Oxide and Friends

It's the annual Oxide and Friends tradition: Books in the Box! What books have the Oxide friends enjoyed? Didn't catch the show live, feel free to add your book recommendation as a PR in the show notes.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Tom Lyon, and Ian Grunert.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s01e16 - The Books in the Box
• OxF s02e18 - Books in the Box Redux
• OxF s03e22 - Books in the Box III
• OxF s04e28 - Books in the Box IV
• OxF s05e30 - Books in the Box V

Recommendations from Bryan and Adam:

• Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
• Incorruptible by Eric Ries
• Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain
• The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby
• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
• Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

• Need more? Phantom Plague by Vidya Krishnan

• American Poison by Daniel Stone
• The Morris Chang autobiography (in Chinese): Volume 1 and Volume 2
• Apple in China by Patrick McGee
• Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross
• The Everything Store by Brad Stone
• Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson (from last year's recommendations)
• Eccentric Orbits by John Bloom (from last year's recommendations)

Books in the Bonfire:

• Grateful Geek by Jean-Louis Gassée
• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (again)

Recommendations from Tom Lyon:

• Me and My Big Ideas by Lee Felsenstein
• The Proof in the Code by Kevin Hartnett
• Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch by A. Thomas Cole

Recommendations from Ian Grunert:

• Eccentric Orbits by John Bloom
• King PONG by Raiford Guins
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• The Master Switch by Tim Wu

Also mentioned (but not necessarily recommended):

• Snow Crash
• You Can See Everything (A24)
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
• Creating the Digital Future by Albert Yu (mentioned, not recommended)
• Thomas Midgley Jr.
• Robert A. Kehoe and the Kehoe principle
• Prefontaine (1997)
• Community Memory
• Lean
• The AGI Chronicles by Kevin Roose (mentioned, not yet read)
• Racing the Beam
• At the End of the Rainbow: The Identity Crisis of the Atari 8-Bit Computer

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!

We've talked about Oxide's Root of Trust--the hardware underpinning the security of the product--but how do we keep a bad actor from spoofing Oxide to load malicious software? Philip Tricca joined Bryan and Adam to describe the key ceremony, the process of creating and storing the secret that plays a critical role in manufacturing. And we paid our respects to the dot matrix printers that made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of security.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Philip Tricca.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s01e15 - Theranos, Silicon Valley, and the March Madness of Tech Fraud
• OxF s04e28 - Books in the Box IV
• OxF s06e07 - Building a Quorum of Trust in the Oxide Rack
• OxF s03e18 - Okay, Doomer: A Rebuttal to AI Doom-mongering

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

• You Can See Everything (A24)
• IANA: Root KSK Ceremonies
• Caliptra
• IANA YouTube: live streams
• RFD 585: Cosmo RoT Code Signing Ceremony
• RFD 605: Virtual Machine Identity and Attestation
• NLnet Labs: DNSSEC Offline KSK Ceremony Tools

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!

After raising $200M in February... we raised another $445M in July! Your favorite computer company is capitalized to the gills--enough to weather the supply chain upheaval even! Come for co-founders Steve and Bryan describing the raise; stay for tax, debt, and credit talk with Scott Orn.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests were Steve Tuck and Scott Orn.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s06e05 - Oxide's $200M Series C
• OxF s05e24 - Oxide's $100M Series B

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

• Oxide blog: Our $445M Series D
• Hacker News: Our $445M Series D
• Hacker News: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

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!

Wicked problems defy simple solutions. Even as we describe the problem, we may be presupposing particular solutions and narrowing scope. Our greatest, most persistent societal problems fit this model. Wicked problems may not be solvable, but progress can be made. Noah Harlan joins us to describe his technical entrepreneurship battling wicked problems.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Noah Harlan.

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

• Rittel and Webber, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (1973)
• Wikipedia: Cynefin framework
• HOPICS
• Kiip
• Noah Harlan: "Why We Started Kiip"
• Findhelp: "Transforming CBO Case Management with Kiip"
• AlleyCorp
• https://findhelp.org/
• MTS: "AI Doomsday Predictions Lack Real-World Reality" with Bryan Cantrill
• Eric Ries, Incorruptible

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!

