Stoked to be presenting to #rustnyc in two weeks to talk about Rust in the LLM age. Signups open -- with thanks to @datadoghq for hosting! meetup.com/rust-nyc/events/3…

Had guests over last night that smoked tobacco. Its scent in the morning with coffee is ultra kino, I don’t smoke but I love the scent so much. Compliments the beige milk glass mug from the great @oxidecomputer company. All that’s missing is the faint analog noise of office equipment in the background and a memo on my desk to read the AS/400 manual. Air conditioner is already set to 68F. This is the situation at the USGC office at present and this morning has been excellent, I wish the same to all of you.

Framed print from an @oxidecomputer trip to the Computer History Museum September 10, 2025

We anticipated this @oxidecomputer and are shipping to customers at tremendous scale. Buckle up 📈

Today on Oxide and Friends, @ahl and I will be joined by @noahharlan to talk about his work on wicked problems. Wicked problems are those that defy easy solutions -- or even concrete characterization. These problems often represent our greatest societal ills, and can be despairing to work on. But wicked though they may be, progress CAN be made on these problems -- and technologists can serve a critical role. Noah is a technology entrepreneur who has thrown himself into the wickedest of wicked problems, and has found opportunity to make tangible impact. Join us, 5p Pacific today! discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=…

disclaimer: networking noob What is a NIC? I always wondered what a network card actually did - it sits somewhere between the CPU host that has network stack and the switches / routers, but it also is a specialized ASIC in its own right. It’s a part of the network stack just beyond what I usually touch. So I drew a bad diagram. I think i understand a bit better now, NICs do a few things: 1. Speaks PCIe to convert CPU data buffers over DMA into electrical signals over the line, and vice versa. 2. Handle Ethernet / L2 framing (it has a MAC address) and offload common parts like checksums. 3. Optionally run hardware offload eBPF programs. 4. Optionally handle RDMA packets and translate them directly to memory access. In particular one thing I didn’t realize is that the actual optical signal part is not part of the NIC, there’s a separate little “transceiver” gadget that plugs into the socket and turns your electricity into lasers. Anyway this is why NICs are so complicated I guess, they have a bunch of hardware+firmware to speak PCIe + custom protocols.

My full @MTSlive segment is up -- and I definitely stand by my Richard Scarry recommendation piped.video/QVbAFGakkY4?is=Y-kF…

Video is now up! piped.video/watch?v=3kbPyuAt…

Slides for my #monktoberfest talk today, "Execution in the Kingdom of Agents: Reflections on Abstraction and Complexity"; video to come! speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/ex…

Oxide CTO @bcantrill says the future is full of things we can build but still won’t, because economics kills more sci-fi dreams than technology does: "What does powerful even mean? We've already accelerated ourselves into science fiction as far as I'm concerned. This is science fiction. Let's call it what it is." "I'm a bullseye Gen X-er. I've got my space Lego set. We were gonna have moon colonization. We were gonna have flying cars. We were gonna have jet packs. We were gonna have supersonic travel everywhere. None of that has come to fruition." "My grandfather flew in a Concorde exactly once. He said it was very uncomfortable. It solves one problem, but it creates a bunch of other problems that we as a society are not that interested in. We don't want sonic booms all the time." "Efficiency matters. The cost matters. The economics matter. People get divorced from the actual economics of these things, and economics is the driver of everything. Sometimes people chalk up to politics what is actually economics." @oxidecomputer

Oxide CTO @bcantrill predicted the iPhone almost perfectly in 2003, then thought it would flop, and says AI doomers should audit their failed predictions before making bigger ones: "Do predictions and write them down. Predictions tell you more about the present than the future." "I made a three-year prediction in 2003 that Apple would introduce a new must-have gadget called the iPhone that would be a combination cellphone, MP3 player, and digital camera, which is exactly what they did. I also thought it was gonna be a flop." "I had a bunch of operating system kernel people together every year to make predictions. Not one of us predicted cloud computing." "What is frustrating to me about some of these doomsayers is, can you go back to some of your past predictions which have been wrong at this point? Kudos to Hinton for coming back and saying, 'I was wrong.' We need a lot more of that." @oxidecomputer

Oxide CTO @bcantrill says AI extinction talk "escaped containment" from Silicon Valley, only to run into a basic question from family members: how exactly does this lead to extinction? "In the larger world, the commonsensical world, these arguments don't carry the weight that they do here in Silicon Valley. People have the natural question of, 'I'm a gym teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I'm trying to understand how that would lead to my extinction.'" "Nope, it does not lead to your extinction, and sorry, on behalf of everyone in Silicon Valley, sorry that we've let this escape containment into mainstream discourse, implying that you should be afraid for your life and the life of your kids." "It's convenient to talk about x-risk and divorce it from the underlying humanity, but you're talking about my kids and my sibling, my mom." @oxidecomputer

Oxide CTO @bcantrill says the people promising to "automate the economy" should spend a day in a factory, because much of the physical world isn’t even in the software loop: "People would benefit from going, working in a factory, going to a mine. Go into the actual industrial economy that people are talking about. It doesn't work the way you think it does." "It reminds me very much of the hysteria before Y2K. Ed Yourdon was saying that in New York City, you will not have water on January 1st, 2000, because there are microcontrollers that control the water system." "They interviewed the person that runs the municipal water authority. He's like, 'Do you understand how water works in New York? Do I need to send you a memo on gravity? The water is in the Adirondacks. It flows down to New York City.'" "People need to spend more time reading Richard Scarry. Learn how the world works, and then you can learn what the actual perils of automation might be and might not be." @oxidecomputer

Oxide CTO @bcantrill argues Geoff Hinton’s 2016 call to stop training radiologists shows why AI expertise doesn’t make you an expert in every field AI touches: "I thought Jensen did admirably, but I thought the questions from Klein were honestly terrible. He was admonishing Jensen for not deferring to the expertise of AI experts, like pioneers like Geoff Hinton." "Nothing against Geoff Hinton, but Geoff Hinton is not an expert in radiology. If you wanna weigh in on radiology, go spend some time with radiologists. Work a shift with radiologists." "In 2016, Hinton says, 'We should not be training radiologists.' You can easily imagine an aspiring physician in 2016 who comes across this article from a putative expert and thinks, 'I'm not gonna do that.' Meanwhile, we need radiologists." "This is true across so many of these domains where these guys weigh in on things that are not their domain of expertise." @oxidecomputer

I'm in the @MTSlive studio now and very much looking forward to this conversation with @theojaffee -- join us live in a few minutes!

Such an underrated episode. piped.video/1q2Dw57flPA?si=iTrl… startup with a unique philosophy. Thank you for this gem @oxidecomputer

You still can’t vibe code something like this. @oxidecomputer ✨