bcantrill

Clearly, you find Oxide's approach very upsetting; in the words of Laurie Bream, "look inward."

Thank you for rooting for us! One important point of clarification: I am the CTO -- the CEO of Oxide is my co-founder, Steve Tuck. Long before we know what we wanted to do (or had a name for the company!), Steve and I knew we wanted to do something together; it's worth getting to know Steve (and our collaboration) in his own words![0][1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_XqNYt0cY0

I appreciate that our approach to compensation leaves some with overwhelming feelings of whataboutery, but no, we (of course?) do not have equal equity: as we have said (several times?) equity broadly compensates for risk -- and risk has gone down over time. (I used to tell people to "value the equity at zero"; I don't say that any longer because it plainly isn't.)

In terms of the cap table: that's a bit of an odd request? On the one hand, there are no real secrets hanging out on our cap table -- but on the other, based on your tone, it doesn't feel like the request is terrible earnest? (And, I hasten to add, transparency is a value -- not a principle.[0])

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002

I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application materials thoroughly? That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)?

To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to get a job at Oxide. Yes, we get a lot applicants. Yes, we ask a lot of applicants upfront. But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team -- one that I daresay each of us counts as being of unparalleled breadth and depth in our careers.

We have taken funding from In-Q-Tel, yes. The idea that taking funding from IQT amounts to "CIA roots" is preposterous: aside from the fact that IQT writes very small checks (<$1M), an IQT investment does not necessarily even denote that the federal government is a customer. IQT develops a work program with its government affiliates (the identities of which are opaque to portfolio companies), and the sale of any product to any government entity happens outside of IQT; the presence of IQT is merely to help startups fund (and deliver) features that are of special interest to the government affiliates.

And as long as I'm elaborating on IQT, let me add that they have been a terrific partner for us -- and we have found the individuals we have worked with there to be of exceptionally high character.

I have died.

I'm not sure what else you're looking for; we are already explicit about the fact that we (like YC!) don't give detailed feedback. If you would like to DM me, I will look at the reviews of your materials and tell you what I can tell you -- but I think it's pretty clear that you and Oxide aren't really a fit for one another?

Sorry to hear that you viewed it as a "litany of crap", but if it's of any solace, if you had slopped it, the result would not have been immediately different -- but you would be marked in our system in such a way that subsequent applications would also be disqualified.

It sounds like we're not a fit for you either, though, so maybe just as well!

I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the future is especially uncertain right now, and will contain many surprises!

This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential.

As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1])

[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8

That feels a tad unfair?

On the one hand, I admire (at some level) you sticking to your guns here, willing to take on all comers. On the other, though, I don't entirely understand the inference that you're drawing from the piece; what, exactly, is getting commoditized?

You're taking me slightly out of context there, but my intent was: it's not about free speech. That is, I strongly support free speech (they have the right to be as racist as they want!), but that isn't what this is about: this is about consequences of deplorable (but non-criminal!) behavior -- and just as people have the right to be hateful, we have the freedom to not want to be associated with the racist biker bar that is what Twitter has become.

I was recently asked about our (Oxide's) disposition to Twitter on the Peterman Pod[0], and the rationale for why we're no longer active there is pretty simple: the platform has become a cesspool of hate -- and it's antithetical to promoting a business (or any message, really). Aside from the morality of it (which is significant!), the hate itself is repugnant; it's not something that normal people want to be a part of in the long term.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s

I was 22! (I was only slightly older than my oldest kid is now!) So... yeah. May your mistakes at 22 not follow you around at age 52!

For whatever it's worth (perhaps not much?), I was actually asked about this three-decade-old post (!) recently on the Peterman Pod[0], which allowed for a slightly more nuanced discussion.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM&t=3757s

I do take a perverse kind of pride that this can now be said without any explicit reference -- and everyone knows you're talking about the lawnmower.

I would second the black bar for Kidder -- The Soul of a New Machine constitutes the literary foundation of our craft: it is our Odyssey. Speaking personally, I have spoken and written about Soul many times ([0][1][2]) -- and I know that its impact from me is far from unique.

RIP Tracy Kidder -- and thank you for giving us all permission to feel passion for the machine.

[0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/oral-tradition-in-software...

[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-so...

[2] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...

Yes, that's the joke?

There's a lot of confusion here about the way VC operates (or companies, for that matter), but just to clarify one point: an IPO is not an "exit" -- it is a public offering. That is, an Oxide IPO, were we to be so lucky, would be a milestone towards being the generational company that we aspire to be.

I LOL'd -- or certainly snorted. Underrated post, anyway.

