LINUX Unplugged - 657: Slop to Slap

Starting point is 00:00:00 Oh, and I just got hungry. Right on time. Right on time. Isn't that something? That's how we know it's time to stop the show? Now I'm hungry. How dare you? You guys are going to have to share oatmeal.

Starting point is 00:00:09 It's going to get rough. Sorry about that. No, I got my... I got my... The soundboard is so risky. You are so risky. He's a wild man this morning. What happens?

Starting point is 00:00:20 Caughting. As it like shakes? He was like, eh, no. He's trending to chaotic. Neutral. I mean, I don't know. Uh-oh, D&D reference. It's trending here.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Oh, come on down. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And my name is Jason. Hello, gentlemen. We are live from beautiful Pasadena, California.

Starting point is 00:00:52 And it is Planet Nix and Scale 2026 going on right now. So you guessed it that's what we are talking about this week. We have really seen the future. I mean, this is probably one of the biggest trend-setting scales we have ever been to. So we'll tell you all about that. Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts and picks and a whole lot more. So before we get to that point in the show, we got to do a little good morning to our friends over at Managed Nebula. Go check out Defined Networking and grab yourself some managed Nebula.

Starting point is 00:01:25 Now listen, Nebula is one of our favorite open source project. And Define Networking is doing this right. They have built a decentralized VPN on top of the Open Source Nebula platform that you can get set up in just minutes. no credit card required. You go to define a dot net slash unplugged. It's built for simplicity. It's serious security. And if you're building a homelab with just a couple of machines or you have an entire global enterprise infrastructure, it will manage the job. No fragile hub and spoke choke point, no control plane that you don't manage, no particular big tech lock-in at all. You build it how you want it. If you want to self-host the network, you can, or if you want to take advantage of their

Starting point is 00:02:03 whole setup with 100 hosts, absolutely free. Go to Defined. dot net slash unplugged support the show no credit card required and check it out see why we love it and a big thank you to define dot net for sponsoring this here show you guys as a best you know you can tell we love it because we were troubleshooting some networking issues for our pal bruntley here and what was the first thing that we said you know if we were using nebula it's so true yeah we can we have how can we use nebula to test this we'd have better insights into this problem if we were using nebula that is very true uh before we do uh chat about everything i just want to say one more time thank you to flocks for sending us down here and then honestly for putting on a hell of a

Starting point is 00:02:44 planet nix oh yeah they really do a great job they know the people in the industry to bring in so you really get something valuable out of it and uh then they bring everybody together with a couple of different after parties too and they provide it has really been a fantastic event and flocks made it possible for us to make it and um they really are taking something that is very complex in corporations you know you get somebody in a maybe your business or you your enterprise and they're the Knicks person and they become the Nix expert and then they move on and companies sometimes struggle with that and there's ways to solve that and flocks is one of them that is trying to make it possible for people to create dev environments quickly that other people can

Starting point is 00:03:22 address where you know the S-bomb you have everything right there onboarded instantly across the entire software lifecycle that's what flocks is doing it's flocks. Dev and go check them out because they really really made it possible and they threw a hell of a party and approachable too yeah like really You know, happy to, you know, chat with you, give you great time and just down to Earth, which was actually really nice. We had a great meetup as well. Yeah, we did. I mean, it was, we were just blown away.

Starting point is 00:03:52 Just, yeah, just nonstop. Just shaking hands and saying hi and getting in conversations. Great to see Sessna Mike there. Yeah. Got some great stories. Good to see him. I didn't confirm whether he flew in or not. I guess he lives near his year, so why would you fly?

Starting point is 00:04:03 Sounds like his plane might be in the shop for a bit. Oh, no. He showed me his avionics layout. that he had replaced in his sessna, and I was so impressed. I was like, oh, man, that is gorgeous. He's also, I won't say too much because I don't think it's fully public yet,

Starting point is 00:04:17 but he's working on a really cool project in the avionics industry that brings a modern tech solution to a problem that has been in this industry since, you know, for 50 years. Of course, it was great to see Carl from Texas. He brought a new type of pocket meat for us. Yeah, it was good, too.

Starting point is 00:04:34 I was afraid. It was your first pocket meat. What did you think, but it was actually quite delicious. I mean, savory. and at the same time, sort of warm and cozy. It was like love in small meat chunk form. Harvested by Carl himself, as they say.

