Podcasts about Unix

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This is the first column in a series dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems. This month's column was inspired by an article on the Linux Journal web site 1 describing a custom-built script that would contain a binary tar archive and, when run, would extract the contents onto the user's system. Upon reading this, memories immediately came rushing back of the days of Usenet, before MIME-encoded e-mail made sending file attachments standard 2 , and where we walked ten miles each way to school (uphill both ways!) in three feet of snow. Yes, at that time, you had to put everything into the body of your message. But what if you needed to send a bunch of files to someone? There was tar , but the format differed between systems, and e-mail and Usenet could only reliably handle 7-bit plain-text ASCII anyhow. You could send separate e-mail messages (but what if one goes missing?) or put "CUT HERE" lines to designate where one file ends and another one begins (tedious for the recipient). The solution was a shell archive created by the shar program. This wraps all your files in a neat shell script that the recipient can just run and have the files magically pop out. All he needs is the Bourne shell and the sed utility, both standard on any UNIX-like system. Suppose you had a directory named "foo" containing the files bar.c, bar.h, and bar.txt, and wanted to send these. All you'd need to do is run the following command, and your archive is on its way. $ shar foo foo/* | mail -s "Foo 1.0 files" bob@example.com When the recipient runs the resulting script, it will create the foo directory and copy out the files onto his system. You can also pick and choose files; if you wanted to leave out bar.txt, you could do shar foo foo/bar.c foo/bar.h or, more simply, shar foo foo/bar.? . Different versions of shar have varying capabilities. For example, the BSD 3 and OS X 4 editions can only really manage plain-text files. If you had a binary object file bar.o, it'd likely get mangled somewhere along the way if you tried to include it in an archive. They also require, as in the examples above, that you name a directory before naming any files inside it (the typical way is to let the find command do the work for you; it produces a list in the right order). The GNU implementation is more flexible and can take just a directory name, automatically including everything underneath. It can also handle binary files by using uuencode—a method for encoding data as ASCII that predated the current base64 MIME standard. GNU shar rather nicely auto-detects whether the input file is text or binary and acts accordingly, and can even compress files if asked. However, unpacking encoded or compressed files from such an archive requires the recipient to have the corresponding decode/uncompress utility, and the documentation is littered with (now somewhat anachronistic) warnings about this 5 . Looking at other UNIX systems, the HP-UX version 6 also can uuencode binary files, and as a special bonus adds logic to the script that will compile and use a simple uudecode tool if the recipient doesn't already have one. It will even handle device files and put the corresponding mknod commands into the script, probably making it the most full-featured implementation of all. IBM's AIX doesn't appear to come with shar . Neither do SunOS and Solaris, which seems quite odd as original development of the program is credited to James Gosling 5 ! And so we bid farewell to shar . Next time you're considering rolling your own script for a particular purpose, consider whether such a tool might already exist, just waiting on your system for you to use it. References: Add a Binary Payload to your Shell Scripts https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/add-binary-payload-your-shell-scripts MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1521 BSD shar manual page https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=shar&sektion=1&manpath=4.4BSD+Lite2 macOS 26.2 shar manual page https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=shar&sektion=1&manpath=macOS+26.2 GNU shar utilities manual https://www.gnu.org/software/sharutils/manual/sharutils.html HP-UX Reference (11i v3 07/02) - 1 User Commands N-Z (vol 2) https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=c01922474&docLocale=en_US This article was originally written in May 2010. The podcast episode was recorded in February 2026. Provide feedback on this episode.

