RFDs--Requests for Discussion--are how we at Oxide discuss... just about everything! Technical design, hardware component selection, changes in process, culture, interview systems, (even) chat--we have RFDs for all of these, over 500 in a bit under 5 years. Bryan and Adam were joined by Oxide colleagues instrumental to RFDs, from their most prolific author to those making them more consumable.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Robert Mustacchi, David Crespo, Ben Leonard, and Augustus Mayo.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• We're sorry, Germany
• Oxide RFD site
• RFD 1: Requests for Discussion
• A Tool for Discussion (Oxide blog post from Ben)
• Sun PSARC cases
• The Queen's Duck
• The Hairy Arm
• Joyent RFDs
• RFC-3
• AsciiDoc
• Joyent RFD 77
• OxF: Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
• Oxide RFD API
• ... with it's CLI generated by progenitor
• ... which we talked about some on OxF here and here
• "Own your strategic weirdness"
• RFD 113: Engineering Determination, or how we close out RFDs

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Lots of engineering decisions get made on vibes. Popularity, anecdotes—they can lead to expedient decisions rather than rigorous ones. At Oxide, our choice to go with CockroachDB was hardly hasty! Dave Pacheco joins Bryan and Adam to talk about why we choose CRDB… and how Cockroach Lab’s recent switch to a proprietary license impacts that.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Dave Pacheco.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• TechCrunch: Cockroach Labs shakes up its licensing to force bigger companies to pay
• Kelsey's Tweet
• Oxide RFD 53: Control plane data storage requirements
• Oxide RFD 110: CockroachDB for the control plane database
• Oxide RFD 508: Whither CockroachDB
• Joyent blog post on the outage due to postgres autovacuum
• Jepsen
• Dave's CRDB exploration repo
• Chrony
• OxF: A Debugging Odyssey -- debugging an issue that manifested in CRDB
• The Liberation of RethinkDB

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

The Oxide control plane coordinates multiple services to do complex, compound operations. Early on, we knew we wanted to provide a robust structure for these multi-part workflows. We stumbled onto Distributed Sagas and built our own implementation in Steno. Bryan and Adam are joined by several members of the Oxide team who built and use Steno to drive the complex operation of the control plane.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Dave Pacheco. Eliza Weisman, Andrew Stone, Greg Colombo, and James MacMahon.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices - Caitie McCaffrey
• Oxide RFD 107: Workflows Engine
• Steno
• chat: "the trouble with other people's workflow engines, somehow with all the yaml in the world they're never quite extensible enough"
• Not our first bit of background noise on OxF (trombone)
• SAGAS paper
• chat: "when i hear sagas i think "transaction semantics enforced at the application layer" and when i hear workflow i hear "a dsl that doesn't have a for loop""
• Automated saga testing
• Oxide RFD 289: Steno Upgrade
• Feral Concurrency Control paper from Berkeley and the University of Sydney
• Eliza's PR
• Steno's description of its divergence from Distributed Sagas
• AWS "constant work" blog
• chat: "Now, migrate the owl."
• OxF on formal methods
• A complex bug with sagas: "tl;dr there's TWENTY steps in 5042 that leads to an accounting bug"
• Oxide RFD 373: Reliable Persistent Workflows
• Eliza's novella on updating an instance

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his terrific blog post on his many pragmatic uses of LLMs to solve real problems. He has great advice about when to use them (often!) and what kinds of problems they handle well. LLMs aren't great at many things, but used well they can be an amazing tool.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest, Nicholas Carlini as well as by listeners Mike Cafarella, p5commit, and chrisbur.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Nicholas' blog: How I Use "AI"
• The McLaughlin Group
• Surge 2011 ~ Closing Plenary ~ Theo Schlossnagle
• Microsoft's Tay chatbot
• Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry vs. Siri
• Sal Khan on LLMs
• Google's awful AI ad
• Google pulls ad

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam were joined by security expert, Katie Moussouris, to discuss the largest global IT outage in history. It was an event as broadly impactful as it will be instructive; as Bryan noted, you can see all of computing from here, from crash dumps to antitrust.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Katie Moussouris.

• PRs needed!

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Raja Koduri joined Bryan and Adam to answer a question sent in from a listener: what's are the differences between a CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC? And after a walk through history of hardware, software, their intersection and relevant companies, we ... almost answered it!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Raja Koduri.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• 3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell
• 3dfx
• OpenGL
• Glide
• Direct3D
• CUDA
• Dennard scaling
• VLIW
• GPGPU
• AMD APU
• Energy Efficiency and AI Hardware
• PRs needed!

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Charity Majors joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the idea of "innovation tokens"--a fixed budget for, so called, "innovative" projects. When is boring better and when is innovation the safer approach? Is Oxide issuing innovation tokens in some sort of hyper-inflationary cycle!?

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Charity Majors.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Glyph: Against Innovation Tokens
• Charity's Twitter Thread
• OxF: Let That Sink In! (Whither Twitter?) with Charity
• Druid
• Scuba whitepaper
• Oxide RFD 68: Partnership as Shared Values
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
• Dropshot and Progenitor
• OxF: The Pragmatism of Hubris
• OxF: Helios

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Every so often we like to give our Oxide and Friends hot takes (or as Adam puts it "Bryan getting trolled on Twitter"). This time, a viral tweet suggests that NVIDIA is on the same trajectory as Sun Microsystems on its ascent during the Dot Com Bubble. From two alumni of Sun's rise and fall: maaaaybe not.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Todd Gamblin.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• The Tweet!
• OxF: Innovation Stagnation? -- wherein we forgot to read the tweet
• Framework laptop RISC-V mainboard
• Tadpole SPARCbook
• OxF: A Requiem for SPARC with Tom Lyon -- we're RISC dead-enders
• Acquired on NVIDIA: part I, part II, part III, Jensen
• RIVA 128
• OxF: Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!