Starting point is 00:04:47 It's true. Little deer. It's kind of like Bambi. Never mind. Nope, that didn't make me afraid. He also puts in the work. Not only was he there at the booth talking about Fedora and all, you know, sent to West and all the great stuff he's up to there,

Starting point is 00:05:01 but he also let a workshop. So you get hands-on stuff if you want to try your hand-to-packaging. Also, there's the companies that don't necessarily have an official presence, but they're here. You know, Anthropic is one of them. Shopify was another. System 76. They had some booth stuff here with the Amper folks, but like Emma was here.

Starting point is 00:05:19 We got to hang out with Emma. Always good. More lasers. And we saw listeners from all over the place. Anybody stand out? I mean, I always try, as you know, to figure out who came for the furthest. And we had a listener who came all the way from North California. North Carolina.

Starting point is 00:05:35 North Carolina, that's the place. Nice. Which is pretty much the opposite? I think it was Dewey. You're right. Pretty much the opposite side of the continent. Distros Deux Dewe was there? Distros do, yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Yeah, it was great. It was great. I mean, I didn't get everybody's handle, so I can't shout at everybody, but I'm true. We're sorry. We love you, though. And some people that were new, too. We got to meet some new folks. It's always a chance to network.

Starting point is 00:05:58 So. You know, that was actually. You said a guy stopped you on the stairs right before you walked down to Planet Nix. And they were like, hey, hey, it's you. And one of them literally said, you guys just made my weekend. Yeah, it was so sweet. It was so sweet and beautiful to behold. As like as an outsider, I was just like, look at them guys shy.

Starting point is 00:06:13 That's fun. You know, multiple times I do think we ran into people, or at least I did, where, you know, I knew one of the group, but they drug along a bunch of other people for this Linux thing or the Nix part or, you know, whatever nerdery and they were sharing. The other thing that's fun is, you know, you walk up to somebody like, oh, you do that project? I like what you make. And they're like, oh, I like what you make. Oh, you're the person who does that. But like they say, the hallway track or for us, the stairway track is really where all the magic happens. And it is, if you miss your opportunity, Linux Fest Northwest is just around the corner, April 24th to the 26th at Ballingham Technical College in the beautiful Pacific Northwest at a beautiful time of the year.

Starting point is 00:06:54 Rumor has it. We'll be doing a live show. Oh, God. And the new snap. The big venue is back too. The big room is back. So we're back in our original location. Well, what has become original location. We'll tell you more about it as I get closer. I won't naggy about it. But I just want you to know if you're feeling a little fomo

Starting point is 00:07:09 after listening to this episode, you do have another opportunity. I will say I've committed to bring the van to the venue. Here we go. It's on the record point. There it is. Can I get a lock? I think it is locked.

Starting point is 00:07:21 Drew, don't edit that out no matter how much he ends. You know what? Let's officially lock that in. There it is. Well done. Start betting on whether that'll happen or not. Yeah, right. Okay.

Starting point is 00:07:31 So let's do this in chronological order. this worked is scale has had an expansion over the years where they have what you could consider parallel tracks or side tracks. Subconferences maybe. Subconferences maybe. There's a Postgres subconference. There's a VoIP subconference. There was obviously a NICS, Planet NIC subconference. Yeah, I think that DevOps days, L.A.

Starting point is 00:07:52 is part of this. Yeah, yeah. And so those subconferences start a couple of days before the actual scale event. And then there's a tiny bit of overlap there. So we showed up a couple of days before scale to attend Planet Nix, and we got ourselves all situamicated and arrived on day one with Bellzone. Well, it's the morning of Planet Nix, just about to get going, and we've replaced Brent. I think this was a great idea.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Your idea, really. Well, I wanted to use your personal open-clay agent, but you broke it, so we couldn't. But the next best thing is we brought Jason with us. Hi, Jason. Can you describe the scene for us? Right now, we're inside a room, inside a larger room, inside another room, here at scale, the planet nixifying itself as we speak. That is actually the best description ever.

Starting point is 00:08:40 It's a room, in a room, that's in a room. Instead of like, in a world, it's in a room. Okay, I lied. We brought Brent to. You made it, Brentley. You made it. Oh, hi, I'm here. Hey, guys.

