally just work and you don't need to think about. And then unfortunately, sometimes you do need to think about them.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, so the main way we do this is that there are often reference platforms. So, you know, if you look at George's article, all of his testing was done on a volcano platform, which is the name of a platform that AMD developed that was specific for Turin. There's a couple older generations.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
I mean, you had Volcano, you had Puroko. I'm trying to remember what the other two were. The ones before that were all metals.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, so we are doing ours mostly on a bunch of Ruby platforms, which were the ones that first came out for Zen 4. And so we have those, which gives us generally most of the schematics and other bits there. You generally get most of the firmware, but not all of it. So you can't always do all the things on the board that you think you should, like a reference platform that you do.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
But that gives us a development platform. So we're fortunate that we were able to get some early silicon from AMD, so we could actually start doing development of that ahead of launch. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, and the other nice bit there is that as you get into DDR5, one of the big problems is training time. Yes. So one of the things that AMD has is that you actually, after you train the first time, you actually end up writing back a bunch of this data into that spy flash. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And if you have it, you know, without that virtualization, then if you're trying to kind of hash or figure out like, you know, how do I make sure this contents are all what I thought I wrote down and that it just gets gnarlier.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And this kind of just indirection layer, you know, computer sciences, you know, it's one contribution is adding another layer of indirection just to cheat just comes in handy.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, the first thing I had, which admittedly was early, A0 silicon. This is no shade on AMD. But I think it was one dim of GDR5, not that big. It definitely felt like minutes. It was 11 minutes, I believe, was the number. Was it really?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
as a former colleague of mine who retired was fond of saying, why do we have pins for Azalea on SP five? And they couldn't give me two pins to have a second flow controlled. You are.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Um, and we were specifically looking for something that, that we could use that didn't require PCIe training or very much, uh, from the peripheral space that kind of keeps us stuck in the FCH. Uh, even USB obviously requires a lot of smooth bring up and shenanigans. So that was out of the picture. Um, so we ended up with the UART and, uh, actually the AMD UARTs can go up to three megabaud.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
which is more than you know well okay well okay so they actually they can't go up to three megabod by default they didn't we we actually we needed a uh and well the rs232 level translator to go from like the 3.3 volt to i don't know minus 12 plus 12 that could not do Three megabaud.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
But we, the three megabaud ended up being very load bearing for us because, because during, well, because the, yes, when we wanted the, when we wanted the PS, when we were doing dim training and are doing dim margining and we were, the PSP is spewing output. It was just happily going at one, one, five, 200. Yes. And there was no token to change it to anything. Yeah. That's for real.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
It's not to get a three megabaud. So it was very, it's very slow.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
You could practically run a message up there faster.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So we, we first are writing the spine or which actually goes much faster.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
That part is quick. But then we basically, instead of sending the full M dot two image that we would boot from, which would be like a gig and basically be, you know, an eternity in that world. We have a slimmed down, basically kind of phase two image. So unlike a traditional BIOS where you're basically splitting up, you know, the BIOS is in your spy flash.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
It's, it, it sits there and then kind of goes and pretends to reset the world back into 1970 after waking up and changing everything and, you know, turning on all the CPUs so it can turn them off again. Um, you know, we basically have a continuous operating system image. So basically, but we just kind of say, Hey, you find it half your like Ram disk, half your modules somewhere else.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So, um, we end up when we end up doing the recovery, we end up sending kind of a like slim down, just, just, you know, a measly a hundred megabytes over this, this small link. Um,
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yep. Yeah, so we're excited to see how all that kind of starts to change. I mean, there's a recent... I dropped a link in there. I think they did this at OSFC. They talked about how they're going to have OpenSeal kind of be the mainstay more so for Venice. Yes. And so I think, you know, from our perspective, this is all good. It kind of gets us out there. We can start to point to things that...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
you know, are in open cell and ends up being a, a win for, uh, uh, for everyone. So I think it's, it's basically, it's excited. We're, we're excited to see it. Parts of it. Um, you know, we may be able to leverage directly, but if not, you know, we can be inspired by it. They can be inspired by us and vice versa.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
I mean, I still think the best bit for me is in SP3 where the SMU to do hot plug, it speaks over I2C. And I'm pretty sure it, the smooth itself does not reset the I squared C peripheral to run at a hundred kilohertz.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
When the, when the I squared C peripheral restarts, it starts in basically fast mode plus, which is this weird push pull mode at like faster than 101 megahertz, which basically means it don't work. Yeah. And the only there was definitely no explicit initialization.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
It's just that, hey, this Dixie module in a, you know, dependent on this Dixie, which probably just did a generic blanket I squared C initialization, which changed, you know, which reset everything to 100 kilohertz.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, so the big... So I think to help understand making the trade-off for DDR5, you kind of have to go back to DDR4. So when you have two DIMMs per channel, the way it works is that kind of in the channel, or you go back even further in time, you'll actually find platforms with three DIMMs per channel. you basically are daisy chaining the channel.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So the traces will literally go up to the first dim, then continue on to the second dim or to the third dim in those platforms. So just the presence of that second, of having two dims on there sometimes changes the SI. In DDR4, it often didn't. So if you only had one dim populate, you could still get the maximum memory speed. possible.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
However, in DDR5, just the presence of two DIMMs per channel drops dramatically what maximum speed you can hit. And then if you actually make the mistake of populating it, then that drops the speed.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, then for us, the other big change is that from SP3 to SP5, you went from 8 channels to 12 channels.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And so just for us, since we kind of have this half-width system, that's, I guess that's, what about, I don't know, one of the other, I don't know, Eric, do you remember what the width is on that?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So basically, we were in a place where you could fit 16 DIMM slots, but you weren't going to make 24 DIMM slots magically appear in the space of 16, not unless you got very creative. So we ended up saying, okay, between that and the fact that you now had 96 gig and 128 gig RDIMMs without going to 3DS, which means you can actually purchase them and pay for them without a lot of blood money, then...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
or really you're not basically fighting against the GPUs and HBM, which means you can actually get them. Then that kind of, kind of put us down to, okay, well that, that, you know, you want the memory bandwidth. That's definitely one of the big values here. And the memory latency for a number of applications can definitely matter and you can still get to capacity in other ways.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So that, that's kind of, I ended up kind of going at a kind of 12 channel, one DPC kind of configuration and, Because we looked at saying, okay, was that better? The other option was, hey, eight channel, two DPC. And that just kind of seemed kind of the worst of all worlds.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Well, in the DDR4 world, where you went from 3200 to 2933, that was a very easy cost to pay. If you were telling me to go from 6400 to 6000...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, the MR part of it is there. I think you'll, then once the questions, you know, as that slowly enters the market and memory controller support and, you know, seeing the costs, you know, assuming you can get the cost not to be ridiculous because volume is definitely one of the big parts of the DRAM business.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
But, you know, for us, because we have a platform that's not trying to scrunch everything into a 1U, you know, a higher dim just means a new thermoformed air flow shroud. Right. And that's pretty easy to go fit in. You know, for us, the added height is not a problem. For other platforms and other chassis, you could be kind of SOL.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, I think AMD's biggest strength is the fact that you're basically only choosing the number of cores, what the frequency is, and cache size. Otherwise, all the other features are the same. And I think that actually ends up being pretty powerful. You're not getting into a case where it's like, oh, do you want to have fast memory? Different SKU. Do you want to have a different...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Do you want to have RAS features? Ooh, sorry. That's going to cost you. That's going to cost you.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
No. That's the most shocking bit to me, is that you basically still never, despite Intel championing it and trying to put all that energy into everything over the years, you still just got nothing.
Oxide and Friends
Querying Metrics with OxQL
And this is someone in the chat has asked about open telemetry in particular. I know we spent some time looking at that. What was your take on open telemetry?
Oxide and Friends
Querying Metrics with OxQL
Only thing you can support is pulling out raw data. Right. We want to actually be able to query those things in RAC effectively. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Querying Metrics with OxQL
But that's something that they should be in control of, I would think, ultimately.
Oxide and Friends
Querying Metrics with OxQL
It's very straightforward. Yeah, I mean, and then what about RAM utilization?
Oxide and Friends
Querying Metrics with OxQL
Yeah, using the same physical device, but you will, but other than that.
Oxide and Friends
Querying Metrics with OxQL
Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. For the same reasons. For the same reasons. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Querying Metrics with OxQL
And what is the data that we're storing in this? I'll say that again. What kind of data are we storing in it?
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Anyone can get it. Just put your kid in school and see if he brings one home.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
So your car had an antenna, and it was like one of these little foam balls that you would stick at the end. God, I feel like I'm telling a story about the Kairos.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
If you were sitting in your chair and you could throw it into the glass in the middle of the table, it was like a rectangle effectively, like a kind of oval, like a shaped table. If you were the short side, that was one point. If you were on the longer side, If you're farther away, then that was two points. And if you were in the corner of the conference room, that was like a four-pointer.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
There were a bunch of rules about like suddenly it was like deuces wild.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
There was like some doubling thing, like suddenly the stakes were higher if certain things happened. And the ball would frequently bounce out of this thing. It should be said. That's right.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
So, I mean, the length of the walk we took you all on aside, I do feel like there's something deep in human DNA that causes office games to spawn from nothing, right? Everyone has their in-office game that was conjured from the tchotchkes that happened to be left in a conference room.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
So I'm not sure. Like alternative forms where they could have potentially happened.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah. I like that you specified that you were alone in your office, but you didn't specify that for the shower. I just, I'm just going to make note of that. Yeah, listen, I, you know. Listen, I said what I said.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
And it didn't require in-person collaboration. I think there's this romantic idea we have of cross-pollination, too, where it's maybe not you struggling to solve a problem at a whiteboard that couldn't have been solved elsewhere, but rather it's the lunchtime conversation or
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
You walk and get in coffee, or you're doing a drive-by and you overhear something, and that's what spawns this moment of inspiration. I even struggle more to come up with those kinds of examples where
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Let's wait until this place clears out and it's on. We're racing these things. I do like this idea of like, instead of fighting return to office mandates, people should instead say, we should return to office and get back to the days of Z-ball and chariot racing. as sort of like a way to undermine the return to office mandate. Like, no, we're on the same page.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Does this cross the species boundary into your MacBook? Maybe. I mean, I think we all went through this experience, and maybe we still are, of our coworkers doing some upgrade and then making some hand gesture and be like, what is going on? Where is that coming from? Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I don't know. I think I'm, I'm, I'm already like, so skimming over the part of like, just what, what is happening? Where are we going?