It's another glorious bounty of listener questions for the monthly Q&A, touching on a bunch of subjects like modern HDMI switchers, enormous turn-of-the-century TVs, MikroTik network gear, Pluribus, why the PCIe retaining clip exists (and how to defeat it), Unix on the desktop, our wishlist ESP32 projects, and the exact moment when cell phones became widespread -- and whether phone numbers are increasingly useless, at least in the US. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Bryan Cantrill is the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company. We discuss why the biggest cloud providers don't use off the shelf hardware, how scaling data centers at samsung's scale exposed problems with hard drive firmware, how the values of NodeJS are in conflict with robust systems, choosing Rust, and the benefits of Oxide Computer's rack scale approach. This is an extended version of an interview posted on Software Engineering Radio. Related links Oxide Computer Oxide and Friends Illumos Platform as a Reflection of Values RFD 26 bhyve CockroachDB Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. Intro [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I am talking to Bryan Cantrill. He's the co-founder and CTO of Oxide computer company, and he was previously the CTO of Joyent and he also co-authored the DTrace Tracing framework while he was at Sun Microsystems. [00:00:14] Jeremy: Bryan, welcome to Software Engineering radio. [00:00:17] Bryan: Uh, awesome. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. [00:00:20] Jeremy: You're the CTO of a company that makes computers. But I think before we get into that, a lot of people who built software, now that the actual computer is abstracted away, they're using AWS or they're using some kind of cloud service. So I thought we could start by talking about, data centers. [00:00:41] Jeremy: 'cause you were. Previously working at Joyent, and I believe you got bought by Samsung and you've previously talked about how you had to figure out, how do I run things at Samsung's scale. So how, how, how was your experience with that? What, what were the challenges there? Samsung scale and migrating off the cloud [00:01:01] Bryan: Yeah, I mean, so at Joyent, and so Joyent was a cloud computing pioneer. Uh, we competed with the likes of AWS and then later GCP and Azure. Uh, and we, I mean, we were operating at a scale, right? We had a bunch of machines, a bunch of dcs, but ultimately we know we were a VC backed company and, you know, a small company by the standards of, certainly by Samsung standards. [00:01:25] Bryan: And so when, when Samsung bought the company, I mean, the reason by the way that Samsung bought Joyent is Samsung's. Cloud Bill was, uh, let's just say it was extremely large. They were spending an enormous amount of money every year on, on the public cloud. And they realized that in order to secure their fate economically, they had to be running on their own infrastructure. [00:01:51] Bryan: It did not make sense. And there's not, was not really a product that Samsung could go buy that would give them that on-prem cloud. Uh, I mean in that, in that regard, like the state of the market was really no different. And so they went looking for a company, uh, and bought, bought Joyent. And when we were on the inside of Samsung. [00:02:11] Bryan: That we learned about Samsung scale. And Samsung loves to talk about Samsung scale. And I gotta tell you, it is more than just chest thumping. Like Samsung Scale really is, I mean, just the, the sheer, the number of devices, the number of customers, just this absolute size. they really wanted to take us out to, to levels of scale, certainly that we had not seen. [00:02:31] Bryan: The reason for buying Joyent was to be able to stand up on their own infrastructure so that we were gonna go buy, we did go buy a bunch of hardware. Problems with server hardware at scale [00:02:40] Bryan: And I remember just thinking, God, I hope Dell is somehow magically better. I hope the problems that we have seen in the small, we just. You know, I just remember hoping and hope is hope. It was of course, a terrible strategy and it was a terrible strategy here too. Uh, and the we that the problems that we saw at the large were, and when you scale out the problems that you see kind of once or twice, you now see all the time and they become absolutely debilitating. [00:03:12] Bryan: And we saw a whole series of really debilitating problems. I mean, many ways, like comically debilitating, uh, in terms of, of showing just how bad the state-of-the-art. Yes. And we had, I mean, it should be said, we had great software and great software expertise, um, and we were controlling our own system software. [00:03:35] Bryan: But even controlling your own system software, your own host OS, your own control plane, which is what we had at Joyent, ultimately, you're pretty limited. You go, I mean, you got the problems that you can obviously solve, the ones that are in your own software, but the problems that are beneath you, the, the problems that are in the hardware platform, the problems that are in the componentry beneath you become the problems that are in the firmware. IO latency due to hard drive firmware [00:04:00] Bryan: Those problems become unresolvable and they are deeply, deeply frustrating. Um, and we just saw a bunch of 'em again, they were. Comical in retrospect, and I'll give you like a, a couple of concrete examples just to give, give you an idea of what kinda what you're looking at. one of the, our data centers had really pathological IO latency. [00:04:23] Bryan: we had a very, uh, database heavy workload. And this was kind of right at the period where you were still deploying on rotating media on hard drives. So this is like, so. An all flash buy did not make economic sense when we did this in, in 2016. This probably, it'd be interesting to know like when was the, the kind of the last time that that actual hard drives made sense? [00:04:50] Bryan: 'cause I feel this was close to it. So we had a, a bunch of, of a pathological IO problems, but we had one data center in which the outliers were actually quite a bit worse and there was so much going on in that system. It took us a long time to figure out like why. And because when, when you, when you're io when you're seeing worse io I mean you're naturally, you wanna understand like what's the workload doing? [00:05:14] Bryan: You're trying to take a first principles approach. What's the workload doing? So this is a very intensive database workload to support the, the object storage system that we had built called Manta. And that the, the metadata tier was stored and uh, was we were using Postgres for that. And that was just getting absolutely slaughtered. [00:05:34] Bryan: Um, and ultimately very IO bound with these kind of pathological IO latencies. Uh, and as we, you know, trying to like peel away the layers to figure out what was going on. And I finally had this thing. So it's like, okay, we are seeing at the, at the device layer, at the at, at the disc layer, we are seeing pathological outliers in this data center that we're not seeing anywhere else. [00:06:00] Bryan: And that does not make any sense. And the thought occurred to me. I'm like, well, maybe we are. Do we have like different. Different rev of firmware on our HGST drives, HGST. Now part of WD Western Digital were the drives that we had everywhere. And, um, so maybe we had a different, maybe I had a firmware bug. [00:06:20] Bryan: I, this would not be the first time in my life at all that I would have a drive firmware issue. Uh, and I went to go pull the firmware, rev, and I'm like, Toshiba makes hard drives? So we had, I mean. I had no idea that Toshiba even made hard drives, let alone that they were our, they were in our data center. [00:06:38] Bryan: I'm like, what is this? And as it turns out, and this is, you know, part of the, the challenge when you don't have an integrated system, which not to pick on them, but Dell doesn't, and what Dell would routinely put just sub make substitutes, and they make substitutes that they, you know, it's kind of like you're going to like, I don't know, Instacart or whatever, and they're out of the thing that you want. [00:07:03] Bryan: So, you know, you're, someone makes a substitute and like sometimes that's okay, but it's really not okay in a data center. And you really want to develop and validate a, an end-to-end integrated system. And in this case, like Toshiba doesn't, I mean, Toshiba does make hard drives, but they are a, or the data they did, uh, they basically were, uh, not competitive and they were not competitive in part for the reasons that we were discovering. [00:07:29] Bryan: They had really serious firmware issues. So the, these were drives that would just simply stop a, a stop acknowledging any reads from the order of 2,700 milliseconds. Long time, 2.7 seconds. Um. And that was a, it was a drive firmware issue, but it was highlighted like a much deeper issue, which was the simple lack of control that we had over our own destiny. [00:07:53] Bryan: Um, and it's an, it's, it's an example among many where Dell is making a decision. That lowers the cost of what they are providing you marginally, but it is then giving you a system that they shouldn't have any confidence in because it's not one that they've actually designed and they leave it to the customer, the end user, to make these discoveries. [00:08:18] Bryan: And these things happen up and down the stack. And for every, for whether it's, and, and not just to pick on Dell because it's, it's true for HPE, it's true for super micro, uh, it's true for your switch vendors. It's, it's true for storage vendors where the, the, the, the one that is left actually integrating these things and trying to make the the whole thing work is the end user sitting in their data center. AWS / Google are not buying off the shelf hardware but you can't use it [00:08:42] Bryan: There's not a product that they can buy that gives them elastic infrastructure, a cloud in their own DC The, the product that you buy is the public cloud. Like when you go in the public cloud, you don't worry about the stuff because that it's, it's AWS's issue or it's GCP's issue. And they are the ones that get this to ground. [00:09:02] Bryan: And they, and this was kind of, you know, the eye-opening moment. Not a surprise. Uh, they are not Dell customers. They're not HPE customers. They're not super micro customers. They have designed their own machines. And to varying degrees, depending on which one you're looking at. But they've taken the clean sheet of paper and the frustration that we had kind of at Joyent and beginning to wonder and then Samsung and kind of wondering what was next, uh, is that, that what they built was not available for purchase in the data center. [00:09:35] Bryan: You could only rent it in the public cloud. And our big belief is that public cloud computing is a really important revolution in infrastructure. Doesn't feel like a different, a deep thought, but cloud computing is a really important revolution. It shouldn't only be available to rent. You should be able to actually buy it. [00:09:53] Bryan: And there are a bunch of reasons for doing that. Uh, one in the one we we saw at Samsung is economics, which I think is still the dominant reason where it just does not make sense to rent all of your compute in perpetuity. But there are other reasons too. There's security, there's risk management, there's latency. [00:10:07] Bryan: There are a bunch of reasons why one might wanna to own one's own infrastructure. But, uh, that was very much the, the, so the, the genesis for oxide was coming out of this very painful experience and a painful experience that, because, I mean, a long answer to your question about like what was it like to be at Samsung scale? [00:10:27] Bryan: Those are the kinds of things that we, I mean, in our other data centers, we didn't have Toshiba drives. We only had the HDSC drives, but it's only when you get to this larger scale that you begin to see some of these pathologies. But these pathologies then are really debilitating in terms of those who are trying to develop a service on top of them. [00:10:45] Bryan: So it was, it was very educational in, in that regard. And you're very grateful for the experience at Samsung in terms of opening our eyes to the challenge of running at that kind of scale. [00:10:57] Jeremy: Yeah, because I, I think as software engineers, a lot of times we, we treat the hardware as a, as a given where, [00:11:08] Bryan: Yeah. [00:11:08] Bryan: Yeah. There's software in chard drives [00:11:09] Jeremy: It sounds like in, in this case, I mean, maybe the issue is not so much that. Dell or HP as a company doesn't own every single piece that they're providing you, but rather the fact that they're swapping pieces in and out without advertising them, and then when it becomes a problem, they're not necessarily willing to, to deal with the, the consequences of that. [00:11:34] Bryan: They just don't know. I mean, I think they just genuinely don't know. I mean, I think that they, it's not like they're making a deliberate decision to kind of ship garbage. It's just that they are making, I mean, I think it's exactly what you said about like, not thinking about the hardware. It's like, what's a hard drive? [00:11:47] Bryan: Like what's it, I mean, it's a hard drive. It's got the same specs as this other hard drive and Intel. You know, it's a little bit cheaper, so why not? It's like, well, like there's some reasons why not, and one of the reasons why not is like, uh, even a hard drive, whether it's rotating media or, or flash, like that's not just hardware. [00:12:05] Bryan: There's software in there. And that the software's like not the same. I mean, there are components where it's like, there's actually, whether, you know, if, if you're looking at like a resistor or a capacitor or something like this Yeah. If you've got two, two parts that are within the same tolerance. Yeah. [00:12:19] Bryan: Like sure. Maybe, although even the EEs I think would be, would be, uh, objecting that a little bit. But the, the, the more complicated you get, and certainly once you get to the, the, the, the kind of the hardware that we think of like a, a, a microprocessor, a a network interface card, a a, a hard driver, an NVME drive. [00:12:38] Bryan: Those things are super complicated and there's a whole bunch of software inside of those things, the firmware, and that's the stuff that, that you can't, I mean, you say that software engineers don't think about that. It's like you, no one can really think about that because it's proprietary that's kinda welded shut and you've got this abstraction into it. [00:12:55] Bryan: But the, the way that thing operates is very core to how the thing in aggregate will behave. And I think that you, the, the kind of, the, the fundamental difference between Oxide's approach and the approach that you get at a Dell HP Supermicro, wherever, is really thinking holistically in terms of hardware and software together in a system that, that ultimately delivers cloud computing to a user. [00:13:22] Bryan: And there's a lot of software at many, many, many, many different layers. And it's very important to think about, about that software and that hardware holistically as a single system. [00:13:34] Jeremy: And during that time at Joyent, when you experienced some of these issues, was it more of a case of you didn't have enough servers experiencing this? So if it would happen, you might say like, well, this one's not working, so maybe we'll just replace the hardware. What, what was the thought process when you were working at that smaller scale and, and how did these issues affect you? UEFI / Baseboard Management Controller [00:13:58] Bryan: Yeah, at the smaller scale, you, uh, you see fewer of them, right? You just see it's like, okay, we, you know, what you might see is like, that's weird. We kinda saw this in one machine versus seeing it in a hundred or a thousand or 10,000. Um, so you just, you just see them, uh, less frequently as a result, they are less debilitating. [00:14:16] Bryan: Um, I, I think that it's, when you go to that larger scale, those things that become, that were unusual now become routine and they become debilitating. Um, so it, it really is in many regards a function of scale. Uh, and then I think it was also, you know, it was a little bit dispiriting that kind of the substrate we were building on really had not improved. [00:14:39] Bryan: Um, and if you look at, you know, the, if you buy a computer server, buy an x86 server. There is a very low layer of firmware, the BIOS, the basic input output system, the UEFI BIOS, and this is like an abstraction layer that has, has existed since the eighties and hasn't really meaningfully improved. Um, the, the kind of the transition to UEFI happened with, I mean, I, I ironically with Itanium, um, you know, two decades ago. [00:15:08] Bryan: but beyond that, like this low layer, this lowest layer of platform enablement software is really only impeding the operability of the system. Um, you look at the baseboard management controller, which is the kind of the computer within the computer, there is a, uh, there is an element in the machine that needs to handle environmentals, that needs to handle, uh, operate the fans and so on. [00:15:31] Bryan: Uh, and that traditionally has this, the space board management controller, and that architecturally just hasn't improved in the last two decades. And, you know, that's, it's a proprietary piece of silicon. Generally from a company that no one's ever heard of called a Speed, uh, which has to be, is written all on caps, so I guess it needs to be screamed. [00:15:50] Bryan: Um, a speed has a proprietary part that has a, there is a root password infamously there, is there, the root password is encoded effectively in silicon. So, uh, which is just, and for, um, anyone who kind of goes deep into these things, like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Um, when we first started oxide, the wifi password was a fraction of the a speed root password for the bmc. [00:16:16] Bryan: It's kinda like a little, little BMC humor. Um, but those things, it was just dispiriting that, that the, the state-of-the-art was still basically personal computers running in the data center. Um, and that's part of what, what was the motivation for doing something new? [00:16:32] Jeremy: And for the people using these systems, whether it's the baseboard management controller or it's the The BIOS or UF UEFI component, what are the actual problems that people are seeing seen? Security vulnerabilities and poor practices in the BMC [00:16:51] Bryan: Oh man, I, the, you are going to have like some fraction of your listeners, maybe a big fraction where like, yeah, like what are the problems? That's a good question. And then you're gonna have the people that actually deal with these things who are, did like their heads already hit the desk being like, what are the problems? [00:17:06] Bryan: Like what are the non problems? Like what, what works? Actually, that's like a shorter answer. Um, I mean, there are so many problems and a lot of it is just like, I mean, there are problems just architecturally these things are just so, I mean, and you could, they're the problems spread to the horizon, so you can kind of start wherever you want. [00:17:24] Bryan: But I mean, as like, as a really concrete example. Okay, so the, the BMCs that, that the computer within the computer that needs to be on its own network. So you now have like not one network, you got two networks that, and that network, by the way, it, that's the network that you're gonna log into to like reset the machine when it's otherwise unresponsive. [00:17:44] Bryan: So that going into the BMC, you can are, you're able to control the entire machine. Well it's like, alright, so now I've got a second net network that I need to manage. What is running on the BMC? Well, it's running some. Ancient, ancient version of Linux it that you got. It's like, well how do I, how do I patch that? [00:18:02] Bryan: How do I like manage the vulnerabilities with that? Because if someone is able to root your BMC, they control the system. So it's like, this is not you've, and now you've gotta go deal with all of the operational hair around that. How do you upgrade that system updating the BMC? I mean, it's like you've got this like second shadow bad infrastructure that you have to go manage. [00:18:23] Bryan: Generally not open source. There's something called open BMC, um, which, um, you people use to varying degrees, but you're generally stuck with the proprietary BMC, so you're generally stuck with, with iLO from HPE or iDRAC from Dell or, or, uh, the, uh, su super micros, BMC, that H-P-B-M-C, and you are, uh, it is just excruciating pain. [00:18:49] Bryan: Um, and that this is assuming that by the way, that everything is behaving correctly. The, the problem is that these things often don't behave correctly, and then the consequence of them not behaving correctly. It's really dire because it's at that lowest layer of the system. So, I mean, I'll give you a concrete example. [00:19:07] Bryan: a customer of theirs reported to me, so I won't disclose the vendor, but let's just say that a well-known vendor had an issue with their, their temperature sensors were broken. Um, and the thing would always read basically the wrong value. So it was the BMC that had to like, invent its own ki a different kind of thermal control loop. [00:19:28] Bryan: And it would index on the, on the, the, the, the actual inrush current. It would, they would look at that at the current that's going into the CPU to adjust the fan speed. That's a great example of something like that's a, that's an interesting idea. That doesn't work. 'cause that's actually not the temperature. [00:19:45] Bryan: So like that software would crank the fans whenever you had an inrush of current and this customer had a workload that would spike the current and by it, when it would spike the current, the, the, the fans would kick up and then they would slowly degrade over time. Well, this workload was spiking the current faster than the fans would degrade, but not fast enough to actually heat up the part. [00:20:08] Bryan: And ultimately over a very long time, in a very painful investigation, it's customer determined that like my fans are cranked in my data center for no reason. We're blowing cold air. And it's like that, this is on the order of like a hundred watts, a server of, of energy that you shouldn't be spending and like that ultimately what that go comes down to this kind of broken software hardware interface at the lowest layer that has real meaningful consequence, uh, in terms of hundreds of kilowatts, um, across a data center. So this stuff has, has very, very, very real consequence and it's such a shadowy world. Part of the reason that, that your listeners that have dealt with this, that our heads will hit the desk is because it is really aggravating to deal with problems with this layer. [00:21:01] Bryan: You, you feel powerless. You don't control or really see the software that's on them. It's generally proprietary. You are relying on your vendor. Your vendor is telling you that like, boy, I don't know. You're the only customer seeing this. I mean, the number of times I have heard that for, and I, I have pledged that we're, we're not gonna say that at oxide because it's such an unaskable thing to say like, you're the only customer saying this. [00:21:25] Bryan: It's like, it feels like, are you blaming me for my problem? Feels like you're blaming me for my problem? Um, and what you begin to realize is that to a degree, these folks are speaking their own truth because the, the folks that are running at real scale at Hyperscale, those folks aren't Dell, HP super micro customers. [00:21:46] Bryan: They're actually, they've done their own thing. So it's like, yeah, Dell's not seeing that problem, um, because they're not running at the same scale. Um, but when you do run, you only have to run at modest scale before these things just become. Overwhelming in terms of the, the headwind that they present to people that wanna deploy infrastructure. The problem is felt with just a few racks [00:22:05] Jeremy: Yeah, so maybe to help people get some perspective at, at what point do you think that people start noticing or start feeling these problems? Because I imagine that if you're just have a few racks or [00:22:22] Bryan: do you have a couple racks or the, or do you wonder or just wondering because No, no, no. I would think, I think anyone who deploys any number of servers, especially now, especially if your experience is only in the cloud, you're gonna be like, what the hell is this? I mean, just again, just to get this thing working at all. [00:22:39] Bryan: It is so it, it's so hairy and so congealed, right? It's not designed. Um, and it, it, it, it's accreted it and it's so obviously accreted that you are, I mean, nobody who is setting up a rack of servers is gonna think to themselves like, yes, this is the right way to go do it. This all makes sense because it's, it's just not, it, I, it feels like the kit, I mean, kit car's almost too generous because it implies that there's like a set of plans to work to in the end. [00:23:08] Bryan: Uh, I mean, it, it, it's a bag of bolts. It's a bunch of parts that you're putting together. And so even at the smallest scales, that stuff is painful. Just architecturally, it's painful at the small scale then, but at least you can get it working. I think the stuff that then becomes debilitating at larger scale are the things that are, are worse than just like, I can't, like this thing is a mess to get working. [00:23:31] Bryan: It's like the, the, the fan issue that, um, where you are now seeing this over, you know, hundreds of machines or thousands of machines. Um, so I, it is painful at more or less all levels of scale. There's, there is no level at which the, the, the pc, which is really what this is, this is a, the, the personal computer architecture from the 1980s and there is really no level of scale where that's the right unit. Running elastic infrastructure is the hardware but also, hypervisor, distributed database, api, etc [00:23:57] Bryan: I mean, where that's the right thing to go deploy, especially if what you are trying to run. Is elastic infrastructure, a cloud. Because the other thing is like we, we've kinda been talking a lot about that hardware layer. Like hardware is, is just the start. Like you actually gotta go put software on that and actually run that as elastic infrastructure. [00:24:16] Bryan: So you need a hypervisor. Yes. But you need a lot more than that. You, you need to actually, you, you need a distributed database, you need web endpoints. You need, you need a CLI, you need all the stuff that you need to actually go run an actual service of compute or networking or storage. I mean, and for, for compute, even for compute, there's a ton of work to be done. [00:24:39] Bryan: And compute is by far, I would say the simplest of the, of the three. When you look at like networks, network services, storage services, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you need to go build in terms of distributed systems to actually offer that as a cloud. So it, I mean, it is painful at more or less every LE level if you are trying to deploy cloud computing on. What's a control plane? [00:25:00] Jeremy: And for someone who doesn't have experience building or working with this type of infrastructure, when you talk about a control plane, what, what does that do in the context of this system? [00:25:16] Bryan: So control plane is the thing that is, that is everything between your API request and that infrastructure actually being acted upon. So you go say, Hey, I, I want a provision, a vm. Okay, great. We've got a whole bunch of things we're gonna provision with that. We're gonna provision a vm, we're gonna get some storage that's gonna go along with that, that's got a network storage service that's gonna come out of, uh, we've got a virtual network that we're gonna either create or attach to. [00:25:39] Bryan: We've got a, a whole bunch of things we need to go do for that. For all of these things, there are metadata components that need, we need to keep track of this thing that, beyond the actual infrastructure that we create. And then we need to go actually, like act on the actual compute elements, the hostos, what have you, the switches, what have you, and actually go. [00:25:56] Bryan: Create these underlying things and then connect them. And there's of course, the challenge of just getting that working is a big challenge. Um, but getting that working robustly, getting that working is, you know, when you go to provision of vm, um, the, all the, the, the steps that need to happen and what happens if one of those steps fails along the way? [00:26:17] Bryan: What happens if, you know, one thing we're very mindful of is these kind of, you get these long tails of like, why, you know, generally our VM provisioning happened within this time, but we get these long tails where it takes much longer. What's going on? What, where in this process are we, are we actually spending time? [00:26:33] Bryan: Uh, and there's a whole lot of complexity that you need to go deal with that. There's a lot of complexity that you need to go deal with this effectively, this workflow that's gonna go create these things and manage them. Um, we use a, a pattern that we call, that are called sagas, actually is a, is a database pattern from the eighties. [00:26:51] Bryan: Uh, Katie McCaffrey is a, is a database reCrcher who, who, uh, I, I think, uh, reintroduce the idea of, of sagas, um, in the last kind of decade. Um, and this is something that we picked up, um, and I've done a lot of really interesting things with, um, to allow for, to this kind of, these workflows to be, to be managed and done so robustly in a way that you can restart them and so on. [00:27:16] Bryan: Uh, and then you guys, you get this whole distributed system that can do all this. That whole distributed system, that itself needs to be reliable and available. So if you, you know, you need to be able to, what happens if you, if you pull a sled or if a sled fails, how does the system deal with that? [00:27:33] Bryan: How does the system deal with getting an another sled added to the system? Like how do you actually grow this distributed system? And then how do you update it? How do you actually go from one version to the next? And all of that has to happen across an air gap where this is gonna run as part of the computer. [00:27:49] Bryan: So there are, it, it is fractally complicated. There, there is a lot of complexity here in, in software, in the software system and all of that. We kind of, we call the control plane. Um, and it, this is the what exists at AWS at GCP, at Azure. When you are hitting an endpoint that's provisioning an EC2 instance for you. [00:28:10] Bryan: There is an AWS control plane that is, is doing all of this and has, uh, some of these similar aspects and certainly some of these similar challenges. Are vSphere / Proxmox / Hyper-V in the same category? [00:28:20] Jeremy: And for people who have run their own servers with something like say VMware or Hyper V or Proxmox, are those in the same category? [00:28:32] Bryan: Yeah, I mean a little bit. I mean, it kind of like vSphere Yes. Via VMware. No. So it's like you, uh, VMware ESX is, is kind of a key building block upon which you can build something that is a more meaningful distributed system. When it's just like a machine that you're provisioning VMs on, it's like, okay, well that's actually, you as the human might be the control plane. [00:28:52] Bryan: Like, that's, that, that's, that's a much easier problem. Um, but when you've got, you know, tens, hundreds, thousands of machines, you need to do it robustly. You need something to coordinate that activity and you know, you need to pick which sled you land on. You need to be able to move these things. You need to be able to update that whole system. [00:29:06] Bryan: That's when you're getting into a control plane. So, you know, some of these things have kind of edged into a control plane, certainly VMware. Um, now Broadcom, um, has delivered something that's kind of cloudish. Um, I think that for folks that are truly born on the cloud, it, it still feels somewhat, uh, like you're going backwards in time when you, when you look at these kind of on-prem offerings. [00:29:29] Bryan: Um, but, but it, it, it's got these aspects to it for sure. Um, and I think that we're, um, some of these other things when you're just looking at KVM or just looks looking at Proxmox you kind of need to, to connect it to other broader things to turn it into something that really looks like manageable infrastructure. [00:29:47] Bryan: And then many of those projects are really, they're either proprietary projects, uh, proprietary products like vSphere, um, or you are really dealing with open source projects that are. Not necessarily aimed at the same level of scale. Um, you know, you look at a, again, Proxmox or, uh, um, you'll get an OpenStack. [00:30:05] Bryan: Um, and you know, OpenStack is just a lot of things, right? I mean, OpenStack has got so many, the OpenStack was kind of a, a free for all, for every infrastructure vendor. Um, and I, you know, there was a time people were like, don't you, aren't you worried about all these companies together that, you know, are coming together for OpenStack? [00:30:24] Bryan: I'm like, haven't you ever worked for like a company? Like, companies don't get along. By the way, it's like having multiple companies work together on a thing that's bad news, not good news. And I think, you know, one of the things that OpenStack has definitely struggled with, kind of with what, actually the, the, there's so many different kind of vendor elements in there that it's, it's very much not a product, it's a project that you're trying to run. [00:30:47] Bryan: But that's, but that very much is in, I mean, that's, that's similar certainly in spirit. [00:30:53] Jeremy: And so I think this is kind of like you're alluding to earlier, the piece that allows you to allocate, compute, storage, manage networking, gives you that experience of I can go to a web console or I can use an API and I can spin up machines, get them all connected. At the end of the day, the control plane. Is allowing you to do that in hopefully a user-friendly way. [00:31:21] Bryan: That's right. Yep. And in the, I mean, in order to do that in a modern way, it's not just like a user-friendly way. You really need to have a CLI and a web UI and an API. Those all need to be drawn from the same kind of single ground truth. Like you don't wanna have any of those be an afterthought for the other. [00:31:39] Bryan: You wanna have the same way of generating all of those different endpoints and, and entries into the system. Building a control plane now has better tools (Rust, CockroachDB) [00:31:46] Jeremy: And if you take your time at Joyent as an example. What kind of tools existed for that versus how much did you have to build in-house for as far as the hypervisor and managing the compute and all that? [00:32:02] Bryan: Yeah, so we built more or less everything in house. I mean, what you have is, um, and I think, you know, over time we've gotten slightly better tools. Um, I think, and, and maybe it's a little bit easier to talk about the, kind of the tools we started at Oxide because we kind of started with a, with a clean sheet of paper at oxide. [00:32:16] Bryan: We wanted to, knew we wanted to go build a control plane, but we were able to kind of go revisit some of the components. So actually, and maybe I'll, I'll talk about some of those changes. So when we, at, For example, at Joyent, when we were building a cloud at Joyent, there wasn't really a good distributed database. [00:32:34] Bryan: Um, so we were using Postgres as our database for metadata and there were a lot of challenges. And Postgres is not a distributed database. It's running. With a primary secondary architecture, and there's a bunch of issues there, many of which we discovered the hard way. Um, when we were coming to oxide, you have much better options to pick from in terms of distributed databases. [00:32:57] Bryan: You know, we, there was a period that now seems maybe potentially brief in hindsight, but of a really high quality open source distributed databases. So there were really some good ones to, to pick from. Um, we, we built on CockroachDB on CRDB. Um, so that was a really important component. That we had at oxide that we didn't have at Joyent. [00:33:19] Bryan: Um, so we were, I wouldn't say we were rolling our own distributed database, we were just using Postgres and uh, and, and dealing with an enormous amount of pain there in terms of the surround. Um, on top of that, and, and, you know, a, a control plane is much more than a database, obviously. Uh, and you've gotta deal with, uh, there's a whole bunch of software that you need to go, right. [00:33:40] Bryan: Um, to be able to, to transform these kind of API requests into something that is reliable infrastructure, right? And there, there's a lot to that. Uh, especially when networking gets in the mix, when storage gets in the mix, uh, there are a whole bunch of like complicated steps that need to be done, um, at Joyent. [00:33:59] Bryan: Um, we, in part because of the history of the company and like, look. This, this just is not gonna sound good, but it just is what it is and I'm just gonna own it. We did it all in Node, um, at Joyent, which I, I, I know it sounds really right now, just sounds like, well, you, you built it with Tinker Toys. You Okay. [00:34:18] Bryan: Uh, did, did you think it was, you built the skyscraper with Tinker Toys? Uh, it's like, well, okay. We actually, we had greater aspirations for the Tinker Toys once upon a time, and it was better than, you know, than Twisted Python and Event Machine from Ruby, and we weren't gonna do it in Java. All right. [00:34:32] Bryan: So, but let's just say that that experiment, uh, that experiment did ultimately end in a predictable fashion. Um, and, uh, we, we decided that maybe Node was not gonna be the best decision long term. Um, Joyent was the company behind node js. Uh, back in the day, Ryan Dahl worked for Joyent. Uh, and then, uh, then we, we, we. [00:34:53] Bryan: Uh, landed that in a foundation in about, uh, what, 2015, something like that. Um, and began to consider our world beyond, uh, beyond Node. Rust at Oxide [00:35:04] Bryan: A big tool that we had in the arsenal when we started Oxide is Rust. Um, and so indeed the name of the company is, is a tip of the hat to the language that we were pretty sure we were gonna be building a lot of stuff in. [00:35:16] Bryan: Namely Rust. And, uh, rust is, uh, has been huge for us, a very important revolution in programming languages. you know, there, there, there have been different people kind of coming in at different times and I kinda came to Rust in what I, I think is like this big kind of second expansion of rust in 2018 when a lot of technologists were think, uh, sick of Node and also sick of Go. [00:35:43] Bryan: And, uh, also sick of C++. And wondering is there gonna be something that gives me the, the, the performance, of that I get outta C. The, the robustness that I can get out of a C program but is is often difficult to achieve. but can I get that with kind of some, some of the velocity of development, although I hate that term, some of the speed of development that you get out of a more interpreted language. [00:36:08] Bryan: Um, and then by the way, can I actually have types, I think types would be a good idea? Uh, and rust obviously hits the sweet spot of all of that. Um, it has been absolutely huge for us. I mean, we knew when we started the company again, oxide, uh, we were gonna be using rust in, in quite a, quite a. Few places, but we weren't doing it by fiat. [00:36:27] Bryan: Um, we wanted to actually make sure we're making the right decision, um, at, at every different, at every layer. Uh, I think what has been surprising is the sheer number of layers at which we use rust in terms of, we've done our own embedded firmware in rust. We've done, um, in, in the host operating system, which is still largely in C, but very big components are in rust. [00:36:47] Bryan: The hypervisor Propolis is all in rust. Uh, and then of course the control plane, that distributed system on that is all in rust. So that was a very important thing that we very much did not need to build ourselves. We were able to really leverage, uh, a terrific community. Um. We were able to use, uh, and we've done this at Joyent as well, but at Oxide, we've used Illumos as a hostos component, which, uh, our variant is called Helios. [00:37:11] Bryan: Um, we've used, uh, bhyve um, as a, as as that kind of internal hypervisor component. we've made use of a bunch of different open source components to build this thing, um, which has been really, really important for us. Uh, and open source components that didn't exist even like five years prior. [00:37:28] Bryan: That's part of why we felt that 2019 was the right time to start the company. And so we started Oxide. The problems building a control plane in Node [00:37:34] Jeremy: You had mentioned that at Joyent, you had tried to build this in, in Node. What were the, what were the, the issues or the, the challenges that you had doing that? [00:37:46] Bryan: Oh boy. Yeah. again, we, I kind of had higher hopes in 2010, I would say. When we, we set on this, um, the, the, the problem that we had just writ large, um. JavaScript is really designed to allow as many people on earth to write a program as possible, which is good. I mean, I, I, that's a, that's a laudable goal. [00:38:09] Bryan: That is the goal ultimately of such as it is of JavaScript. It's actually hard to know what the goal of JavaScript is, unfortunately, because Brendan Ike never actually wrote a book. so that there is not a canonical, you've got kind of Doug Crockford and other people who've written things on JavaScript, but it's hard to know kind of what the original intent of JavaScript is. [00:38:27] Bryan: The name doesn't even express original intent, right? It was called Live Script, and it was kind of renamed to JavaScript during the Java Frenzy of the late nineties. A name that makes no sense. There is no Java in JavaScript. that is kind of, I think, revealing to kind of the, uh, the unprincipled mess that is JavaScript. [00:38:47] Bryan: It, it, it's very pragmatic at some level, um, and allows anyone to, it makes it very easy to write software. The problem is it's much more difficult to write really rigorous software. So, uh, and this is what I should differentiate JavaScript from TypeScript. This is really what TypeScript is trying to solve. [00:39:07] Bryan: TypeScript is like. How can, I think TypeScript is a, is a great step forward because TypeScript is like, how can we bring some rigor to this? Like, yes, it's great that it's easy to write JavaScript, but that's not, we, we don't wanna do that for Absolutely. I mean that, that's not the only problem we solve. [00:39:23] Bryan: We actually wanna be able to write rigorous software and it's actually okay if it's a little harder to write rigorous software that's actually okay if it gets leads to, to more rigorous artifacts. Um, but in JavaScript, I mean, just a concrete example. You know, there's nothing to prevent you from referencing a property that doesn't actually exist in JavaScript. [00:39:43] Bryan: So if you fat finger a property name, you are relying on something to tell you. By the way, I think you've misspelled this because there is no type definition for this thing. And I don't know that you've got one that's spelled correctly, one that's spelled incorrectly, that's often undefined. And then the, when you actually go, you say you've got this typo that is lurking in your what you want to be rigorous software. [00:40:07] Bryan: And if you don't execute that code, like you won't know that's there. And then you do execute that code. And now you've got a, you've got an undefined object. And now that's either gonna be an exception or it can, again, depends on how that's handled. It can be really difficult to determine the origin of that, of, of that error, of that programming. [00:40:26] Bryan: And that is a programmer error. And one of the big challenges that we had with Node is that programmer errors and operational errors, like, you know, I'm out of disk space as an operational error. Those get conflated and it becomes really hard. And in fact, I think the, the language wanted to make it easier to just kind of, uh, drive on in the event of all errors. [00:40:53] Bryan: And it's like, actually not what you wanna do if you're trying to build a reliable, robust system. So we had. No end of issues. [00:41:01] Bryan: We've got a lot of experience developing rigorous systems, um, again coming out of operating systems development and so on. And we want, we brought some of that rigor, if strangely, to JavaScript. So one of the things that we did is we brought a lot of postmortem, diagnos ability and observability to node. [00:41:18] Bryan: And so if, if one of our node processes. Died in production, we would actually get a core dump from that process, a core dump that we could actually meaningfully process. So we did a bunch of kind of wild stuff. I mean, actually wild stuff where we could actually make sense of the JavaScript objects in a binary core dump. JavaScript values ease of getting started over robustness [00:41:41] Bryan: Um, and things that we thought were really important, and this is the, the rest of the world just looks at this being like, what the hell is this? I mean, it's so out of step with it. The problem is that we were trying to bridge two disconnected cultures of one developing really. Rigorous software and really designing it for production, diagnosability and the other, really designing it to software to run in the browser and for anyone to be able to like, you know, kind of liven up a webpage, right? [00:42:10] Bryan: Is kinda the origin of, of live script and then JavaScript. And we were kind of the only ones sitting at the intersection of that. And you begin when you are the only ones sitting at that kind of intersection. You just are, you're, you're kind of fighting a community all the time. And we just realized that we are, there were so many things that the community wanted to do that we felt are like, no, no, this is gonna make software less diagnosable. It's gonna make it less robust. The NodeJS split and why people left [00:42:36] Bryan: And then you realize like, I'm, we're the only voice in the room because we have got, we have got desires for this language that it doesn't have for itself. And this is when you realize you're in a bad relationship with software. It's time to actually move on. And in fact, actually several years after, we'd already kind of broken up with node. [00:42:55] Bryan: Um, and it was like, it was a bit of an acrimonious breakup. there was a, uh, famous slash infamous fork of node called IoJS Um, and this was viewed because people, the community, thought that Joyent was being what was not being an appropriate steward of node js and was, uh, not allowing more things to come into to, to node. [00:43:19] Bryan: And of course, the reason that we of course, felt that we were being a careful steward and we were actively resisting those things that would cut against its fitness for a production system. But it's some way the community saw it and they, and forked, um, and, and I think the, we knew before the fork that's like, this is not working and we need to get this thing out of our hands. Platform is a reflection of values node summit talk [00:43:43] Bryan: And we're are the wrong hands for this? This needs to be in a foundation. Uh, and so we kind of gone through that breakup, uh, and maybe it was two years after that. That, uh, friend of mine who was um, was running the, uh, the node summit was actually, it's unfortunately now passed away. Charles er, um, but Charles' venture capitalist great guy, and Charles was running Node Summit and came to me in 2017. [00:44:07] Bryan: He is like, I really want you to keynote Node Summit. And I'm like, Charles, I'm not gonna do that. I've got nothing nice to say. Like, this is the, the, you don't want, I'm the last person you wanna keynote. He's like, oh, if you have nothing nice to say, you should definitely keynote. You're like, oh God, okay, here we go. [00:44:22] Bryan: He's like, no, I really want you to talk about, like, you should talk about the Joyent breakup with NodeJS. I'm like, oh man. [00:44:29] Bryan: And that led to a talk that I'm really happy that I gave, 'cause it was a very important talk for me personally. Uh, called Platform is a reflection of values and really looking at the values that we had for Node and the values that Node had for itself. And they didn't line up. [00:44:49] Bryan: And the problem is that the values that Node had for itself and the values that we had for Node are all kind of positives, right? Like there's nobody in the node community who's like, I don't want rigor, I hate rigor. It's just that if they had the choose between rigor and making the language approachable. [00:45:09] Bryan: They would choose approachability every single time. They would never choose rigor. And, you know, that was a, that was a big eye-opener. I do, I would say, if you watch this talk. [00:45:20] Bryan: because I knew that there's, like, the audience was gonna be filled with, with people who, had been a part of the fork in 2014, I think was the, the, the, the fork, the IOJS fork. And I knew that there, there were, there were some, you know, some people that were, um, had been there for the fork and. [00:45:41] Bryan: I said a little bit of a trap for the audience. But the, and the trap, I said, you know what, I, I kind of talked about the values that we had and the aspirations we had for Node, the aspirations that Node had for itself and how they were different. [00:45:53] Bryan: And, you know, and I'm like, look in, in, in hindsight, like a fracture was inevitable. And in 2014 there was finally a fracture. And do people know what happened in 2014? And if you, if you, you could listen to that talk, everyone almost says in unison, like IOJS. I'm like, oh right. IOJS. Right. That's actually not what I was thinking of. [00:46:19] Bryan: And I go to the next slide and is a tweet from a guy named TJ Holloway, Chuck, who was the most prolific contributor to Node. And it was his tweet also in 2014 before the fork, before the IOJS fork explaining that he was leaving Node and that he was going to go. And you, if you turn the volume all the way up, you can hear the audience gasp. [00:46:41] Bryan: And it's just delicious because the community had never really come, had never really confronted why TJ left. Um, there. And I went through a couple folks, Felix, bunch of other folks, early Node folks. That were there in 2010, were leaving in 2014, and they were going to go primarily, and they were going to go because they were sick of the same things that we were sick of. [00:47:09] Bryan: They, they, they had hit the same things that we had hit and they were frustrated. I I really do believe this, that platforms do reflect their own values. And when you are making a software decision, you are selecting value. [00:47:26] Bryan: You should select values that align with the values that you have for that software. That is, those are, that's way more important than other things that people look at. I think people look at, for example, quote unquote community size way too frequently, community size is like. Eh, maybe it can be fine. [00:47:44] Bryan: I've been in very large communities, node. I've been in super small open source communities like AUMs and RAs, a bunch of others. there are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches just as like there's a strength to being in a big city versus a small town. Me personally, I'll take the small community more or less every time because the small community is almost always self-selecting based on values and just for the same reason that I like working at small companies or small teams. [00:48:11] Bryan: There's a lot of value to be had in a small community. It's not to say that large communities are valueless, but again, long answer to your question of kind of where did things go south with Joyent and node. They went south because the, the values that we had and the values the community had didn't line up and that was a very educational experience, as you might imagine. [00:48:33] Jeremy: Yeah. And, and given that you mentioned how, because of those values, some people moved from Node to go, and in the end for much of what oxide is building. You ended up using rust. What, what would you say are the, the values of go and and rust, and how did you end up choosing Rust given that. Go's decisions regarding generics, versioning, compilation speed priority [00:48:56] Bryan: Yeah, I mean, well, so the value for, yeah. And so go, I mean, I understand why people move from Node to Go, go to me was kind of a lateral move. Um, there were a bunch of things that I, uh, go was still garbage collected, um, which I didn't like. Um, go also is very strange in terms of there are these kind of like. [00:49:17] Bryan: These autocratic kind of decisions that are very bizarre. Um, there, I mean, generics is kind of a famous one, right? Where go kind of as a point of principle didn't have generics, even though go itself actually the innards of go did have generics. It's just that you a go user weren't allowed to have them. [00:49:35] Bryan: And you know, it's kind of, there was, there was an old cartoon years and years ago about like when a, when a technologist is telling you that something is technically impossible, that actually means I don't feel like it. Uh, and there was a certain degree of like, generics are technically impossible and go, it's like, Hey, actually there are. [00:49:51] Bryan: And so there was, and I just think that the arguments against generics were kind of disingenuous. Um, and indeed, like they ended up adopting generics and then there's like some super weird stuff around like, they're very anti-assertion, which is like, what, how are you? Why are you, how is someone against assertions, it doesn't even make any sense, but it's like, oh, nope. [00:50:10] Bryan: Okay. There's a whole scree on it. Nope, we're against assertions and the, you know, against versioning. There was another thing like, you know, the Rob Pike has kind of famously been like, you should always just run on the way to commit. And you're like, does that, is that, does that make sense? I mean this, we actually built it. [00:50:26] Bryan: And so there are a bunch of things like that. You're just like, okay, this is just exhausting and. I mean, there's some things about Go that are great and, uh, plenty of other things that I just, I'm not a fan of. Um, I think that the, in the end, like Go cares a lot about like compile time. It's super important for Go Right? [00:50:44] Bryan: Is very quick, compile time. I'm like, okay. But that's like compile time is not like, it's not unimportant, it's doesn't have zero importance. But I've got other things that are like lots more important than that. Um, what I really care about is I want a high performing artifact. I wanted garbage collection outta my life. Don't think garbage collection has good trade offs [00:51:00] Bryan: I, I gotta tell you, I, I like garbage collection to me is an embodiment of this like, larger problem of where do you put cognitive load in the software development process. And what garbage collection is saying to me it is right for plenty of other people and the software that they wanna develop. [00:51:21] Bryan: But for me and the software that I wanna develop, infrastructure software, I don't want garbage collection because I can solve the memory allocation problem. I know when I'm like, done with something or not. I mean, it's like I, whether that's in, in C with, I mean it's actually like, it's really not that hard to not leak memory in, in a C base system. [00:51:44] Bryan: And you can. give yourself a lot of tooling that allows you to diagnose where memory leaks are coming from. So it's like that is a solvable problem. There are other challenges with that, but like, when you are developing a really sophisticated system that has garbage collection is using garbage collection. [00:51:59] Bryan: You spend as much time trying to dork with the garbage collector to convince it to collect the thing that you know is garbage. You are like, I've got this thing. I know it's garbage. Now I need to use these like tips and tricks to get the garbage collector. I mean, it's like, it feels like every Java performance issue goes to like minus xx call and use the other garbage collector, whatever one you're using, use a different one and using a different, a different approach. [00:52:23] Bryan: It's like, so you're, you're in this, to me, it's like you're in the worst of all worlds where. the reason that garbage collection is helpful is because the programmer doesn't have to think at all about this problem. But now you're actually dealing with these long pauses in production. [00:52:38] Bryan: You're dealing with all these other issues where actually you need to think a lot about it. And it's kind of, it, it it's witchcraft. It, it, it's this black box that you can't see into. So it's like, what problem have we solved exactly? And I mean, so the fact that go had garbage collection, it's like, eh, no, I, I do not want, like, and then you get all the other like weird fatwahs and you know, everything else. [00:52:57] Bryan: I'm like, no, thank you. Go is a no thank you for me, I, I get it why people like it or use it, but it's, it's just, that was not gonna be it. Choosing Rust [00:53:04] Bryan: I'm like, I want C. but I, there are things I didn't like about C too. I was looking for something that was gonna give me the deterministic kind of artifact that I got outta C. But I wanted library support and C is tough because there's, it's all convention. you know, there's just a bunch of other things that are just thorny. And I remember thinking vividly in 2018, I'm like, well, it's rust or bust. Ownership model, algebraic types, error handling [00:53:28] Bryan: I'm gonna go into rust. And, uh, I hope I like it because if it's not this, it's gonna like, I'm gonna go back to C I'm like literally trying to figure out what the language is for the back half of my career. Um, and when I, you know, did what a lot of people were doing at that time and people have been doing since of, you know, really getting into rust and really learning it, appreciating the difference in the, the model for sure, the ownership model people talk about. [00:53:54] Bryan: That's also obviously very important. It was the error handling that blew me away. And the idea of like algebraic types, I never really had algebraic types. Um, and the ability to, to have. And for error handling is one of these really, uh, you, you really appreciate these things where it's like, how do you deal with a, with a function that can either succeed and return something or it can fail, and the way c deals with that is bad with these kind of sentinels for errors. [00:54:27] Bryan: And, you know, does negative one mean success? Does negative one mean failure? Does zero mean failure? Some C functions, zero means failure. Traditionally in Unix, zero means success. And like, what if you wanna return a file descriptor, you know, it's like, oh. And then it's like, okay, then it'll be like zero through positive N will be a valid result. [00:54:44] Bryan: Negative numbers will be, and like, was it negative one and I said airo, or is it a negative number that did not, I mean, it's like, and that's all convention, right? People do all, all those different things and it's all convention and it's easy to get wrong, easy to have bugs, can't be statically checked and so on. Um, and then what Go says is like, well, you're gonna have like two return values and then you're gonna have to like, just like constantly check all of these all the time. Um, which is also kind of gross. Um, JavaScript is like, Hey, let's toss an exception. If, if we don't like something, if we see an error, we'll, we'll throw an exception. [00:55:15] Bryan: There are a bunch of reasons I don't like that. Um, and you look, you'll get what Rust does, where it's like, no, no, no. We're gonna have these algebra types, which is to say this thing can be a this thing or that thing, but it, but it has to be one of these. And by the way, you don't get to process this thing until you conditionally match on one of these things. [00:55:35] Bryan: You're gonna have to have a, a pattern match on this thing to determine if it's a this or a that, and if it in, in the result type that you, the result is a generic where it's like, it's gonna be either the thing that you wanna return. It's gonna be an okay that contains the thing you wanna return, or it's gonna be an error that contains your error and it forces your code to deal with that. [00:55:57] Bryan: And what that does is it shifts the cognitive load from the person that is operating this thing in production to the, the actual developer that is in development. And I think that that, that to me is like, I, I love that shift. Um, and that shift to me is really important. Um, and that's what I was missing, that that's what Rust gives you. [00:56:23] Bryan: Rust forces you to think about your code as you write it, but as a result, you have an artifact that is much more supportable, much more sustainable, and much faster. Prefer to frontload cognitive load during development instead of at runtime [00:56:34] Jeremy: Yeah, it sounds like you would rather take the time during the development to think about these issues because whether it's garbage collection or it's error handling at runtime when you're trying to solve a problem, then it's much more difficult than having dealt with it to start with. [00:56:57] Bryan: Yeah, absolutely. I, and I just think that like, why also, like if it's software, if it's, again, if it's infrastructure software, I mean the kinda the question that you, you should have when you're writing software is how long is this software gonna live? How many people are gonna use this software? Uh, and if you are writing an operating system, the answer for this thing that you're gonna write, it's gonna live for a long time. [00:57:18] Bryan: Like, if we just look at plenty of aspects of the system that have been around for a, for decades, it's gonna live for a long time and many, many, many people are gonna use it. Why would we not expect people writing that software to have more cognitive load when they're writing it to give us something that's gonna be a better artifact? [00:57:38] Bryan: Now conversely, you're like, Hey, I kind of don't care about this. And like, I don't know, I'm just like, I wanna see if this whole thing works. I've got, I like, I'm just stringing this together. I don't like, no, the software like will be lucky if it survives until tonight, but then like, who cares? Yeah. Yeah. [00:57:52] Bryan: Gar garbage clock. You know, if you're prototyping something, whatever. And this is why you really do get like, you know, different choices, different technology choices, depending on the way that you wanna solve the problem at hand. And for the software that I wanna write, I do like that cognitive load that is upfront. With LLMs maybe you can get the benefit of the robust artifact with less cognitive load [00:58:10] Bryan: Um, and although I think, I think the thing that is really wild that is the twist that I don't think anyone really saw coming is that in a, in an LLM age. That like the cognitive load upfront almost needs an asterisk on it because so much of that can be assisted by an LLM. And now, I mean, I would like to believe, and maybe this is me being optimistic, that the the, in the LLM age, we will see, I mean, rust is a great fit for the LLMH because the LLM itself can get a lot of feedback about whether the software that's written is correct or not. [00:58:44] Bryan: Much more so than you can for other environments. [00:58:48] Jeremy: Yeah, that is a interesting point in that I think when people first started trying out the LLMs to code, it was really good at these maybe looser languages like Python or JavaScript, and initially wasn't so good at something like Rust. But it sounds like as that improves, if. It can write it then because of the rigor or the memory management or the error handling that the language is forcing you to do, it might actually end up being a better choice for people using LLMs. [00:59:27] Bryan: absolutely. I, it, it gives you more certainty in the artifact that you've delivered. I mean, you know a lot about a Rust program that compiles correctly. I mean, th there are certain classes of errors that you don't have, um, that you actually don't know on a C program or a GO program or a, a JavaScript program. [00:59:46] Bryan: I think that's gonna be really important. I think we are on the cusp. Maybe we've already seen it, this kind of great bifurcation in the software that we writ

