Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVZ80_tbkbc

by bcantrill • 3 years ago

110 32 3 years ago

bcantrill5• 3 years ago

Disclaimer: I posted this link -- and hosted the discussion!

To the best of my knowledge (and I would love to be proven wrong!), this is the first time an engineering team has gone on the record with their warts-and-all experience with electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and safety compliance testing. If you have never heard of compliance before or have no idea what any of this could possibly be about, you're guaranteed to learn something about the world of devices around you. And if you have dealt with EMC: you know how wild and unpredictable the process can be -- and I think you'll enjoy hearing some of our own harrowing details. Either way, this is a technically meaty discussion that I think the HN demographic will enjoy!

gorgoiler• 3 years ago

Is there a summary I could read, or just some notes to help navigate the presentation? It sounds super interesting but the video is very long to commit to. Thanks!

myers• 3 years ago

There are show notes open for PRs for folks to add too. See if someone does over the next few days: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/oxide-and-friends/blob/mast...

madrush2014• 3 years ago

I think the HN demographic will enjoy!

Indeed. Any update on a ship date?

bcantrill5• 3 years ago

Compliance was our final hurdle to begin our PVT build so... soon!

gabeiscoding• 3 years ago

I felt a loss when the On the Metal podcast series wrapped up. I figured these Oxide guys now have too much real work to do, they won’t be able to keep up this podcast, even if it is the best tech podcast I’ve listened to. Bryan is an unbeatable host. If you love retro-computing or just the history of our industry in general, you will walk away learning something from anything he talks about. His quick wit and deep tech knowledge keeps you totally engaged, and gives you the feeling of living vicariously in the silicon valley that was about getting your hands dirty and building great tech products.

But now I can look forward to their leap over to “social audio”. First Twitter spaces (where I would sometimes chime in live) and now the Discord-hosted On the Metal.

Most podcasts are sports commentary. These guys are full-contact in the game. I love it. Keep it up Bryan!

sophacles• 3 years ago

Just FYI i can get the Oxide And Friends sessions in my podcast app (I use podcast addict on Android).

bcantrill5• 3 years ago

Wow, those are incredibly kind and inspiring words -- thank you! The good news is that these are all made available via RSS wherever you get podcasts.[0]

What I (we!) love about social audio is that it allows for many more voices -- both on the team here at Oxide and in the broader community. As a result, we've been able to get into some really deep detail with members of the team; I collected a few of my favorites in [1].

Thank you again for the kind words; I think you'll enjoy exploring the back catalog of Oxide and Friends!

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34430594

walkerbrown• 3 years ago

Thanks for the links Bryan!

May I suggest a small teaser trailer post to the old “On the Metal” feed? I’m still subscribed there, but wasn’t aware of the new channels.

Those were some incredible interviews! I’ve listened to a few of the episodes twice.

crest• 3 years ago

I missed the On the Metal podcast and hadn't noticed the Oxide and friends format until a few weeks ago. It just ended without any hint as to what if anything to expect next. I really enjoy it when the conversation goes of whatever script there may be, someone can't/won't stop and dives ever deeper into a topic or pet pieve/past trauma. It may not have the highest production quality (looking at you Twitter spaces), but who cares? Often times it feels like some random encounter in a hackspace (e.g. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stop working as soon as someone mentions firmware bugs).

sfaxon• 3 years ago

I felt a loss when the On the Metal podcast series wrapped up.

Big same. I was so happy to find the Oxide and Friends podcast that I went through the entire backlog in the last couple months. It really helped solidify my thoughts on debug-ability as a first class property of a programming language/environment/system.

It's a great mix of tech history, personal accounts from industry, practical conversations about development and debugging and current industry happenings.

A few standout episodes:

  Engineering Culture
  Engineering Incentives... and Misincentives
  The Rise and Fall of DEC

password4321• 3 years ago

I am glad to hear things are going well, though still disappointed there is no decentralized Discord.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33788339

linksnapzz• 3 years ago

This reminds me of a story told by Mike Valentine (of Valentine radar-detector fame) about having to drive home from work near Cincinnati, across the path of the Voice of America WLW AM transmitter. The 500,000watt VOA signal would make the Bosch D-Jetronic fuel system in his Porsche reset itself; the car would stall and you had to be going a certain speed before you intersected the beam so you could coast through and then restart the engine once clear.

The D-Jetronic isn't really microprocessor-controlled though; a similar story came from the Missouri Highway Patrol. In the 1980s, they had pursuit 5.0L Ford Mustangs, with Ford EEC-IV MCU fuel injection. They also had police radios that had been tweaked to increase the transmitting power past what the FCC would consider normal, and past what Ford had rated the EEC unit for EMF. It was discovered that, at highway speeds with the cruise-control on, holding the transmit button on the handset down for more than ten seconds caused:

1.) The engine controller to think the gas pedal had been floored. 2.) The transmission to need to downshift.