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Oh, clear founder mode, right? Getting rid of managers? Well, I guess there are two ways to improve any kind of ratio, right? Improve the numerator and improve the denominator.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Got it. You're creating potentially some perverse incentives in empire building to encourage the manager mode you've already embraced. Exactly.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I mean, it would be like the most founder mode end to this email would be, I myself have terminated 15% of my reports.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
That was already in place. Yeah. I mean, that was like a tenet of management by the time I got to Sun, I believe.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I think we're strong on leadership and a little bit light on follow-through. Very light on follow-through.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
What I appreciate is he is putting his arm around us, walking us right up to the edge of the cliff. which we think he's going to push us off. And then he's like, actually, could you just come to the office more? Like, Oh, thank you. You're not pushing me off the cliff. It's like, no, I'm not pushing you off the cliff. No, it's not like that at all.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
No, I mean, you figure like the folks for whom going to the office three days a week was great. They're maybe going four or five days a week. Like if you're actually seeing that benefit, you know, and so much of it comes down to trust.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Like if you trust your folks are doing the right thing for themselves and for the team and for the product and for their teammates and so forth, they're doing what they need to do. They're going in four or five days a week, whatever.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
But for the folks who are going in three days a week to sit on Zoom calls, for the other folks who are in three days a week in some other location, it just sounds crazy.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah. I mean, all about seaball and cherry races. I mean, or, or it could be, maybe we'll have a dedicated episode for that, but yeah. But now having read the full context, I'd love to hear what other people are seeing in other organizations and how things are changing if there's a return to office mandate or if there's something more progressive and what's motivating these things.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
yeah there's a there's a whole litany of them double thumbs up like gives you some uh some like light show or no pardon me that's if you do like double um i tell my son it's double quiet coyote because like that's the hand signal he knows but like double kind of like rock on double quiet coyote crisscross applesauce yeah exactly yeah
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
We'll split the difference. Take half as vacation. Take them unpaid. That's fine. It's not vacation.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Amazon is a lot of things, but I don't think they're stupid. And just letting some subset of your employees opt out is pretty stupid. It's an opportunity to make sure that the least productive employees stay and the most productive employees walk out. It is.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Hmm. I think there's something to that. I think there's something to that. I think you're right about the emotional aspect of it and that sort of shock of like, where is everyone? I think there's a lack of trust, which I would also chalk up into like sort of a paranoia. But I think there may also be like a financial aspect to it, like a sunk cost fallacy. Like we're paying for all this.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah, I don't think it's crazy at all. I think, yeah, I think there's something to it. I don't know how to sort of evaluate that. I wonder how we'll kind of shake that out over time, but I can definitely keep it in mind.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah, exactly right. But Matt, I don't want to tee up too much. So just what's on your mind?
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I could watch hours of that. The reaction of someone accidentally responding with balloons and then... I mean, it's kind of mortifying, right? Like in a business setting. It's also like, Steve, what did you just do?
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
And so Matt, what's the reaction been as this becomes more enforced? Like are, I mean, like are there some folks who are receptive to it and think it would be a positive change or are most folks, especially from the VMware culture, is it bugging them?
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah, this is an intervention. Right. Oh, thank God there's a dress code. God, they did keep that.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Has anyone reached out to you? Have you gotten any? That's a great question. I was like, wait, hold on. It wasn't the RFD one. Oh, it's like, no, the one where I confessed about my
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
There's a real clarity, right? Like he's not talking out of both sides of his mouth. It's not a 18 paragraph email. It's like my way or the highway. Let's go.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Actually, you know what? We weren't that remote. We were pretty in-person. And we got an expensive office space in downtown San Francisco, and people went to it. We had some remote time. People would work remotely on Wednesdays or whatever. But by and large, it was in-person. I think I said at the time...
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I was looking at what you had done at Joyent, and I thought you had done a great job of having some folks in person and some folks remote. And I don't know. I wasn't sure how to operate in a team like that, especially very early on. Now, I think that's changed for me. That's changed, I think, for the industry broadly. But even in that 2016, eight years ago when I was starting the company...
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I felt like that was a choice you could make between whether you were mostly in person or mostly remote and you'd hire different folks or whatever, but it was kind of a viable choice. I'm not so sure how viable this is a choice these days. To be remote or to be in person? Oh, pardon me, to be like, to say we're in person.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Obviously, I think being remote is like, I mean, it feels to me, I'm like very much biased on this one, but it feels like,
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah, you just closed your eyes, put my hand on the wheel, and stepped on the accelerator, and off the cliff we went. I did. I did.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I just want to make that clear. No, for sure. You're like, wow, Adam, I loved reading the thing you wrote. The thing I wrote. The thing I wrote.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Chris, I think you're really onto something. Yeah, I think it is. I think it's both a generational thing and kind of one's own experience. But I think it's also the tools that have become commonplace in the way that we work. And yet people sort of having this nostalgia for a time and forgetting the absence of these tools. Brian, you were talking about how...
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
you know uh talking in chat or on a google meet or uh in lots of these different kind of remote collaboration tools recall like we didn't really have that like when we would when we would work remotely at sun in the like early 2000s or whatever like you would get on a conference call but like there was no uh there was no like video chat or anything i think we did a little bit of like
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I think we were on like AOL instant messenger and stuff like randomly.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I think, like, why would you use that for? That doesn't make any sense. I feel like people are going to, you know, If someone comes to my house and like rings the doorbell, like my older son who's now moved out, but like didn't know how to react, like total panic that like somebody would show up at your door. I feel like that's how people are going to regard email. Like I'm receiving an email.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
There are things I cannot do for you. Do you know how long our last episode on this topic was?
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
right and there's like a fatigue thing i think like for for commuting too like i think it just grinds on you uh you know even if you're working you know less hands on keyboard or whatever i think when i personally like have to take public transportation in terms of commuting sorry man what were you saying no i was gonna say i think it's actually interesting where i don't know if it's changed like specifically oh well at this time i walk out but i think it has eroded goodwill
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
This example you're coming up with, I remember this moment in my career in particular where it was like Sunday night, I was working on getting something done and I got an email from my manager that said, hey, you took a day off on Tuesday and you didn't record it properly. And here's how you record it properly. And here I am Sunday night working my ass off.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
And I just remember feeling like just so enraged by that moment. Right. Yeah, and that was at Sun. No, no, it actually was at Delphix. It was at Delphix. That makes a little more sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The folks at Sun wouldn't be paying attention. Yeah, exactly.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
And those remote access token cards, those one-time password cards, was somehow load-bearing for a long time for how some IT would let us get in remotely. Yes.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I think my critique of remote work at the time was that it was very haphazard. Because the benefit of going to the office was conversing with certain folks or collaborating with certain folks. But then if it turned out like, oh, they didn't go in that day. They didn't go in that day. That's right. Then you sort of feel like, why did I get on the train? What am I doing here?
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah. Well, you know, we talk about Oxide. We got, you founded Oxide. as it turns out, sort of moments before the pandemic. Moments before the pandemic, yeah. And I do wonder, if we were starting Oxide today, what would the office situation look like? Or if you were starting it in March 2020 rather than late 2019, Like maybe would have got an office.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Maybe there would have been a place that we needed to like warehouse materials or do some of this bring up or whatever. But it would certainly have looked differently because when you got that office in 2019, sure, you thought we're going to have whatever it is, 50% remote, 20% remote. But you envisioned a building, a room with a bunch of people in it. Like that's what it was for.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
That's right. Operations. A bunch of these double E's had to be. Yeah, totally. You're right. It looks very different and I'm not sure we are. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
And that I don't think he gets. So two and a half years ago when we were talking about this, Matt was on and he said that he hoped remote work wasn't just viewed as a cost savings. I think that at the time people were like shedding their offices and feeling like that was a huge benefit. Not just a cost savings, but instead a way to hire the best people, as you're saying, Brian.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
And I think also in that episode, speaking to a question in chat about interns and something, Chris, you had mentioned about, I think, some of the generational differences. One of the questions we had was, what's it like for new employees? What's it like for new college grads coming in? And I think at the time, I was really worried about it.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
And I feel like that is maybe my OK Boomer moment, because these folks... Especially if you're a student who's graduating from college and you spent a big chunk of your time remote during the pandemic, you know how to do this. You figured it out. This is how you operate. And so for the person in chat asking about the college intern starting, I think you meet them where they are.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
You figure out how they want to work. Because they've already figured out how to do a bunch of this stuff. And yeah, for me coming out of school, it was so important to sit at the lunchroom table. It was so important to stumble into people's office and ask them questions or whatever.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
But I think that different generations figure out their own ways that are going to be different than the ways that we were familiar with doing them.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah, I do think it's a trend. I think that you're onto something with regard to this emotionality and justification of one's role. I think the finance folks who have invested in a bunch of real estate, I think it's the confluence of these things is going to keep pushing for these RTO mandates and then
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
whether it turns out to be like hocked hands my way or the highway or a softer mandate, but don't enforce like Scott McNeely would do if you were still in charge. I think that's a big question for me. What do you think?
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
No, that was because there were too few people in the office. It was like semi-abandoned.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yes. In fact, that was the place where I heard about catalytic converter thefts first. Yes.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
They were ahead of their time. It was in the building 17 parking lot. Now –
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think in part this podcast was like an accidental consequence of that missing socialization. I think you are absolutely right.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
home to meta you're welcome uh i'm sure they don't have the same problems but like as people like stop you know the the remote work was sort of like self-perpetuating because once you go in a couple times and the people you wanted to see weren't there then you're like well i'm just gonna stay home too people didn't show up they started turning off the lights to save power and people's catalytic converters started getting stolen it was very it was very bleak it was very bleak
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Talk about a podcast I would listen to. That'd be great. Well, low bar.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
um just uh don't let this get you too far down but um this is um it's it's it's a little bit of a little bit of a downer at the moment yeah but agree i think this too shall pass and i think that companies will distinguish themselves by being remote friendly even as in this trend then hey go work for nvidia Go work for NVIDIA.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah, and it should be said, we're talking about remote work. So at the time, we are now in the future. Oh, you've given it away now. I mean, this feels like at the top already? I mean, are we going to just write into it? A lot of context.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I feel like that is the story. Like I think my greatest point of like socialization with other adults is like kids' birthday parties. Okay, that's just the phase of life I'm in. But like that is like a story at everybody's like, you know, everyone has that story, right? Everyone has the story of like, yeah, I have to go to work.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
And it's kind of dumb because when I'm home, I'm on Zoom calls with these folks. And when I'm at work, I'm on noisier Zoom calls with these folks in much less convenient conditions and so forth. And I've wasted or spent, depending, the time to get there. So I think everyone's, whether it's Amazon or kind of you name it,
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Everyone feels that kind of like Sisyphean, like I've got this, I'm in the office, the boulders at the top of the hill. Now I'm on a Zoom call with a person who's at a different office. Thanks very much.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
The market game was great. Did you play the market game much? Oh, of course. Like, over the light. I mean, we should do an episode on, like, in-office games. I want a call-in show where people do their best to describe their in-office games.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
I mean, Unshared insofar as like, what, there's only one long wiki in the public? Oh, you mean on this podcast? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure we'll have a fishpong. At this point, fish pong will be an Olympic sport.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
There we go. I look forward to talking about Z-ball. I'm just going to leave that as a teaser.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
We had a weekly Detroit meeting. I want to say. That's right. That's right. That conference room is now like a graffitied wall in Facebook. I just want to tell you what happened to Nana's estate. Yeah. It got, it got turned into a big mansion. Sorry. Oh,
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
Yeah, I mean, or even better, don't, I wouldn't do that. Don't do that. You don't need to do that. I thought it was good, actually. I thought it was a good discussion. I liked it. It was good. Our audio was atrocious. It was Twitter spaces. It was Twitter spaces, and it would have been about half an hour shorter if we weren't discussing the various audio problems we were also experiencing.