OpenZFS monitoring, hellosystems 0.8, GhostBSD and XLibre, Bhyve Exporters and 30 year old LibC issues. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines OpenZFS Monitoring and Observability: What to Track and Why It Matters helloSystem 0.8 Released FreeBSD Based OS Inspired by macOS. https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/hellosystem-08-released-freebsd-based-os-inspired-by-macos/ News Roundup [Default GhostBSD to XLibre](https://github.com/ghostbsd/ghostbsd-build/pull/259] Addressing XLibre Change and GhostBSD Future Bhyve Prometheus Exporter for Sylve on FreeBSD. Linux GNU C Library Fixes Security Issue Present Since 1996 Beastie Bits NetBSD 11.0 RC1 available! The Book of PF, 4th Edition is now available December 2025 Finance Report LLDB improvements on FreeBSD Any desire for OnmiOS/Illumos Support : Now's your chance to convince me Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by special guests Samvit Mishra and Rashmi Panda for an in-depth discussion on security and migration with Oracle Database@AWS. Samvit shares essential security best practices, compliance guidance, and data protection mechanisms to safeguard Oracle databases in AWS, while Rashmi walks through Oracle's powerful Zero-Downtime Migration (ZDM) tool, explaining how to achieve seamless, reliable migrations with minimal disruption.   Oracle Database@AWS Architect Professional: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-databaseaws-architect-professional/155574 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Anna Hulkower, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services. Lois: Hello again! We're continuing our discussion on Oracle Database@AWS and in today's episode, we're going to talk about the aspects of security and migration with two special guests: Samvit Mishra and Rashmi Panda. Samvit is a Senior Manager and Rashmi is a Senior Principal Database Instructor.  00:59 Nikita: Hi Samvit and Rashmi! Samvit, let's begin with you. What are the recommended security best practices and data protection mechanisms for Oracle Database@AWS? Samvit: Instead of everyone using the root account, which has full access, we create individual users with AWS, IAM, Identity Center, or IAM service. And in addition, you must use multi-factor authentication. So basically, as an example, you need a password and a temporary code from virtual MFA app to log in to the console.  Always use SSL or TLS to communicate with AWS services. This ensures data in transit is encrypted. Without TLS, the sensitive information like credentials or database queries can be intercepted. AWS CloudTrail records every action taken in your AWS account-- who did what, when, and from where. This helps with audit, troubleshooting, and detecting suspicious activity. So you must set up API and user activity logging with AWS CloudTrail.  Use AWS encryption solutions along with all default security controls within AWS services. To store and manage keys by using transparent data encryption, which is enabled by default, Oracle Database@AWS uses OCI vaults. Currently, Oracle Database@AWS doesn't support the AWS Key Management Service. You should also use advanced managed security services such as Amazon Macie, which assists in discovering and securing sensitive data that is stored in Amazon S3.  03:08 Lois: And how does Oracle Database@AWS deliver strong security and compliance? Samvit: Oracle Database@AWS enforces transparent data encryption for all data at REST, ensuring stored information is always protected. Data in transit is secured using SSL and Native Network Encryption, providing end-to-end confidentiality. Oracle Database@AWS also uses OCI Vault for centralized and secure key management. This allows organizations to manage encryption keys with fine-grained control, rotation policies, and audit capabilities to ensure compliance with regulatory standards. At the database level, Oracle Database@AWS supports unified auditing and fine-grained auditing to track user activity and sensitive operations. At the resource level, AWS CloudTrail and OCI audit service provide comprehensive visibility into API calls and configuration changes. At the database level, security is enforced using database access control lists and Database Firewall to restrict unauthorized connections. At the VPC level, network ACLs and security groups provide layered network isolation and access control. Again, at the database level, Oracle Database@AWS enforces access controls to Database Vault, Virtual Private Database, and row-level security to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. And at a resource level, AWS IAM policies, groups, and roles manage user permissions with the fine-grained control. 05:27 Lois Samvit, what steps should users be taking to keep their databases secure? Samvit: Security is not a single feature but a layered approach covering user access, permissions, encryption, patching, and monitoring. The first step is controlling who can access your database and how they connect. At the user level, strong password policies ensure only authorized users can login. And at the network level, private subnets and network security group allow you to isolate database traffic and restrict access to trusted applications only. One of the most critical risks is accidental or unauthorized deletion of database resources. To mitigate this, grant delete permissions only to a minimal set of administrators. This reduces the risk of downtime caused by human error or malicious activity. Encryption ensures that even if the data is exposed, it cannot be read. By default, all databases in OCI are encrypted using transparent data encryption. For migrated databases, you must verify encryption is enabled and active. Best practice is to rotate the transparent data encryption master key every 90 days or less to maintain compliance and limit exposure in case of key compromise. Unpatched databases are one of the most common entry points for attackers. Always apply Oracle critical patch updates on schedule. This mitigates known vulnerabilities and ensures your environment remains protected against emerging threats. 07:33 Nikita: Beyond what users can do, are there any built-in features or tools from Oracle that really help with database security? Samvit: Beyond the basics, Oracle provides powerful database security tools. Features like data masking allow you to protect sensitive information in non-production environments. Auditing helps you monitor database activity and detect anomalies or unauthorized access. Oracle Data Safe is a managed service that takes database security to the next level. It can access your database configuration for weaknesses. It can also detect risky user accounts and privileges, identify and classify sensitive data. It can also implement controls such as masking to protect that data. And it can also continuously audit user activity to ensure compliance and accountability. Now, transparent data encryption enables you to encrypt sensitive data that you store in tables and tablespaces. It also enables you to encrypt database backups. After the data is encrypted, this data is transparently decrypted for authorized users or applications when they access that data. You can configure OCI Vault as a part of the transparent data encryption implementation. This enables you to centrally manage keystore in your enterprise. So OCI Vault gives centralized control over encryption keys, including key rotation and customer managed keys. 09:23 Lois: So obviously, lots of companies have to follow strict regulations. How does Oracle Database@AWS help customers with compliance?  Samvit: Oracle Database@AWS has achieved a broad and rigorous set of compliance certifications. The service supports SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3, as well as HIPAA for health care data protection. If we talk about SOC 1, that basically covers internal controls for financial statements and reporting. SOC 2 covers internal controls for security, confidentiality, processing integrity, privacy, and availability. SOC 3 covers SOC 2 results tailored for a general audience. And HIPAA is a federal law that protects patients' health information and ensures its confidentiality, integrity, and availability. It also holds certifications and attestations such as CSA STAR, C5. Now C5 is a German government standard that verifies cloud providers meet strict security and compliance requirements. CSA STAR attestation is an independent third-party audit of cloud security controls. CSA STAR certification also validates a cloud provider's security posture against CSA's cloud controls matrix. And HDS is a French certification that ensures cloud providers meet stringent requirements for hosting and protecting health care data. Oracle Database@AWS also holds ISO and IEC standards. You can also see PCI DSS, which is basically for payment card security and HITRUST, which is for high assurance health care framework. So, these certifications ensure that Oracle Database@AWS not only adheres to best practices in security and privacy, but also provides customers with assurance that their workloads align with globally recognized compliance regimes. 11:47 Nikita: Thank you, Samvit. Now Rashmi, can you walk us through Oracle's migration solution that helps teams move to OCI Database Services? Rashmi: Oracle Zero-Downtime Migration is a robust and flexible end-to-end database migration solution that can completely automate and streamline the migration of Oracle databases. With bare minimum inputs from you, it can orchestrate and execute the entire migration task, virtually needing no manual effort from you. And the best part is you can use this tool for free to migrate your source Oracle databases to OCI Oracle Database Services faster and reliably, eliminating the chances of human errors. You can migrate individual databases or migrate an entire fleet of databases in parallel. 12:34 Nikita: Ok. For someone planning a migration with ZDM, are there any key points they should keep in mind?  Rashmi: When migrating using ZDM, your source databases may require minimal downtime up to 15 minutes or no downtime at all, depending upon the scenario. It is built with the principles of Oracle maximum availability architecture and leverages technologies like Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Guard to achieve high availability and online migration workflow using Oracle migration methods like RMAN, Data Pump, and Database Links. Depending on the migration requirement, ZDM provides different migration method options. It can be logical or physical migration in an online or offline mode. Under the hood, it utilizes the different database migration technologies to perform the migration. 13:23 Lois: Can you give us an example of this? Rashmi: When you are migrating a mission critical production database, you can use the logical online migration method. And when you are migrating a development database, you can simply choose the physical offline migration method. As part of the migration job, you can perform database upgrades or convert your database to multitenant architecture. ZDM offers greater flexibility and automation in performing the database migration. You can customize workflow by adding pre or postrun scripts as part of the workflow. Run prechecks to check for possible failures that may arise during migration and fix them. Audit migration jobs activity and user actions. Control the execution like schedule a job pause, resume, if needed, suspend and resume the job, schedule the job or terminate a running job. You can even rerun a job from failure point and other such capabilities. 14:13 Lois: And what kind of migration scenarios does ZDM support? Rashmi: The minimum version of your source Oracle Database must be 11.2.0.4 and above. For lower versions, you will have to first upgrade to at least 11.2.0.4. You can migrate Oracle databases that may be of the Standard or Enterprise edition. ZDM supports migration of Oracle databases, which may be a single-instance, or RAC One Node, or RAC databases. It can migrate on Unix platforms like Linux, Oracle Solaris, and AIX. For Oracle databases on AIX and Oracle Solaris platform, ZDM uses logical migration method. But if the source platform is Linux, it can use both physical and logical migration method. You can use ZDM to migrate databases that may be on premises, or in third-party cloud, or even within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. ZDM leverages Oracle technologies like RMAN datacom, Database Links, Data Guard, Oracle GoldenGate when choosing a specific migration workflow. 15:15 Are you ready to revolutionize the way you work? Discover a wide range of Oracle AI Database courses that help you master the latest AI-powered tools and boost your career prospects. Start learning today at mylearn.oracle.com. 15:35 Nikita: Welcome back! Rashmi, before someone starts using ZDM, is there any prep work they should do or things they need to set up first? Rashmi: Working with ZDM needs few simple configuration. Zero-downtime migration provides a command line interface to run your migration job. First, you have to download the ZDM binary, preferably download from my Oracle Support, where you can get the binary with the latest updates. Set up and configure the binary by following the instructions available at the same invoice node. The host in which ZDM is installed and configured is called the zero-downtime migration service host. The host has to be Oracle Linux version 7 or 8, or it can be RCL 8. Next is the orchestration step where connection to the source and target is configured and tested like SSH configuration with source and target, opening the ports in respective destinations, creation of dump destination, granting required database privileges. Prepare the response file with parameter values that define the workflow that ZDM should use during Oracle Database migration. You can also customize the migration workflow using the response file. You can plug in run scripts to be executed before or after a specific phase of the migration job. These customizations are called custom plugins with user actions. Your sources may be hosted on-premises or OCI-managed database services, or even third-party cloud. They may be Oracle Database Standard or Enterprise edition and on accelerator infrastructure or a standard compute. The target can be of the same type as the source. But additionally, ZDM supports migration to multicloud deployments on Oracle Database@Azure, Oracle Database@Google Cloud, and Oracle Database@AWS. You begin with a migration strategy where you list the different databases that can be migrated, classification of the databases, grouping them, performing three migration checks like dependencies, downtime requirement versions, and preparing the order migration, the target migration environment, et cetera. 17:27 Lois: What migration methods and technologies does ZDM rely on to complete the move? Rashmi: There are primarily two types of migration: physical or logical. Physical migration pertains to copy of the database OS blocks to the target database, whereas in logical migration, it involves copying of the logical elements of the database like metadata and data. Each of these migration methods can be executed when the database is online or offline. In online mode, migration is performed simultaneously while the changes are in progress in the source database. While in offline mode, all changes to the source database is frozen. For physical offline migration, it uses backup and restore technique, while with the physical online, it creates a physical standby using backup and restore, and then performing a switchover once the standby is in sync with the source database. For logical offline migration, it exports and imports database metadata and data into the target database, while in logical online migration, it is a combination of export and import operation, followed by apply of incremental updates from the source to the target database. The physical or logical offline migration method is used when the source database of the application can allow some downtime for the migration. The physical or logical online migration approach is ideal for scenarios where any downtime for the source database can badly affect critical applications. The only downtime that can be tolerated by the application is only during the application connection switchover to the migrated database. One other advantage is ZDM can migrate one or a fleet of Oracle databases by executing multiple jobs in parallel, where each job workflow can be customized to a specific database need. It can perform physical or logical migration of your Oracle databases.  And whether it should be performed online or offline depends on the downtime that can be approved by business. 19:13 Nikita: Samvit and Rashmi, thanks for joining us today. Lois: Yeah, it's been great to have you both. If you want to dive deeper into the topics we covered today, go to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database@AWS Architect Professional course. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 19:35 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Jake Hamilton, founder of Groundwire and Nockbox, to explore zero-knowledge proofs, Bitcoin identity systems, and the intersection of privacy-preserving cryptography with AI and blockchain technology. They discuss how ZK proofs could offer an alternative to invasive identity verification systems being rolled out by governments worldwide, the potential for continual learning AI models to shift the balance between centralized and open-source development, and why building secure, auditable computing infrastructure on platforms like Urbit matters more than ever as we face an explosion of AI agents and automated systems. Jake also explains Nockchain's approach to creating a global repository of cryptographically verified facts that can power trustless programmable systems, and how these technologies might converge to solve problems around supply chain security, personal data sovereignty, and resistance to censorship.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to Groundwire and Knockbox02:48 Understanding Zero-Knowledge Proofs06:04 Government Adoption of ZK Proofs08:55 The Future of Identity Verification11:52 AI and ZK Proofs: A New Era14:54 The Role of Urbit in Technology18:03 The Impact of COVID on Trust20:51 The Evolution of AI and Data Privacy23:47 The Future of AI Models26:54 The Need for Local AI Solutions29:51 Interoperability of Knockchain and BitcoinKey Insights1. Zero-Knowledge Proofs Enable Privacy-Preserving Verification: Jake explains that ZK proofs allow you to prove computational outcomes without revealing the underlying data. For example, you could prove you're over 18 without exposing your full identity or driver's license information. The proof demonstrates that a specific program ran through certain steps and reached a particular conclusion, and validating this proof is fast and compact. This technology has profound implications for age verification, identity systems, and protecting privacy while maintaining necessary compliance, potentially offering a middle path between surveillance states and complete anonymity.2. Government Adoption of Privacy Technology Remains Uncertain: There are three competing motivations driving government identity verification systems: genuine surveillance desires, bureaucratic efficiency seeking, and legitimate child protection concerns. Jake believes these groups can be separated, with some officials potentially supporting ZK-based solutions if positioned correctly. He notes the EU is exploring ZK identity verification, and UK officials have shown interest. The key is framing privacy-preserving technology as protection against "the swamp" rather than just abstract privacy benefits, which could resonate with certain political constituencies.3. The COVID Era Destroyed Institutional Trust at Unprecedented Scale: The conversation identifies COVID as potentially the largest institutional trust-burning event in human history, with numerous institutions simultaneously losing credibility with large portions of the population. This represents a dramatic shift from the boomer generation's default trust in authority figures and mainstream media. This collapse is compounded by the incoming AI revolution, creating a perfect storm where established bureaucracies cannot adapt quickly enough to manage rapidly evolving technology, leaving society in fundamentally unmanageable territory.4. Centralized AI Models Create Dangerous Dependencies: Both speakers acknowledge growing dependence on centralized AI services like Claude, with some users spending thousands monthly on tokens. This dependency creates vulnerability to price increases and service disruptions. Jake advocates for local AI deployment using models like DeepSeek R1, running on personal hardware to maintain control and privacy. The shift toward continuous learning models will fundamentally change the AI landscape, making personal data harvesting even more valuable and raising urgent questions about compensation and consent for training data contribution.5. High-Quality Training Data Is Becoming the Primary AI Bottleneck: Stewart argues that AI development is now limited more by high-quality training data than by compute power. The industry has exhausted easily accessible internet data and body-shop-style data labeling. Companies are now using specialized boutique services with techniques like head-mounted cameras for live-streaming world model training. This scarcity is subtly driving price increases across AI services and will fundamentally reshape the economics of AI development, with implications for who controls these increasingly powerful systems.6. Urbit Offers a Foundation for Trustworthy Computing: Jake positions Urbit as essential infrastructure for the AI age because its 30,000-line codebase (versus Unix's three million lines) can be understood by individual humans. Its deterministic, purely functional, and strictly typed design aims for eventual ossification—software that doesn't require constant security patches. This "tiny and diamond perfect" approach addresses the fundamental insecurity of systems requiring monthly vulnerability patches. In an era of AI agents and potential prompt injection attacks, having verifiable, comprehensible computing infrastructure becomes existentially important rather than merely desirable.7. Nockchain Creates a Global Repository of Provable Truth: Jake's vision for Nockchain combines ZK proofs with blockchain technology to create a globally available "truth repository" where verified facts can be programmatically accessed together. This enables smart contracts or programs gated on combinations of proven facts—such as temperature readings from secure devices, supply chain events, and payment confirmations. By using Nock's abstract, simple design optimized for ZK proof generation, the system can validate complex real-world conditions without exposing underlying data, creating infrastructure for coordinating action based on verifiable private information at global scale.