With the police-duty 5.0, this was...startling.

owenpalmer2• 3 years ago

Hi Bryan, as a young developer I have found your content and work so inspiring. As others have alluded to, On the Metal and your talks are fantastic! Keep up the good work at Oxide!

bcantrill5• 3 years ago

That's very meaningful to hear -- thank you!

Part of what we wanted to create with both "On the Metal" and especially with "Friends of Oxide" is something that we (Adam and I) both really appreciated as younger engineers: hanging around the (metaphorical) campfire, absorbing the wisdom of more senior engineers through their lived stories. On the one hand, we have lost a bit of that in that we (broadly) aren't in person, and as a result we don't break bread as much as we used to with the team. But on the other, social audio offers us an even better path: the campfire is not only accessible and open, but recorded -- the tales and wisdom can be absorbed beyond earshot. This was something I was uncertain about when we started, but I have now heard from so many younger engineers for whom "Oxide and Friends" has been meaningful that I can now say it with confidence: social audio is an essential vector for engineering oral tradition -- would that more teams partook!

owenpalmer2• 3 years ago

I completely agree, absorbing the wisdom of senior engineers is invaluable. Mentorship is especially important. In fact, it was a mentor of mine that introduced me to your podcasts and conversations. I have fond memories of us listening to your talks as we worked. I love the historical, philosophical, and ethical touch you add, and the conversations you've had are a legacy that will be remembered!

gertlex• 3 years ago

Is there supposed to be non-static video with this? I just see two still images over the course of the ~hour and forty minutes.

The conversation goes along as if there's periodic pictures to be seen of what's being discussed.

Yeah, just feeling grumpy about this not being a podcast like it used to be :)

steveklabnik• 3 years ago

I wasn't there for the recording, but I suspect it was only audio.

just feeling grumpy about this not being a podcast like it used to be :)

In what sense is it not? If you mean about the medium here, you can still get it that way! https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends has the various links to different ways of getting it in pure podcast form.

soneil2• 3 years ago

They did throw photos in for their "weird boards" one, which was awesome (and really benefitted from it). Otherwise - it's a podcast, I suspect Youtube is just the easiest version to link to.

ahl2• 3 years ago

That episode was a bunch of work—glad to hear that it was beneficial! And, yes, YouTube is just convenient for posting recordings. We added the podcast in early 2022. There’s usually a delay between YouTube and the podcast in the hope that we get some show notes submissions (and to shake out the occasional audio screw up).

SystemHacker_69• 3 years ago

Sorry to say when I watched this the first time I didn't see those "pictures" either. I thought it was my browser but restarting and playing on another device confirmed there were no images. Thought I must have missed something.

wave-trample-0h• 3 years ago

have you considered doing more devrel? inventing node.js, youtube shorts, saving Sun from itself, Oxide laptop stickers and a history of giving metal oral like this are really inspiring to people serious about nft and are a good way to groom new engineers

tomleb2• 3 years ago

Those are always fun to watch.

I've been wondering, what's the plan at Oxide with the recent announcement from Intel about moving away from the Intel Tofino business? Are you still going to be using tofino 2 chips for the network?

panick21_• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34550969

tomleb2• 3 years ago

Thanks for the link. Interesting, I know Intel said they'd continue to support it, but I don't remember for how long.

jeffrallen• 3 years ago

Oxide Computer is the new Soul of a New Machine.

binjip• 3 years ago

The best tech podcast that I had chance to listen. Especially I like history episodes, like the fall of DEC. The only podcast that I often relisten.

rcarmo• 3 years ago

I'm still catching up on the Oxide and Friends "birdsite"/"discord" recordings/podcast, and look forward to listening to this one in a few weeks (I save them for my walks in the big blue room).

In a time when tech is imploding under the weight of its own hype, the amazing retrospectives, history lessons and low-level hardware/software lore contained in that podcast has been the highlight of my days every. Single. Time.

It reminds me that there is a side to this industry that is still actually solving real problems (from testbench design to firmware/software supply chain and attestation) instead of just throwing GPUs at a problem and virtualizing an infinite number of monkeys to generate Shakespeare sonnets.

In these days of layoffs done to compensate for hyped investments and lack of strategic focus, it is a shining beacon of... actual engineering.

A minor sidenote, for those who probably care more about software: The podcast drew me back to Rust because, all of a sudden, here were these people who actually _reasoned out why_ it made sense, and had decades of expertise that allowed them to spell that out with actual examples.

But I really stuck around because of the low-level hardware discussions, and the history background (I just listened to the Optane episode yesterday, and although I knew some folk at Micron and understood why it had failed in general, the discussion was amazing).

(I'm a telco/hardware guy drifting inside the bowels of a cloud/software behemoth and dearly wish I could burn to the ground all the paperwork, ceremony and "strategic investments" that surrounds me and just go and do interesting stuff, so forgive me if this seems a bit much. If I can stay up late enough--I'm in Europe--I might try to join on Discord some day.)

Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries [video]

Related Stories