Starting point is 00:08:53 You're looking sharp. Well, we dressed up for you. So they're going to give us the introduction and all of that jazz. Then a little bit later in the day, Wes has a talk. And I'm already thinking about lunch. Yeah, well, I always do, of course. Because as soon as these things start, that's when I get hungry. And I thought it was good to sit there and kind of get the latest update from Ron.

Starting point is 00:09:13 Ron, not only the CEO of Flocks, but also runs the, he's the head of the Nix Foundation. And there was a good conversation between him and Kelsey Hightower, which we had on the show just recently, Kelsey. And I thought this point was worth capturing for you. And that is sort of this discussion with if vibe coding becomes more and more of a thing, And then people have these agents that can just crank out software as they need it to solve solutions. Do we, as an open source community, start to see a lack of contributions back? Because these things are just one-shodding or creating a custom bit of code for the user. The user implements it, and they never contribute anything back upstream.

Starting point is 00:09:49 And that was the sort of context for this conversation. There's no guarantee there's going to have to be anything. That's the hard truth. If you all believe that it's just going to be there because we want it, that's not how it goes. A lot of us don't own these companies. A lot of us are employees at these companies. They're given RSUs that you probably sell pretty close to immediate because it's deferred comp. A lot of us aren't that invested in this.

Starting point is 00:10:17 And there are pressures, right? I'm watching people say, hey, I'm anti-AI until you see the layoffs. Changes your tune real quick if you need that job. So I think the reality is the tools of the trade will dictate what, the hiring process looks like. I'm pretty sure someone somewhere is like, I don't believe in typewriters. It's going to be real hard to get a job today if you don't believe in mechanical keyboards. It's not going to work. The team will look at you crazy. Like, what do you mean you don't believe in email and sending electronic messages? That will change. It probably will. And where the

Starting point is 00:10:50 inertia is right now, a lot of people are trying their very best to make that happen. So we've got to be honest about it. And if those tools are actually any good, would you not use them? Who uses is a compiler here. Okay. There was an argument. If you look back in the archives, 30 years ago, compilers are for people that don't know how to write code. What are you using a compiler for? You're going to let the compiler decide when instruction

Starting point is 00:11:13 sets you use? People are still arguing about garbage collection. That's a sensitive topic. A contingent. Garbage collection? Not real people, man, if they're whole memory. Buffer overflows and all. So the way

Starting point is 00:11:31 I think about it right now, that's what we're faced with, the reality of it. So I think a lot of people here are practitioners. You're at a Nix conference, flux conference. You are probably in the fringe part of the technology where you know what's going on. You've turned that knowing what's going on to leverage. And also, I would really hope that people who are in charge of the core layers of our infrastructure actually know what's going on. So I'm not surprised that people in this community need to know how software is actually built. We need to know how software can be exploit it, and we need to understand how these tool chains go together. So I think this group is very special in that regard, but if you all zoom out a little bit, that's not the norm. A lot of

Starting point is 00:12:10 people can care less where the software comes from. App Git install the internet until this thing works. I'm not sure who packaged it. I don't even look at the author's name. I don't look at the checksums. If it works, it works. That's the reality. And one thing you and I were talking about was, do you need package management in this day and age? And you all would say, Kelsey, of course, this is a silly question. But have you seen people use some of these tools? Give me a thing that does X. And I don't honestly see these things go out and go find the right library.

Starting point is 00:12:43 Sometimes it just generates the snippet. You remember the left pad debate? Should you use things like left pad when you can just write a three-line function instead of taking a third-party dependency? Well, every prompt is having that same discussion, except for the developer isn't really making that decision anymore. So what happens to all this package management work that we're doing underneath the hood? Do we become the guardrails or do we get replaced by people creating software for themselves and not sharing it back?

Starting point is 00:13:11 I think this is an interesting discussion to be having right now. And it's probably something we're going to have to wait and see to a degree. But I do think maybe it's the wrong framing for the conversation. I think the right framing is will operators be trained? to submit that code back up stream, right? Because it's an LLM that's being operated. The LM isn't choosing on its own initiative to build a piece of software

Starting point is 00:13:34 to fork a piece of software. The LLM is being instructed to do so. So will the operator remember to contribute backup code? Can we train that back in for people that maybe don't have that culture? Or will the agents that get built this be part of their instruction set? Because if we get more autonomy a little bit,

Starting point is 00:13:51 the agents are off and they're doing things on their own, is part of that mindset that you give the agent, quote, unquote, that it goes and contributes, because that's the thing it can do while you're asleep. I think the incentives line up, and I'm curious to know what you, West, but I think the incentives line up to reuse existing open source code and to contribute backup stream, because there is ultimately an incentive to use the least amount of resources, the least amount of tokens, and the least amount of time, and produce the most stable result.