Who wants to hear me make incorrect assumptions about old software? RSX is a system that, from the outside, can sound like it has a similar story to that of UNIX. First developed for the PDP-15 in 1969, RSX becomes much more well known when it migrates to the PDP-11. It becomes a multitasking and multiuser system. A key difference is niche. While UNIX is a very general purpose system RSX is built for real time. That leads to something very unique.

GeoIP PF FreeBSD, ZFs in production, linuxulator feels like magic, XFCE is great, the scariest boot code, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines GeoIP-Aware Firewalling with PF on FreeBSD ZFS in Production: Real-World Deployment Patterns and Pitfalls News Roundup Xfce is great Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic The scariest boot loader code OpenBSD-current now runs as guest under Apple Hypervisor Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Matt - Audio Levels Interviews can be troublesome because there's only so much we can do with multiple guests with multiple feeds, and mulitple audio conditions. We can try to normalize but sometimes it's just not easy to do without editing taking an entire day.. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

AT&T's $2000 shell, ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity, FFS Backups, FreeBSD Home Nas, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines One too many words on AT&T's $2,000 Korn shell and other Usenet topics Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity News Roundup FFS Backup FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1) 8 more parts! Beastie Bits The BSD Proposal UNIX Magic Poster Haiku OS Pulls In Updated Drivers From FreeBSD 15 FreeBSD 15.0 VNET Jails Call for NetBSD testing Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Gary - Links Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This series is dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems. As the zeroth entry of this series, we'll have a little introduction to what it is supposed to be about and why you might want to listen. So that you don't leave without getting at least one piece of useful information, it will end with a little curio that you might find helpful someday. Back in 2010, I was the editor of the newsletter, titled The Open Pitt, for the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group in Pittsburgh. We distributed it as a two-page PDF, so had to have enough material to fill each issue. Because we were having some trouble getting contributions, I started writing columns in a series called "UNIX Curio" to occupy the empty space. They were inspired in large part by examples I had seen of people re-inventing ways to do things when utilities for the same purpose had already existed for a long time. The obvious question is: just what is a UNIX Curio? Let's start with the first word, UNIX. While a lot of people write it "Unix" instead, I have chosen to put it in all capitals because that is the way The Open Group, which controls the trademark and the certification process to use it, spells the word 1 . The history of UNIX is complex (search online for more details 2 )—the short version is that many variants emerged, often introducing incompatibilities. Even within AT&T/Bell Laboratories, two major branches came out. The Research UNIX lineage, which includes Seventh Edition (sometimes called Version 7), was often used in universities and government while System III and its more popular successor System V were clearly intended as commercial products 3 . The University of California's BSD was also very influential. My intention is to talk about things that are relatively common; ideally, they would be present on a large majority of systems so you can actually use them. Luckily, there were people who recognized the value in compatibility, so in the mid-1980s they initiated the development of the POSIX standards 4 . Publication of these not only caused commercial UNIX versions to aim for conformance—it gave Free Software implementations of utilities and operating systems a stable base to shoot for rather than having to chase multiple moving targets. As a result, today's GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD systems generally behave as specified in POSIX, even if they haven't officially earned the UNIX or POSIX labels, so I treat them as part of the UNIX world. Moving on to the second word, "curio," it just means "an object of curiosity, often one considered novel, rare, or bizarre." There are many well-used utilities in the UNIX world, but people forget about others because they are only useful in specific circumstances. And when those circumstances arise, these obscure ones don't always get remembered. One purpose of this series is to point out some of them and describe where they can be appropriately put to use. With the flexible tools available on UNIX systems and the ability to string them together, it shouldn't be surprising that people come up with new ways to accomplish a task. I don't want to claim that these curios are always the best way to do something, just that it can be helpful to know they exist and see the way someone else solved the problem. Also, if you're using an unfamiliar system, sometimes programs you are accustomed to employing might not be installed so it's good to know about options that are widely available. So why am I the person to talk about this subject? I am not a UNIX graybeard with decades of professional computing experience. If I did grow a beard, it would only be partially gray, and my working life has been spent in the engineering world mainly around safety equipment. Sadly, there I have been forced to use Windows almost exclusively. However, in my academic and personal pursuits, I have been involved with using UNIX and Linux for more than 30 years, so I do have a bit of a historical perspective. For some reason, when I encounter an unusual or obscure tool, I want to learn more about it, especially so if I find it to be useful in some way. After gaining that information, I might as well share it with you. In addition, I have been involved with Toastmasters International, a public speaking organization, for about 15 years so I have experience in presenting things orally. I was inspired to turn this article series into podcasts by murph 5 , who delivered a presentation at the 2025 OLF Conference describing how and why to contribute to Hacker Public Radio 6 . The show notes for curios 1 through 3 will consist of the articles as they were originally written (though with references added). Because some examples, especially code, can be difficult to understand when they are read out loud, the podcasts will sometimes present the information in a different way. Show notes for this curio 0 and for curios 4 and later will be written with the podcast format in mind, so they will more closely match what I say. Let's end with an actual curio to kick off the series. Have you ever needed a quick reminder about whether the file you're looking for can be found under the /usr or /var directories? On many UNIX systems, man hier will give you an overview of how the file hierarchy is organized. This manual page is not a standard, but was present in Seventh Edition UNIX 7 and many descendents, direct and indirect, including every Linux distribution I have ever used. There are attempts to standardize the layout; in the Linux world, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) 8 , now hosted by Freedesktop.org 9 , intends to set a path to be followed. It should be noted that systemd has its own idea of how things should be laid out based on the FHS; if it is in use, try man file-hierarchy instead as it will likely be a more accurate description. I hope this gives you a good idea of what to expect in future episodes. The first one will be about shell archives, so keep an eye on Hacker Public Radio's schedule for it to appear. References: The Open Group Trademarks https://www.opengroup.org/trademarks History of Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix The Unix Tutorial, Part 3 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-10/page/n133/mode/2up POSIX Impact https://sites.google.com/site/jimisaak/posix-impact Correspondent: murph https://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents/0444.html OLF Conference - December 6th, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyEunLtqbrA&t=25882 File system hierarchy https://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th/7/hier Finding a successor to the FHS https://lwn.net/Articles/1032947/ Freedesktop.org now hosts the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard https://lwn.net/Articles/1045405/ Provide feedback on this episode.

农历新年将至。本期节目，在近期新闻播报之后，我们将久违地与大家分享几则听众留言。 参考链接 TDC27 正在征稿中，最终截止日期为 2 月 27 日 汉仪第六届字体之星设计大赛获奖名单公布 Seoul Arim，全新设计的韩国首尔地铁导示字体，由 July Type 及 Tlab 合作设计 Frutiger字体原名 Roissy，原型是为法国巴黎戴高乐机场所定制的导示字体 “It's hard to justify Tahoe icons”，Nikita Prokopov 撰文批评 macOS Tahoe 的图标设计，另有 Nullpinter 及少数派翻译的中文版 SF Symbols，Apple 推出的图标系统 字谈字畅 274：鞋合不合脚要穿一下才知道 字谈字畅 273：寻找中文的字体排印师 字谈字畅 272：「我确实觉得这个字体不太庄重」 “We can all be friends: Times New Roman vs Calibri”，Si Daniels 在 Microsoft Design 发布的文章 “From paper to pixels: The evolution of ClearType and onscreen reading”，Tracy Jones 在 Microsoft Design 发布的文章 alias，类 Unix 系统中的 shell 命令之一 字谈字畅 270：「这个奖可以推着我」 《陀飞轮》，陈奕迅演唱的粤语歌曲，黄伟文作词 主播 Eric：字体排印研究者、译者，The Type 执行编辑 蒸鱼：设计师，The Type 编辑 欢迎与我们交流或反馈，来信请致 podcast@thetype.com​。如果你喜爱本期节目，也欢迎用支付宝向我们捐赠：hello@thetype.com​。

UNIX is beloved by many. It's the classic minicomputer operating system. It's big, it's powerful, it's multitasking, and it has some very specific memory requirements. So what happens when you try and get UNIX to run on a microcomputer? Hilarity ensues. Today we are looking at 3 small versions of UNIX: OMNIX, LSX, and CROMIX. And, I'll tell you, one of these is closer to vaporware than the others.

ZFS Scrubs and Data integrity, Propolice, FreeBSD vs Slackware and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity The story of Propolice Desk reviews describe comment ask questions No reponses, no justications. [Tj's Desk](media/bsdnow649-tjs-desk.jpg) [Ruben's Desk](media/bsdnow649-rubens-desk.jpg) News Roundup FreeBSD vs. Slackware: Which super stable OS is right for you? Prometheus, Let's Encrypt, and making sure all our TLS certificates are monitored Wait, a repairable ThinkPad!? Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

An airhacks.fm conversation with Simon Ritter (@speakjava) about: first computer experiences with TRS-80 and mainframe ALGOL68 programming via punched cards in the 1970s UK, one-week turnaround times for program execution, writing battleship games on mainframes, bbc micro with color graphics and dual floppy drives, father's influence as a tech enthusiast with a PDP-8 in his chemistry lab, early fascination with robotics and controlling machines through programming, writing card games and Mandelbrot set fractal generators in Basic, transition from BASIC to C programming through sponsored university degree, working at Rocc Computers on Unix device drivers and kernel debugging, the teleputer, memory leak debugging requiring half-inch mag tape transfers and two-week investigation periods, AT&T Unix source code license access and kernel modifications, Unix System V Release 4 and Bell Labs heritage, Motorola 68000 processor's flat memory model versus Intel's near/far pointers, Novell acquisition of Unix from AT&T in 1993, Unixware development and time spent in Utah, SCO's acquisition of Unix IP and subsequent IP trolling, joining Sun Microsystems in 1996 as Solaris sales engineer, transition to Java evangelism in 1997, working under Reggie Hutcherson and Matt Thompson for nearly 10 years, building Lego Mindstorms blackjack-dealing robot with Java speech recognition and computer vision, using Sphinx for voice recognition and FreeTTS for speech synthesis, JMF webcam integration for card recognition, JavaOne 2004 robot demonstration, Glassfish application server evangelism and reference implementation benefits, Sun's technology focus versus business development challenges, CDE desktop environment nostalgia, Oracle acquisition of Sun in 2010, Jonathan Schwartz's acquisition announcement email, Oracle's successful stewardship of Java through openJDK, praise for Brian Goetz Mark Reinhold John Rose and Stuart Marks, six-month release cycle benefits, Project Amber Loom Panama and Valhalla developments, OpenSolaris discontinuation leading to docker adoption for server containerization, Oracle's 2015 pivot to cloud focus, career-defining conversation in Japan about cloud versus Java evangelism, layoff during vacation in September 2015, joining Azul Systems after three-and-a-half-hour interview with Gil Tene, ten years at Azul working on high-performance JVM Platform Prime garbage collection and CRaC technology, comparison of Azul culture to Sun Microsystems innovation environment, commercial Java distribution value propositions and runtime inventory features Simon Ritter on twitter: @speakjava

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. 1985, I started to work at a telecom equipment manufacturer. We had a main frame computer in our combined office- and lab room. We were four sitting in the room and it was this one terminal for all of us and maybe even for someone more. Downstairs, we at component technology department had our big climate controlled laboratories. I used an HP 85 computer having the Basic programming language to automize measurements of resistors. And there were several more of them for other measurements of various electronic components. Also more advanced computers were used in the labs and as I recall also with other languages than Basic. I remember I learned briefly a bit about one of those languages but have forgotten which one. The secretary at the department could send Telex messages around the world. We handed a hand written manuscript to her and she typed it into the Telex system. And she had a Xerox computer with big, at least the 8 inch floppy discs. Not so many years later my manager got a Personal computer running DOS and some years later it DOS computers also to the staff. But also very early we had a Sun Unix station. And for many years Unix became my daily driver at work. Before I started to work, in school we had some education in Basic programming. We were using the at least in Sweden very successful and good Luxor ABC 80 computer. At the end of my school time, my school got the top notch ABC 800 with colour screen. At home so I could get a chance to learn somewhat more about computers and Basic programming in my own pace, I got a Zinclair ZX 80 computer, which I later upgraded to ZX 81. One summer job when I was a student I was at Televerket, the Swedish PTT. It meant that I visited numerous of exchange stations. Many at the country side, some with very few subscribers so I could hear the relay start when someone was making a call. At bigger stations it was noise from relays all the time. As I mentioned, after studies were completed I was working with telecom equipment in particular for land line telephony. Not at least I worked with components for the line cards, the card at the telephone exchange that is facing towards the end user. The book The_Cuckoo's_Egg is a hacker thriller based on a true story that happened in the mid-1980's going on for a year. It was written by the hunter shortly after. Cliff Stoll describes Unix commands, which are similar to Linux. He talks about passwords, about encryption and a lot more. Many technical details he describes by using analogy with more common non technical life examples. A security hole in GNU-Emacs software, a software still around today, plays a central role in how the hacker could penetrate. To fix and update security holes are very relevant today as well. Many things in computers and technology have changed. But at the same time very much of the problems are valid today although they are somewhat different. And the way he describes technical details for the non-technical reader are relevant also today, I believe. At the same time as the book has many technical details, he also describes the daily life at home, the left wing culture he belonged to at the university, his long hair and the dress code he belonged to. And the music. He also describes his contacts to numerous authorities and frustration in those contacts. I am very impressed of his analytical research approach, his persistence, his skills and inventiveness including inventiveness of his girl friend and others. One take away for me is that he kept a detailed log book. It is an important research tool. The log book together with the print outs of exactly what the hacker did were core references for analyzing and make conclusions, retract and change conclusions when new information lead to that earlier assumptions were wrong. He also wrote a technical paper about it before he wrote the book. For those interested, there are several videos with him of later date on various topics.Provide feedback on this episode.