Oxide and Friends
RTO or GTFO
No, not a ping pong ball. It was a foam ball. This is really dating it. Do you remember cars used to have antennas? It's really true. Go on. It was a foam ball. Would you put your phone on top of the antenna? Or is this to get Wi-Fi in the car? Oh, God. Where do I start? Yeah. Let's just say yes.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
And Craig and Chiark have deemed, now that I've given them, I've succumbed to their demands.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
I'd also say, Robert, there's fewer opportunities for you to... I think one of the things that you do well, I'm sure we're going to get into this, is cast that eye that is so well-informed about disparate parts of the system. And I think that
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
You're right that a strength of a large organization is that you can have experts narrowly focused, and sometimes it's a lot easier to be productive along those lines. But I think what they miss is the kind of system-wide insights that you've been able to make at Oxide, for example, because of diving deep into all these different areas.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Robert, can you talk about more, like what problems you're trying to solve with Dogpatch and what were the solutions? But before you get there, I just want to say, Brian, you mentioned hiring Robert. You failed to mention that he was actually your first hire. So he is employee number one.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
I know, but it's like raising money certainly gives you that feel of tangibility, but it's when other people are now saying, people you've worked with, in Robert's case, for five, 10 years or whatever, saying, yeah, okay, I'm in. Let's do it. It's a new kind of reality setting in about the venture you're heading down.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
At least a like set of permissions in Discord.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
I know. Those air quotes are just like screaming.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
But that is the marketing of it, right? That is the ostensible value add of Redfish.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
So first of all, his internship was great. I, and I can't take anything away from that. I would say that the thing I remember from that internship was, is that Robert then and continues to be an amazing baker and maker of confections of all kinds. And I think it was that internship. I think it was that internship. Food for Money Friday? Yes, which spawned.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
They're helping by not actively sabotaging us, is what it sounds like.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Robert, can you talk about what AGESA is and what we needed to do in that domain?
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
The cheesecake brownies that launched the thousand ships.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
So how on earth did you do like, what was it just back to the code and reading more? Like it just, uh,
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
I mean, I do want to sort of get to the actual point of what we're talking about, but I would just say that first of all... The point of what we're talking about is Food for Money Friday, sir. Okay, good. Then allow me to digress. So Robert brought in these cheesecake brownies, which I think, Robert, you said took... like all the butter in every Safeway.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Were the iteration loops on this just like, you know, 5, 10, 20 minutes?
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
I'm factoring in the trip to the therapist and then the drive back home.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
You had to like smurf butter from all the different Safeways in San Francisco.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
It's California. Uh, so, so Robert brings in this delicious cheesecake brownie with a billion calories. And I can't remember, I think we had already gotten to some like light food betting here and there. And I think I said something like, I don't, I'm not, okay.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
So I think I was like, Brian, I'll, I'll pay you five bucks or whatever to eat the rest of it. And there was a lot, a lot left. And I think you like, so in a rare act of self-preservation.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
So it wasn't self-preservation. So the other thing I remember is- Oh, it was self-preservation.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Uh, only Robert was describing a bit of it to me, uh, maybe a week or two ago, as I heard a lot of T6 buzz, but for, uh, T6 is the, the Nick Silicon that we're using in the next generation server, right?
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
What I also remember is that even, I think even before you had declined the number, like as soon as I said, you know, five or 10 bucks, everyone else on the team was kicking in. It was up to 75 bucks almost immediately.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
And so the way that normal folks would program their NIC is like having a little like a Norflash or whatever kind of strapped to it that had this configuration information and it loaded up autonomously. Is that...
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Right. And as you were saying, doing this every time allows us to put known, attested, valid bits there as opposed to having this question of what's living persistently and did some nefarious actor manage to wedge some bad bits down there?
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Everyone's like, I, too, would like to see this person commit ritual suicide.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
That's right. And we had, we had some time-based constraints that I won't go into the specifics of.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Is this about figuring out analog kind of coefficients and constant values that make things flow with minimal errors?
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
resource they're using i mean so is robert like you're saying that like anyone can read it but holistic boot allows us to read it coherently and know what the fuck is going on whereas like in in other scenarios it's possible but kind of academic right like they're very hard to make sense of it yeah yeah i mean you can with enough expertise you can build up a mapping
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
This thing that I thought would be a delicious treat for everyone, I guess, has become your prop bet.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Oh, God. But yeah, Brian, it was like an inch and a half by an inch and a half square. Yes.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
So now this is the part of the story when usually I tell it to folks and I'm like, and then Julie couldn't do it. So she didn't get the money and everyone is aghast. Wait, you didn't give her the money. And I think, no, I don't know. What kind of lesson are we teaching the children?
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Not to quibble, Brian, but I'd say it enables holistic debugging. No, no, as you're saying, holistic design, if this were a more traditional system, you'd chase it to the border, and that's the best you could do. That's right. You could sort of imply that there was some other component that required now examination, but there was really no...
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
trivial way or straightforward way at all to communicate across that those arbitrary boundaries in fact that conway's law i don't know conway's law is when it applies to an entire industry but you've got that industrial super form of conway's law applied to this aggregation that has become the the modern server is that like a conway's wall conway's yeah mr conway tear down this wall
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Yep, 9 a.m. in a week, 9 a.m. Pacific, and we've got Orhun, and we're talking about Ratatouille, one of our favorite crates. I know we talked about lots of favorite crates last week, but one of our favorite crates for writing Tooie is going to be really fun.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
Yeah, no, I mean, and no, we weren't like, you know, a ritual of, I don't know, whatever position was to like eat 90% of a cheesecake. No, this was all voluntary. These were all consulting consenting adults.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
There actually is another. So there's a kind of bait and switch follow-up to this internship, which is Robert interns with us. It was great. Cheesecake included, but not the only reason. It's a great internship. Yeah, yeah, great. Goes back to Brown University to finish out, gets his degree there. And we made Robert an offer to join us full time and he accepted.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
But in the meantime, we were off getting acquired by Oracle. Yes. And, and then, you know, you and I were off figuring out how not to work for Oracle.
Oxide and Friends
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
And Robert joined and I don't know if it was clear that I was leaving, but I was like, Robert, it's a great learning opportunity is me teaching you about all the stuff that I've done and everything that I've ever owned in case it comes up. And then I think I left two weeks later.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
It's like, dude, we are in college. We're not in middle school. You don't have to raise your hand.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
I would say as distinct from Mastodon where you knew you were there because it was boring as fuck.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
it must've just felt so right. Like it just, it just feels like so spot on from an architectural perspective, from a usability perspective. And it's, it's got to clear up both the, some of the, the, the real concerns around Twitter, around Facebook, around threads, around these other social sites where you're like, as you say in the paper, like,
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
They're prioritizing engagement over all else, like over the mental health of the users. And then the other side, you got Mastodon saying, look, the algorithm is timestamp ordering, which leads to a less than simple experience.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think I continue to like and use Mastodon. I think I actually like it more than you do, Brian. I wouldn't say I love it, but I still, I still love Mastodon.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
Yeah, exactly. And actually for a while, I liked that it just helped me put down my phone and not keep on scrolling. So there was that benefit too. But it just feels like it plugs such a nice hole. It's a really lovely design that you have.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
I'm a little embarrassed that what Steve's anecdote just triggered in me is the recollection of on Facebook. I had a friend who would post every 20 seconds, and I only just now remembered that I muted him 15 years ago. So I need to go take a look at Henrik and see if I can unmute him.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
Holy smokes. All right. There is Paul. Not even raising his hand. He's just waiting patiently to be called on.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
I hesitate to mention the R word, but it seems like there are even third-party revenue opportunities. Would people pay to get an improved feed, whether it's from a first-party thing from Blue Sky or others? I'm sure it'd be great to see, I mean, obviously you folks making money off of it, but other folks making money off it as well. Meaning the platform writ large. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
I'm in the brotherhood too. And I have no idea why, but yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to get together for meetups and stuff too.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
they've tapped into something deep in the older sibling brain.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
I'm sure Paul can tell you this, but you could move it. You could change it later, right? This is one of the frustrations with the Fediverse and one of the liberating things about Blue Sky.
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
Not working and making it work. Are you talking more from like a product perspective rather than like a technical perspective?
Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
So, Paul, that seems tough to handle as a consumer and as a sender. Do you have a sense of, like, is there a scale at which that no longer becomes feasible? And might that have contributed to Twitter kind of limiting that and then turning it off? Oh, yeah. What are your thoughts on that?