Starting point is 00:14:21 and the way you do that is by taking advantage of things that have already been built in are solid. And it doesn't matter if you're an LLM or if you're a human. That is just sort of a natural incentive you often arrive to, unless it's some small piece, right? Well, I think that the size of that might now be able to be changed, right? Because I think the cost of having your own fork is less, because the LM can maintain it. And the LM is pretty good about managing patch set, especially if you're just adding some stuff or making a few changes, not trying to re-architect the core. and it costs tokens to file the issue and to respond to the request to change your code.

Starting point is 00:14:56 And I think you're right, it is still worth it. But I think there could be some shorter term incentives and maybe people that aren't yet don't fully get it because they haven't done a few cycles of this where it is just very convenient to have it, you know, copy the code upstream, maybe templated out, fork it, make your tweaks on top, carry your own changes. And you can push it back up, but you might not be material harmed in the short term if you don't, or you might not think you are. In the context of this conversation, I'm curious what's going to happen with licensing, because we've seen a lot of these ELMs just suck in basically the world's content.

Starting point is 00:15:29 But what has been really important for open source projects is to follow licensing and try to make modifications available again. Is that, and we're just going to ignore all of that now? And we're not going to get open source projects to have the same momentum that they have in sort of this. Well, I don't think necessarily, I mean, we can talk about the training, but the use case could, totally be compliant, right? You only have to distribute stuff if it's, you know, maybe a GPL or GPL and you're trying to distribute some actual end user thing. We can carry your own internal forks as long as you want. Yeah, although it's easier said than done, especially for people that have never done this before. People that are like yourself that are familiar with software development,

Starting point is 00:16:07 yes, it's very trivial. I maintain is not, it is not a trivial thing for regular average users. And to that end, I think this is speaking to sort of a meta-theme. It wasn't implicitly. stated at Planet Nix directly, but it definitely kept being inferred to. It was the sense that Nix might become a little more inevitable when agents and LLMs are building software, simply because these things, these LLMs need guardrails, and they need the ability to know when they've broken the system or when the system is operational. And Ron kind of touched on that on stream, so I'll play, or on the stage during the keynote, so I'll just play a moment of that. The way that I've been looking at it, and I've been talking to folks inside of NICS, outside of NICS, is I think the more I'm seeing where the industry is going is that I would love for it to be a fact, right?

Starting point is 00:16:57 So to your point about the vision for NICS in the modern SELC, is that NICS can be the pure way that we actually are able to derive the packages and the baseline infra for what we're building, regardless if it's led by a human, by an agent, by a model, it doesn't matter. Right. So when you need something to be reproducible and you care about the speed, the infrastructure, the security, the underlying factors of it, I think Nix is uniquely positioned to be that platform. Right. And again, folks in this room kind of understand the underlying tech for it and why it's uniquely positioned. But I think that's, you know, when you want to be pure, there's NICs. And I think it's also fine to tell the industry that it's fine to be impure, right? Like if you want to just vibe code an app that. you don't care if you throw it away, right? Like, there is still a reason to use paper plates. It's bad for the environment. You shouldn't do it. But, you know, when you're tired at the end of the day and you have like four people over, and the last thing you want to do is dishes, throw the paper plates on there and then throw them in the trash.

Starting point is 00:17:58 It's totally fine. I don't love the message, but I actually think I agree with that framing. A lot of this vibe-coated stuff is paper plates. It's stuff you can throw away after you're done with the meal. And that stuff, I don't know if it really matters if it gets contributed back up because the person's not putting a lot of intention or design into it. and the people that do put intention and design into it, I think are inclined to contribute back upstream. Because, again, I maintain it's a personal operator thing.