FreeBSD's Future, 18 years of greytrapping, PF vs Linux firewalls, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Powering the Future of FreeBSD Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? BSDCan Organisating committee Interview News Roundup How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner BSD PF versus Linux nftables for firewalls for us Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Join Christina Warren and Brett Terpstra as they navigate the freezing Minnesotan cold without running water, delve into the intersection of tech and political turmoil, and explore the latest in AI agents and multi-agent workflows. Dive into a whirlwind of emotions, tech tips, and political ranting, all while contemplating the ethics of open source funding and AI coding. From brutal weather updates to philosophical debates on modern fascism, this episode pulls no punches. Sponsor Copilot Money can help you take control of your finances. Get a fresh start with your money for 2026 with 2 months free when you visit try.copilot.money/overtired. Show Links Crimethinc: Being “Peaceful” and “Law-Abiding” Will Not Stop Authoritarianism Gas Town Apex OpenCode Backdrop Cindori Sensei Moltbot Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Host Updates 00:21 Brett’s Water Crisis 02:27 Political Climate and Media Suppression 06:32 Police Violence and Public Response 18:31 Social Media and Surveillance 22:15 Sponsor Break: Copilot Money 26:20 Tech Talk: Gas Town and AI Agents 31:58 Crypto Controversies 37:09 Ethics in Journalism and Personal Dilemmas 39:45 The Future of Open Source and Cryptocurrency 45:03 Apex 1.0? 48:25 Challenges and Innovations in Markdown Processing 01:02:16 AI in Coding and Personal Assistants 01:06:36 GrAPPtitude 01:14:40 Conclusion and Upcoming Plans Join the Conversation Merch Come chat on Discord! Twitter/ovrtrd Instagram/ovrtrd Youtube Get the Newsletter Thanks! You’re downloading today’s show from CacheFly’s network BackBeat Media Podcast Network Check out more episodes at overtiredpod.com and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Find Brett as @ttscoff, Christina as @film_girl, Jeff as @jsguntzel, and follow Overtired at @ovrtrd on Twitter. Transcript AI Agents and Political Chaos Introduction and Host Updates Christina: [00:00:00] Welcome back. You’re listening to Overtired. I’m Christina Warren. Joined as always by Brett Terpstra. Jeff Severns. Guntzel could not be with us this week, um, but uh, but Brett and I are here. So Brett, how are you? How’s the cold? Brett: The cold. Brett’s Water Crisis Brett: So I’m going on day four without running water. Um, I drove to my parents last night to shower and we’re, we’re driving loads of dishes to friends’ house to wash them. We have big buckets of melted snow in our bathtub that we use to flush the Toyland. Um, and we have like big jugs with a spout on them for drinking water. So we’re surviving, but it is highly inconvenient. Um, and we don’t know yet if it’s a frozen pipe. Or if we have [00:01:00] a bad pump on our, well, uh, hopefully we’ll find that out today. But no guarantees because all the plumbers are very busy right now with negative 30 degree weather. They tend to get a lot of calls, lots of stuff happens. Um, so yeah, but I’m, I’m staying warm. I got a fireplace, I got my heat’s working Christina: I mean, that’s the important thing. Brett: and that went out, that went out twice, in, twice already. This winter, our heat has gone out, um, which I’m thankful. We, we finally, we added glycol to our, so our heat pumps water through, like, it’s not radiators, it’s like baseboard heat, but it, it uses water and. Um, and though we were getting like frozen spots, not burst pipes, just enough that the water wouldn’t go through fast enough to heat anything. So we added glycol to that [00:02:00] system to bring the freeze point down to like zero degrees. So it’s not perfect, but we also hardwired the pump so that it always circulates water, um, even when the heat’s not running. So hopefully it’ll never freeze again. That’s the goal. Um, and if we replace the well pump, that should be good for another 20 years. So hopefully after this things will be smoother. Political Climate and Media Suppression Brett: Um, yeah, but that, that’s all in addition to, you know, my state being occupied by federal agents and even in my small town, we’ve got people being like, abducted. Things are escalating quickly at this point, and a lot of it doesn’t get talked about on mainstream media. Um, but yeah, things, I don’t know, man. I think we’re making progress because, um, apparently Binos [00:03:00] getting retired Christina: I was going to say, I, I, I, I heard, I heard that, and I don’t know if that’s good or if that’s bad. Um, I can’t, I can’t tell. Brett: it’s, it’s like, it’s like if Trump died, we wouldn’t know if that was good or bad because JD Vance as president, like maybe things get way worse. Who knows? Uh, none of these, none of these actual figureheads are the solution. Removing them isn’t the solution to removing the kinda maga philosophy behind it. But yeah, and that’s also Jeff is, you know, highly involved and I, I won’t, I won’t talk about that for him. I hope we can get him monsoon to talk about that. Christina: No, me, me, me too. Because I’ve, I’ve been thinking about, about him and about you and about your whole area, your communities, you know, from several thousand miles away. Like all, all we, all we see is either what people post online, which of course now is being suppressed. [00:04:00] Uh, thanks a lot. You know, like, like the, oh, TikTok was gonna be so terrible. Chi the, the Chinese are gonna take over our, uh, our algorithms. Right? No, Larry Ellison is, is actually going to completely, you know, fuck up the algorithms, um, and, and suppress anything. I, yeah. Yeah. They’re, they’re Brett: is TikTok? Well, ’cause Victor was telling me that, they were seeing videos. Uh, you would see one frame of the video and then it would black out. And it all seemed to be videos that were negative towards the administration and we weren’t sure. Is this a glitch? Is this coincidence? Christina: well, they claim it’s a glitch, but I don’t believe it. Brett: Yeah, it seems, it seems Christina: I, I mean, I mean, I mean, the thing is like, maybe it is, maybe it is a glitch and we’re overreacting. I don’t know. Um, all I know is that they’ve given us absolutely zero reason to trust them, and so I don’t, and so, um, uh, apparently the, the state of California, this is, [00:05:00] so we are recording this on Tuesday morning. Apparently the state of California has said that they are going to look into whether things are being, you know, suppressed or not, and if that’s violating California law, um, because now that, that, that TikTok is, is controlled by an American entity, um, even if it is, you know, owned by like a, you know, uh, evil, uh, billionaire, you know, uh, crony sto fuck you, Larry Ellison. Um, uh, I guess that means we won’t be getting an Oracle sponsorship. Sorry. Um, uh, Brett: take it anyway. Christina: I, I know you wouldn’t, I know you wouldn’t. That’s why I felt safe saying that. Um, but, uh, but even if, if, if that were the case, like I, you know, but apparently like now that it is like a, you know, kind of, you know, state based like US thing, like California could step in and potentially make things difficult for them. I mean, I think that’s probably a lot of bluster on Newsom’s part. I don’t think that he could really, honestly achieve any sort of change if they are doing things to the algorithm. Brett: Yeah. Uh, [00:06:00] if, if laws even matter anymore, it would be something that got tied up in court for a long time Christina: Right. Which effectively wouldn’t matter. Right. And, and then that opens up a lot of other interesting, um, things about like, okay, well, you know, should we, like what, what is the role? Like even for algorithmically determined things of the government to even step in or whatever, right now, obviously does, I think, become like more of a speech issue if it’s government speech that’s being suppressed, but regardless, it, it is just, it’s bad. So I’ve been, I’ve been thinking about you, I’ve been thinking about Jeff. Police Violence and Public Response Christina: Um, you know, we all saw what happened over the weekend and, and, you know, people be, people are being murdered in the streets and I mean that, that, that’s what’s happening. And, Brett: white people no less, Christina: Right. Well, I mean, that’s the thing, right? Like, is that like, but, but, but they keep moving the bar. They, they keep moving the goalpost, right? So first it’s a white woman and, oh, she, she was, she was running over. The, the officer [00:07:00] or the ice guy, and it’s like, no, she wasn’t, but, but, but that, that’s immediately where they go and, and she’s, you know, radical whatever and, and, and a terrorist and this and that. Okay. Then you have a literal veterans affair nurse, right? Like somebody who literally, like, you know, has, has worked with, with, with combat veterans and has done those things. Who, um, is stepping in to help someone who’s being pepper sprayed, you know, is, is just observing. And because he happens to have, um, a, a, a, a gun on him legally, which he’s allowed to do, um, they immediately used that as cover to execute him. But if he hadn’t had the gun, they would’ve, they would’ve come up with something else. Oh, we thought he had a gun, and they, you know what I mean? So like, they, they got lucky with that one because they removed the method, the, the, the weapon and then shot him 10 times. You know, they literally executed him in the street. But if he hadn’t had a gun, they still would’ve executed. Brett: Yeah, no, for sure. Um, it’s really frustrating that [00:08:00] they took the gun away. So he was disarmed and, and immobilized and then they shot him. Um, like so that’s just a straight up execution. And then to bring, like, to say that it, he, because he had a gun, he was dangerous, is such a, an affront to America has spent so long fighting against gun control and saying that we had the right to carry fucking assault rifles in the Christina: Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse was literally acquitted. Right? Brett: Yeah. And he killed people. Christina: and, and he killed people. He was literally walking around little fucking stogey, you know, little blubbering little bitch, like, you know, crying, you know, he’s like carrying around like Rambo a gun and literally snipe shooting people. That’s okay. Brett: They defended Christina: if you have a. They defended him. Of course they did. Right? Of course they did. Oh, well he has the right to carry and this and that, and Oh, you should be able to be armed in [00:09:00] these places. Oh, no, but, but if you’re, um, somebody that we don’t like Brett: Yeah, Christina: and you have a concealed carry permit, and I don’t even know if he was really concealed. Right. Because I think that if you have it on your holster, I don’t even think that counts as concealed to Brett: was supposedly in Christina: I, I, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. Brett: like it Christina: Which I don’t think counts as concealed. I think. Brett: No. Christina: Right, right. So, so, so, so, so that, that, that wouldn’t be concealed. Be because you have someone in, in that situation, then all of a sudden, oh, no. Now, now the, the key, the goalpost, okay, well, it’s fine if it’s, you know, uh, police we don’t like, or, or other people. And, and, and if you’re going after protesters, then you can shoot and kill whoever you want, um, because you’ve perceived a threat and you can take actions into your, to your own hands. Um, but now if you are even a white person, um, even, you know, someone who’s, who’s worked in Veterans Affairs, whatever, if, if you have, uh, even if you’re like a, a, a, you know, a, a gun owner and, and have permits, um, now [00:10:00] if we don’t like you and you are anywhere in the vicinity of anybody associated with law enforcement, now they have the right to shoot you dead. Like that’s, that’s, that’s the argument, which is insanity. Brett: so I’m, I’m just gonna point out that as the third right came to power, they disarmed the Jews and they disarmed the anarchists and the socialists and they armed the rest of the population and it became, um, gun control for people they didn’t like. Um, and this is, it’s just straight up the same playbook. There’s no, there’s no differentiation anymore. Christina: No, it, it, it actively makes me angry that, um, I, I could be, because, ’cause what can we do? And, and what they’re counting on is the fact that we’re all tired and we’re all kind of, you know, like just, [00:11:00] you know, from, from what happened, you know, six years ago and, and, and what happened, you know, five years ago. Um, and, and, and various things. I think a lot of people are, are just. It kind of like Brett: Sure. Christina: done with, with, with being able to, to, to, right. But now the actual fascism is here, right? Like, like we, we, we saw a, a, you know, a whiff of this on, on, on January 6th, but now it’s actual fascism and they control every branch of government. Brett: Yeah. Christina: And, um, and, and, and I, and I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, right? Like, I mean it, because I mean, you know, uh, Philadelphia is, is, is begging for, for, for them to come. And I think that would be an interesting kind of standoff. Seattle is this, this is what a friend of mine said was like, you know, you know Philadelphia, Filch Philadelphia is begging them to come. Seattle is like scared. Um, that, that they’re going to come, um, because honestly, like we’re a bunch of little bitch babies and, um, [00:12:00] people think they’re like, oh, you know the WTO. I’m like, yeah, that was, that was 27 years ago. Um, uh, I, I don’t think that Seattle has the juice to hold that sort of line again. Um, but I also don’t wanna find out, right? Like, but, but, but this is, this is the attack thing. It’s like, okay, why are they in Minnesota? Right? They’re what, like 130,000, um, Brett: exactly Christina: um, immigrants in, in Minnesota. There are, there are however many million in Texas, however many million in Florida. We know exactly why, right? This isn’t about. Anything more than Brett: in any way. Christina: and opt. Right, right. It has nothing, it has nothing to do with, with, with immigration anyway. I mean, even, even the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal who a, you know, ran an op-ed basically saying get out of Minnesota. They also, they also had like a, you know, a news story, which was not from the opinion board, which like broke down the, the, the footage showing, you know, that like the, the video footage doesn’t match the administration’s claims, but they also ran a story. Um, that [00:13:00] basically did the math, I guess, on like the number of, of criminals, um, or people with criminal records who have been deported. And at this point, like in, you know, and, and when things started out, like, I guess when the raid started out, the, the majority of the people that they were kind of going after were people who had criminal records. Now, whether they were really violent, the worst, the worst, I mean that’s, I’m, I’m not gonna get into that, but you could at least say like, they, they could at least say, oh, well these were people who had criminal records, whatever. Now some, some huge percentage, I think it’s close to 80% don’t have anything. And many of the people that do the, the criminal like thing that they would hold would be, you know, some sort of visa violation. Right. So it’s, it’s, it’s Brett: they deported a five-year-old kid after using him as bait to try to get the rest of his family. Christina: as bait. Brett: Yeah. And like it’s, it’s pretty deplorable. But I will say I am proud of Minnesota. Um, they have not backed [00:14:00] down. They have stood up in the face of increasing increasingly escalated attacks, and they have shown up in force thousands of people out in the streets. Like Conti, like last night they had a, um, well, yeah, I mean, it’s been ongoing, but, uh, what’s his name? Preddy Alex. Um, at the place where he was shot, they had a, like continuing kind of memorial protest, I guess, and there’s footage of like a thousand, a thousand mins surrounding about 50, um, ICE agents and. Like basically corralling them to the point where they were all backed into a corner and weren’t moving. And I don’t know what happened after that. Um, but thus far it hasn’t been violent on the part of protesters. It’s been very violent on the part of ice. I [00:15:00] personally, I don’t know where I stand on, like, I feel like the Democrats are urging pacifism because it affects their hold on power. And I don’t necessarily think that peace when they’re murdering us in the street. I don’t know if peace is the right response, but I don’t know. I’m not openly declaring that I support violence at this point, but. At the same time, do I not? I’m not sure. Like I keep going back and forth on is it time for a war or do we try to vote our way out of this? Christina: I mean, well, and the scary thing about voting our way out of this is will we even be able to have free elections, right? Be because they’re using any sort of anything, even the most benign sort of legal [00:16:00] protest, even if violence isn’t involved in all of a sudden, talks of the Insurrection Act come Brett: yeah. And Trump, Trump offered to pull out of Minnesota if Minnesota will turn over its voter database to the federal government. Like that’s just blatant, like that’s obviously the end goal is suppression. Christina: Right, right. And, and so to your point, I don’t know. Right. And I’m, I’m never somebody who would wanna advocate outwardly for violence, but I, I, I, I, I don’t know. I mean, they’re killing citizens in the streets. They’re assassinating people in cold blood. They’re executing people, right. That’s what they’re doing. They’re literally executing people in the streets and then covering it up in real time. Brett: if the argument is, if we are violent, it will cause them to kill us. They’re already killing Christina: already doing it. Right. So at, at this point, I mean, like, you know, I mean, like, w to your point, wars have been started for, for, for less, or for the exact same things. Brett: [00:17:00] Yeah. Christina: So, I don’t know. I don’t know. Um, I know that that’s a depressing way to probably do mental health corner and whatnot, but this is what’s happening in our world right now and in and in your community, and it’s, it’s terrifying. Brett: I’m going to link in the show notes an article from Crime Think that was written by, uh, people in Germany who have studied, um, both historical fascism and the current rise of the A FD, which will soon be the most powerful party in Germany, um, which is straight up a Nazi party. Um, and it, they offered, like their hope right now lies in America stopping fascism. Christina: Yeah. Brett: Like if we can, if we can stop fascism, then they believe the rest of Europe can stop fascism. Um, but like they, it, it’s a good article. It kind of, it kind of broaches the same questions I do about like, is it [00:18:00] time for violence? And they offer, like, we don’t, we’re not advocating for a civil war, but like Civil wars might. If you, if you, if you broach them as revolutions, it’s kind of, they’re kind of the same thing in cases like this. So anyway, I’ll, I’ll link that for anyone who wants to read kinda what’s going on in my head. I’m making a note to dig that up. I, uh, I love Crime Fake Oh and Blue Sky. Social Media and Surveillance Brett: Um, so I have not, up until very recently been an avid Blue Sky user. Um, I think I have like, I think I have maybe like 200 followers there and I follow like 50 people. But I’ve been expanding that and I am getting a ton of my news from Blue Sky and like to get stories from people on the ground, like news as it happens, unfiltered and Blue Sky has been [00:19:00] really good for that. Um, I, it’s. There’s not like an algorithm. I just get my stuff and like Macedon, I have a much larger following and I follow a lot more people, but it’s very tech, Christina: It’s very tech and, Brett: there for. Christina: well, and, and MAs on, um, understandably too is also European, um, in a lot of regards. And so it’s just, it’s not. Gonna have the same amount of, of people who are gonna be able to, at least for instances like this, like be on the ground and doing real-time stuff. It’s not, it doesn’t have like the more normy stuff. So, no, that makes sense. Um, no, that’s great. I think, yeah, blue Sky’s been been really good for, for these sorts of real-time events because again, they don’t have an algorithm. Like you can have one, like for a personalized kind of like for you feed or whatever, but in terms of what you see, you know, you see it naturally. You’re not seeing it being adjusted by anything, which can be good and bad. I, I think is good because nothing’s suppressing things and you see things in real time. It can be bad because sometimes you miss things, but I think on the whole, it’s better. [00:20:00] The only thing I will say, just to anyone listening and, and just to spread onto, you know, people in your communities too, from what I’ve observed from others, like, it does seem like the, the government and other sorts of, you know, uh, uh, the, you know, bodies like that are finally starting to pay more attention to blue sky in terms of monitoring things. And so that’s not to say don’t. You know, use it at all. But the same way, you don’t make threats on Twitter if you don’t want the Feds to show up at your house. Don’t make threats on Blue Sky, because it’s not just a little microcosm where, you know, no one will see it. People are, it, it’s still small, but it’s, it’s getting bigger to the point that like when people look at like where some of the, the, the fire hose, you know, things observable things are there, there seem to be more and more of them located in the Washington DC area, which could just be because data centers are there, who knows? But I’ve also just seen anecdotally, like people who have had, like other instances, it’s like, don’t, don’t think [00:21:00] that like, oh, okay, well, you know, no one’s monitoring this. Um, of course people are so just don’t be dumb, don’t, don’t say things that could potentially get you in trouble. Um. Brett: a political candidate in Florida. Um, had the cops show up at her house and read her one of her Facebook posts. I mean, this was local. This was local cops, but still, yeah, you Christina: right. Well, yeah, that’s the thing, right? No, totally. And, and my, my only point with that is we’ve known that they do that for Facebook and for, for, you know, Twitter and, and, uh, you know, Instagram and things like that, but they, but Blue Sky, like, I don’t know if it’s on background checks yet, but it, uh, like for, uh, for jobs and things like that, I, I, I don’t know if that’s happening, but it definitely is at that point where, um, I know that people are starting to monitor those things. So just, you know, uh, not even saying for you per se, but just for anybody out there, like, it’s awesome and I’m so glad that like, that’s where people can get information out, but don’t be like [00:22:00] lulled into this false sense of security. Like, oh, well they’re not gonna monitor this. They’re not Brett: Nobody’s watching me here. Christina: It is like, no, they are, they are. Um, so especially as it becomes, you know, more prominent. So I’m, I’m glad that that’s. That’s an option there too. Um, okay. Sponsor Break: Copilot Money Christina: This is like the worst possible segue ever, but should we go ahead and segue to our, our, our sponsor break? Brett: Let’s do it. Let’s, let’s talk about capitalism. Christina: All right. This episode is brought to you by copilot money. Copilot money is not just another finance app. It’s your personal finance partner designed to help you feel clear, calm, and in control of your money. Whether it’s tracking your spending, saving for specific goals, or simply getting the handle on your investments. Copilot money has you covered as we enter the new year. Clarity and control over our finances has never been more important with the recent shutdown of Mint and rising financial stress, for many consumers are looking for a modern, trustworthy tool to help navigate their financial journeys. That’s where copilot money comes in. 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Download copilot money on your devices or visit. Try copilot money slash [00:24:00] overti today to claim you’re two months free and embrace a more organized, stress-free approach to your finances. Try copilot.money/ Overtired. Brett: Awesome that I appreciate this segue. ’cause we, we, we could, we could be talking about other things. Um, like it’s, it feels so weird, like when I go on social media and I just want to post that like my water’s out. It feels out of place right now because there’s everything that’s going on feels so much more important than, Christina: Right. Brett: than anything else. Um, but there’s still a place for living our lives, um, Christina: there are a absolutely. I mean, and, and, and in a certain extent, like not to, I mean, maybe this is a little bit of a cope, but it’s like, if all we do is focus on the things that we can’t control at the expense of everything else, it’s like then they win. You know? Like, which, which isn’t, which, which isn’t even to [00:25:00] say, like, don’t talk about what’s happening. Don’t try to help, don’t try to speak out and, and, um, and do what we can do, but also. Like as individuals, there’s very little we can control about things. And being completely, you know, subsumed by that is, is not necessarily good either. Um, so yeah, there’s, there, there are other things going on and it’s important for us to get out of our heads. It’s important, especially for you, you know, being in the region, I think to be able to, to focus on other things and, and hopefully your water will be back soon. ’cause that sucks like that. I’ve been, I’ve been worried about you. I’m glad that you have heat. I’m glad you have internet. I’m glad you have power, but you know, the pipes being frozen and all that stuff is like, not Brett: it, the, the internet has also been down for up to six hours at a time. I don’t know why. There’s like an amplifier down on our street. Um, and that has sucked because I, out here, I live in a, I’m not gonna call it rural. Uh, we’re like five minutes from town, [00:26:00] but, um, we, we don’t. We have shitty internet. Like I pay for a gigabit and I get 500 megabits and it’s, and it’s up and down all the time and I hate it. But anyway. Tech Talk: Gas Town and AI Agents Brett: Let’s talk about, uh, let’s talk about Gas Town. What can you tell me about Gastown? Christina: Okay. So we’ve talked a lot about like AI agents and, um, kind of like, uh, coding, um, loops and, and things like that. And so Gastown, uh, which is available, um, at, I, it is not Gas Town. Let me find the URL, um, one second. It’s, it’s at a gas town. No, it’s not. Lemme find it. Um. Right. So this is a thing that, that Steve Yy, uh, has created, and [00:27:00] it is a multi-agent workspace manager. And so the idea is basically that you can be running like a lot of instances of, um, of, of Claude Code or, um, I guess you could use Codex. You could use, uh, uh, uh, co-pilot, um, SDK or CLI agent and whatnot. Um, and basically what it’s designed to do is to basically let you coordinate like multiple coding agents at one time so they can all be working on different tasks, but then instead of having, um, like the context get lost when agents restart, it creates like a, a persistent, um, like. Work state, which it uses with, with git on the backend, which is supposed to basically enable more multi-agent workflows. So, um, basically the idea would be like, you get, have multiple agents working at once, kind of talking to one another, handing things off, you know, each doing their own task and then coordinating the work with what the other ones are doing. But then you have like a persistent, um, uh, I guess kind of like, you know, layer in the backend so that if an agent has to restart or whatever, it’s not gonna lose the, [00:28:00] the context, um, that that’s happening. And you don’t have to manually, um, worry about things like, okay, you know, I’ve lost certain things in memory and, and I’ve, you know, don’t know how I’m, I’m managing all these things together. Um, there, there’s another project, uh, called Ralph, which is kind of based on this, this concept of like, what of Ralph Wickham was, you know, coding or, or was doing kind of a loop. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s kind of a similar idea. Um, there’s also. Brett: my nose wouldn’t bleed so much if I just kept my finger out of there. Christina: Exactly, exactly. My cat’s breath smells like cat food. Um, and um, and so. Like there are ideas of like Ralph Loops and Gastown. And so these are a couple of like projects, um, that have really started to, uh, take over. So like, uh, Ralph is more of an autonomous AI agent loop that basically like it runs like over and over and over again until, uh, a task is done. Um, and, and a lot of people use, use Gastown and, [00:29:00] and, and Ralph together. Um, but yeah, no Ga gastown is is pretty cool. Um, we’ll we’re gonna talk about it more ’cause it’s my pick of the week. We’ll talk about Molt bot previously known as Claude Bot, which is, uses some, some similar ideas. But it’s really been interesting to see like how, like the, the multi-agent workflow, and by multi-agent, I mean like, people are running like 20 or 30 of them, you know, at a time. So it’s more than that, um, is really starting to become a thing that people can, uh, can do. Um, Brett: gets expensive though. Christina: I was, I was just about to say that’s the one thing, right? Most people who are using things like Gastown. Are using them with the Claude, um, code Max plans, which is $200 a month. And those plans do give you more value than like, what the, what it would be if you spent $200 in API credits, uh, but $200 a month. Like that’s not an expensive, that’s, you know, that, that’s, that, that, like, you know what I mean? Like, like that, that, that, that, that, that’s a lot of money to spend on these sorts of things. Um, but people [00:30:00] are getting good results out of it. It’s pretty cool. Um. There have been some open models, which of course, most people don’t have equipment that would be fast enough for them to, to run, uh, to be able to kind of do what they would want, um, reliably. But the, the AgTech stuff coming to some of the open models is better. And so if these things can continue, of course now we’re in a ram crisis and storage crisis and everything else, so who knows when the hardware will get good enough again, and we can, when we as consumers can even reasonably get things ourselves. But, but in, in theory, you know, if, if these sorts of things continue, I could see like a, a world where like, you know, some of the WAN models and some of the other things, uh, potentially, um, or Quinn models rather, um, could, uh. Be things that you could conceivably, like be running on your own equipment to run these sorts of nonstop ag agentic loops. But yeah, right now, like it’s really freaking cool and I’ve played around with it because I’m fortunate enough to have access to a lot of tokens. [00:31:00] Um, but yeah, I can get expensive real, real fast. Uh, but, but it’s still, it’s still pretty awesome. Brett: I do appreciate that. So, guest Town, the name is a reference to Mad Max and in the kind of, uh, vernacular that they built for things like background agents and I, uh, there’s a whole bunch, there are different levels of, of the interface that they kind of extrapolated on the gas town kind of metaphor for. Uh, I, it was, it, it, there were some interesting naming conventions and then they totally went in other directions with some of the names. It, they didn’t keep the theme very well, but, but still, uh, I appreciate Ralph Wig and Mad Max. That’s. It’s at the very least, it’s interesting. Christina: No, it definitely is. It definitely is. Crypto Controversies Christina: I will say that there’s been like a little bit [00:32:00] of a kerfuffle, uh, involved in both of those, uh, developers because, um, they’re both now promoting shit coins and, uh, and so that’s sort of an interesting thing. Um, basically there’s like this, this, this crypto company called bags that I guess apparently like if people want to, they will create crypto coins for popular open source projects, and then they will designate someone to, I guess get the, the gas fees, um, in, um, uh, a Solana parlance, uh, no pun intended, with the gas town, um, where basically like that’s, you know, like the, the, the fees that you spend to have the transaction work off of the blockchain, right? Like, especially if there’s. A lot of times that it would take, like, you pay a certain percentage of something and like those fees could be designated to an individual. And, um, in this case, like both of these guys were reached out to when basically they were like, Hey, this coin exists. You’ve got all this money just kind of sitting in a crypto wallet waiting for you. [00:33:00] Take the money, get, get the, the transaction fees, so to speak. And, uh, I mean, I think that, that, that’s, if you wanna take that money right, it’s, it’s there for you. I’m not gonna certainly judge anyone for that. What I will judge you for is if you then promote your shit coin to your community and basically kind of encourage everyone. To kind of buy into it. Maybe you put in the caveat, oh, this isn’t financial advice. Oh, this is all just for whatever. But, but you’re trying to do that and then you go one step beyond, which I think is actually pretty dumb, which is to be like, okay, well, ’cause like, here’s the thing, I’m not gonna judge anyone. If someone who’s like, Hey, here’s a wallet that we’re gonna give you, and it has real cash in it, and you can do whatever you want with it, and these are the transaction fees, so to speak, like, you know, the gas fees, whatever, you know what you do. You, even if you wanna let your audience know that you’ve done that, and maybe you’re promoting that, maybe some people will buy into it, like, people are adults. Fine. Where, where I do like side eye a little bit is if you are, then for whatever reason [00:34:00] going to be like, oh, I’m gonna take my fees and I’m gonna reinvest it in the coin. Like, okay, you are literally sitting on top of the pyramid, like you could not be in a better position and now you’re, but right. And now you’re literally like paying into the pyramid scheme. It’s like, this is not going to work well for you. These are rug bulls. Um, and so like the, the, the, the gas town coin like dropped like massively. The Ralph coin like dropped massively, like after the, the, the Ralph creator, I think he took out like 300 K or something and people, or, you know, sold like 300 K worth of coins. And people were like, oh, he’s pulling a rug pull. And I’m like, well, A, what did you expect? But B it’s like, this is why don’t, like, if someone’s gonna give you free money from something that’s, you know, kind of scammy, like, I’m not saying don’t take the money. I am saying maybe be smart enough to not to reinvest it into the scam. Brett: Yeah. Christina: Like, I don’t know. Anyway, that’s the only thing I will mention on that. ’cause I don’t think that that takes [00:35:00] anything away from either of those projects or it says that you shouldn’t use or play around with it either of those ideas at all. But that is just a thing that’s happened in the last couple of weeks too, where it’s like, oh, and now there’s like crypto, you know, the crypto people are trying to get kind of involved with these projects and, um, I, I think that that’s, uh, okay. You know, um, like I said, I’m, I’m not gonna judge anybody for taking free money that, that somebody is gonna offer them. I will judge you if you’re gonna try to then, you know, try to like, promote that to your audience and try to be like, oh, this is a great way where we, where you can help me and we can all get rich. It’s like, no, there are, if you really wanna support creators, like there are things like GitHub sponsors and there are like other methods that you can, you can do that, that don’t involve making financial risks on shit coins. Brett: I wish anything I made could be popular enough that I could do something that’s stupid. Yeah. Like [00:36:00] I, I, I, I’m not gonna pull a rug pull on anyone, but the chances that I’ll ever make $300,000 on anything I’m working on, it’s pretty slim. Christina: Yeah, but at the same time, like if you, if you did, if you were in that position, like, I don’t know, I mean, I guess that’d be a thing that you would have to kind of figure out, um, yourself would be like, okay, I have access to this amount of money. Am I going to try to, you know, go all in and, and maybe go full grift to get even more? Some, something tells me that like your own personal ethics would probably preclude you from that. Brett: I, um, I have spent, what, um, how old am I? 47. I, I’ve been, since I started blogging in like 1999, 2000, um, I have always adhered to a very strict code and like turning down sponsors. I didn’t agree with [00:37:00] not doing anything that would be shady. Not taking, not, not taking money from anyone I was writing about. Ethics in Journalism and Personal Dilemmas Brett: Like, it’s been, it’s a pain in the ass to try to be truly ethical, but I feel like I’ve done it for 30 some years and, and I don’t know, I wouldn’t change it. I’m not rich. I’ll never be rich. But yeah, I think ethics are important, especially if you’re in any kind of journalism. Christina: Yeah, if you’re in any sort of journalism. I think so, and I think like how people wanna define those things, I think it’s up to them. And, and like I said, like I’m not gonna even necessarily like, like judge people like for, because I, I don’t know personally like what my situation would be like. Like if somebody was like, Christina, here’s a wallet that has the equivalent of $300,000 in it and it’s just sitting here and we’re not even asking you to do anything with this. I would probably take the money. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t [00:38:00] know if I would promote it or anything and I maybe I would feel compelled to disclose, Hey, Brett: That is Christina: wallet belongs to me. Brett: money though. Christina: I, I, right. I, I, I might, I might be, I might feel compelled to com to, to disclose, Hey, someone created this coin in this thing. They created the foam grow coin and they are giving me, you know, the, the, the gas fees and I have accepted Brett: could be, I’d feel like you could do it if you were transparent enough about it. Christina: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think where I draw the line is when you then go from like, because again, it’s fine if you wanna take it. It’s then when you are a. Reinvesting the free money into the coin, which I think is just idiotic. Like, I think that’s just actually dumb. Um, like I just, I just do like, that just seems like you are literally, like I said, you’re at the top of the pyramid and you’re literally like volunteering to get into the bottom again. Um, and, or, or b like if you do that and then you try to rationalize in some way, oh, well, you know, I think [00:39:00] that this could be a great thing for everybody to, you know, I get rich, you know, you could get rich, we could all get money out of this because this is the future of, you know, creator economy or whatever. It’s like, no, it’s not. This is gambling. Um, and, and, and, and you could make the argument to me, and I’d probably be persuaded to be like, this isn’t that different from poly market or any of the other sorts of things. But you know what? I don’t do those things either. And I wouldn’t promote those things to any audience that I had either. Um, but if somebody wanted to give me free money. I probably wouldn’t turn it down. I’m not gonna pretend that my ethics are, are that strong. Uh, I just don’t know if I would, if I would, uh, go on the other end and be like, okay, to the Moom, everyone let, let’s all go in on the crypto stuff. It’s like, okay, The Future of Open Source and Cryptocurrency Brett: So is this the future of open source is, ’cause I mean like open source has survived for decades as like a concept and it’s never been terribly profitable. But a [00:40:00] lot of large companies have invested in open source, and I guess at this point, like most of the big open source projects are either run by a corporation or by a foundation. Um, that are independently financed, but for a project like Gastown, like is it the future? Is this, is this something people are gonna start doing to like, kind of make open source profitable? Christina: I mean, maybe, I don’t know. I think the problem though is that it’s not necessarily predictable, right? And, and not to say that like normal donations or, or support methods are predictable, but at least that could be a thing where you’re like, they’re not, but, but, but it’s not volatile to the extent where you’re like, okay, I’m basing, you know, like my income based on how well this shit coin that someone else controls the supply of someone else, you know, uh, uh, created someone else, you know, burned, so to speak, somebody else’s is going to be, uh, [00:41:00] controlling and, and has other things and could be responsible for, you know, big seismic like market movements like that I think is very different, um, than anything else. And so, I don’t know. I mean, I, I think that they, what I do expect that we’ll see more of is more and more popular projects, things that go viral, especially around ai. Probably being approached or people like proactively creating coins around those things. And there have been some, um, developers who’ve already, you know, stood up oddly and been like, if you see anybody trying to create a coin around this, it is not associated with me. I won’t be associated with any of it. I won’t do it. Right. Uh, and I think that becomes a problem where you’re like, okay, if these things do become popular, then that becomes like another risk if you don’t wanna be involved in it. If you’re involved with a, with a popular project, right? Like the, like the, like the creator of MPM Isaac, like, I think there’s like an MPM coin now, and that, that he’s, you know, like involved in and it’s like, you know, again, he didn’t create it, but he is happy to promote it. He’s happy to take the money. I’m like, look, I’m happy for [00:42:00] Isaac to get money from NPMI am at the same time, you know, bun, which is basically like, you know, the, you know, replacement for, for Node and NPM in a lot of ways, they sold to Anthropic for. I guarantee you a fuck load more money than whatever Isaac is gonna make off of some MPM shitcoin. So, so like, it, it’s all a lottery and it’s not sustainable. But I also feel like for a lot of open source projects, and this isn’t like me saying that the people shouldn’t get paid for the work, quite the contrary. But I think if you go into it with the expectation of I’m going to be able to make a sustainable living off of something, like when you start a project, I think that that is not necessarily going to set you up for, I think that those expectations are misaligned with what reality might be, which again, isn’t to say that you shouldn’t get paid for your work, it’s just that the reason that we give back and the reason we contribute open source is to try to be part of like the, the greater good and to make things more available to everyone. Not to be [00:43:00] like, oh, I can, you know, quit my job. Like, that would be wonderful. I, I wish that more and more people could do that. And I give to a lot of, um, open source projects on, on a monthly basis or on an annual basis. Um, Brett: I, I give basically all the money that’s given to me for my open source projects I distribute among other open source projects. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a wash for me, but yeah, I am, I, I pay, you know, five, 10 bucks a month to 20 different projects and yeah. Christina: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s important, but, but I, I don’t know. I, I, I hope that it’s not the future. I’m not mad, I think like if that’s a way where people can make, you know, a, a, an income. But I do, I guess worry the sense that like, if, if, if, I don’t want that to be, the reason why somebody would start an open source project is because they’re like, oh, I, I can get rich on a crypto thing. Right? Like, ’cause that that’s the exact wrong Brett: that’s not open source. That’s not the open source philosophy. Christina: no, [00:44:00] it’s not. And, and so, I mean, but I think, I think if it already exists, I mean, I don’t know. I, I also feel like no one should feel obligated. This should go without saying that. If you see a project that you like that is involved in one of those coins. Do you have a zero obligation to be, uh, supportive of that in any way? And in fact, it is probably in your financial best interest to not be involved. Um, it, it is your life, your money, your, you do whatever you want, gamble, however you want. But, uh, I, I, I, I do, I guess I, I bristle a little bit. Like if people try to portray it like, oh, well this is how you can support me by like buying into this thing. I’m like, okay, that’s alright. Like, I, I, if you wanna, again, like I said, if you wanna play poly market with this, fine, but don’t, don’t try to wrap that around like, oh, well this is how you can give back. It’s like, no, you can give back in other ways. Like you can do direct donations, you can do other stuff. Like I would, I would much rather encourage people to be like, rather than putting a hundred dollars in Ralph Coin, [00:45:00] give a hundred dollars to the Ralph Guy directly. Apex 1.0? Brett: So, speaking of unprofitable open source, I have Apex almost to 1.0. Um, it officially handles, I think, all of the syntax that I had hoped it would handle. Um, it does like crazy things, uh, that it’s all built on common mark, GFM, uh, like cmar, GFM, GitHub’s project. Um, so it, it does all of that. Plus it handles stuff from like M mark with like indices. Indices, and it incorporates, uh. Uh, oh, I forget the name of it. Like two different ways of creating indices. It handles all kinds of bibliography syntax, like every known bibliography syntax. Um, I just added, you can, you can create insert tags with plus, plus, uh, the same way you would create a deletion with, uh, til detail. Um, and [00:46:00] I’ve added a full plugin structure, and the plugins now can be project local. So you can have global plugins. And then if you have specific settings, so like I have a, I, my blogs are all based on cramdown and like the bunch documentation is based on cramdown, but then like the mark documentation. And most of my writing is based on multi markdown and they have different. Like the, for example, the IDs that go on headers in multi markdown. If it’s, if it has a space in multi markdown, it gets compressed to no space in common Mark or GFM, it gets a dash instead of a space, which means if I have cross links, cross references in my document, if I don’t have the right header syntax, the cross reference will break. So now I can put a, a config into like my bunch documentation that tells Apex to use, [00:47:00] um, the dash syntax. And in my Mark documentation, I can tell it to use the multi markdown syntax. And then I can just run Apex with no command line arguments and everything works. And I don’t know, I, I haven’t gotten adoption for it. Like the one place I thought it could be really useful was DEVONthink, Christina: Mm-hmm. Brett: which has always been based on multi markdown, which. Um, is I love multi markdown and I love Fletcher and, um, it’s just, it’s missing a lot of what I would consider modern syntax. Christina: Right. Brett: so I, I offered it to Devin think, and it turned out they were working on their own project along the same lines at the same time. Um, but I’m hoping to find some, some apps that will incorporate it and maybe get it some traction. It’s solid, it’s fast, it’s not as fast as common Mark, but it does twice as much. Um, like the [00:48:00] benchmarks, it a complex document renders in common mark in about. Uh, 27 milliseconds, and in Apex it’s more like 46 milliseconds. But in the grand scheme of things, I could render my whole blog 10 times faster than I can with cramm down or Panoc and yeah, and, and I can use all the syntax I want. Challenges and Innovations in Markdown Processing Brett: Did I tell you about, did I tell you about, uh, Panoc Divs? The div extension, um, like you can in with the panoc D extension, you can put colon, colon, colon instead of like back, take, back, take backtick. So normally, like back ticks would create a code block with colons, it creates a div, and you can apply, you can apply inline attribute lists after the colons to make, to give it a class and an ID and any other attributes you wanna apply to it. I extended that so that you can do colon, [00:49:00] colon, colon, and then type a tag name. So if you type colon, colon, colon aside and then applied an attribute list to it, it would create an aside tag with those attributes. Um, the, the only pan deck extension that I wish I could support that I don’t yet is grid tables. Have you ever seen grid tables? Christina: I have not. Brett: There, it’s, it’s kind of like multi markdown table syntax, except you use like plus signs for joints and uh, pipes and dashes, and you actually draw out the table like old ASCI diagrams Christina: Okay. Brett: and that would render that into a valid HTML table. But that supporting that has just been, uh, tables. Tables are the thing. I’ve pulled the most hair out over. Christina: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think I, they feel like tables are hard. I also feel like in a lot of circumstances, I mean obviously people use tables and whatnot, but like, [00:50:00] only thing I would say to you, like, you know, apex is, is so cool and I hope that other projects adopt it. Um, and, uh, potentially with the POC support as far as you’ve gotten with it, maybe, you know, projects that support some of POC stuff could, could, you know, uh, jump into it. But I will say it does feel like. Once you go into like the Panoc universe, like that almost feels like a separate thing from the markdown Flavors like that almost feels like its own like ecosystem. You know what I mean? Brett: Well, yeah, and I haven’t tried to adopt everything Panoc does because you can als, you can also use panoc. You can pipe from Apex into Panoc or vice versa. So I’m not gonna try to like one for one replicate panoc, Christina: No, no. Totally Brett: do all of panoc export options because Panoc can take HTML in and then output PDFs and Doc X and everything. So you can just pipe output from Apex into Panoc to create your PDF or whatever Christina: And like, and, and like to, [00:51:00] and like to me, like that seems ideal, right? But I feel like maybe like adopting some of the other things, especially like, like their grid, you know, table, things like that. Like that would be cool. But like, that feels like that’s a, potentially has the, has the potential, maybe slow down rendering and do other stuff which you don’t want. And then b it’s like, okay, now are we complicated to the point that like, this is, this is now not becoming like one markdown processor to rule them all, but you Brett: Yeah, the whole point, the whole point is to be able to just run Apex and not worry about what cex you’re using. Um, but grid tables are the kind of thing that are so intentional that you’re not gonna accidentally use them. Like the, the, the, the impetus for Apex was all these support requests I get from people that are like the tilde syntax for underline or delete doesn’t work in Mark. And it, it does if you choose the right processor. But then you have to know, yeah, you have to [00:52:00] know what processor supports what syntax and that takes research and time and bringing stuff in from, say, obsidian into mart. You would just kind of expect things to work. And that’s, that’s why I built Apex and Christina: right? Brett: you are correct that grid tables are the kind of thing, no one’s going to use grid tables if they haven’t specifically researched what Christina: I right. Brett: they’re gonna work with. Christina: And they’re going to have a way that has their file marked so that it is designated as poc and then whatever, you know, flags for whatever POC features it supports, um, does. Now I know that the whole point of APEX is you don’t have to worry about this, but, but I am assuming, based on kind of what you said, like if I pass like arguments like in like a, you know, in a config file or something like where I was like, these documents or, or, or this URL or these things are, you know, in this process or in this in another, then it can, it can just automatically apply those rules without having to infer based on the, on the syntax, right. Brett: right. It has [00:53:00] modes for cram down and common mark and GFM and discount, and you can like tell it what mode you’re writing in and it will limit the feature set to just what that processor would handle. Um, and then all of the flags, all of the features have neg negotiable flags on them. So if you wanted to say. Skip, uh, relax table rendering. You could turn that off on the command line or in a config file. Um, so yeah, everything, everything, you can make it behave like any particular processor. Uh, but I focus mostly on the unified mode, which again, like you don’t have to think about which processor you are using. Christina: Are you seeing, I guess like in, in circumstances like, ’cause I, in, in my, like, my experience, like, I would never think to, like, I would probably like, like to, I would probably do like what you do, which is like, I’m [00:54:00] going to use one syntax or, or one, you know, processor for one type of files and maybe another and another. Um, but I, I don’t think that like, I would ever have a, and maybe I’m misunderstanding this, but I don’t think I would ever have an instance where I would be like mixing the two together in the same file. Brett: See, that’s my, so that’s, that’s what’s changing for me is I’m switching my blog over to use Apex instead of Cramdown, which means I can now incorporate syntax that wasn’t available before. So moving forward, I am mixing, um, things from common mark, things from cram down, things from multi markdown. Um, and, and like, so once you know you have the option Christina: right. Then you might do that Brett: you have all the syntax available, you start doing it. And historically you won’t have, but like once you get used to it, then you can. Christina: Okay. So here’s the next existential question for you. At what point then does it go from being, you know, like [00:55:00] a, a, a rendering engine, kind of like an omni rendering engine to being a syntax and a flavor in and of itself? Brett: That is that, yeah, no, that’s a, that’s a very valid question and one that I have to keep asking myself, um, because I never, okay, so what to, to encapsulate what you’re saying, if you got used to writing for Apex and you were mixing your syntax, all of a sudden you have a document that can’t render in anything except Apex, which does eventually make it its own. Yeah, no, it is, it’s always, it’s a concern the whole time. Christina: well, and I, I wouldn’t even necessarily, I mean, like, and I think it could be two things, right? I mean, like, you could have it live in two worlds where, like on the one hand it could be like the rendering engine to end all rendering engines and it can render, you know, files and any of them, and you can specify like whatever, like in, in, in like a tunnel or something. Like, you know, these files are, [00:56:00] are this format, these are these, and you know, maybe have some sort of, you know, um, something, even like a header files or whatever to be like, this is what this rendering engine is. Um, you know, with, with your projects to have it, uh, do that. Um. Or have it infer, you know, based on, on, on, um, the, the logic that you’re importing. But it could also be one of those things where you’re like, okay, I just have created like, you know, the omni syntax. And that’s a thing that maybe, maybe you get people to try to encourage or try, try to adopt, right? Like, it’s like, okay, you can always just use common mark. You can always just use GFM, you can always just use multi markdown, but we support these other things too, from these other, um, systems and you can intermix and match them. Um, because, because I, I do feel like at a certain point, like at least the way you’re running it yourself, you have your own syntax. Like, like, you know. Brett: yeah. No, you have perfectly encapsulated the, the major [00:57:00] design concern. And I think you’re correct. It can exist, it can be both things at once. Um, but I have like, nobody needs another markdown syntax. Like there are so many flavors right now. Okay. There may be a dozen. It’s not like an infinite number, but, but there’s enough that the confusion is real. Um, and we don’t need yet another markdown flavor, but we do need a universal processor that. Makes the differentiations less, but yeah, no, it’s, I need, I need to nail down that philosophy, uh, and really like, put it into writing and say, this is the design goal of this project, uh, which I have like hinted at, but I’m a scattered thinker and like, part of, part of the design philosophy is if someone says, Hey, [00:58:00] could you make this work? I just wanted a project where I could say, yeah, I’m gonna make that work. I, I, I’m gonna add this somewhat esoteric syntax and it’s just gonna work and it’s not gonna affect anything else. And you don’t have to use it, but if you do, there it is. So it’s kind of, it was designed to bloat to a circuit certain extent. Um, but yeah, I need to, I need to actually write a page That’s just the philosophy and really, really, uh, put, put all my thoughts together on that. Christina: Yeah, no, ’cause I was just kind of thinking, I was like, ’cause it’s so cool. Um, but the way that I would’ve envisioned using it, like I, I still like, it’s cool that you can mix all those things in together. I still feel like I probably wouldn’t because I’m not you. And so then I would just have like this additional dependency that it’s like, okay, if something happens to Apex one day and that’s the only thing that can render my documents, then like, you know what I mean? And, and, and if it’s not getting updated [00:59:00] anymore or whatever, then I’m kind of like SOL, um, Brett: Maku. Do you remember Maku? Christina: vaguely. Brett: It’s, the project is kind of dead and a lot of its syntax has been incorporated into various other processors. But if you built your whole blog on Maku, you have to, you have to be able to run like a 7-year-old binary, um, and, and it’ll never be updated, and eventually you’re gonna run into trouble. The nice thing about Unix based stuff is it’s. Has a, you can stop developing it and it’ll work for a decade, um, until, like, there’s a major shift in processors, but like, just the shift to arm. Like if, if Maku was only ever compiled for, uh, for, uh, Intel and it wasn’t open source, you would, it would be gone. You wouldn’t be able to run it anymore. So yeah, these things can happen. Christina: [01:00:00] Well, and I just even think about like, you know, the fact that like, you know, like some of the early processors, like I remember like back, I mean this is a million years ago, but having to use like certain, like pearl, you know, based things, you know, but depending on like whatever your backend system was, then you moved to PHP, they maybe you move, moved to, you know, Ruby, if you’re using like Jekyll and maybe you move to something else. And I was like, okay, you know, what will the thing be in the future? Yeah. If, if I, if it’s open source and there’s a way that, you know, you can write a new, a new processor for that, but it does create like, dependencies on top of dependencies, which is why I, I kind of feel like I like having like the omni processor. I don’t know if, like, for me, I’m like, okay, I, I would probably be personally leery about intermingling all my different syntaxes together. Brett: to that end though, that is why I wanted it in C um, because C will probably never die. C can be compiled on just about any platform. And it can be used with, like, if you have, if you have a Jekyll blog and you wanna [01:01:00] incorporate a C program into a gem, it’s no problem. Uh, you can incorporate it into just about any. Langu