Is this only based on On the Metal? (If so, those are all from six years ago -- even the ones that were released a mere five years ago.) Please do check out Oxide and Friends[0] -- and feedback always welcome!

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

Well, a couple of things. First, the Jonathan Blow episode[0] was over six years ago. Second, it was nearly a three hour conversation -- I don't think I can be accused of not letting him talk? Third, I definitely remember that I felt I had to interrupt him to move the conversation along. Fourth, I had to pee really badly, I was absolutely freezing, and I was quite concerned about missing my flight to New Zealand that evening with my family for Christmas (which I damned near did) -- and I have no doubt that I was not at my best!

I do try to get better at this stuff, and I re-listen to our episodes to improve as an interviewer. If it's been "a few years", maybe you haven't listen too much to Oxide and Friends? I think we've had some wonderful guests and great conversations over the span of the podcast -- though I also have no doubt that it's imperfect, for which you have my profound apologies!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkdpLSXUXHY

Thank you so much -- it's honestly very meaningful to hear!

Ha ha -- there are definitely voices that I know I have been implicitly inspired by over the years, but I can safely say that Chad the Bird is new to me! I'm enjoying listening to some of Chad the Bird's work now; my apologies in advance if it rubs off on me!

You may disagree with our rationale, but it is absolutely absurd to complain that that RFD 26[0] does not have "any meat." This is in fact dense technical content (10,000+ words!), for which I would expect a thorough read to take on the order of an hour. Not that I think you read it thoroughly: you skimmed to parts, perhaps -- but certainly glossed over aspects that are assuredly not your domain of expertise (or, to be fair, of interest to you): postmortem debuggability, service management, fault management, etc. These things don't matter to you, but they matter to us quite a bit -- and they are absolutely meaty topics.

Now, in your defense, an update on RFD 26 is likely merited: the document itself is five years old, and in the interim we built the whole thing, shipped to customers, are supporting it, etc. In short, we have learned a lot and it merits elucidating it. Of course, given the non-attention you gave to the document, it's unlikely you would read any update either, so let me give you the tl;dr: in addition to the motivation outlined in RFD 26, there are quite a few reasons -- meaty ones! -- that we didn't anticipate that give us even greater resolve in the decision that we made.

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026

I don't often do this, but I'm sorry, you don't know what you're talking about. If you bother to try looking for B-tree libraries in C, you will quickly find that they are either (1) the equivalent of undergraduate projects that are not used in production systems or (2) woven pretty deeply into a database implementation. This is because the memory model of C makes a B-tree library nasty: it will either be low performance or a very complicated interface -- and it is because moving data is emphatically an issue.

One point of clarification: the C version does not have (and never had) a hash table; the C version had a BST (an AVL tree). Moreover, the "Rust hash table implementation" is in fact still B-tree based; the hash table described in the post is a much more nuanced implementation detail. The hash table implementation has really nothing to do with the C/Rust delta -- which is entirely a BST/B-tree delta. As I described in the post, implementing a B-tree in C is arduous -- and implementing a B-tree in C as a library would be absolutely brutal (because a B-tree relies on moving data). As I said in the piece, the memory safety of Rust is very much affecting performance here: it allows for the much more efficient data structure implementation.

My intent at first was not to write about this, but I couldn't stop thinking about it: I was not only profoundly disappointed in my former colleague, but disgusted by the disdain towards VMware customers at Broadcom. I was earnest in that it brought a flood of memories back for me about how ashamed I was to (briefly) work at Oracle, and I did what I have always done when something is burning inside me: I spoke my heart.

I understand that you are concerned about my former colleague (though again, a little hard to say that I'm putting them "on blast" when they are unnamed!), but my sympathies lie not with Broadcom but with the customers that they are screwing over: I have heard many, many stories from VMware customers being taken aback by the audacious things that Broadcom has told them -- the kinds of things that even Oracle has the decency to not say out loud. These customers don't speak publicly (for understandable reasons!), leaving no one to speak for them.

So yes, a Broadcom employee shooting their mouth off in an unsolicited conversation with me about their contempt for their own customers shouldn't assume that their disposition will be kept in confidence -- especially when it tracks with so much bad behavior out there!

Yes, the point I was making (and as you point out, have been making for the last quarter century) is that we err when not making this realization -- and indeed, I think the linked piece is exactly backwards because it doesn't understand this. That is, the piece views a world of LLM-authored/-assisted software as "industrialized" when I view it as the opposite of this: because software costs nothing to replicate (because the blueprints are the machine!), pre-LLM ("handcrafted") software is already tautologically industrialized. Lowering the barrier to entry of software with LLMs serves to allow for more bespoke software -- and it is, if anything, a kind of machine-assisted de-industrialization of software.