Starting point is 00:18:19 And it's not like if you trolled all of GitHub and looked that the code quality is the same across the entire thing, guys. Let's not pretend. I think this is a substrate difference. It's not like before this humans didn't look at stack overflow and look at a bunch of stuff and then amalgamated in their mind and then spit out something else. When a human does that, we're like, oh, look at them, craft that stuff. but they're doing what the LLM was doing, and they just did it in a human substrate with their brain. There's also maybe like different kinds of open source and sharing.

Starting point is 00:18:49 You might, you know, what might change is it's easier to have, to have whatever you make, it be shared, especially if you have a flake dot nix in there is, you know, immediately any other system that has Nix, be it human or LLM or whatever,

Starting point is 00:19:00 can consume it. So whether or not you take the time to do the stuff at the core root upstream of doing it, maybe it's a whole discussion, but I think there's a ton of incentives to just go, put it out there for other things and yourself to use, because especially having it out there makes it easy to consume for yourself as well.

Starting point is 00:19:15 Yeah, I think that's what I've been noticing is it seems like the first step is on the read me for a GitHub project. It's the read me now has, if you're a human do this, if you're an LLM, do this. And they're like if there's actually writing the read me for an LLM audience. And you're seeing that more and more. And I think that's step one.

Starting point is 00:19:32 And then I think step two is, and here's the flake. And because it tells the LM. And because Nix, Nix can run on Mac OS, it can run on any, And it can run, of course, on NixOS. It is sort of this, it could be this universal agentic package manager or something like that that is the human never needs to worry about it.

Starting point is 00:19:50 But what's interesting is humans can. It's sort of at this sweet spot where it is readable enough for humans. The four of us in this room have proved that. But yet it also lends itself towards machine learning having a capacity to deal with it. And that's kind of a nice spot on the seesaw. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, in a way, it's nice that we're able to get in and learn it before the machines took over.

Starting point is 00:20:13 Yeah. And I don't want it to sound like morality-based when I say it's just a substrate difference that there isn't, you know, some moral quandary about that. There is. There's a big difference between, you know, making all these data centers take up lots of natural resources and everything. There are plenty of differences in the end. I only meant if you take out the morality, it is what code gets generated is. When you're talking about, like, a human's copying from Stack Overflow versus an LM doing it. Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Starting point is 00:20:39 So after the talk, Wes, we actually, I kind of liked this. West's talk was up early in the day, early in the event. And Brent and I were, I mean, we were hyped for, whoa, we were hyped. I mean, we've seen West talks at previous conferences like Texas Linux Fest, and they're always kind of wonderful. I'm so lucky to have you as my boost. It was so good, though. I really felt like I was like you were right in the pocket. And it was great about a West talk.

Starting point is 00:21:03 And, you know, Brent and I, you know, we don't, he has it handled. So we don't have to worry and focus on that. stressed. Okay, well, we socialized, and now it's time for, it's time for Wes's talk. And he is doing Nix Anywhere Else, replicatable binaries via elf. Oh, relocatable. Sorry, my eyes are a little blurry. Relocatable? Yeah. Relocatable elf on the shelf binaries during the holidays. Did I get that right? Something like that. I think Wes might clear it up for us, but I think you're on the right track. Oh, man. Where is your elf binary? I think Wes has it. I think it's going to be a good talk, though.

Starting point is 00:21:40 My kids would love this one. And it was a good talk, right? Good talk. Clean, smooth. Mm-hmm. I felt like I learned something while you were learning something because you not only took it to the place where I want to try this to solve this problem. But after you solved it, you were like, wait a second, what if I also do this? And it was so lovely.

Starting point is 00:21:59 You guys have to watch it online. There was a moment that I was a little like hold my breath and because Wes decided to do a live demo of taking the, you know, the BcashFS Nix package and translating it over to a DeB package and getting it actually installed and running and getting BCHAS on an Ubuntu system. So bonkers. Even though the Debian base has removed support. Yeah. And now we can actually format a BcashFS file system on Ubuntu entirely built from Nix.

Starting point is 00:22:34 So just to kind of emphasize what happened, it was the same tool. All these binaries have the metadata anyway. We were blessed from Ilko and others to come up with all of this crazy. tooling to help Nix work that it turns out can do more than just make one of the best Linux distributions possible, right? It can do surgery in to bring whatever tools you need to Nix, even if it's not maybe the right way to do it, and it turns out it can be used for surgery out to take all of the wonders we have in the Nix ecosystem, make them portable, and bring them with you wherever you are. Patch Elf is really, it's setting metadata, it's writing some strings,

Starting point is 00:23:10 and once you see that, you might start seeing it everywhere. At a boy, Westpane. Ad a boy. It was a good talk. We enjoyed it. And like Jason said, we learned. All right. That was pretty good.

