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Ken Shirriff

Instruction decoding in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip

pre {border:none;} In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to run faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. With this chip, CAD software, spreadsheets, flight simulators, and other programs were much speedier. The 8087 chip could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, of course, but it could a...

Oxide and Friends 1:23:23

Shell Game with Evan Ratliff

Evan Ratliff, journalist and podcaster, joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his extraordinary podcast, Shell Game, in which he started a company staffed exclusively by agentic AI.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Evan Ratliff.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit t...

Oxide and Friends 54:52

Software Engineering Past, Present, and Future with Grady Booch

Bryan and Adam were joined by Grady Booch, software engineering pioneer and living legend, to speak about the past present and future of software engineering. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest, Grady Booch.Some of the topic...

Marc Brooker

You Are Here

You Are Here Where to next? The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero. The cost of building efficient, reliable, secure, end-to-end systems...

Embedded 58:47

520: All Sorts of Interesting Facts About Teeth

Chris and Elecia apologize, discuss uses and abuses of chatbots, reach out to an uncertain manager, try to help someone out of their professor's draconian rules, and extol the joys of reading. Chabot Space & Science Center is in Oakland, CA, US. It is wonderful! Some suggestions for UncertainManager: Thanks for the Fee...

Fork Around and Find Out 1:00:32

Embracing the Journey with Cassidy Williams

Come find Justin in-person and get FAFOFM stickers!Devopsdays - Portland, OR - September 8-10. Get 20% off tickets with FAFOFMEdgecase - Gooiland Hilversum, NL - September 24Taloscon - Amsterdam, NL - October 15-16KCD UK - Edinburgh - October 19Kubecon NA - Salt Lake City, UT - November 9-12Have an opening? HIRE AUTUMN...

Ken Shirriff

Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit

In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors, however, the 8086 is a 16-bit chip. Its arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) operates on 16-bit values, performing arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction, as well as logic...

Embedded 1:06:51

519: The Password Is All Zeros

Mark Omo and James Rowley spoke with us about safecracking, security, and the ethics of doing a bad job. Mark and James gave an excellent talk on the development of their safecracking tools at DEF CON 33: Cash, Drugs, and Guns: Why Your Safes Aren't Safe. It included a section of interaction involving the lock maker's...

Marc Brooker

Pass@k is Mostly Bunk

Pass@k is Mostly Bunk MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['\\(', '\\)'], ['$', '$']]} }; Exponentially better results? I'll take three! Measuring the success of AI agents isn’t easy. It’s very sensitive to what success means, it can require a lot of samples, its highly context sensitive. Generally hard. So it doesn’t help...

charity.wtf

Bring Back Ops Pride

"Operations" is not a dirty word, a synonym for toil, or a title for people who can't write code. May those who shit on ops get the operational outcomes they deserve.

Oxide and Friends 1:32:36

Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age

What do LLMs mean for the future of software engineering? Will vibe-coded AI slop be the norm? Will software engineers simply be less in-demand? Rain and David join Bryan and Adam to discuss how rigorous use of LLMs can make for much more robust systems.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined b...

Marc Brooker

Agent Safety is a Box

Agent Safety is a Box Keep a lid on it. Before we start, let’s cover some terms so we’re thinking about the same thing. This is a post about AI agents, which I’ll define (riffing off Simon Willison1) as: An AI agent runs models and tools in a loop to achieve a goal. Here, goals can include coding, customer service, pro...

Embedded 1:08:29

518: Nothing We Can Do About Frogs

James Cameron spoke with us about programming for and operating a large telescope. The show is a blend of astronomy, engineering on the fly, and weird lady bug habitats. The Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) is part of the Australian National University's Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Aust...

Oxide and Friends 1:39:06

Predictions 2026!!

Time for the annual predictions episode! Bryan and Adam were joined by frequent future-ologists Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, and Ian Grunert to review past predictions and peer into the future. If any of these predictions come to fruition, it's going to be an interest 1, 3, or 6 years!In addition to Bryan Cantrill an...

