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Oxide and Friends 1:24:00

The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison

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

Jeff Geerling

Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on my Mac Studio

I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.

Marc Brooker

Lorenz and Little: How Much Does Your Tail Cost?

Lorenz and Little: How Much Does Your Tail Cost? Lorenz and Little sounds like hipster burger bar from 2015. MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['\\(', '\\)'], ['$', '$']]} }; It’s time for Marc’s Amateur Statistics Corner! Today: why I pay a lot of attention to tail latency when optimizing cost. I’ve written before on the...

Embedded 1:08:32

530: A Living Highlighter

Marine biologist Dr. Steven Haddock joins the show to share the alien, glowing, and transparent wonders of the deep ocean. We discuss his beautiful new book, The Radiant Sea, and explore the complex engineering and high-sensitivity optics required to capture living deep-sea creatures. Steve walks us through the evoluti...

Hackaday Podcast 1:03:53

Ep 379: Driving E-ink DIY, NES on ESP, and the Other IRC

On this episode, Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi discuss their love of electronic paper, clunky cartridges, and keeping old games alive by any means possible. You'll also hear about getting the most out of the sensors in our 3D printers, playing with X-rays at home, a ring that runs Java, and a roulette...

Armin Ronacher

Codeberg Divides

Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Considering I want GitHub to get some competition I have thoughts about this. GitHub’s governance has never been democratic and there is plenty about the platform that I dislike. Yet I do not need my infrastructure to b...

Jeff Geerling

Adding a backup Internet WAN on my OPNsense Router

AKA "Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I'm sick of it". I've been borrowing a portable 5G gateway from my Dad for a few weeks, for testing... and two weeks in a row, I've used it as a backup Internet option, since my Spectrum Business cable Internet has gone down. And yes, I'd get AT&T Fiber if I had the op...

Oxide and Friends 1:04:57

The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Storytelling with Ramy Katrib

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

Jeff Geerling

Open Sauce and GPS time were my summer AI Antiseptics

In the midst of our AI slop revolution, traveling to the West coast for Open Sauce this past weekend was the perfect antiseptic for rising costs, summer heat, and online divisiveness. It's ironic, then, that I used Claude to vibe code my Tufty GPS Time Badge. Partly due to time constraints, and partly because I wanted...

John Watson

The Keyboard on Floor 3

For six months, a sticky note on a London hotdesk read: “The S key is sticky, sorry - Mandeep.” What that note did to one keyboard explains exactly what agentic memory toxicity is.

Marc Brooker

Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP

Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP A paper! Our new paper, Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP, is now available on Arxiv. I’m excited about this one: it’s a fully end-to-end look at how Aurora DSQL works, from query processing, to transactions, to replication, to the control plane. We’ve shared most of this...

Hackaday Podcast 58:29

Ep 378: C Coders, Ceramic Printers, and Shadow Archives

It's a hot one at both microphones, as Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos wilt in the heat with ice lollies and freezer packs. But still, we persevered long enough to make a podcast. In Hackaday news, Supercon is on! It's going down in Pasadena, California, but the talks will be somewhere slightly larger, with a courty...

Charity Majors at Honeycomb

Shipping Is Your Company's Heartbeat: A Letter from a CTO

In an open letter to engineering leaders everywhere, Fin CTO Darragh Curran explains that AI isn't a magic wand but rather an amplifier—of the good and the bad—of your engineering practices. And engineering rigor is more important than ever.

Fork Around and Find Out 1:13:31

Laughing Through The Pain with David Crawshaw

Some of you might know David as a co-founder of Tailscale. In this episode we're talking about a new kind of cloud he's building at exe.dev. The SSH-only interface is a breath of fresh air compared to the monstrocity that the AWS console has become. We dive deep into why the cloud needs a reset and how integrating AI c...

John Watson

Correct, Relevant, Concise. In That Order

Writing code was always the surface. The real work was the frameworks and processes underneath. Machines have the typing now; what's left is what always mattered: context, and the deterministic plumbing that makes it reliable.