Starting point is 00:23:21 The patcher elf on the shelf had a little demo that I thought was pretty good. He managed to get B-CashFS working on an Ubuntu box by using Nix tools. That was neat, right? I did not, I'm still kind of speechless. I did not expect that to be a possibility. Yeah. Right there on stage, it was good. It was fun talk.

Starting point is 00:23:40 And now it's lunchtime. That's my favorite, favorite time. at the day. Give it. You know, what's funny is we don't have any clips after lunch. I don't know. Westpane, you're doing a good job. Yeah. Yeah. So day one was great. After lunch, lunch was one of those things where on our way to lunch, we got stopped 15 times, and then we talked with folks, and it was good. It was a lot of socializing. We had a lot of people to see that we haven't seen in a while. But we stayed out a little too late. And maybe we should have realized this was going to be a trend that we needed to get a

Starting point is 00:24:12 handle on, but at this point, we were still naive and thought this would be the only late night. Planet Nick's Day 2. Thankfully, it starts a little later today. We're still at the Airbnb, if you can't tell. Moving a little slow. Yeah, and I think I talked a little too hard yesterday. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:27 Too much socialized. Lunch was good, and then we went and just talked and talked and talked, and then we went to the after party and talked and talked and talked. Yeah, how you doing? You're right? Yeah, actually. Well, I didn't have to walk as much as you guys, because I got a piggyback ride. That's true. That is actually true. Yeah, it was a good piggyback right, too. I saw pictures. It was legit. I got some free sunglasses. That's true. That's cool.

Starting point is 00:24:52 Yeah. Yeah. So it was, um, really, in a way, day two had the big heavy hitter keynote because it's the state of the union for Nick's OS, which we're always kind of interested because you tend to get a few, at least one or two tidbits that, uh, you kind of hang on to for the rest of the year. You can hear the hubbub of Planet Nix. The secure Nix State of the Union is about to kick off. It should be pretty interesting. It's going to be both the state of the union and a talk about security in one, which probably should go together more often than they do.

Starting point is 00:25:22 And there's already people with laptops. Look at all those people actually with laptops up and getting work done. I guess they didn't party as hard as we did last night. Yeah, people getting work done is a big trend at Planet Nix. And once the keynote started, Ron touched on something that I think was on a lot of people's mind. bottom line at the end of the day, the order and solution is Nix. Nix comes in and simply put, because everyone in this room knows that it's a lot more complex than that, unifies the baseline architecture of a few steps of infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:25:57 Now, simply put, what happens when you have one step instead of five, what happens when you have one step instead of six? it's just faster. It doesn't matter what's happening on the top. It just means that whatever that solution ends up being, that solution is able to be more reproducible, more secure, more deterministic, and in general, fast.

Starting point is 00:26:19 And we always listen for some of the financial details because last year at the first planet Nix, Ron said that the goal was was to have two years of runway, if any sponsor were to pull out. They want to have two years of runway to run the Nix OS infrastructure. And what was the number? He said their costs are going up by $25,000 a day.

Starting point is 00:26:38 Is that what he said for the S3 cash? I think it was gigabytes. Gigabytes. 25. It was 200 gigabytes a day. 200 gigabytes a day increase? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:26:48 And I think he said it's costing them 25K a day on average right now. So you can imagine that expense. That's just for the NixOS cash. And so they really want to get to a point where they have two years of runtime. And Ron gave it to a straight. They're not quite there yet. We like to keep finances very, very, very. transparent. That's what we do. We started this a few years ago. Everyone here will have access to

Starting point is 00:27:08 this to the slides and you'd be able to see. Currently, the foundation still does not receive enough funds to be able to do what I think is the sustainable, I would say, P&L. I want the foundation to be in a position that we can fund and continue the infrastructure and keeping the lights on for at least two to three years without relying on anyone. And unfortunately, we're not there yet. I think some good progress has been made. I don't think the numbers are quite final, right? But we did get a little preview on some of the slides here and, you know, donations. There's nearly 46,000 euros a year in donations, a bunch from Open Collective. Also on Nixcon 2025, it looks like they're able to make some money, nearly 33 grand, right? Always good when incomes

