Oxide and Friends Oxide Computer Company

The Oxide Friends have talked about the Hashicorp license change, the emergence of an open source fork of Terraform in OpenTofu, and other topics in open source. A few weeks ago both InfoWorld and Hashicorp (independently?) accused OpenTofu of stealing Terraform code—a serious claim that turned out to be fully unfounded. We (you!) have been lucky to avoid this topic with a couple of guests lined up to talk about the xz exploit discovery and founding the Oakland Ballers… but we ran out of distractions! Bryan and Adam talk about this FUD and FUD generally.
Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Infoworld: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to forkOpenTofu responsePRs 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!

Bryan, Adam, Steve, and the Oxide Friends are joined by the founders of the Oakland Ballers, the continuation of a long history of baseball in Oakland. There turns out to be a plenty in common between founding a computer company and founding a baseball team--and we both have our fans supporting us!
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by very special guests Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel as well our somewhat-special boss, Steve Tuck.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
The Oakland BallersBryan and Adam at Manaea's no-noThe Munson-Nixon lineThe Pioneer LeagueBaseball's longest gameAdam's neighbor, Bill George, scorer of the longest gameYolo HighwheelersBART's sponsorship of the BallersJ.T. Snow joins the BallersJ.T. saves Dusty's sonIf 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!

Andres Freund joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details with Andres. We started by ranting about the coverage in the New York Times… coverage that explicitly refused to dig into the details! It’s all the more shocking because the big story here is how Andres’ penchant for digging into the details is what saved us all from what would have been a pervasive and damaging attack!
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Andres Freund.
Our research for this episode:
Andres' initial public disclosureNew York Times: Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? by Kevin RooseKevin RooseNew York Times front page from April 4th, 2024How I got started as a developer with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas | Path To Citus Con Ep08The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind | WIREDHow one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide - The VergeLinux backdoor was a long con, possibly with nation-state support, experts say - Nextgov/FCWresearch!rsc: Timeline of the xz open source attackBrian Krebs thread on mastodonXz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation ExplainedA Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projectsRisky Business #743 -- A chat about the xz backdoor with the guy who found it (podcast)Risky Biz News: F-Droid narrowly avoided XZ-like incident in 2020 (podcast)What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world | Ars TechnicaEverything I know about the XZ backdoorLINUX Unplugged 556: The xz Backdoor Exposed 🚨 (podcast)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!
Recorded April 8th, 2024

The Oxide Friends talk about about cultural idiosyncrasies--turns out we have a lot of them at Oxide! Some might even sound good enough for you to try out! Demo Fridays, morning water-cooler, no-meet Wednesdays, recorded meetings, dog-pile debugging (aka CSPAN for debugging), RFDs (requests for discussion), no performance review process...
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague Steve Klabnik.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Bryan: Engineering a cultureMatt: It's Free Real EstateCliff: Who killed the network switch?OxF: Engineering CultureDemo DayJujutsuCovid as a catalyst for remote-friendly featuresWatercooler morning meetingNo-meet WednesdayOtM: Jeff RothschildNo (formalized) review processThe non-zero-sum value of praisePositive Coaching AllianceChat as the apple of discord (and remember email?! Or jabber??!!)DORAOxide RFDsRFD 68: Partnership as Shared ValuesMatthew Sanabria: Observability Companies to Watch in 2024"Chat""Rock and stone"
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, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his work with adversarial machine learning. He's found sequences of--seemingly random--tokens that cause LLMs to ignore their restrictions! Also: printf is Turing complete?!
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Nicholas Carlini.
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!

Data visualization is an important--and overlooked!--tool in the software engineer's tool belt. Bryan describes a recent journey with gnuplot while Oxide colleague, Charlie Park, shares his own experience with data visualization and Adam offers a visual analysis of Simpsons episodes. Stay tuned to the end to find out about the Oxide and Friends book club coming up in May.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide Colleague, Charlie Park.

(00:00) - Intro
(13:39) - OODA
(22:30) - Back to Bryan
(24:27) - Flame Graphs
(28:58) - Statemap
(32:39) - Minard / Tufte
(44:53) - thingskatedid
(46:39) - DTrace aggregations
(56:06) - ParaView
(01:03:08) - Simpsons IMDb
(01:05:16) - Survivorship Bias
(01:15:03) - Kartlytics
(01:18:15) - Kartlytics sample group
(01:19:11) - Wrapping up
(01:22:02) - OxF book club
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Bryan's rad gnuplotGitHub PR with Bryan's visualizationsTuftePronunciation of "Tufte" is /ˈtʌfti/Flame Graphsflamegraph-rsOODAThis American Life: A Little Bit of KnowledgeStatemapsMinard's diagramhttps://twitter.com/thingskatedid/status/1386077306381242371plot.awkVisualizing regular expressions and BNF grammars with GraphvizExample implementations of isvg and idotDTrace aggregationsRust crate ratatuiPrograms and libraries for plotting and other data visualizations:gnuplotMatplotlibggplot2ParaViewGLVisSimpsons IMDB visualizationAbraham Wald and the airplane diagram with red bullet holes – here’s the origin storyKartlyticsHow Life Works by Philip BallIf 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!