Will Larson

Generated and suppressed demand.

Eight years ago, I wrote about my theory of restoring struggling teams, which came down to four steps: A team is falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than the week before. Solve by hiring more. A team is treading water if they’re able to get their critical work done, but are not able to start paying down...

Will Larson

Make no assumptions.

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the concept of “soil horizons”, which is the idea that there are many distinct layers of soil, from topsoil all the way down to bedrock, which all combine into a soil horizon. Translating this idea into software, the ideal codebase would have a single uniform “code layer”, but a...

Hackaday Podcast 1:11:03

Ep 377: Parallel Pixels, Wiggly Consoles, and Seven Segments

This week's podcast sees Elliot joined by Jenny List, as both suffer silently in the European summer heat as the sound of a desk fan would come over on the recording. The stand-out hack of the week comes from [Bitluni], whose GPU made from thousands of cheap microcontrollers is on a scale we've never seen before. It's...

Jeff Geerling

QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight. If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine wha...

Embedded 1:22:08

529: The Narwhal Looked Amazing

Chris Svec returns to the show to discuss the messy, non-linear realities of engineering management and onboarding new college graduates. We explore why companies should bother hiring fresh grads in the first place, how to prevent junior developers from going dark when they get stuck, and why admitting ignorance public...

charity.wtf

Have you heard? Clickhouse is winning the observability wars!

Years ago I predicted that columnar storage would remake observability. What I didn't see coming: vendors would build it, nerf it, and sell a worse version back to you as "Datadog, but cheaper"

Hackaday Podcast 57:55

Ep 376: Modern Retro Projects, Retro Modern Projects, and the Teen Years for 3D Printing

Hackadya's Elliot Williams and Al Williams were in a retro mood this week. There was a new '486 computer, a new mechanical TV, and a USB stick with a magnetic personality. Can you watch YouTube on a Game Boy? Maybe. For the can't miss articles, this week, Elliot and Al reflected on the awkward phase of 3D printers when...

charity.wtf

In defense of AI mandates

When you need to execute a coordinated change on a tight timeline, a mandate is the best and most honest way to fund it.

Ken Shirriff

Examining circuit boards from the Space Shuttle's I/O Processor

The Space Shuttle's five1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands of sensors, displaying data to the astronauts, and navigating the Shuttle. Each computer consisted of two 60-pound aluminum-alloy boxes: the box on the right is the CPU, a 32-bit proc...

Oxide and Friends 1:14:30

The Oxide 3D Explorer

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

Hackaday Podcast 1:23:35

Ep 375: Rebuilding Tech on Our Terms and the Hero Nerd

In this episode, Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start off by taking a trip down the Raspberry Pi memory lane and then tackle a fresh pile of listener mail. The discussion moves on to hacking bike counter, homebrew upgrades to the Nintendo Entertainment System, and building RAM from whats in the parts bi...

Embedded 1:10:26

528: Goldfish Chunks

Tyler Hoffman returns to the show to discuss diagnostics and observability data in embedded systems. We catch up on his life after startup acquisition, explore the hows and whys of keeping product data separate from operational data, and consider the realities of fleet management at scale. Tyler is the co-founder of Me...

charity.wtf

Is it ethical to use AI?

On externalities and engagement, the problem with purity politics, and why we need to make AI boring again

Hackaday Podcast 48:54

Ep 374: Flippin' Phones, Sexy Spraysers, and Frikkin' Lasers

Things are back to normal around the Podcast studio, and this week you'll hear the dulcet tones of Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos. In Hackaday news, we still have a Frikkin' Lasers Challenge going on, and now you can even enter your project into it! Join the ranks, won't you? Not only do we have a triple mailbag t...

Marc Brooker

Meet Alice. Alice is impatient.

Meet Alice. Alice is impatient. What do you mean? MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['\\(', '\\)'], ['$', '$']]} }; Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in...