On today's episode, we discuss how collapsing national currencies—from Iran's rial to Venezuela's bolívar—are driving ordinary people into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a last‑ditch store of value. Mark explains why institutional players like Vanguard and Morgan Stanley are finally recommending small crypto allocations, how ETF filings and FOMO are pushing Bitcoin higher, and why none of this should be confused with personalized investment advice. From there, the conversation moves to practical home tech: VPNs, Starlink, and why reliable local storage and good passwords still matter more than shiny gadgets when the internet goes dark. James and Mark also kick around Elon Musk's AI and robotics ambitions—Grok, xAI, Optimus, and full self‑driving Teslas—debating whether a Unix‑like, tightly controlled “Apple‑style” stack will prove safer than a more open, Windows‑like ecosystem for autonomous vehicles. A creek‑flooding scenario near James's house becomes a case study in what current self‑driving systems still miss, forcing humans to override software that cannot yet reliably interpret brown, moving water across a road. That leads into a broader discussion of how many edge cases engineers must sample before regulators will bless truly driverless cars, and why early adopters will inevitably be the ones whose mishaps teach the machines. Throughout, they keep circling back to a core theme: in both finance and transportation, new tech may be transformative, but ordinary users still have to live with the bugs, crashes, and unintended consequences of bleeding‑edge systems. Don't miss it!