When the supply chain crunch catches up with you, sometimes a tiny resistor the size of a fleck of pepper is the difference between a world-class computer and... e-waste. Members of the Oxide operations and electrical engineering teams join Bryan and Adam to discuss how close we came to stopping production, for want of a resistor.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Robert "RFK" Keith, Eric Aasen, Scott Tagwerker, and Steve Tuck.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s06e12 - Rooting for the Home Team with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
• OxF s06e06 - When Nine Nines Isn't Enough
• OxF s02e12 - More Tales from the Bringup Lab

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

• Bryan's blog: The Contagion of Fear
• 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!

We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording.

How do you test configurations you haven't built yet? Steve, Andrew, and Rain join Bryan and Adam to talk about the transformative power of the Oxide emulation environment, VOXEL, and how it has accelerated development in many domains.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Steve Karam, Andrew Stone, and Rain Paharia.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s03e06 - Rack-scale Networking (P4 and DDM with Ry Goodfellow)
• OxF s01e26 - The Pragmatism of Hubris (with Cliff Biffle)
• OxF s03e09 - Get You a State Machine for Great Good (Wicket with Andrew Stone)
• OxF s01e25 - Tales from the Bringup Lab
• OxF s01e18 - Dijkstra's Tweetstorm
• OxF s03e31 - Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz

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

• voxel -- Virtual OXide Emulation Lab: emulated rack deployments on one Helios host (omicron on Falcon/propolis VMs, SoftNPU switches, FRR routers); optional real SP/RoT firmware via sp-emu. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/voxel
• Falcon -- tool for standing up virtual network/rack topologies of propolis VMs on illumos for testing. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/falcon
• Tofino -- Intel/Barefoot programmable switch ASIC (Tofino 2) in Sidecar; P4-programmable. Discontinued by Intel.
• SoftNPU -- software P4 target emulating the switch dataplane, so the stack runs without Tofino hardware. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/softnpu
• P4 -- DSL for describing packet-processing pipelines; how the Tofino/SoftNPU dataplane is programmed. https://p4.org/
• Gimlet -- Oxide's compute sled.
• Sidecar -- Oxide's rack switch board, carrying the Tofino 2.
• raclette -- reduced-size lab rack (a few sleds + switch) used for dev/test rather than a full 32-sled rack. (my read; unverified)
• Hubris -- Rust microkernel/RTOS for the SP and RoT: statically-defined tasks, memory protection, synchronous IPC. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris
• Humility -- debugger for Hubris systems; dumps tasks, stacks, ringbufs over SWD. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/humility
• a4x2 -- pre-voxel testbed topology: 4 emulated Gimlets, 2 SoftNPU switches, omicron on one Helios host.
• trust quorum -- rack secret split into shares across sleds; a quorum must be present to reconstitute the storage-encryption key, so a stolen sled is useless alone. https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/system/initial-rack-setup
• illumos -- open-source Solaris-derived OS; the host OS (Helios) is an illumos distro. https://illumos.org/
• zones -- illumos OS-level virtualization; each control-plane service runs in its own zone.
• Scrimlet -- Gimlet attached to a Sidecar ("switch Gimlet"); hosts the switch zone, dpd, MGS.
• DDM -- Delay-Driven Multipath, the underlay routing protocol, implemented in Maghemite (ddmd, ddmadm). https://github.com/oxidecomputer/maghemite
• Dendrite -- dataplane controller; dpd programs Tofino or SoftNPU and exposes an API to the control plane. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/dendrite
• swadm -- CLI against dpd for port config, links, addresses, routes.
• A0 -- sled power state where the host is fully powered (vs. A2, standby with the host off); driven by the SP sequencer task.
• iCE40 -- Lattice FPGA on Gimlet/Sidecar for power sequencing and board glue logic. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/quartz
• 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!