Starting point is 00:27:51 more than expenses. But still down estimated profit of negative 24,000 euros. It's amazing. It's only that low, actually. When you think about the cost, but it makes it unsustainable and they don't have that two-year runway. And Ron did a great job calling out and to talk some of the sponsors, right? Like working with Fastly, working with AWS. Corporations were willing to help because they know the stuff is good. And they seem to be getting it a little bit more and more. The conversations are beginning to be elite, more productive. Yeah, I think, right, everyone acknowledges we're not there yet, but I think maybe that's just me, my read, but it felt like Ron was maybe a little less existentially freaked out about it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was a good state of the union. All right, so the state of the union was good, and I want to capture some impressions.

Starting point is 00:28:33 What did you think, Wes? You know, I think Ron did a good job of bringing up a lot of different people from the community, and you get a sense that, like, we have a steering committee now, we have a constitution, we have a foundation, and some of those people seem pretty professional, and they do professional jobs, but at the same time, they're all wearing many hats, and you kind of get a sense of, like, what it takes to keep something as diffuse and large and exciting as Nix and Nix OS hanging together. Yeah, and some of it's still new.

Starting point is 00:29:00 They're still experimenting about with the structure. Yeah, I noticed the steering committee, they're getting their legs. It felt like they still are getting their sea legs on what it is like to be a public-facing thing that is responsible for shepherding the needs and wants of a community. That's not easy. You also have human interaction. As part of a steering committee, you have to take human needs and deal with those. and at the same time the other five hats they're wearing.

Starting point is 00:29:30 So kudos to them for getting up there, and it does seem new. It does, you can sense that it's new, but something I think it makes sorely needs. So I'm hoping that they get a little strength. I think they could use a little inner strength. Yeah, I think, well, don't you think as they have to make more decisions as time goes on, right?

Starting point is 00:29:50 Because the steering committee is like the committee of last resort when nobody knows what direction to go. Because they don't want it to be a authoritarian dictatorship, Because then, no matter how benevolent a dictator is, it's still a benevolent dictator. So you want to move to something that seems to be on more sure footing, where you get multiple opinions about what the right way to go forward is. And it is the correct model. I think it's just a muscle that hasn't been exercised. So you sense that.

Starting point is 00:30:18 And speaking of opinions on how the thing went and forming those, what were yours? I noticed just a lot of passion. Like every team member that was there got to dive into their niche and be able to say, hey, I'm really interested in infrastructure, and that's where I'm going to do my work. And there's enough people with different interests that it seems to be going in a positive direction. That was what I noticed. Yeah, I mean, we have a formatting team, right? It's like that spells it out.

Starting point is 00:30:45 And you could actually sense when a person was done talking up there how much the people in the room, and I imagine the people who are watching this, appreciate what they're doing, it's kind of like everybody was so glad they were doing those Kuta things that are difficult. And you really get a sense of gratitude from this community because they know that Nix makes things so much easier than it would be without it. And then without those people, it would be infinitely harder. So I felt that gratitude. Yeah, I think there's like a certain amount of excitement. We know that this community can have a lot of, let's say, active discussions on things.

Starting point is 00:31:22 And maybe it feels like between, you know, flake stability. There's just a lot of outstanding efforts because it is a giant scope. And I think it's easy to see, you know, hot discussions on the discourse or feel like things are stagnant and not necessarily moving. And they get updated in a very diverse way. So it's cool to have all of those updates in one spot because it turns out, even if you're not closely watching, there is a lot of work happening. Yeah, and I think the other takeaway I had is a lot of it's being done in the public. You just have to know where to look. And that was one of the things that we got was resources of where to look.

Starting point is 00:31:51 Now, you had a chance to sit down with Ron a little bit after his, keynote and I grabbed a couple of moments from that. For humans, it was like, what, what is this? Right. Like, am I looking at the ingredients of like my, I don't know, my like multivitamin? Like, why do I need to know what type of B12 complex is included in this, right? So, so for us, I mean, for a subset of us, the folks that were here for a long time, they're like, yeah, that's cool. I want to know, like, you know, that the B12 complex came from that exactly that extractor, that like laboratory function that made it happen.