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I would say, Brian, at the time, that felt like, I don't know. At the time, I was like, oh, that's a great idea. That feels almost controversial. Now, with the proliferation of video, I feel like, I mean, I don't want to take anything away from you. But why would you do it twice? You're right. Exactly. Exactly. And I'm only going to give a talk if it's recorded.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
It's like, why would they not record the talk? You know, here we are in 2024. But I feel like what was once a bold position has now become people's expectations.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
What about the annual, like Werner Vogel's, like, will he pass out? Will he actually have a heart attack this time? Like, I think we're, I mean, I've never, I've never been to it live, but I've certainly watched, I would go to that.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I mean, he just gets real sweaty and animated. Very into it, starts breathing very hard, and you're like, laughs onto every word because it could be his last.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
No, I have not seen him. Steven, if you're in the audience, please take up your hand.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
the higher bid is we're making up as we go, but we have, you know, we're trying to collect some topics. You know, one of the things that about the unconference in the past that we've done with detrace.com is like, we write down the ideas, like literally people are hollering out stuff and then moving their bodies and circling things with markers and so forth.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And knowing that that's going to be tricky. We're trying to on discord, you know, this existing discord where, where folks are now. Yeah. collect ideas that people have and to circulate some of these ideas.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Then we're going to have a Discord channel for each talk so that we can discuss the talk as folks are giving it, have Q&A for the speakers, for the presenters around that, and then switch to a different channel so that we can have that kind of archived along with that video, kind of focused conversation on that talk. And, you know, we're going to see how it goes.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
We know we've softened it up with some bodies already. We've softened it up with some bodies. We're going to juice it up with some folks who we know are going to give some interesting presentations. And we have some cool work at Oxide. This has been sort of pent up. So we know that there's like not nothing there.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Uh, and I'm looking forward to seeing what folks from the community have to have to share and what, what people want to hear about.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
At the very least, at the very least, we have a very wearable t-shirt. I mean, that's, that's at the very least, that's what we get out of it.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
That's right. Such low production values that nobody feels intimidated.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So if you get a note in the package that says I'm being held hostage at a computer factory, you know who it's from.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
In other words, we've heard conference organizers talk about burnout, and we've been really careful to avoid that.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Just to pause for a second. Cause you put on a great conference, like a one and done that, but that systems we love was just a conference.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Just to go on the Wayback Machine, the Java 1 keynote that I got to participate in was in real... Oh, yes. We can't get out of here without talking about that. Was in real media format. And I have it downloaded. Don't worry.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I mean, I gave like five, ten minutes at Java 1, and it was kind of hyperventilating when they were talking about the... whatever it was, 30,000 people in the room, and then even more so on the 200,000 people online. But it was a big room.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So I went back to my calendar, because I was curious about that. I think my first conference, and I'm not sure this counts, but the first conference is the one we went to, AA Debug, and that was an academic conference. So I'm not sure I'm going to count that one, but that was a very academic conference.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I wasn't angry. I was focused. I have a much more unique perspective on that now.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
um sorry no no it was so it's a debug uh which is a weird conference and i think not i don't know it was a weird conference my my next one also a weird conference was sun network in berlin i don't know if you remember this conference brian uh it was it was like 21 years basically to the day we were celebrating your 30th birthday we were celebrating my 30th uh we were celebrating my 30th birthday
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You were trying to keep that a secret from the VP. That's right.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Again, we're going to have to apologize to Germany on the podcast. Once again,
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
uh apology video but the other thing is this is gonna sound hopelessly quaint it was even probably quaint at the moment we were told that we had to wear suits and i being a child didn't own a suit so like i bought a suit for this sun network conference in berlin uh in 2003 we we celebrate your bar mitzvah in berlin in your right
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
that that when i found that one i was pretty pretty pleased by that found find um the only simpsons reference i remember is when there was one time when you and i were recording first of all when we are in the same room recording it is like a thousand percent more twiddle twaddle like it is uh like especially at the intro and i took one of the like intros and made it into its own youtube video and um
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
uh that did use a simpsons reference which was like the kent brockman uh with the cuckoo bird popping out of his head with the technical difficulties please stand by from the simpsons which is like just a hilarious image no chefs you're right that is the only simpsons reference we had this year that's amazing we've had we've had plenty in years past um but that is the only one
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
this year's start to use them up oh you know what there's a there's no this is not our favorite one but there's another one you for the adam stachowiak episode you took a selfie of yourself in the in the podcasting studio and annoyingly you took it in portrait mode and really i need the landscape mode so i had ai kind of fill in the rest of it and it made like here i thought the story was going to go to any other delightful aspects of the selfie of the fact that i'm
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
God, you really dolled yourself up for a podcast. I mean, you look just terrific. It's from my Pied Piper shirt. Pied Piper shirt looks great. But it invented a microphone stand that's not there and an arm that was definitely not holding it. And I don't know. It is kind of remarkable what it's capable of.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I'm glad you feel that way because I felt like, you know, I felt like it was probably more work than the XC one, and I feel like it just did not land.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
why like the various subtle aspects of the craft on this one that i know i know all the subtle aspects like i i am like i poured my heart and soul into it and i just feel like when i even when i was looking at the podcast episode i downloaded i listened to that episode like three days ago
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And I was like, God, I worked so hard for this font that you would have to break out the microscope to understand this joke, I guess. And it looks like just me in front of a screen squinting.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Well, obviously, like I nailed my audience of one on that one. I nailed your audience of one. It was one of these ones, too, where I was like, look, I'm in this deep. I've made the laptop ghost image mask. I've been dorking with the opacity of that. I'm not not posting this. I'm not just writing off this effort to zero. That's going on the image.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
We conjure up an idea for an episode where we're like, we are going to have an episode on, I don't know, accounting. And we thought you'd be a great expert as a local. And then we kind of slow walk into like, have you ever won a contest? I don't know. I love how we would get here in a subtle fashion.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I didn't know. That would be a much better oxide in French tradition. No, this is like the Seinfeld bit, right? No, I know Festivus. I'm unfamiliar with its specific date.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Well, this one actually maybe even took more work also than the XE episode because not only did I dig around and find it, I found like a very low res image then had to like, okay... Then I had to, so my mom has a New Yorker subscription. They have an archive and stuff like that. I don't know if you've been in this particular hell, but the like helping mom remember her password.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
But like it was maybe just felt like it took three days, but like it actually took five minutes, but it was like my least favorite brand of hell.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
That is usually like the, the gating factor. Like I definitely have had episodes that, that kind of were, I put on the back burner for a couple of days while I noodled on the right image.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
It's like now, okay, tell me what the text message says. And it's like, well, it says not to read it over text message over the phone to anyone. I'm not anyone after that. What's it say after that?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Your grievance, your like decades long grievance is well-founded, was well-founded and continues to be well-founded.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
um thank you so much chat says the other other josh says that as a citizen new haven is to mention the appreciation of the picture of the inside of the beinecke rare book library for the rfd episode uh and i was really pleased with that one too um as also as someone who born and raised in new haven um
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
um as we were talking about um rfds and like you know i'm i was thinking of like what are these ancient tomes and of course i grew up in a place where uh you know literal ancient tomes are collected so that uh that other other josh that was also uh one of my favorites uh although I guess they're all kind of like inside jokes, but that's like an inside joke with myself and I guess you as well.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
So yeah, so the Beinecke Rare Book Library is this amazing building in New Haven. And it houses these ancient, ancient books that Books that are like, it's all humidity and temperature controlled and they only, I think, expose some books to environment every once in a while. And it's a very soft light in there so that it doesn't damage the books.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And in fact, the whole building is composed of this light. like maybe centimeter thick, maybe less thick than that marble. So what you get in broad daylight is sunlight diffusing through the marble and it kind of lights up inside. It's just beautiful. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous building.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And if you're in New Haven and you've eaten all the pizza you can eat, go wander by the Beinecke Rare Book Library. It's very cool.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Well, there was one piece of advice that Adam Stachowiak did give us that we slash you have not followed up on. which is the Breakmaster Cylinder intro for intro music.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
So to me, like, so, uh, that's a good question. Maybe one should have asked beforehand before just telling you, I loved it. So to me, this is the little prince, uh,
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
off on his tiny moon as i recall like being hitched to uh a bunch of birds like carrying him back to earth so i'm with you on all of that i'm a hundred percent i'm a woman yes yes on that return to the office is like okay he's he's been working from home on his tiny planet and now he's like being forced to come back to the office on his string of birds I feel silly saying it out loud.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
That's getting... You know, sometimes I, like, sometimes I, I mean, sometimes I just go, like, you know how it gets, like, when you are, like, writing something or you... you start getting deeper and deeper. And like, sometimes you're like, have I just wandered up my own asshole? And sometimes that same feeling can be expressed in absolute confidence.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And I think like that, that this might be, I've wandered up my asshole and this is perfect.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I still love it. Even though, even though reading it, like my justification out loud sounds like a prompt gone wrong.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah, well, thank you. I felt like, you know, that one I just felt like was almost too on the nose. I do love... So, you know, my complaint with Mastodon, which is, I mean, other than it being boring, which I'm... Apparently, nobody gave me flack on that from saying the last week, so I'll say it again.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
So on this one, someone on Mastodon was like, you know, you know, the Shroud of Torin is actually a negative image and you've done a positive image. What you are referring to as Linux. I call it GNU Linux. I just... I just loved that. I felt like that was a very Mastodon comment and I appreciate it.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Oh, I should also mention, you know, on the XZ image, someone on Mastodon was like, why didn't you just draw it by hand? Like, why, why did you go through all the trouble of like plugging into a physics simulator and doing this and that and whatever and, I would just do the physical simulation in my head and draw it by hand. So first of all, here's my free advice to everyone.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Just like the phrase, why didn't you just? You can just leave that aside. You don't even need to use that phrase ever again. So why didn't I just do it? Because I fucking can't. Because I don't know how to do that. I can't draw that. What are you talking about? I'm not that good. I can barely trace it on a screen without my hand shaking. So that's why I didn't just do that.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I remember my recollection. So that one is, I think during the episode, correct if I'm wrong, but we talked about like,
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
a llm uh kind of making subtle perturbations of say an image of flamingo until a classifier decides actually it's not a flamingo it's a bus cool bus yeah yeah and that's a great episode nicholas crony are one of our only guests uh that we had twice in the year uh and another great episode yeah So, and so I decided to make a bus that looked like a flamingo, right? Like a kind of more on the nose.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And I think I remember being like, you know, again, real proud of myself, patting myself on the back, sending you the image and you're like, huh, like explain. I was like, remember? Yeah, yeah. No, I thought, okay. I'll go look for the receipts on that one.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I'm going to do one more. One more I enjoyed because it was kind of an extra callback. And so...
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
episode called innovation stagnation where um this this is the the genesis of read the tweet i think or maybe there was other read the tweets but it is definitely uh one where you're like pretty much shouting out folks read the tweet so i'm sorry we did not read the tweet in innovation stagnation let's go back and edit that so it is nate silver posted something i'm not going to read the tweet now certainly i'm not
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yes, and that reminded me how you haven't followed up with Adam for the intro to Breakmaster Cylinder. Like, what's the worst that happens? He's like, look, I listened to a couple episodes. And I don't think you guys need me. What's the failure mode here? That he just says giving old people when he listens to the episode and that's the feedback we get? I guess that is pretty bad.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
posted something basically saying like, is innovation dead? Like innovation used to be faster. Like remember the space shuttle or something. And now we just have, you know, new social networks, something like that. And that image is a cutout from mystery science theater 3000 pointing at the tweet. And I, I don't know about you, but I loved, loved, loved mystery science theater 3000.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
and um so like my only regret honestly is like maybe we can't use that again but i feel like it is such a great silhouette of like the mst3k guys like pointing at something i thought it was good and that would it was one of our hot takes um so it was a good uh that's what would be tempting so one thing i did is actually went through our episodes and categorized them a little bit okay
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah, that's right. Even though it had, you're right, a lot of these have guests, but just like, you know, nice. Like Amdur was on that show.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
That's right. It wasn't the full 32. It wasn't the full catalog, but you're right. It's a good third.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I'd say probably two-thirds of the time, so I'll say 20. We have some kind of guest, right? Like, you know, I'm going to count, you know, when Amdur joined us on RTR or GTFO, for example.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I mean, he did show up with a tin can microphone to his credit. He really took our low production values.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I mean, I felt that. God, so good. I mean, it was like, it was such a great conversation. It was so enlightening to me personally. Um, and just, I felt really fortunate that, that you got him like at that moment too. It was like, it was great to me. Yeah. It was like having the, the, the conversation that was there for everyone was having. Uh, it was great. That was a terrific one.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah. Yeah, I was like, I didn't think our Kevin Roos hatred kind of bled over across episodes.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I even remember the line I was pissed about where he was like... Yes. Talking about, you know, Andres works on Postgres, which is like... too boring to understand. And if I tried to explain it to it, you'd be bored or whatever. It's like, well, buddy, you'd be bored to tears. If I could explain it, which I can't, I don't know.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
All right. Well, our commitment to you, the listener is that Brian will follow up on this offer. Okay.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And there we were talking about heterogeneous computing. I did love that. I think the pitch that we had was answered, like, what's the difference between a CPU, GPU, FPGA and ASIC. And I think we like only sort of got there after 90 minutes. Like, I think we drew some distinctions, but not all of them. But it was, to be clear, still great.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Because they had read about it with Kevin Roos and everything. Big New York Times fans over there.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Imagine that conversation. If you think recovering passwords is tough, how am I going to explain that image?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
The other one that a family member, my dad, listened to was the baseball startup episode, the baseball episode with the founders of the Ballers, Paul and Brian. Not only did he listen to it, but he shared it with another person that we mentioned on the show.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
We mentioned my dad on the show, mentioned how growing up on the Munson-Nixon line that he forced friends who were wearing Yankees hats to leave them outside.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
It's a war zone, basically. A war zone, exactly. And then we also mentioned Bill George, the scorekeeper for the longest game in baseball history. Also my neighbor in Rhode Island, at our beach house in Rhode Island. And we talked about him as well. And he listened to the episode.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I mean, Rhode Island's pretty small. I think if you lived in Pawtucket, you'd probably be a little cranky, but I don't know. It's not that far.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I don't know. I like the part where you said my name and how I wear the ring from the Hall of Fame.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I don't know that it has inspired him to be a more consistent podcast listener, for example.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Not... Not that closely. I don't know. Sometimes they're ones that crush on YouTube and are just sort of normal on podcasts. And then sometimes they get a little picked up more on the podcast and less on YouTube. I don't know that they're that consistent or there's that much correlation between the two.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
No. But I would say, I was like, oh, cool. Like, cool idea. I'm going to look back on my favorite titles of the year. And I did that. Did you do that?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
The charity one, that one has not been picked up or whatever. Folks have not listened to that one as much as others, which was surprising to me because I think charity is terrific. And that was a great conversation too, talking about being thoughtful about when you innovate. In fact, I would say that is a theme that I've discerned kind of doing my own binging of the podcast over the last...