More and more, people are relying on AI to do their writing for them. Is this the new normal, or the intellectual equivalent of claiming take-out is your own home cooking? Max Spero, founder and CEO of Pangram, joined Bryan and Adam to discuss how they distinguish AI and human authorship.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Max Spero.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF: Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
• OxF: Shell Game with Evan Ratliff
• OxF: Predictions 2026!!

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

• Pangram
• Brandon Sovran: "I Tried to Trick Pangram. I Lost."
• Stanley Druckenmiller: "Let the Bond Market Speak"
• Pangram 4 Technical Report
• Goodfire: understand and debug your AI model

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!

Oxide returns to the chamber... of EMC compliance to earn FCC approval to sell our next generation rack. Did it go smoothly? If it had, would there be a podcast episode? Oxide teammates Robert, Dan, and Stu join Bryan and Adam to discuss the trials and triumph!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Robert "RFK" Keith, Dan Chirpich, and Stu Donnan.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s03e04 - Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries

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

• IEEE EMC+SIPI 2026: International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility, Signal & Power Integrity
• 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!

Simon Willison joined Bryan and Adam to discuss a wild couple of weeks in AI. First, we have a high-profile, AI-induced, AI-diagnosed security incident. Next we have the rise of frontier-class open-weights models. Who's for or against open weights? Do they make for a more or less secure future? Exciting times!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Simon Willison.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF: Shell Game with Evan Ratliff
• OxF: Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
• OxF: Predictions 2025
• OxF: Predictions 2026!!
• OxF: Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball
• OxF: OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl

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

• Gerald the turkey terrorizes Oakland's rose garden
• ABC7: Gerald the turkey and the Morcom Rose Garden
• APD cautions residents after aggressive wild turkey attacks elderly Alamedan
• Hawking radiation
• DHH's racist complaints
• Grok's "MechaHitler" antisemitic spree
• Simon on Grok aka "MechaHitler"
• Hugging Face security incident, July 2026
• OpenAI on the Hugging Face model evaluation security incident
• Greg Brockman's political donations and the Leading the Future super PAC
• OpenAI co-founder and wife donate $5.5M to save the home of bald eagles Jackie and Shadow
• Firecracker microVM
• Meltdown (security vulnerability)
• Kernel page-table isolation
• Jensen Huang on X
• Electronic design automation
• Golden Gate Claude
• Tethics
• Halloween documents
• Zizians
• Biohazard (book)
• CRISPR
• Oliver Sacks: criticism and falsifications
• How Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything
• American Poison by Daniel Stone
• Lead–crime hypothesis
• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas encyclical
• Rerum novarum

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!

Ramy Katrib has been at the forefront of digital storytelling for over 25 years, with his post-production company, DigitalFilm Tree, earning a reputation as one of Hollywood's most technically adventurous post-production houses. He joined Bryan and Adam to explore the past, present, and future of digital storytelling.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Ramy Katrib.

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!

Recently, Oxide rolled out an eye-popping 3D rack explorer at explorer.oxide.computer. Oxide's designer extraordinaire, Ben Leonard, joined Bryan and Adam to describe the process of turning CAD drawings into an interactive site.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Oxide colleague, Ben Leonard.

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

• The Explorer
• its repo
• Pierre Lamond oral history
• 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!

We love Rust for how much the compiler helps enforce safety. But sometimes it's up to us to uphold the complex--and often unclear--expectations of what constitutes safety on our own. Oxide colleague, Rain, joins Bryan and Adam to talk about the technical details of what it takes to impose safety on the hardest type of unsafe Rust.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest star, Rain Paharia,

Previously on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s06e02 - Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age
• OxF s03e01 - Predictions 2023!

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

• Oxide Blog: iddqd, or the hardest kind of unsafe Rust
• 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!

Bryan and Adam discuss the process of restoring a software project--BattleTris--untouched and unbuilt in over 20 years! How did LLMs help restore code Bryan started in the mid-1990s and what does that teach us about developing and maintaining software in the future?

Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.

Previously on Oxide and Friends

• OxF s03e24 - Fork in the road for Terraform?
• OxF s06e02 - Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age
• OxF s06e01 - Predictions 2026!!