In this podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Kumaran Anandan, CTO of TinyMagiq and Enterprise Architect —shares a refreshingly honest journey across hardware, industrial automation, embedded systems, startups, consulting, and Microsoft. From writing programs on a programmable calculator (and storing them in audio cassettes!) to building deep learning habits through daily compounding, Kumaran explains why modern technologists must fall in love with failure, understand fundamentals, and stop building software without users who will pay. A thought-provoking conversation on architecture, human psychology, AI hallucinations, and what it really means to create value. 00:00 – 01:00 — Kumaran's self-introduction: experimenting constantly and looking forward to failures. 01:00 – 02:25 — Earliest career memory: building a DBase 3+ application for a school and earning a watch as his first “payment.”02:26 – 03:29 — Not getting campus placed, being an average student, and the early struggle of finding a job.03:29 – 05:20 — First software experience in 10th holidays: programmable Casio calculator, BASIC programming, and saving programs using an audio cassette tape.05:20 – 07:56 — Early career direction: interest in hardware, industrial automation, 8085 assembly programming, and learning through real-world constraints.07:56 – 10:12 — Moving up the stack: C/C++, antivirus software, Wipro's hardware + software work, and “mobile apps” before mobile became mainstream.10:12 – 11:34 — Entrepreneurship journey: starting a company during the internet boom, shutting it down after the bubble burst, then transitioning to Microsoft.11:36 – 12:29 — Kumaran's definition of good technology: anything that protects evenings and weekends from work.12:31 – 13:48 — A conscious career decision: taking a salary cut to work on hardware because learning mattered more than comfort.13:48 – 15:39 — Microsoft Consulting Services: being called only for complex “fires,” shorter engagements, and high learning intensity.15:39 – 17:23 — The daily learning habit: “Kumaran of yesterday won't be Kumaran today,” and how small learning compounds over time.17:24 – 19:28 — Curiosity beyond the surface: learning “under the hood,” connecting ideas across psychology, neuroscience, and technology.19:42 – 23:16 — Microsoft culture: self-learning, asking better questions, getting pointers instead of hand-holding, and building independent thinking.23:39 – 26:10 — Fundamentals matter: software is predictable (input–process–output), hardware is ambiguous, and AI changes predictability in software.26:36 – 29:21 — TinyMagiq and mentoring: serendipity, a clear timeline to quit corporate life, and why enterprise software rarely creates joy.30:39 – 33:35 — A common founder mistake: building for 14–18 months with no paying users and confusing “features built” with “value delivered.”33:35 – 36:46 — Pricing reality check: if nobody pays even ₹100, the problem isn't the market—it's unclear value and weak conviction.36:46 – 38:35 — “I don't like code”: code as debt, and why architecture must fight unnecessary complexity.38:35 – 41:19 — Loving failure: video games as a metaphor, why software needs failure-tolerance, and a warning to those who want “safe IT careers.”41:56 – 44:01 — Entrepreneurship mindset: de-addiction to monthly salary, India's services legacy, and why playing safe kills learning.44:01 – 46:40 — “Unlearning” is reframing: the hardest failure is success because it reinforces old patterns and makes change difficult.48:11 – 51:27 — AI hallucinations and “Maya”: why we're already trained to handle uncertainty, and how that applies to building AI systems.51:27 – 52:08 — Architecture simplified: an architect ensures user happiness through people, process, and technology.52:44 – 53:06 — Closing advice: be curious about how you can enjoy failure.  Quotable Quotes “A person who keeps experimenting… and looks forward to failures.”“Kumaran of yesterday will not be the Kumaran who goes to sleep today.”“The power of compounding becomes very high.”“If you don't have a user who wants to pay for it… what is the value of your product?”“Even if you can't get somebody to pay you hundred rupees… you have not delivered that value.”“To me, a lot of code is nothing but debt.”“People should fall in love with failure.”“An architect is somebody who ensures happiness of the user.”“Be curious about how you can enjoy failure.”Kumaran Profile:Technology professional with 20+ years experience (Unix, Windows, Cloud AI)Conducts two podcast series: "Saturday Architecture" and "Mindset Matters"Experience spans from hands-on development to business architectureKnown for: Connecting technical and philosophical conceptsKey Philosophies:"If you don't have pain, you haven't done anything"Long-term thinking reveals patterns short-term goals missAge brings pattern recognition advantage despite reduced raw capacityCommon sense is the most uncommon thingKumaran can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/akumaran/ @ctomentor is Kumaran's  twitter handle

The Unix v4 recovery, webzfs, openbgpd 9.0, MidnightBSD 4.0, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines University of Utah team discovers rare computer relic (https://ksltv.com/science-technology/university-of-utah-discovers-rare-computer-relic/853296/) The attempt to read the UNIX V4 tape is underway! (https://mastodon.social/redirect/statuses/115747843746305391) UNIX V4 Tape from University of Utah (https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw) UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again (https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successfully_recovered/) An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape (https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223/) WebZFS (https://github.com/webzfs/webzfs) News Roundup OpenBGPD 9.0 released (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251231070524) MidnightBSD 4.0 (https://www.midnightbsd.org/notes/4.0/index.html) Let's run FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (https://briancallahan.net/blog/20251216.html) Figuring out how I want to set up the TVPC (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/figuring-out-how-i-want-to-set-up-the-tvpc/) TVPC update (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/tvpc-update/) C&C Red Alert2 in your browser (https://chronodivide.com) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions rick - shout out.md (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/646/feedback/rick%20-%20shout%20out.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Bienvenue dans le trois-centième épisode de CacaoCast! Dans cet épisode, Philippe Casgrain et Philippe Guitard discutent des sujets suivants: electricite-quebec.info - La demande provinciale au bout des doigts Electron Liquid Glass - On n'arrête pas le progrès! Swift concurrency - Enfin un guide simplifié Icônes dans les menus de Tahoe - Vous pouvez les enlever dans votre application Subtext - Un éditeur de texte pour iOS simple et gratuit Unixv4.dev - Unix original dans votre navigateur Sloppy - La nouvelle mascotte IA de Microsoft Drone et ski - Un petit film de Philippe Ecoutez cet épisode

В твоей руке сейчас устройство, которое на 60% состоит из того, что изобретено в Bell Labs и на 100% существует благодаря им. Центральный процессор и оперативная память — это миллиардов транзисторов, изобретённых в Bell Labs в 47-м. Операционная система телефона свои истоки берёт в Bell Labs, где написали Unix — будь то IOS, который и есть Unix, или Android — Linux, который вдохновлён Unix и написан, чтобы быть свободным. 69-й Сама связь — Wi-Fi, мобильная, Bluetooth — придумана в Bell Labs Клодом Шенноном в 48-м. Даже концепция использования электронных компонентов для реализации булевой алгебры — основы современных компьютеров — родом из Bell Labs — и тоже спасибо Шеннону. А всё началось в 1875 году с бага, который Александр Грэм Белл не проигнорировал, а превратил в патент. Столетняя историй уникальной компании, где тысячам инженеров и учёных дали возможность реализовать себя без требования скорейшего коммерческого успеха. Что из этого вышло, слушайте в заключительном эпизоде 4-го сезона ДНД. Оставайтесь на связи Кто мы такие: https://linkmeup.ru/about/ Пишите нам: info@linkmeup.ru Канал в телеграме: https://t.me/donasdoshlo. Приходите обсуждать и предлагать. Плейлист подкаста на Youtube Поддержите проект:

We talk with Matt Trentini, Principal Software Engineer at Planet Innovation, about using MicroPython for professional embedded development—including medical devices. Matt shares how he was drawn back to embedded development after becoming jaded with traditional C-based workflows, and explains why MicroPython's interactive REPL and rapid development cycle have become game-changers for his team.We explore the practical realities of using an interpreted language on microcontrollers: how Planet Innovation uses it for Class B medical devices, what the performance trade-offs actually look like, and how features like the Unix port enable robust testing. Matt walks us through deployment considerations, explains how to integrate C code when needed, and shares compelling stories about real-time client demos that would be impossible in C++.Whether you're skeptical about high-level languages in embedded systems or curious about alternatives to traditional development workflows, this conversation offers a grounded, engineering-focused look at what MicroPython can—and can't—do in production environments.Key Topics[03:30] Matt's background and why he left embedded development before MicroPython brought him back[08:45] What MicroPython is: a complete re-implementation of Python for microcontrollers with REPL, filesystem, and machine module[13:20] How Planet Innovation introduced MicroPython through an OpenMV vision processing project[17:15] The game-changing power of the REPL for interactive hardware development and testing[21:40] Running MicroPython code on x86 for testing, and the mock machine library approach[26:30] Python library compatibility: what works, what doesn't, and memory considerations[29:50] Integrating C and C++ code through extension modules for performance-critical sections[33:10] Performance realities: 10-100x slower in interpreter, but can always drop to C speed when needed[37:45] Tooling: MPRemote, the magical mount feature, and development workflow[42:20] When NOT to use MicroPython: cost-sensitive high-volume products and resource constraints[45:30] Using MicroPython in Class B medical devices and safety-critical applications[49:15] Garbage collection: simple, predictable, and controllable—can be disabled when needed[52:40] Real-time client demo story: modifying state machines during a call and showing results immediately[56:20] Deployment: frozen code, disabling REPL and filesystem, and OTA considerations[01:01:30] Common mistakes: logic errors and inadvertent allocations rather than memory corruption[01:05:45] Threading, AsyncIO, and the Global Interpreter Lock across different ports[01:08:20] State machine frameworks: StateChart, Yasme, and PyTransitions[01:11:40] Junior developer productivity: faster onboarding compared to C/C++ embedded development[01:15:10] Getting started: board bring-up as an ideal first use case for MicroPython[01:17:50] Hardware-in-the-loop testing as a low-risk way to try MicroPythonNotable Quotes"It's hard to overstate how game changing the REPL is. Particularly as an embedded engineer, once you see that you can interactively talk to a peripheral, you can generate your own I2C, squirt it across and see what the peripheral does with it—suddenly driver development has just become easy to experiment with." — Matt Trentini"My trite answer is that MicroPython is slow—10 to 100 times slower than C in the interpreter. But my flip side answer is that it can always be made as fast as C because you can always drop into C to write things." — Matt Trentini"There was a moment in a recent project where we were discussing the workflow of a state machine with the client, and while we were on a call, another engineer was actually making changes to MicroPython code. Literally a couple minutes after we'd been hashing out the details, they showed the changes in the state machine using the REPL. The client was blown away—in 25 years of development, I have never had that kind of turnaround in C and C++." — Matt Trentini"If you want to make a good friend of your electronics engineers, give them a build of MicroPython that can run on their custom board. In the past, they would typically be waiting for weeks or sometimes months before a software resource could be assigned. Now I can turn around a MicroPython build in a day or two, and they can test I2C, GPIOs, and UARTs themselves." — Matt Trentini"The irony is that the people who have embedded C knowledge are actually the people that can benefit the most from MicroPython. It's like having a superpower—you understand what MicroPython is doing in the background, you know you're just effectively writing a lot less code." — Matt TrentiniResources MentionedMicroPython Official Site - The official MicroPython project website with documentation and downloadsOpenMV - Computer vision project using MicroPython for camera-based applicationsMPRemote - Tool for interacting with MicroPython devices, including the magical mount featurePlanet Innovation - Medical device consultancy using MicroPython in production devicesStateChart - State machine library compatible with Python and MicroPythonYasme - Yet another state machine library developed at Planet InnovationPyTransitions - Popular Python state machine library being ported to MicroPythonCircuitPython - Adafruit's fork of MicroPython with additional features and CPython compatibility focus You can find Jeff at https://jeffgable.com.You can find Luca at https://luca.engineer.Want to join the agile Embedded Slack? Click hereAre you looking for embedded-focused trainings? Head to https://agileembedded.academy/Ryan Torvik and Luca have started the Embedded AI podcast, check it out at https://embeddedaipodcast.com/

RobChrisRob welcomed in the new year by regrouping after a lengthy hiatus to discuss the government doing battle against DEI fonts now that everything important has been taken care of, the resurrection of unix backup tapes from the 70s revealing a pre v5 unix, as well as Plur1bus, Welcome to Derry, Wake up Dead Man, Bazzite installation shenanigans, and nothing else of significance. Join our discord to talk along or the Subreddit where you will find all the links https://discord.gg/YZMTgpyhB https://www.reddit.com/r/TacoZone/

Holidays 2025 - What you been do'in? NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines What tech did we enjoy playing with or found interesting in 2025? Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions - Gary - Storage Is Cheap (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/644/feedback/Gary%20-%20Storage%20Is%20Cheap.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

On this week's Film Sack Podcast, a decidedly odd couple with ulterior motives convince Dr. Grant to go to Isla Sorna for a holiday, but their unexpected landing startles the island's new inhabitants. I wonder if it will feature people running from wild dinosaurs. Oh, right. This has all the flying ones! It's a UNIX system! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's Film Sack Podcast, a decidedly odd couple with ulterior motives convince Dr. Grant to go to Isla Sorna for a holiday, but their unexpected landing startles the island's new inhabitants. I wonder if it will feature people running from wild dinosaurs. Oh, right. This has all the flying ones! It's a UNIX system! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Upwrapping OpenZFS gifs, Propolice the OpenBSD Stack Protector, refreshing zpools, and the FreeBSD 15.0 release. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Unwrapping ZFS: Gifts from the Open Source Community (https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-community-contributions-2025/?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) Who wins when we filter the open web through an opaque system? (https://hidde.blog/filtered-open-web/) News Roundup We can't fund our way out of the free and open source maintenance problem (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/OpenSourceFundingNotSolution) The story of Propolice, the OpenBSD stack protector (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251212094310) Copying everything off a zpool, destroying it, creating a new one, and copying everything back (https://dan.langille.org/2025/12/11/copying-everything-off-a-zpool-destroying-it-creating-a-new-one-and-copying-everything-back/) All aboard the 15.0-RELEASE train! (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/all-aboard-the-150-release-train/) Beastie Bits Running A PDP-8 From 1965 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2r_GujSc6w) The library of time (https://libraryoftime.xyz) OPNsense 25.7.9 released (https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=49986.0) - OPNsense 25.10.1 business edition released (https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=50052.0) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Martin - recordings (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/643/feedback/Martin%20-%20recording%20of%20bsdnow.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Is DWPD Still a Useful SSD Spec? (https://klarasystems.com/articles/is-dwpd-still-useful-ssd-spec/?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative (https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/moving-from-windows-to-freebsd-as-the-linux-chaos-alternative/) Computer Chronicles Revisited 131 - Open Look, OSF/Motif, Macintosh IIcx and A/UX (https://computerchronicles.blog/post/computer-chronicles-revisited-131-open-look-osf-motif-macintosh-iicx-aux/) - Submitted by listener S.M. Oliva News Roundup We haven't seen ZFS checksum failures for a couple of years (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSOurRareChecksumFailuresII) Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again (https://jsteuernagel.de/posts/using-freebsd-to-make-self-hosting-fun-again/) The usability of open source operating systems (https://posixcafe.org/blogs/2025/11/24/0/) Phoenix AZ timezone issue (https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/JZTH2RBARV4YFNTNFAXBGOACAN65JPIX/) The only existing copy of UNIX v4 (https://oldbytes.space/@bitsavers/115505135441862982) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow) Is DWPD Still a Useful SSD Spec? (https://klarasystems.com/articles/is-dwpd-still-useful-ssd-spec/?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative (https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/moving-from-windows-to-freebsd-as-the-linux-chaos-alternative/) Computer Chronicles Revisited 131 - Open Look, OSF/Motif, Macintosh IIcx and A/UX (https://computerchronicles.blog/post/computer-chronicles-revisited-131-open-look-osf-motif-macintosh-iicx-aux/) - Submitted by listener S.M. Oliva News Roundup We haven't seen ZFS checksum failures for a couple of years (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSOurRareChecksumFailuresII) Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again (https://jsteuernagel.de/posts/using-freebsd-to-make-self-hosting-fun-again/) The usability of open source operating systems (https://posixcafe.org/blogs/2025/11/24/0/) Phoenix AZ timezone issue (https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/JZTH2RBARV4YFNTNFAXBGOACAN65JPIX/) The only existing copy of UNIX v4 (https://oldbytes.space/@bitsavers/115505135441862982) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

In this episode of Hands-On IT, Landon Miles explores the history of servers and enterprise IT infrastructure, from early mainframe computers to cloud computing, Linux servers, virtualization, containers, and AI-driven data centers.This episode connects decades of server evolution into a clear, accessible story, focusing on the people, technologies, and ideas that shaped modern computing. From IBM's System/360 and minicomputers, to Unix and Linux, virtualization, cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, and container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes, this episode explains how servers became the foundation of today's digital world.Topics covered include: • Server history and early computing systems • IBM mainframes and enterprise computing • Minicomputers and distributed computing • Unix, Linux, and open-source software • Virtualization and data center efficiency • Cloud computing and hyperscale infrastructure • Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native architecture • AI workloads, GPUs, and modern server hardwareLandon also highlights key figures in computing history, including Grace Hopper, Ken Olsen, Linus Torvalds, Dave Cutler, Diane Greene, and Jeff Bezos, and explains how their work still influences IT operations today.This episode is part of our December Best Of series, featuring some of our favorite moments and episodes from the past year.Originally aired March 20, 2025.