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
uh week or so since we talked about doing this episode was um you know talking about being thoughtful about what kinds of innovations you do and the benefits of of kind of those investments and and how it's okay to be weird but maybe you shouldn't always be weird although it does probably feel like we are always are weird but
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
That was a really good one with charity to not just be hearing the same thing from us, but hearing about how their own investment in their strategic ways in which they're weird really paid off for them. And ways in which there's a great discussion there about...
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
kind of this dichotomy about wanting to find product market fit, but really build the thing in order to find the product market fit and being kind of pulled in these two different directions. So I thought Charity, it was a great conversation with her.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I did come away feeling like we have unsurprisingly made the podcast that we wanted to listen to.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I just feel like our titles are fine. Our titles are a little on the nose.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
absolutely i was i was going through a little back and forth with transistor fm uh our podcast distribution platform uh at first because like their ai transcription software had some sort of weird hallucination where it imagined yeah like in the transcription it would drop in random names like it it thought brian was whispering jp morgan a couple of times uh To my knowledge, you weren't.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And apparently they have been using this audio file to try to debug their AI model because it just wreaks havoc on whatever AI model they're using. So anyway, I was going back and forth with them and I started asking about some weird downloads. We see it turns out there is this IP address in Arizona, which has downloaded our podcast a bajillion times. So I said, go ahead and block that.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And they were saying, well, I know these analytics are important to you. They probably help you figure out what episodes to make. And I was like, no, we're going to do what we're going to do. It's like we're not sort of keeping a finger too closely on the pulse of what does 100 more listens or not.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
but then you know it's like I listen to this thing and I know that I'm like walking around with the dogs cackling and I know I'm just mortified that I'm sure lots of folks are just like fast forward can we get to the content here but anyway I'm I'm a fan
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I mean, maybe just jokes. The second part is not even necessary to qualify.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
yeah you know what i i even like i met a former uh she described herself as formerly of facebook and i said did you leave facebook or did you leave meta she said well technically i left for this going at all technically i met left meta and of course i was like oh does that make you a former metamate and then i did try to explain matamates the greek philosopher and
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Can you imagine that slays just as much in person at like a party where kids are playing in the next room as it does on the podcast?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
The one that I don't know the origin of, I can't remember when you dropped this, but it still slays, is there was some... I think we were talking about adversity being the, you know, spawning great innovation. And I think your insight at the time was that World War II was stressful.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
These are good, honest titles. The jobs-to-be-done framework for titles. I'm with you.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And I do love that, like, every time you hear yourself say something that's sort of like knuckleheaded or like a facile observation, you kind of apropos of nothing.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah. Exactly. I just love that a casual listener to the podcast might pause and say, wait a minute, did he just say... What does World War II have anything to do with anything?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
World War II was a stressful event. It obviously was. Yes, I agree. World War II was a stressful event. I feel like many historians would agree with that statement.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yes. No, actually, that is a good title. That's a very good title. Okay. That is a very good title. I liked Intel after Gelslinger. I guess concise, but also kind of nail in the coffin.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Uh, I, I also listening to parts of that, I realized I was looking for some safe for work euphemisms and describe. So it turned into a bit of you and me doing some either mutual back padding or a little group think or reinforcement bias or high five huddle is what GPT, uh, chat GPT suggested for, um, circle G. So that's my cleaned up version of that.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
so what did we i guess we made reference to that in no no no no i just mean it was sort of i feel like a little gift to the magi like you were saying oh well i i chose to do rust because i read your blog post and then i said well i chose to do rust because i read your blog post um and just uh you know kind of on and on in that vein a little too self-congratulatory well mutually congratulatory
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Well, look, it's the high-five huddle. It's not like a self-high-five.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Oh, yeah. That is one of my notes to ourselves that I've been taking while listening to the episode. So why don't we go ahead? That sounds fun. Okay.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
So Oxide specific being like kind of folks from Oxide talking about Oxide stuff.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I think in season one or something like that, We did an episode that was, I'll say, actually pretty good about supporting systems that kind of look like Unix, but are appliance-sized and so forth. And the episode title is, like, I Know This or something. It's an awful title for a pretty good episode.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Exactly. Exactly. So I really enjoyed that one too. In part, one of the things I enjoyed most was we were talking about, I think there were a lot of good, I think talking about culture and culture being what we do and good discussion. I loved your kind of incredulity about companies not doing demo day. You're like, demo day is great.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And I was like, Brian, you remember, we were a company that did not have demos.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
That's right. We did that. Your company did not have demos until you thought about doing demos.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yes. Yeah, I think so. No, we did another one during the day to accommodate a guest. I can't remember which one. Um, but, uh, yeah, that was, that was a special place in my heart. Cause I did that from our Airbnb in Italy where I had like packed a mic just for that occasion. Um, so that was a great episode.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah, but it's over and it's under, right? You get downloads that obviously someone downloaded, but then listened to. But apparently some of the platforms will cache it and stuff, so you don't necessarily get those stats. So it's hard to know. I mean, it's wrong, but it's hard to know in what direction.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Maybe. One of the cool things about going back to Italy, went to this conference six weeks ago, something like that, and meeting a bunch of folks. I don't know about you, Brian, but I'm a little shy about, in the same way that I used to be shy about saying I have this blog and I've written this thing here in 2024 saying I have this podcast and we talked about this thing.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I don't necessarily like break that out right away, but over and over when I'm like, oh, yeah, we recorded an episode.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
There are a bunch of fans at this Rust Lab conference who appreciated when we did the European time zone friendly one so they can join live. It is fun how the niche reach has reached a bunch of different places.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I'm with you, yes. Don't look at your lawyer. Why is that an awful title? Because you have no idea what it's about. You've got no idea what it's about.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
You know, we should make some more of those oxide and friends stickers. Like those are, those are good stickers. And we were sending them out to folks who helped with the show notes, which really appreciate it. So I'll keep on doing that in 2025.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
That's right. Alan and James were very apprehensive about joining the show. James went to Guitar Center, got a microphone, brought it home, didn't like it. He was expressing his anxiety about being on the show in acoustic quality.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
and yeah alan you listen to it much james i mean we're not you know seriously and then yeah very nervous i was like alan look nobody's gonna care about this thing like nobody's gonna listen to it like it's gonna be fine it's just for us uh and it was great and it was like it was yeah that's i you know what i think sometimes you give people what they need to hear i think and i think that's what he needed to hear in that moment thank you very much okay okay you know what that sounds great yeah
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
But also I lied to him because it's one of our most downloaded shows.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah. And Ben was kind of freaked out about that. He was not happy that he was being called a... I don't know. Like a sucker or whatever by this esteemed professor.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah. I mean, you know there's one more that I want to do that I've been asking for. So now I'm going to do my airing of grievances.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
It's time to air your grievances. It's been a minute now, but we, you, me, Rain, Dave, a bunch of folks, debugged a really nasty, really complicated issue. that maybe I won't even spoil, but there was a moment in debugging. You know that debugging is going great when Dave and I were like, Brian, we think that this might be a virtual memory bug of some description.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And you said, okay, let's say you can make a bug with your mind. How would that bug work? I mean, when we're like, look, nothing is making sense. Yeah, exactly. How do we invent something that would conceivably justify it? And you're right. It did seem like... Almost like we were saying, what if the computer is haunted?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
You're like, okay, describe that deceased person's previous life that caused them to inhabit this computer.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
What are some of the episodes, other episodes that we need to go, uh, I don't, you know, if, if I knew that we would have, we would not be thinking Monday mornings about what episode we should do next. Um, I do have some like stretch goals for 2025 that I'm, and this, like, this is one of these ones, like I need you not to laugh, but I think that it's possible. So first of all, yeah, yeah.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Stretch goal. Um, this, this one is like maybe less stretchy, but, um, the, Playdate, which makes this little yellow console device. They had a great podcast. I think we've talked about it here, but it might have been a minute. They have a great podcast describing the hardware software interface and how they built it. It's a software company that branched out into hardware
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
great i think their intro podcast is like maybe an hour or two it's a great great episode yeah other other great episodes about like games and stuff like that but i think the first one if you just listen to that it's so good and listening to it i'm like man their story and our story you know feel like very similar in the same way that when last year we had um
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
we have the CEO framework on like some similar, some, some, yeah. And their office. Awesome. Right. Some kind of similar histories. And like, I would love to have the play date folks on, and this might be like maybe a little bit of a reach, but I think that that'd be a great episode, but I'll tell you my real, like kind of embarrassing aspiration. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
is to get morris chang on the show like that would be oh god wow my dream that is a that is and i know that i know that this is a bit of a fantasy but i feel like we're we're not that far removed from being able to like bubble up to and like he's done some like kind of low budget podcasts so yeah this is my fantasy
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Morris Chang, let's put that down. Pierre Lamond probably knows Morris Chang, right?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Just read me the text, even the six digits after it. It's fine, Pierre.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I looked for it, published in Taiwan, all written in Chinese. So I'm not sure I'm the target demo for that. I think the first volume he released a while ago, because he referenced it in his interview with Jensen Wong in the Computer History Museum, Oral Histories. And that was a while ago. But he just released the second volume, which is like 1,200 pages or something like that.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I mean, am I going to, no, no, he, he, he speaks great English. Like, have you, have you watched the, uh, the episode, the, um, computer history museum interview with Jensen?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Oh, yeah, because they're listening. They're like, look, I'm just waiting for them to mention my name so I can respond to that invitation. It's been sitting in my inbox.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yes. That feels like, you're right, because he's trying to sell his book in English and everything. Yeah, that's right. As opposed to Mars Chang, not trying to sell a book in English.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah, look, you can find all the reasons you want for why it can't happen.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I have two self-destructive hobbies related to async cancellation. First, I buy all the new books that come out about async rust, and I don't review them because I think it would be rude to. Interesting, because they don't talk about this issue. Oh, because... Okay, as long as they're not listening right now. Because they're all terrible. They're all just like, makes me cry.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Because it's not even that. It's like, man, the one I got recently, it's like talking about how processes are kind of like threads, but different. It's like, please stop. Please stop. Yeah, exactly. If you're going to talk about a framework which is inherently about concurrency, I'd like you to have a strong understanding about the distinction between what is a process and what is a threat.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
The other self-destructive habit I have is occasionally attending the Rust Async Working Group meetings. Wow. It's a cry for help, is what I'm saying.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
um very little like very little not that much and then when i'm there i i offer like unhelpful pedestrian statements like it would be nice if the documentation were better or yeah or like if you could debug the thing that would be nifty and they're like this is great like practical you know salt of the earth kind of feedback but nothing really happens All right. So are we, we'll do it.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
We'll do it next year. I do feel like I want to get my, there's a blog post that I, that I, that I got kind of cooking. Um, but like, we'll, we'll definitely get that sorted out.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Hmm. Uh, I, and does it lead to data corruption when it does? That's the real question.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Like favorites from the year? Yeah. Looking back through my eyes here.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
That's a good idea. Always a good gift for the man who has everything.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I think it's just like, it's a good like general, you know, yeah, I don't know. Appeals to a lot of folks, right? Like folks know about it. And like, it's an interesting one.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
That's good. The RFD one, we've already mentioned it, but that's another good kind of meat and potatoes approachable one that I refer to.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
You do very little editing. I do all the editing. Fair. much do we edit like rarely do we do i like really like take a hatchet to something like i you know if especially as people are talking over each other i'll do that kind of editing it's rare but it happens sometimes that i'll like actually remove some slice of content like we had a guest on the show not this year but in previous years
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Into the image. And you know what? I know that I'm going to throw out my shoulder, patting myself on the back on this. But looking back on our year of images, we had some good images.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
who was kind of like blowing through all the stop signs that everyone and all the other speakers were giving them to like, please stop talking, like on the vein that you are about to go down, please stop going down that vein. Just like could not be deterred. So just clip that out of the show.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah, very light. It'll be like if we screwed something up that we really are mortified about personally, that's usually the thing I'm fixing.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
They're basically positive and recently some spam about Tether. Really? Yeah. That was more on detrace.com. It turns out USDT also means U.S. dollar tether. So the fact that we have that title attracted all the spam. Oh, my God. Hey, this is a great topic. A little off topic, but I have a wallet with this is the passphrase. Can you help me access it?
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Oh, right. I forgot. Yeah, I bumped into Orhan at this, one of the maintainers of Ratatouille at this conference in Italy I was mentioning. And yeah, it'd be great to get him on the show because we use it. All the time. We use Ratatouille a lot. In fact, it featured as the image in the OXQL episode.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
This is Rain, who basically rewrote the whole thing. Thank you, Rain. It was delightful. But yeah, let's do that. Let's do a crates episode. We can talk about some crates that even other people have written.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah, sometimes I just take a whole week off of work just to think about the image.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And, uh, next time in the new year, bring your predictions. We're going to be reviewing predictions from, uh, I can't remember when we started, but we're going to, we might even have some three years cooked, but we've got a, the, the, the, the first, uh, our first three years are coming due.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
But what were some of the images that really... I mean, obviously, like the XZ image, I loved.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And... What will surprise maybe everyone except for you, Brian, is how much self-doubt I had over the concept. I went back and looked at our chat messages. Oh, yeah. If you go back and look at our chat messages, you probably were in a meeting and I was like, hey, I have an idea, which is here's kind of the idea of it. And you're like, that's a neat idea. Or you could just use the XZ image.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah. I've never raised my hand once in my life. Just got something to say.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And I don't know whether this was like you thinking about... Oh, I'm so sorry. No, no, no. I don't know whether this was like you thinking, well, this is not going to work. Like, let me save you some time. Or you thinking, you know, you do technically like have a job and this isn't particularly it. So maybe you could do that instead.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
yeah completely unrelated with you yeah no i was really not trying to say no no so i so i just i mean again it's like you gotta you gotta understand my self-doubt going into this so the the the image is i thought i'm gonna take this x you know we're talking about the xz backdoor with andres freud which is just a really fun episode i was so i would i mean amazed kind of brian that uh
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Coming out of his interview with Kevin Roos of the New York Times, you were able to score this great interview. So awesome to get Andres on the show. And of course, what comes to mind is this XKCD image of the stacked up blocks with an arrow pointing to a part maintained by a thankless Nebraskan or whatever for decades.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Totally. And thinking, okay, cool. Like, let me remove that block and see what happens. And so I plug, I was like, I think this will be a really neat image. I plugged into chat GPT, chat GPT gave me something totally unusable. And I went, you know, I feel like I do this a bunch with chat GPT, like again, maybe surprising, surprising everyone for you, Brian, but
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I like when chat GPT is very wrong, I just keep at it. I just, I'm like, no chat GPT. How about a little bit of this? How about a little of that? And I get in arguments with it. And it's like, this is a two dimensional image. I'm like, chat GPT, you have given me a three dimensional image. Like, I don't, I don't know how to like, we're kind of at loggerheads.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
And then I've had chat GPT say like, basically let's agree to disagree. Like just kind of using its managerial techniques to, to get me to back off. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
So then I downloaded not one, but several physics simulators. I finally got one to work. I think it's built in Java. I drew the thing. I got some image that looked okay, downloaded it to my son Will's iPad where he has an Apple Pencil, and I traced it with the Apple Pencil to get the XKCD style back onto the computer. This is all during an all-hands and stuff. I'm trying not to have this...
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
He listens to this podcast. He may be a little... I mean, yeah. During an all-hands that I was paying... Hey, look, I wasn't doing a crossword puzzle or something.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Exactly. And then it just came out great. I was really pleased with how it worked out. So great, in fact, that I've seen it like... used in other people's podcasts, which was a little surprising. And then I got a little uppity about like, hey, how dare you steal our images? And then I looked at all of our other images, which is like mostly me stealing copyrighted material.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
for the image but i feel like i mean that maybe it's a it's an outlier but it's not an outlier by that much i feel we've it's an outlier yeah yeah but it's also like if if it took an hour and a half that would be a lot like i think it's probably closer to an hour so it really is like
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
I do have one favorite of my images, which are we going to talk about the open AI boardroom brawl? Oh, was that what that was? That was last year.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
What I like from this year was open source LLMs with Simon Willison, which also was... That was a great get on your part again. But the image is like a robot reading the New York Times. And a big theme of that episode was the provenance of the training data. And like... look, this is all this copyrighted material.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
So I do love that image of the AI casually reading the New York Times as it obviously memorizes it and then feeds it back to you.
Oxide and Friends
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
Yeah, as someone told us, they referred to, they told us their child referred to this as grand theft autocomplete, which I thought was awesome. That is, that's, man, that's, is that a teenager? Yeah, we were there. We were at dtrace.conf when Alex was telling us that, I think.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
So when you first load the page, you get the spinner for the comments because it's fetching those in the background. So that's why it feels fast. So it's kind of fake fast.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Oh, definitely. And wouldn't they love to have our beautiful styling too? Everyone should be so lucky to have this gorgeous styling.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
I wanted to ask Augusta something. So something I'm not sure if we've really gone into is how it works in the GitHub repo. So the whole thing is when you make a PR, creating an RFD, that is a branch that's named with the RFD number. And so when the RFD site is scanning the repo for all, I mean, when the API is scanning the repo for all the RFDs, it's scanning all the branches.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
You can't just look at main. I'm curious how coupled the RFD API is to that model. We run into some friction with that, even as nice as it is to have PRs as the site of discussion. You could imagine not wanting to do it that way. How coupled is it to that?
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
The fact that we're standardized on all these tools means that it's sort of this flywheel. Because we use, for example, like you said, the ASCII doc rendering stuff on the doc site. It's sort of the investments that we make in internal tooling also go into the product itself, which is really a good way to be.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
you've got to fill the car with gas, but a road trip is not a tour of gas stations, which I really like, by the way, it's delightful. And he was like, but people only heard a road trip is not a tour of gas stations. That's right.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And knowing when, I think one of the dangers of just following expertise is that you're cargo culting without understanding the rationale. You are doing the things that you're being told to do without understanding whether they apply to your business, how they should apply.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And then I've also seen this in folks doing things at one company, coming to a new company, trying to do it the same way, and not understanding the differences that made them successful that then make them unsuccessful in the new company.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah, I was, I mean, it is a narrow joke. I mean, I just, I didn't know.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Especially because as we, as we've talked about years ago on the show, like Steve jobs, I think is not fully understood or appreciated in, in terms of like how he operated when, when he succeeded and when he failed.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
In terms of what you were saying about experience, I just feel like these reductive views of Scully versus jobs or founder mode versus management mode, Like you want founders who are thoughtful and it's sort of like also good at ignoring things. I mean, I think one of the, one of the spoke, I think briefly to this kind of notion of paralysis.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
If you're like, I want to get all of these things right. It's impossible. Yes. So you need to take shorthands for some of them. Some of the shorthands are, I'm going to do it my way arbitrarily. I'm going to do it the way that it's always been done arbitrarily.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Not that either of those is correct, but then focusing on the ones that are key to your business and they're taking a blend of like what you think is right for your business, but then learning from experience.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Absolutely. And I think, yeah, I mean the other side of it of like, this won't scale when we're 10 people, a hundred people, a thousand people. They have been in those arguments. I remember one in particular, um, where there was a cranky customer. They weren't getting the performance they wanted out of a thing we had sold them.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I'm like, well, what if we just give them enough of the thing that we sold them to meet their performance needs? Not at Oxide, by the way. Cherish customers of Oxide. To be clear. And... Also, it was a software product, so giving them twice as much was sort of fine or whatever. And someone started freaking out about revenue recognition when we're a public company.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
This is a company, by the way, that never went public. This is a company that got acquired 10 years after this conversation by private equity. But being able to say, yes, this doesn't scale. Yes, when we are being held to certain standards... You know, by our public investors, we can't do this. Also, it's today. And like, let's just get through the day. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I mean, first, I mean, first three reactions were, thank God we're not. And they got our brain next week. And you're saying, and you saying like, you didn't want to talk about it. I was like, I'm just going to mute notifications against Brian DMS me or something. I'm just, I'm off the grid. It felt so. So Paul Graham's piece is,
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I remember at Delphix, I joined this company. It was like 20 people at the time. It was the first startup I'd been at. And what I found really interesting startling was the degree to which when we were hiring people, we wanted to see people who had done that exact thing like two or three times. And I sort of thought, oh, we're going to be this scrappy startup.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
We're going to take chances on people. We're going to... But it was clearly not part of the risk budget to find people who were just hungry and we thought could do the thing. And I think there was some, maybe it was just where the risk budget was, and there was some strength to that thought. There are also a bunch of downsides to it.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
We found people who had done it before and maybe weren't hungry to do it again or had forgotten the drive that it took to do that again.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
felt so nonspecific that it was going to be inevitably used as a justification for founders to do whatever they wanted. Yeah. To rationalize whatever sort of like terrible decisions were being made or whatever cultural decisions had been made with very, almost a justification for a lack of introspection. And I mean, that's probably what rankled you so much too.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah, I mean, it's a very expensive mistake. And it's a big bet. Maybe it's the right bet. But if... that person and that team and that other company match things up really well. But if it doesn't match up, if it's, if it's sort of surface level similarities, then you've just onboarded a big team and you know, it's, it's going to take a lot of money to then undo that.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I do think there can be, for founders in particular, there's going to be pressure from the board. The pressure from the board is hire someone who is an expert in this domain to de-risk the company, this thing that I've put a bunch of money into. Part of that is the whole hire and retain search firm. They go and find the people and plugging someone in.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
So then after you as a company have spent money on the search and money on an expensive person, then you feel really misled Yes. You told me to just like hold my nose and hire this person who, and with faith in their expertise, and then it didn't pan out.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
To some degree, I feel like the fakers may be the least culpable. Absolutely. Because I don't think fakers, I mean, maybe this is naive, but I think most people are basically honest or try to be. and good people. I think there are very few people who try to represent themselves as one thing to get into a startup, get underpaid, and get some stock compensation, and then try to take the company.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
It's just like it, that that's what grinds so much. The, the, these, these kind of little aphorisms that people say, I'm going to do it my way because conventional wisdom is tautologically busted and therefore founder mode. Therefore, founder mode.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
None of that makes sense. I think by and large, although I can think of some examples.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I remember in particular, there was one example who was telling me they could sell all this stuff at a previous company and they were going to be amazing. I saw that they had worked with you, and I asked. I was like, clearly this person doesn't tell 100% truth, but I'm not sure it's 100% false either. Oh, yes. And I think you told me it was closer to 99.8% false, but you're right.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
It was like 0.2% true. It is 0.2% true. But this is like a relatively rare example of someone who's actually like... A flim-flam man. I think mostly people show up thinking that they did the thing, that they can do it again, that it's a good fit.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Absolutely. It is falsehoods that they are promoting. Maybe liars is fine. To some degree, everyone believes their own story. It's up to you, the founders, the board, the folks interviewing these folks to figure out what's true and what's not. That's right. That's true of every hire to some degree. Everyone comes in with some degree of divergence from reality. For a lot of people, it's small.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
For some people, it's bigger, whatever. But especially for a high leverage, for a key role in the company, when you're hiring VP of whatever, you've got to be careful.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah, I mean, that's what you'd hope that you can get from your board. And sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, but whether it's directly or plugging you into other founders or other leaders to help educate yourself.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
is actually, how do you get that wisdom as opposed to just discarding it? And not get it as the answer. What they say is not the answer, but it's part of what goes into the calculation.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Especially, as you say, when you're hiring into domains that were previously not needed at the company. When you're hiring your first person in support, when you're hiring your first program manager, your first product manager, whatever.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I hope. No. The sort of mystical reverence that he speaks for.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
But I think... You know what? I'm glad that we... we had this cooling off period to not just go into the hot take of, of, you know, founder versus management mode. But I think like there, there is, there's like a kernel of wisdom and certainly the kernel of a discussion here about like, when do you value experience and why not?
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah, you sent me a link to that YouTube video. We'll keep that in the show notes. And I watched the first 45 minutes or something of it. I thought it was great. I thought that what I heard from him was... he deferred too much to folks. He absorbed, in particular, the wisdom of hire great people and set them loose and let them do their job and don't mess with them.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And then found that a lot of the things that he cared about about the business, about the health of the business, were not going well. And then he drew this distinction between
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
micromanagement and getting involved in the details yeah in particular you know he kind of made some very significant changes to the way they did product management he got really in the details understanding how these different functions operate um i would be interested to know if if the facts on the ground draw this distinction between micromanagement and being in the details Right.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I mean, who knows how it plays on the ground. But I thought... Certainly, as a founder, as a leader, there's this fear of losing control. This fear of when I hire someone and I want them to feel responsible. I want them to be able to operate with autonomy. I have trust. I want to build that trust and I want to hand over that trust and operate with trust.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And that can be scary where you say, and then tell me in three months or six months or 18 months how it went.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
That's a great point because I think there is a... People like to provide autonomy, or at least it sounds nice, right? I trust the person, I'm going to provide autonomy. But if you don't show them what true north is, Yes. Then everyone will try to figure it out and they'll figure it out a little bit differently and you're not going to be happy with the results.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
It was great. I think that's great. I think when there's autonomy without as strong a sense of true north, you can get people unclear about prioritization. With so many things, especially at a startup, When it's like, actually for any given task, there's no owner. It's not that everyone's standing shoulder to shoulder and everyone has their lane. For any given task, there might be no owner.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
So knowing which of the 25 things I could do, should I prioritize? And how does that tie to what the objectives are? And when objectives are changing, as they will, how do I know it's fine that I'm still doing this other thing?
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I can confess. I was a little glad we had a hiatus. That piece came out. You wrote a nice blog post. Other folks were chatting about it. I was glad. For a moment that we'd have to talk about it. Okay.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah. You know, this is actually almost exactly the pathology at my wife's last job for her that caused her to leave. And part of what led to it.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
But that came about in her organization because of growth. Growth where leaders previously did have the bandwidth to have the level of involvement that they wanted to be able to be comfortable with all these programs. And then as the organization grew, they didn't have the time to do it. They didn't have the bandwidth to do it. There was too much stuff going on.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And they had not taken the lesson that they needed to like changed the way that they interacted with some of these priorities.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
a buddy of mine said of like, as he was assigning the ranks at a bigger company, he said, you know, the more you get promoted, like the roads tend toward CFO, like all roles, which I thought was a great insight. Cause his point was, you know, you, you start losing the ability to, to be involved with projects at a level of detail that matters.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And all you really get to do is pull the levers of who gets money, who gets staffing. Those are the kinds of things that you have control over.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I mean, first, my understanding is that people write a memo of five pages or something. I think that's of a fairly prescribed length. And then people sit down in the meeting, they read it. I guess they raise their pencils when they're done or whatever and discuss it. Slowly, the hands go up. God, I'm the slowest reader in here. It's like, oh, boy. You come 15 minutes early. That's right.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
But I think it's great. I mean, I think it also... Well, they famously write the press release too. Oh, yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I'm going to go do a deep cut here. Another place where we read about this was one of our favorite books. by Dave hits. Oh, out of cast rateable. He talked about, does he writing the future history, the future history. Now, dear listener, do not purchase this book.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Anyway, terrible, terrible autobiography. I feel comfortable saying this now. Uh, but do we, do we feel totally comfortable? Not fully comfortable.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
That's right. We were trying to build a product to compete directly with NetApp. Yes.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah. I mean, the term manager mode feels like so easily pejorative. You know what I mean? Oh, it's super easy pejorative. Yes. Like managers are the enemy. Yes. It's like, do you want to be manager? And as much as founder mode is such like a great mean nothing aphorism that you could use to potentially justify behavior, management mode is such like a Just such a burn, right? It is such a burn.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I also have a signed copy. So what is the genesis of this? So first of all, we wanted this book. We, the team at Fishworks. Now, Oxide is thrifty. Fishworks was cheap. Yeah. And so we were going to pay like the $18 or whatever those books.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
That's pretty much right. So I contacted the publisher. I used true but misleading statements about how I might want to teach a class. Are you reading from a prepared statement right now? Yeah, I need my lawyer. That's right. I'm not going to go pro se on this one. So we got a copy. And then actually, I don't know if you know this, but... like the FedEx got delayed or something.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And I sent like a nasty gram to the publisher. And so they sent us two copies.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Um, I think by this time it was out, but I, I, I just, I, I think I, I needed a copy. You needed a copy, obviously, and you're not going to pay for it. Okay. Not going to pay for it. Right. So, uh, so I read it, I started reading it and it was terrible.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Right. We would bring it in. So what we started writing a fan blog, I started writing when, where's the germ of this idea? It's such a good idea. I think, first of all, it was like a distraction from our ping pong variant. So we needed something else to do with that other than working on the product. So I think we felt like this personality was someone who was so susceptible to praise.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
No, that's a little, that's a homework assignment. That's a good one. So Dave Lightman wrote a chapter by chapter review, like overly praising concern of embodying like much too much of, do you have the link? Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Okay, so at what point do the lawyers... Oh, that's right. So I took the design of the blog from the NetApp blog. Gone, yes. So I made it look exactly like the NetApp blog of the time.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And then I did get some sort of email from the lawyers saying you can't have a fan. Maybe it was an email from Dave Hitz. I can't remember. Yeah, it looks like it was. So email from Dave Hitz saying love the blog. got to change the way it looks. Our lawyers are pretty sure you can't just rip off the look and feel of the NetApp blog.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Chapter one, Dave hits as... I mean, spoiler for everyone, but please, again, do not read this book. He starts... I mean, I'll give you my copy. Seriously, just hit me up. He starts the book... With the advice, never listen to your mother. Right. That was like chapter one. I think it might have been the title of chapter one or something. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
It's like if you were saying something in a meeting and someone was like, oh, nice management mode there. Yeah, be like, oh, never mind. I'm leaving.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Which is just like, God, he's just putting the ball on the tee for you. Just bait. Right. So then my persona here talks about blowing up his mother. It's like, thank God. It's fun at some point getting some good advice from an adult. That's right. So, yeah. And later on, the big reveal at the end was like, sometimes listen to your mother or something.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I mean, I don't know. I like when you, when, I mean, it's so, it's so soft work too, but just like, it's so, it's so great. We've put this, we've launched this little piece of cheese out into the internet.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I just, I do want to, uh, yeah, I just want to observe like you, you actually wrote some of these entries and I can't remember which ones, but just to throw you under the bus with me. Oh, I will definitely be under the bus with you. Cause when I, and like the Federalist Papers.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I can't believe blogspot is still a domain that resolves. Uh, so, uh, anyway, short story long. Uh, so I, I did meet Dave hits. I, I got him to, to sign my copy of the book.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Got him to sign the book. I said, you know, my buddy can't make it, Dave Lightman. Would you sign it for him? And he said, what's the name of his blog again? And it was, I mean, it speaks volumes that this was sort of like the pinnacle of my pranking. I don't know. Like it was just, it was just, it was so funny to me.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
That one of the practices at NetApp that I remember from a very careful reading of this book was that... There has never been a more careful reading of how to castrate a bull.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I still have that copy. It's got notes from at least half a dozen people in the margins. Yeah. It's like, yes, it's ironic detachment.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Spot on. And I think that... I'm sure you've seen this from VCs, like... There's so little weight often put on experience and expertise and the past. I've talked to VCs who say, I only want to work with founders who can conjure things from first principles. And I think there is something valuable to that. There is something valuable to saying, I'm just going to educate myself on a topic.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
There is one, one, one post-it I want to mention on this. So, uh, we were brought in for you and I, uh, or rather, um, NetApp Sue's son, son Sue's NetApp. Yes. Sort of a thing you may recall. Oh my God. Yeah. Huge lawsuit. And you were brought in, you, you, you, you had a delightful deposition. I was brought in for a deposition as well. And I confess that I was worried. I was worried.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I'd done a bunch of work in CFS, like in Red Sea and stuff like that. That's true. They actually should do a W versus me. There you go. They took my notebooks in Discovery and like, good luck with that. Joke's on you, pal. Literally, page one of the notebook was this whole description about how we were going to do RAIDZ expansion. So I'm like, oh, dang.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
If I just put it on page two, you would have never found it. Right, right. So I'm in this deposition thinking, if they're like, Mr. Leventhal, do you have a blog? I'd be like, yes. Also, I need a break right now. I need a break. I need to talk to my lawyers. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
when you go into a deposition, uh, you know, you're supposed to basically tell your lawyer everything, right? You should, they should like, because they're tell sons lawyers.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Didn't tell the lawyers. I was waiting until the lawyers needed to know and then I was going to tell them in a fake heart attack.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
What do you want the success to look like? Right. Like sitting here from the beginning, sitting here from the inception of the idea, what do you want it to look like at the end? What's the story you want to be able to tell? And writing all that down. Exactly.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Here's what I'm going to say. A little Oxford critique, if you'll forgive me. I think there are some things that we don't write down. Oh, 100%. That maybe not only should be written down, but should be open for revision. So I don't want to do performance reviews of folks. I don't think that's something I've had to do in my career and don't want to do in my career.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
There are people at Oxide right now who think that we should do that. And I'll tell you that because I've, I've spoken with them. Right. Yeah. I think even having the discussion, even having the rationale for why we do or don't do things.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Maybe sometimes it shouldn't be written down because we talked about our discussion of which chat program to use. Obviously, that's way too volatile to write down.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
But it's just so dismissive of everything that came before. Oh, absolutely. And there was a time in my career when I got hit up by recruiters for this one particular role. And the role was usually founder CTO who couldn't manage 10 people. Now the team was 100 people. And they wanted to bring me in.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah. And it's a good point that you make that that's the way we communicate those kinds of things. That is how our culture gets codified. And that's not true for everyone, right? Other folks are going to have their culture kind of work its way through the system in different ways.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Interesting. Just because you're too susceptible to things changing unseen or people not knowing what True North is.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And you know what? Maybe amended trust and clarity or everything because I think absent trust and absent clarity, you can spend a lot of cycles inefficiently. Yes. Worrying about whether you're doing the right things, worrying if you are, how you're being judged by your peers, like working inefficiently. I think it consumes a lot of caloric budget, as you might say, when you're unclear.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Clark budget, as I might say, as you say, no, I just mean people spend a lot like lack of certainty. I mean, I think it's one thing to say, Hey, don't worry about all this other stuff. Just focus on this thing.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Like people worry about that other stuff. For sure. If you've told them not to worry about that other stuff, like, yeah, uh, I think, you know, and, um, you know, I mentioned that the RFD episode, um, One of the things I saw at Delphix was everyone had really clear ideas about what we should go do. They were all different. Most of them were terrible.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
But even just being able to get those out of their system, let them ignore them. Let them move on past them and just wash their hands of those ideas and move on to the things that did matter.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
You're right. Founder mode is definitely more like... waving your scepter and zapping folks as opposed to like listening to them and wondering what they're about.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
No, that's totally, that's right. It was kind of first adult mold, but almost to a person, the CTO would kind of describe the role as like, we've got this cake. I enjoy eating cake, but mostly I like eating frosting. So I'm going to lick off all the frosting. And then I thought you as the first adult would enjoy eating the rest of the cake.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
I'm glad we took a little more of a lukewarm take on this one. Because I think there's something there, something worth discussing. And my knee jerk on this was not as helpful.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And William, that the buying in process was clearly them saying like, you'll still be able to like gorge yourself on frosting. Don't worry. Like it's like, Right. Like you, you only like the process. And I remember this one company in particular plaid where the founders talked to me, young guys. Oh God. No, they were great. They were, they were, they were fantastic.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
And they were like, we want to hire people who can help us see around corners. Like we don't want to have to be like encounter every mistake that uh, the hard way. That is great. Yeah. We want to, we want to learn from the mistakes other folks have made. Uh, and I, I just found it to be so, and like, so terrific. I would say the Collison brothers are similar in that regard.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Actually, the way it turned out for me, well, Plaid turned out gangbusters. Right, exactly. I mean, put that in, I think I've talked about my poor financial decisions in the past. It turned out, as I thought about it harder, I was just not interested in the problem space. Every engineer I spoke with there was meticulous about personal finances, loved it as a hobby almost.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
That sounds like a great fit for, no, wait a minute, that's not a great fit for me. Well, I was like, I've never balanced my checkbook. I only sort of know what that means to do as an activity. So I just realized that the problem space was not a good match.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah. Unusual, especially like, I think these guys were in their late twenties at the time. Very unusual. I think. Yeah, exactly.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Well, it's so hard to know that you're drawing the right lessons from success or like that. Oh, for sure. Like that, you know, um, A couple of companies ago, Delphix, we talked to lots of folks from VMware. We were doing something virtualization-related and VMware was doing something virtualization-related.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
There were lots of folks who were early but not super early at VMware who drew all kinds of weird result inferences from their success.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah. There's a great line in that piece from Tim where he was talking about an interview with Michael Lewis where Michael Lewis said, you don't know the book you've written until people tell you what they've read or something along those lines. Does this have a Sam Bankman Freed kind of moral to it?
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Yeah. Even the culture you're creating, like even the culture that we're creating here. Oh, for sure. Go figure out how new employees experience it to understand what it actually looks like.
Oxide and Friends
Reflecting on Founder Mode
Because even that has changed and you lose track of it over the years and how it's practiced.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
So, Simon, I love this prediction in particular being short agents. This reminds me of an even more dystopian prediction I read along these lines. I'm going to read it out loud.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Yeah, I mean, that was a kindness, Brian. I think, like, you're saving us all from ourselves.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
It said, by the end of 2025, at least 20% of C-level executives will regularly send AI avatars to attend routine meetings on their behalf, allowing them to focus on strategic tasks while still participating and maintaining a presence and making decisions through their digital counterparts. And I read that. way too low.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
I've been in a place where the chief of staff for the CEO was sent off on a similar mission, and we gave that person as much credence and patience as you might imagine. Try it now with a robot. We'll see how that goes.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Yeah, I have another dystopian one, and this goes counter to my one from a few years ago. I think crypto is back, baby. I think Web3 is back, and I think that through a bunch of factors this year, we're going to see like...
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Chris Dixon's horrible, horrible book that he pumped to the top of the New York Times bestseller list by forcing all of the portfolio companies to buy tons of copies for all of their customers. That's going to be back on the bestseller list, maybe organically.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
So true, you're not wrong, but also I think Bitcoin's like over 100,000 or something like that right now. And we've got a bunch of lunatics coming into power. A bunch of lunatics, yeah. So anyway, that's what informed this one.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Yes. Oh, my God. I'm putting, I'm stacking my chips on the Web3 square and spinning the roulette wheel.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
But you're right. Maybe it is more telling not just about the present, but also about my present state of mind. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
This English as a second language, it's like, look, I can speak English, but I have to actually think in Chinese.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
I mean, you were likening the intel to the Nazis. So my prediction, maybe a part of that is- I was likening intel to 1933 Germany.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Um, I predict a chips crisis. So a confluence of things here, uh, shortages may be due to geopolitics, to tariffs, to natural disasters, perhaps, um, to certainly Intel and their, their Weimar, um, leanings or whatever, their inability to execute.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
But all of this culminates in chips being incredibly scarce, failures of batches, yield problems maybe not necessarily due to the fabs, but perhaps to the designs. But all of this leading to a real shortage, even more extreme to the point where Only, you know, the chosen few are able to get access to all of the chips that they're interested in.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
And this impacts consumers, it impacts all kinds of devices and certainly impacts kind of the kinds of servers and devices that we're used to attaining.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Okay. For sure. Or a missile lobbed over or a shipment being destroyed. Yeah. Don't pin me down to the cause, but just that there is a chips crisis. I mean, it could be of our own creation. Could be we jack up tariffs on all this stuff without realizing that we're shooting ourselves in the foot.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
We'll know when we see it. I mean, it's a crisis by its nature is not like a blip, right? The, the, the fuel shortage of the seventies wasn't, wasn't like a one week affair. I mean, I don't think so, you know, you'll know when you see it.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
No, no, no. We've got strong relationships with AMD, decreasingly with Intel, apparently. But no, we're going to be among the chosen few. We'll get the chips we need. Don't worry, Steve.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
In fact, it's going to help us. We're going to have a lot of wind in our sails because we're going to be one of the few places that people can get the modern architectures.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
i got pushed into the fox corner you're a long fox all right i mean it's gonna be a household name i feel like this is maybe an intervention but have you rented from fox in the past because i have several times and i feel like i'm still waiting in line like okay we are actually if this is going to turn like i will sit here and defend fox i've read it from fox like 40 times uh okay what do they call their affinity program
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
So Brian, I think it's a great prediction and obviously like terrible tragedies with the Cybertruck. And I mean, I think that that also predicts some really entertaining falling out between Musk and the Trump administration. So I love this prediction.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
I was listening to that the other night and thinking, oh, well...
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
So would you, pay for this either with money or with listening to ads? Yeah. Okay.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
That's right. And maybe not even, you don't want the full episode or whatever, but you want something that leads you in, something that gives you the parts that you're interested in or whatever. And obviously you can look for more, but something that's helping to curate that.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
So a little closer to home, we searched up how to clean the grout in the tile in our bathroom and got a recommendation from the Google AI summary that turned out to cause massive damage and was a very expensive mess to clean up. So PSA for natural stone folks, like don't use anything acidic. Turns out.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Turns out you should click through the link and check the source and read the whole thing. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
It really explained your recent Intel suggestions, which was to open source their entire EDA tool chain. Clearly, you were trying to put your thumb on the scale of this prediction from three years ago. I was.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Feels pretty right. I mean, I think that there are certainly the niche hardcore Doomers who are still holding on to it, but I think people are mostly letting go of it. I agree.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Brian, I do like your suggestion that they just declare victory on GPT-3-5 or something, because there are these moments in chats where I'm sure everyone feels themselves like they're just kind of fancy autocomplete. Like that people have predicted the thing you're about to say. So maybe they just decide that actually general intelligence is mostly just autocomplete anyway.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
I'm glad that you know that you need to explain that. I'm glad that you know that movie pass is not like the, the Harvard business case study that everybody knows.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
I do, yes. My six year is that, and this is from the deep ignorance I hold, that AI will mostly not be done on GPUs. But we'll have more specific hardware tailored, potentially even tailored for models. It becomes much more economical and there are many more players. And in particular, we mentioned CUDA earlier, like it's not driven by CUDA or Rackham or some of these existing platforms.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Yeah, I mean, maybe I should stop while I'm ahead, but I think even multiple of them do. That it is not a single company having a good insight, but rather many folks, maybe even incumbent players, maybe even existing GPU manufacturers, but building things that really don't look like GPUs, that increasingly don't look like GPUs.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
And most of that, both training and inference, happens outside of the domain of GPUs.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Well, and also Intel spitting out the foundry and this rogue entrepreneur buying it for a dollar, or perhaps the US government taking ownership of it. Yes, but all of those things have resulted in this diversity of silicon.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Yeah. Accuracy is, I mean, like there's, there's no thrill in accuracy.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
nothing really stood out. Uh, Ben wanted, uh, to get credit for predicting a significant portion of the commercial office space was converted to housing. Uh, it depends on what you call significant, but we'll give it to you. Right. It's if it's significant to you, you know, that's right.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
I mean... I love the LLM that's all Steamboat Willie references and public domain songs and stuff.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
My son's high school English teacher, his senior year, last year, had them do all their writing, pen and paper, in class. So she was like, not an issue for us.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
And that teacher also was the teacher who didn't hand back assignments for weeks and weeks and weeks. So the kids weren't getting feedback. So you're right that like chat GPT is a way to get that feedback instantaneously where otherwise it's, you know, you may never be able to improve because you're not getting that feedback.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Brian, I would say that I asked ChatGPT to evaluate my predictions because you don't want them to be too obvious or whatever. And I think that this applies for everyone. It told me none of these predictions are obviously wrong yet, and they all fall within reasonable expectations for their timeframes. So I think we can take that one to the bank.
Oxide and Friends
Predictions 2025
Yeah. I mean, it was, I remember at the, I think it was a year ago or whatever, that I was reading the Watergate, A New History. And folks visiting the Oval Office at the time would say that occasionally Nixon would move to a corner of the office and speak as if into history. Like, so really, really telegraphing that like this was his intention with the recordings. Yeah.