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

• BattleTris on github
• Surge 2011 ~ Closing Plenary ~ Theo Schlossnagle
• From the Governor of Delaware

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!

Two years ago we introduced listeners to the Oakland Ballers, the startup returning baseball to the city of Oakland. Bryan and Adam were joined again by Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel to discuss the Ballers first two--highly successful--seasons, and to announce some exciting new collaborations between the Ballers and Oxide!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Paul Freedman, Bryan Carmel, and Steve Tuck.

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

• OxF S4 E11: A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
• OxF S4 E7: Data Visualization
• Bryan's blog: A parade in Oakland
• Ballers x Oxide hackathon

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!

Oxide ships a rack scale system--how to test the manufacturing of the backplane and switches? Previously we've been using a collection of sacrificial servers, but this was unwieldy, expensive, and unscalable--all big problems as we ramp up manufacturing to 100s a month! Enter "Reverso", an extremely simple test fixture, that uncovered an extremely complex bug.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Oxide colleagues, Robert "RFK" Keith, Adam "The Hammer" Suczewski, and Matt Keeter.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s01e26 - The Pragmatism of Hubris
• OxF s01e24 - The Sidecar Switch
• OxF s03e13 - The Network Behind the Network
• OxF s05e23 - Adventures in Data Corruption

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

• Adam Leventhal, Hardware Engineer
• dendrite
• Paddle-to-the-Sea
• 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!

AI is an existential topic for all aspects of education--for none more so than Computer Science. Bryan and Adam were joined by Kathi Fisler and Shriram Krishnamurthi, professors of Computer Science at Brown, to discuss their experimental introductory course that strongly incorporates agentic programming. What do students take away from their "smoke the whole pack" approach?

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Shriram Krishnamurthi, Kathi Fisler, and Will.

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

• OxF s5e29: AI in Higher Education with Michael Littman
• Greenspun's tenth rule
• Andy van Dam
• Brown CS15 Tetris
• Wesleyan Tetris
• Generating Programs Trivially: Student Use of Large Language Models
• Data-Centricity: A Challenge and Opportunity for Computing Education -- Shriram Krishnamurthi and Kathi Fisler
• LLMs ⭢ Regular Expressions, Responsibly!

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 members of the Oxide mechanical engineering team to talk the mechanical challenges of building a rack-scale computer, and--in particular--of scaling manufacturing from just a few racks to hundreds. NOTE: Keep an eye on the chapter art for the pictures under discussion.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide Colleagues Elliott Donlon, Brooks Willis, Doug Wibben, and Ben Williams.

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

• Topic
• [@M:SS](link into recording) Leventhal's Conundrum
• 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!

Brogrammer Garry Tan has been boasting about "writing" tens of thousands of lines of code each day as the paragon of productivity. Is this really the right way to think about building systems? Bryan and Adam were joined by Polish software engineer, Gregorein, who took a closer look into what Tan was generating to discuss what was found.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our guest (who we introduced a mere 4 minutes in) was gregorein.

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

• Gregorein's twitter thread
• Bryan's blog: The Peril of Laziness Lost
• 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!

The Oxide rack contains within it a distributed system that needs to trust itself. But how is this trust built? Bryan and Adam were joined by colleagues Andrew and Finch to explore how Trust Quorum was designed, built, and verified.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Andrew Stone, and Finch Foner.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF s06e02 - Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age
• OxF s03e17 - Software Verificationpalooza
• OxF s06e02 - Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age
• OxF s05e20 - Debugger-Driven Development

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

• Oxide RFD 238: Trust Quorum and Rack Unlock
• 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!

Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide team to describe the multi-year search for a mysterious source of hardware failures. All related to an ultra-reliable--and yet still not reliable enough--component.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by members of the Oxide team: Nathanael Huffman, Alan Hanson, Cliff Biffle, Eric Aasen, Robert "RFK" Keith, and Jordan Hendricks.

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

• Oxide RFD 630: BMR491 Glitch Mitigation Plan
• RFK's report
• 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!