Podcast 294 of atomar audio, featuring cutting edge techno artists. This week we present you unix. from Leipzig, Germany. unix.: SC: @unix-le Visit atomar audio on Facebook: www.facebook.com/atomar.audio

In this episode, Todd and Jon discuss the latest AI agreements, updates to the Apple ecosystem (OS 26.2), and the history of PowerShell. The core discussion focuses on the "overcomplication issue" facing tech enthusiasts and offers hardware and software tips to simplify daily workflows. AI & Industry News Disney & OpenAI: The Walt Disney Company has reached an agreement to license characters to OpenAI's Sora. Google Labs: Todd joined the waitlist for "Google Disco," a tool that uses "GenTabs" to create interactive web apps and complete tasks using natural language without coding. Visual Podcasting: Todd discussed using "Nano Banana Pro" and Gemini to create visual whiteboard summaries for podcast notes. Apple OS 26.2 Updates watchOS 26.2: Features updates to Sleep Scores, which Jon notes can feel "judgmental" regarding sleep quality. iPadOS 26.2: Reintroduces multitasking features like slide over and enables "Auto Chapters" for podcasts. macOS 26.2: Introduces "Edge Light" (a virtual ring light for video calls) and "low latency clusters" for local AI development on M5 Macs. Tech History PowerShell Origins: Jeffrey Snover, creator of PowerShell, revealed in a blog post that "cmdlets" were originally named "Function Units" (FUs), reflecting the "Unix smart-ass culture" of the era. Discussion: Simplifying the Tech Stack The hosts discuss the tendency to overcomplicate setups, such as using Docker for RSS feeds or complex SSO for home use. They recommend the following simplifications: Hardware KableCARD: A credit-card-sized kit containing multiple adapters, a light, and a phone stand to replace carrying multiple cables. Presentation Remotes: Use a simple dedicated remote ($20–$30) or repurpose a Surface Pen via Bluetooth instead of relying on complex software solutions. Software Pythonista (iOS/macOS): Run simple local scripts (e.g., GPA calculators) rather than paying for dedicated subscription apps. Homebridge: A lighter-weight alternative to Home Assistant for connecting IoT devices (like Sonos) to Apple HomeKit. Troubleshooting Tip Pixel Tablet YouTube Glitch: If the YouTube app on the Pixel Tablet displays unusable, giant thumbnails, the fix is to clear both the app's cache and storage/memory.

FreeBSD 15 release, moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD, ZFS Boot Environments explained, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Welcome to the world FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE Announcement (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/announce/) and Release Notes (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/relnotes/) We're (now) moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for Firewalls (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/OpenBSDToFreeBSDMove) - Submitted by listener Gary News Roundup ZFS Boot Environments Explained (https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/11/25/zfs-boot-environments-explained/) Why I (still) love Linux (https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/11/24/why-i-still-love-linux/) rocinante - A configuration management tool by the BastilleBSD team (https://github.com/BastilleBSD/rocinante) A Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug (https://github.com/oxidecomputer/oxide-and-friends/blob/master/2025_11_24.md) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srKYxF66A0c) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Claudio - A Silent Reflection (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/641/feedback/Claudio%20-%20Reflection.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

FreeBSD is an OCI runtime, ZFS Disaster Recovery, Cleaning up Hammer, and some historical information, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD Officially Supported in OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-officially-supported-in-oci-runtime-specification-v1-3) ZFS Enabled Disaster Recovery for Virtualization (https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-enabled-disaster-recovery-virtualization?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup How I think OpenZFS's 'written' and 'written@' dataset properties work (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSWrittenPropertyHowItWorks) Make sure your Hammer cleanup cleans up (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2025/11/13/make-sure-your-hammer-cleanup-cleans-up) [TUHS] David C Brock of CHM: 2024 oral history with Ken Thompson + Doug McIlroy (https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032751.html) Special Issue “Celebrating 60 Years of ELIZA? Critical Pasts and Futures of AI” (https://ojs.weizenbaum-institut.de/index.php/wjds/announcement/view/8) Source and state limiters introduced in pf (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251112132639) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Göran - grafana (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/640/feedback/G%C3%B6ran%20-%20grafana.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

In this wildly cosmic and deeply grounded episode of Third Eye Roll, Justine and Emily dive headfirst into the psychedelic storm of Rahu entering Shatabishaka—the star of 100 healers, 100 illusions, and the shadow scientist inside all of us. Cue spiritual hypochondria, Google-diagnosed awakenings, black-bug omens, and one extremely on-theme tick encounter.With Saturn finally moving direct in Pisces and Mercury straightening itself out, the grown-ups have walked back into the room… and they're asking whether your healing journey is medicine or madness (spoiler: sometimes both).Expect couture lab coats, futuristic headpieces, Rahu-coded fashion, AI expansions, ascension-syndrome snark (“You're not ascending, you're just ungrounded”), plus a detour into Woodstock 1969, the Unix epoch, MAS*H, and why the universe apparently wants us all to become low-key engineers of our own psyche.Justine closes with the myth of Matsya and the Great Flood, revealing how Saturn in Pisces is the steady hand that pulls us through dissolution into renewal.Stay to the end for Yatra gossip, Spain retreat teasers, and the most Rahu-coded sign-off ever.

Reproducible builds, Highly available ZFS Pools, Self Hosting on a Framework Laptop, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-now-builds-reproducibly-and-without-root-privilege) How to Set Up a Highly Available ZFS Pool Using Mirroring and iSCSI (https://klarasystems.com/articles/highly-available-zfs-pool-setup-with-iscsi-mirroring?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop + disks (https://jamesoclaire.com/2025/10/05/self-hosting-10tb-in-s3-on-a-framework-laptop-disks/) Crucial FreeBSD Toolkit (https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/07/08/crucial-freebsd-toolkit/) Some notes on OpenZFS's 'written' dataset property (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSSnapshotWrittenProperty) vi improvements on Dragonfly (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2025/10/28/vi-improvements) Big news for small /usr partitions (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251112121631) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Patrick - Feedback (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/639/feedback/patrick%20-%20notes.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

New Open Indiana Release, Understanding Storage Performance, a Unix OS for the TI99, FreeBSD Tribal knowledge, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Signifier flotation devices (https://davidyat.es/2025/09/27/signifier-flotation-devices) Open Indiana Hipster Announcement (https://openindiana.org/announcements/openindiana-hipster-2025-10-announcement/) Understanding Storage Performance Metrics (https://klarasystems.com/articles/understanding-storage-performance-metrics?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/380883-unix99-a-unix-like-os-for-the-ti-994a) Making the veb(4) virtual Ethernet bridge VLAN aware (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251029114507) FreeBSD tribal knowledge: minor version upgrades (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/freebsd-tribal-knowledge-minor-version-upgrades) It's been 10 years since ZFS's 10th aniversary its integration into Solaris - A Reflection (https://blogs.oracle.com/oracle-systems/post/happy-10th-birthday-zfs) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

It's a wet November evening across Western Europe, the steel-grey clouds have obscured a rare low-latitude aurora this week, and Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week's podcast. And we've got a fine selection for your listening pleasure! The 2025 Component Abuse Challenge has come to an end, so this week you'll be hearing about a few of the entries. We've received an impressive number, and as always we're bowled over by the ingenuity of Hackaday readers in pushing parts beyond their limits. In the news is the potential discovery of a lost UNIX version in a dusty store room at the University of Utah, Version 4 of the OS, which appeared in 1973. Check out your own stores, for hidden nuggets of gold. In the hacks, we have two cameras at the opposite end of the resolution spectrum, but sharing some impressive reverse engineering. Mouse cameras and scanner cameras were both a thing a couple of decades ago, and it's great to see people still pushing the boundaries. Then we look at the challenge of encoding Chinese text as Morse code, an online-upgraded multimeter, the art of making lenses for an LED lighting effect, and what must be the best recreation of a Star Wars light sabre we have ever seen. In quick hacks we have a bevvy of Component Abuse Challenge projects, a Minecraft server on a smart light bulb, and a long term test of smartphone battery charging techniques. We round off with a couple of our long-form pieces, first the uncertainties about iRobot's future and what it might mean for their ecosystem -- think: cheap hackable robotics platform! -- and then a look at FreeBSD as an alternative upgrade path for Windows users. It's a path not without challenges, but the venerable OS still has plenty to give. As always, check out the links to all the articles over on Hackaday.

Thunderbolt on FreeBSD, ZFS on Illumos and Linux and FreeBSD, ZFS Compression, Home networking monitoring, LibreSSH and OpenSSH releases and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Thunderbolt on FreeBSD (https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/10/thunderbolt-on-freebsd) The broad state of ZFS on Illumos, Linux, and FreeBSD (as I understand it) (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSOnIllumosLinuxAndFreeBSD) News Roundup zfs: setting compression and adding new vdevs (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/18/zfs-setting-compression-and-adding-new-vdevs) The hunt for a home network monitoring solution (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/the-hunt-for-a-home-network-monitoring-solution) LibreSSL 4.2.0 Released (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251015043527) OpenSSH 10.2 released (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251010131052) - Related to 10.x versions : Post-Quantum Cryptography (https://www.openssh.com/pq.html) Check your IP infos using nginx (https://www.tumfatig.net/2025/check-your-ip-infos-using-nginx) Experimenting with Compression (just given an overview, I dont exepect you to read the all three writeups fully) Experimenting with compression off (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/06/experimenting-with-compression-off/) Experimenting with compression=lz4 (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/06/experimenting-with-compressionlz4/) Experimenting with compression=zstd (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/06/experimenting-with-compressionzstd/) Compression results (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/06/compression-results) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Anton - Boxybsd (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/636/feedback/anton%20-%20boxybsd.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

OpenBSD 7.8, Building Enterprise Storage with Proxmox, SSD performance, Virtual Machines and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines OpenBSD 7.8 Released (https://www.openbsd.org/78.html) also (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251022025822) and (https://bsd.network/@brynet/115403567146395679) Building Enterprise-Grade Storage on Proxmox with ZFS (https://klarasystems.com/articles/building-enterprise-grade-storage-on-proxmox-with-zfs) News Roundup [TUHS] Was artifacts, now ethernet (https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-July/032268.html) I wish SSDs gave you CPU performance style metrics about their activity (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SSDWritePerfMetricsWish) Migrate a KVM virtual machine to OmniOS bhyve (https://www.tumfatig.net/2025/migrate-a-kvm-virtual-machine-to-omnios-bhyve) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions brad - bhyve (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/635/feedback/brad%20-%20bhyve.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Why Self-host?, Advanced ZFS Dataset Management, Building a Simple Router with OpenBSD, Minimal pkgbase jails / chroots, WSL-For-FreeBSD, Yubico yubikey 5 nfc on FreeBSD, The Q3 2025 Issue of the FreeBSD Journal, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Why Self-host? (https://romanzipp.com/blog/why-a-homelab-why-self-host) Advanced ZFS Dataset Management: Snapshots, Clones, and Bookmarks (https://klarasystems.com/articles/advanced-zfs-dataset-management/) News Roundup Building a Simple Router with OpenBSD (https://btxx.org/posts/openbsd-router/) Minimal pkgbase jails / chroots (https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/minimal-pkgbase-jails-chroots-docker-oci-like.99512/) WSL-For-FreeBSD (https://github.com/BalajeS/WSL-For-FreeBSD) Yubico yubikey 5 nfc on FreeBSD (https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/yubico-yubikey-5-nfc-on-freebsd.99529) The Q3 2025 Issue of the FreeBSD Journal is Now Available (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/the-q3-2025-issue-of-the-freebsd-journal-is-now-available/) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Go 1.25.3 and 1.24.9 released

ZFS Features, Roadmap, and Innovations, Magical systems thinking, How VMware's Debt-Fueled Acquisition Is Killing Open Source, OpenSSH 10.1 Released, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD, Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS, Balkanization of the Internet, GhostBSD 25.02 adds 'Gershwin' desktop for a Mac-like twist, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines What the Future Brings – ZFS Features, Roadmap, and Innovations (https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-new-features-roadmap-innovations?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) Magical systems thinking (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/magical-systems-thinking) The $69 Billion Domino Effect: How VMware's Debt-Fueled Acquisition Is Killing Open Source, One Repository at a Time (https://fastcode.io/2025/08/30/the-69-billion-domino-effect-how-vmwares-debt-fueled-acquisition-is-killing-open-source-one-repository-at-a-time) News Roundup OpenSSH 10.1 Released (https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-10.1) KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD (https://euroquis.nl/kde/2025/09/07/wayland.html) Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS (https://thenewstack.io/unix-co-creator-brian-kernighan-on-rust-distros-and-nixos) GhostBSD 25.02 adds 'Gershwin' desktop for a Mac-like twist (https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/27/ghostbsd_2502/) Beastie Bits Adventures in porting a Wayland Compositor to NetBSD and OpenBSD by Jeff Frasca (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo_8gnWQ4xo) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Kylen - CVEs (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/633/feedback/Kylen%20-%20CVEs.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

zipbomb defeated, Optimizing ZFS for High-Throughput Storage Workloads, Open Source is one person, Omada SDN Controller on FreeBSD, Building a Simple Router with OpenBSD, Back to the origins, Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines zipbomb defeated (https://www.reddit.com/r/openzfs/comments/1niu6h7/when_a_decompression_zip_bomb_meets_zfs_19_pb/) Optimizing ZFS for High-Throughput Storage Workloads (https://klarasystems.com/articles/optimizing-zfs-for-high-throughput-storage-workloads?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup Open Source is one person (https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person) Omada SDN Controller on FreeBSD (https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/08/omada-on-freebsd) Back to the origins (https://failsafe.monster/posts/another-world/) Google Summer of Code 2025 Reports: Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc2025_nat64_protocol_translation) Undeadly Bits j2k25 - OpenBSD Hackathon Japan 2025 (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250601104254) OpenSSH will now adapt IP QoS to actual sessions and traffic (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250818113047) Preliminary support for Raspberry Pi 5 (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250903064251) OpenBSD enters 7.8-beta (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250911045955) Full BSDCan 2025 video playlist(s) available (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250912124932) OpenBGPD 8.9 released (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250926141610) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Brad - a few things (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/632/feedback/Brad%20-%20a%20few%20things.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

video: https://youtu.be/GWF9d5CDF9g Sponsored by Sandfly Security: the revolutionary agentless platform designed for Linux. Visit https://destinationlinux.net/sandfly to experience security that's not just effective but gives you peace of mind. No agents. No downtime. Just cutting-edge protection. In this episode of Destination Linux, the team dives into global privacy laws and how the UK's proposed child protection and filtering systems could reshape the internet as we know it. Ryan breaks down Google's latest developer decree that threatens the very existence of F-Droid and other open-source Android app stores, while Jill takes us on a nostalgic journey through her boxed Linux collection—from Red Hat 5 to Corel Linux and Mandrake 7.0. Nate wraps things up with a look at Samsung's bizarre decision to push advertisements on $1,800 smart refrigerators. Privacy, history, and a little bit of corporate absurdity all collide in this week's show. Forum Discussion Thread (https://destinationlinux.net/forum) Download as MP3 (https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/32f28071-0b08-4ea1-afcc-37af75bd83d6/14fee361-101b-4f8f-834b-68c94975eedc.mp3) Support the show by becoming a patron at tuxdigital.com/membership (https://tuxdigital.com/membership) or get some swag at tuxdigital.com/store (https://tuxdigital.com/store) Hosted by: Ryan (DasGeek) = dasgeek.net (https://dasgeek.net) Jill Bryant = jilllinuxgirl.com (https://jilllinuxgirl.com) Michael Tunnell = michaeltunnell.com (https://michaeltunnell.com) Chapters: 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:58 Update on Michael & The Two-Week Hiatus 00:05:12 Community Feedback: UK Privacy Laws & Router Control 00:23:09 Sponsor: Sandfly Security 00:25:30 Is Google Killing F-Droid? Android's Open Source Dilemma 00:43:18 Jill's Treasure Hunt: Unboxing Classic Linux Distros 00:45:50 Red Hat 5.0 Hurricane: The Shift from UNIX to FOSS 00:53:29 Corel Linux OS: Industry Graphics and the Wine Breakthrough 01:07:29 Linux Mandrake 7.0: The Distro That Detected Your Sound Card 01:15:06 Treasure Hunt Wrap Up 01:15:35 Samsung's Ad-Riddled ,800 Refrigerator 01:40:44 Over Time 01:41:44 Support the Show 01:43:35 Outro 01:44:36 Post Show Links: Community Feedback https://destinationlinux.net/comments (https://destinationlinux.net/comments) https://destinationlinux.net/forum (https://destinationlinux.net/forum) Sandfly Security https://destinationlinux.net/sandfly (https://destinationlinux.net/sandfly) Is Google Killing F-Droid? Android's Open Source Dilemma https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html (https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html) Samsung's Ad-Riddled ,800 Refrigerator https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerators-advertisements/ (https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerators-advertisements/) Support the Show https://tuxdigital.com/membership (https://tuxdigital.com/membership) https://store.tuxdigital.com/ (https://store.tuxdigital.com/) Special Guests: Nathan Wolf and Wendy Hill.

FreeBSD Foundation Q2 2025 Status Update, Keeping Data Safe with OpenZFS, Ollama on FreeBSD Using GPU Passthrough, ClonOS, Preliminary support for Raspberry Pi 5, Sylve: Manage bhyve VMs and Clusters on FreeBSD, Preventing Systemd DHCP RELEASE Behavior, Call for testing - Samba 4.22, and more

Converting Timestamps in .bash_history Unix shells offer the ability to add timestamps to commands in the .bash_history file. This is often done in the form of Unix timestamps. This new tool converts these timestamps into a more readable format. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/New%20tool%3A%20convert-ts-bash-history.py/32324 Cisco ASA/FRD Compromises Exploitation of the vulnerabilities Cisco patched last week may have bone back about a year. Cisco and CISA have released advisories with help identifying affected devices. https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/resources/asa_ftd_continued_attacks https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/directives/ed-25-03-identify-and-mitigate-potential-compromise-cisco-devices Github Notification Phishing Github notifications are used to impersonate YCombinator and trick victims into installing a crypto drainer. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/github-notifications-abused-to-impersonate-y-combinator-for-crypto-theft/

Secure Boot for FreeBSD, Systems lie about their proper functioning, Teching the tech and rushing the endorphins, Passing a Device Into A FreeBSD Jail With A Stable Name, ZFS snapshots aren't as immutable as I thought, due to snapshot metadata, Let's write a peephole optimizer for QBE's arm64 backend, Migrate a Peertube instance from Debian to FreeBSD, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Secure Boot for FreeBSD (https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/how-to-set-up-secure-boot-for-freebsd.99169/) The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem: Systems lie about their proper functioning (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250716-00/?p=111383) News Roundup Teching the tech and rushing the endorphins (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/teching-the-tech-and-rushing-the-endorphins) Passing a Device Into A FreeBSD Jail With A Stable Name (https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/09/passing-device-freebsd-jail-with-stable-name/) ZFS snapshots aren't as immutable as I thought, due to snapshot metadata (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSSnapshotsNotFullyImmutable) Let's write a peephole optimizer for QBE's arm64 backend (https://briancallahan.net/blog/20250901.html) Migrate a Peertube instance from Debian to FreeBSD (https://www.tumfatig.net/2025/migrate-a-peertube-instance-from-debian-to-freebsd) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions -Steve - Interviews (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/631/feedback/Steve%20-%20Interviews.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Simon Ritter has been in the IT industry for 40 years. He went from university to work on Unix in the early days, employed by AT&T and programming in the C language. In 1996, he switched gears to join Sun Microsystems, programming in Java. Years later, after the Oracle transition, he started to dig into what might be next. Outside of tech, he is married with an older son. He is a complete petro-head - meaning, he is really into cars. In fact, in the last few years, he and his son re-built a classic mini from the ground up.While Simon was at Oracle, he started to crave a different opportunity, but still in the Java space. He stumbled upon a company digging into powering the Java platform, to make it the most secure, efficient and trusted platform on the planet - and he, and the company, found a great fit.This is Simon's creation story at Azul.SponsorsFull ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinkshttps://www.azul.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/siritter/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy