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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Today, @ahl.bsky.social and I will be joined by @noahharlan.bsky.social to talk about his work on wicked problems. These thorny problems represent some of our greatest societal ills, but progress CAN be made on them; join us, 5p Pacific today! discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?e...

discord.gg

Join the Oxide Computer Company & Friends Discord Server!

The Oxide Computer Company and friends; home of the Oxide and Friends podcast. | 5026 members

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

A classic track! @ahl.bsky.social and I also (of course?) had a podcast episode on this a few years ago, looking back on the years since it was published: oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rev...

oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm

Oxide and Friends | Revisiting Unikernels

Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends revisit a 7 year old blog post from Bryan regarding unikernels.

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Reposted by Bryan Cantrill

conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

do not try to talk to this guy about factories

Presentation slide titled "Aside: Actual factory" featuring a panoramic wide-angle photo of an Oxide Computer manufacturing floor, showing a curved row of upright server racks being assembled and tested inside a large, brightly lit industrial facility.

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

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

speakerdeck.com

Execution in the Kingdom of Agents: Reflections on Abstraction and Complexity

Talk I gave at Monktoberfest 2026; video to come!

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Reposted by Bryan Cantrill

Taylor Barnett-Torabi @taylorbar.net · 02/10/2026

our laziness is what allows us as humans to say no, and this helps us push back against complexity @bcantrill.bsky.social #monktoberfest

A slide that says:

The virtue of laziness
• Our need to comprehend and compose systems drives us towards developing simple, powerful abstractions
• This is our drive to cognitive efficiency in a system - what Larry Wall famously called the programmer virtue of laziness
• LLMs lack the virtue of laziness - they are biased to the complex
• Moreover, their limited context makes them tautologically emergent..

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oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm

No Oxide and Friends today, but we'll be back next week! Meanwhile, if you happen to have missed it, our recent For Want of a Resistor episode has turned into an instant classic oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/for...

Oxide and Friends | For Want of a Resistor

When the supply chain crunch catches up with you, sometimes a tiny resistor the size of a fleck of pepper is the difference between a world-class computer and... e-waste. Members of the Oxide opera...

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Unsurprisingly, @simonwillison.net has delivered a must-watch banger of a talk -- I cannot recommend it highly enough. Come for Simon, stay for the Pope!

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This debate is not about what is 50 years in the future

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I mean, do you feel this way about alien invasion, which has those same properties?

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🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Yeah, agreed -- Jensen got over his skis a couple of times

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Agreed -- and I was tempted to quip that he might well be at over a billion nanodijkstras...

Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

YouTube, you scamp! Thanks for the heads-up -- and DM away, I guess?

Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Well done -- and nice pulls in particular on Tandem, CDC, and the original Oxide logo!

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

As part of our annual @oxide.computer meetup, I added three new logos to our wall honoring our forebears; how many can you name?

A wall of Oxide logos paying homage to defunct companies

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Homage shirt #4 memorializes a company that burned fast and bright -- and whose operational miscues gained eternal life as an eponymous effect

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Homage shirt #3 is at once a tribute to a company, an engineer, a law -- and a mug

An Oxide homage shirt to a defunct computer company

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Reposted by Bryan Cantrill

Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 22/09/2026

Come for the employee reflection on the company, stay for this talk relating the CEO's post-mortem on it www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMG...

youtube.com

Principles of Technology Leadership | Bryan Cantrill | Monktoberfest 2017

YouTube video by RedMonk Tech Events

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

ngl homage shirt #2 goes just as hard

Oxide homage to a defunct computer company

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I found that my response to this merited something longer on what Sun got wrong bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/20/w...

bcantrill.dtrace.org

What Sun got wrong | The Observation Deck

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Sun had plenty! For starters, I stand by this HN comment from 15 years ago: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287...

news.ycombinator.com

I don't indulge in the SUNW autopsy parlor game often, but coincidentally, I've ... | Hacker News

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Instead of Taylorism, it could have been Cruise Control? I'll show myself out.

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Oh, I have another one that you are also going to want...

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I will also add: I am generally uncomfortable with 9/11 as metaphor. Unlike the author of the piece, I was an adult on 9/11 -- and its horrors still feel fresh, if now distant.

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Flight 93 has been occurring to me as a metaphor as well, but quite literally in the opposite sense of the linked piece. Critically: the passengers on flight 93 KNEW what had happened to the WTC (that's why they acted!); if we are to act like the passengers now, what is the WTC equivalent?

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Feeling is very much mutual -- loved your "AI Norms and Values"!

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Reposted by Bryan Cantrill

Adam Leventhal @ahl.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Absolutely crazy OxF yesterday with the @oxide.computer team and @bcantrill.bsky.social. The supply chain is a mess and a critical part for us went from a few bucks to, a few hundred, to unobtainable. What followed was some amazing luck, followed by bad luck, followed by good luck, and on and on...

youtube.com

Oxide and Friends 9/14/2026 -- For Want of a Resistor

YouTube video by Oxide Computer Company

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I see what you did there! The answer to your riddle is: the theater was not, in fact, crowded.

Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I would rather be Frink, no question. The grass is always greener, I guess?

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Reposted by Bryan Cantrill

I think I'm really regretting asking Google how it hallucinated me as Sideshow Bob

Google LLM'splaining hallucination to me -- and then insulting me for its hallucination

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I think I'm really regretting asking Google how it hallucinated me as Sideshow Bob

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I realize -- belatedly -- that you are not a technologist, so this apparently merits more patient explanation: technologists making technical claims are not, in fact, expressing sentiment -- they should be expressing facts or the closest approximation to it.

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Sorry, a technical claim -- which their loco 10% claim is by way of its (nonsense) quantification -- should NOT be about the sentiment. THAT'S the point, and yes, you appear to be missing it.

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