Embedded 1:01:12

517: A Direct, Sensible Podcast

Nathan Jones and Chris Svec give Chris and Elecia their 2025 performance review. Donations went to Elevate Tutoring, an organization that provides funding and support to low-income and first-generation college students as well as free STEM tutoring for underserved schools. Embedded has already sent in the match to the...

Ken Shirriff

Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip's microcode

In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. Plugging it into your IBM PC would make operations up to 100 times faster, a big boost for spreadsheets and other number-crunching applications. The 8087 uses complicated alg...

charity.wtf

On Friday Deploys: Sometimes that Puppy Needs Murdering

It's the most wonderful time of the year: the pie, the eggnog, the eternal debates over whether deploy freezes cause more harm than good. 🤶🌲

charity.wtf

2025 was for AI what 2010 was for cloud

The satellite, experimental technology has become the mainstream, foundational tech. (At least in developer tools.)

Oxide and Friends 1:27:51

OxF 2025 Wrap-Up

Bryan and Adam reflect on Oxide and Friends in 2025--favorite moments, episodes, and images. Happy new year and see you in 2026!Your hosts are Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:RFD 576: Using LLMs at Oxide (hacker news comments)OxF: Oxide and Friends 6/2/2025...

charity.wtf

Hello World

On platform choices, professional responsibilities, and picking your battles

Marc Brooker

On the success of 'natural language programming'

On the success of ‘natural language programming’ Specifications, in plain speech. I believe that specification is the future of programming. Over the last four decades, we’ve seen the practice of building programs, and software systems grow closer and closer to the practice of specification. Details of the implementati...

Fork Around and Find Out 32:49

Objecting to storage

Thank you NoPorts for sponsoringhttps://fafo.fm/noportsIf the Internet is a big computer, Amazon s3 is the hard drive. So what happens when a single typo breaks the Internet's hard drive? On this episode of Fork Around and Find Out we review the s3 outage from 2017. It wasn't that long ago and yet it seems everyone has...

Marc Brooker

What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?

What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like? MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['\\(', '\\)']]} }; Maybe not what you think. Over on X, Ben Dicken asked: What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning...

charity.wtf

Moving from WordPress to Substack

After a decade on WordPress, it's time to try something new.

Embedded 58:26

516: Voices From the Cataclysms of the Universe

Sophi Kravitz joined us to talk about art, science, and engineering. You can see Messages from Space on Sophi's website /sophikravitz.com). A subset of the artwork had a short stay for a demo at Chabot Space & Science Center. The completed work will be shown in 2026. Sophi mentioned collaborating with two sonic environ...

Ken Shirriff

The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered

Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This was a huge benefit for IBM PC applications such as AutoCAD, spreadsheets, and flight simulators. The 8087...

Oxide and Friends 1:00:37

Death by Uptime

We hit a new (and disturbing!) failure mode recently when a production rack that had been up for several months saw every (!) compute sled's service processor become simultaneously unresponsive. Bryan and Adam were joined by the members of the Oxide team who debugged the vexing issue -- and reached its surprising root...

Embedded 1:10:23

515: Script Boomers

Nick Kartsioukas joined us to talk about security in embedded systems. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is the primary database to check your software libraries, tools, and OSs: cve.org. Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP, owasp.org) has information on how to improve security in all kinds of a...

Oxide and Friends 1:21:04

Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug

Hey hey! We recently tripped over a ZFS data corruption bug–introduced over 18 years ago! Bryan and Adam discuss with members of the Oxide team as well as Matt Ahrens, the co-inventor of ZFS.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Alan Hanson, Matt Keeter, Andy Fiddaman, James MacMahon, and...

charity.wtf

From Cloudwashing to O11ywashing

I just watched a panel where tech execs nodded along as someone described the original definition of observability as an "unsolved problem" they had to build custom tooling for. My head exploded.