Starting point is 00:32:23 But I think that's also what's making it so in tune with agents, right? Because Nix was one of the purest ways to communicate with computers that you can find. And guess what? Now, agents, the computers are able to do more. So I don't think it's surprising that the thing that can communicate the most with the computer and is the most, I would say, perpendicular to the way that computers are thinking in a descriptive format is able to be utilized and pretty much leveraged very effectively by those very computers now that they have more capabilities.

Starting point is 00:32:52 I'm going to tell it to you straight audience. I'm not hyping this up. I'm not making it up at all. The people that we talk to that are really heavy hitters that are in industry that are building things, every single one of them is working with agents. Every single one of them. None of them were like, oh, we're not doing that.

Starting point is 00:33:13 And then there were people that are like, oh, the gal we talked to from France. Roxanne. Yeah, she's like, that's her whole business. Fisher with a sea. Yeah, Fisher with a sea. There was some diversity. Some folks are using it more,

Starting point is 00:33:22 or less or for different things. Yeah. Yeah, that was a consistent. I mean, that was her whole focus. Yeah. Well, agents, like her company's whole focus.

Starting point is 00:33:30 Well, even, but my point here, too, is even the companies where that's not their focus, where they're delivering other things, they are all experimenting with agents too. Now, I'm not saying 100% of people where I'm saying the people that are established,

Starting point is 00:33:41 heavy hitters that build things you use every day that are out there, shipping things to, to end users. 100% of them are messing with stuff and building agents. and some of them are seemingly building harnesses and test suites, including, sounds like even Ron and the folks over at Flox. We've been able to build up something that I'm hoping to open source completely unrelated to Flux inside of Flux.

Starting point is 00:34:06 We pretty much made a mandate inside of the firm around AI utilization about three or four month ago, and pretty much we built an engine that is able to take all of our contacts from across the entire bit, especially with Nix, and almost be like a sidekick assistant to everything we deploy and actually deploy things for us. So I think our engineering pace inside of the company, and I was a skeptic. I was like, no, no, no, this Nick stuff, it's going to take way longer for us to actually be able to automate any part of that build through the roof. Like we're seeing about 10 to 20X on across the band on engineering output, velocity, product, you know, response.

Starting point is 00:34:47 Like customers are coming in with asks, we're able to split that up, put that into roadmaps like at a pace that I've never seen. before. So I guess it's kind of related to flux, but I'm more personally excited about that because I think that's going to set the entire industry standard across the band of what we as humans are able to ship out and create value around. It's totally game-changing for the market. He said a 10x increase in some of what they've been able to deliver. That's crazy. Yeah. And these are still early days. And he's so excited about it. He wants to release it. They're all so pumped about it. Yeah. Yeah. One of the conversations we were having before the event is it's going to be really interesting to see if we walk in,

Starting point is 00:35:24 and this is a crowd of skeptics. This is a Linux community. It could be a total AI skeptic crowd or if it's going to be a crowd of enthusiasts. And it wasn't 100% alignment on any particular issue, and there's a lot of people that are grappling with some of the wider issues that we often discuss when it comes to AI and big tech AI in particular.

Starting point is 00:35:42 We definitely heard that from our audience there and folks we were talking to. But, I mean, it was overwhelmingly, they are working on these things. But like anything that is this important, and this impactful, it's people working through it in real time. It's humans being like, oh, I think this is, oh, wait, no, that's not. Oh, but maybe, and they're literally grappling with something brand new that has long-term consequences in real time. And that's how we work it out.

Starting point is 00:36:06 We need to talk about this stuff. We need to just say, look, let's not boogeyman this. Let's just rationalize that there are good, there are bad. There's all kinds in this, in this. It also didn't feel like humans were excluded, right? Like, I didn't, you know, we heard about that from Fox, but Fox was just bringing on new team members. who are kicking butt helping the event go. And, you know, everyone's talking about how, you know, how it's sort of enabling them to do more with, like, a distributed team that they have, that, you know, now they can do more with these tools.

Starting point is 00:36:32 So it's interesting to watch. I have to also say as an observation, I didn't hear anyone talking about how any of this would lead to employment loss. If anything, there was, like, just this buzzing about new ideas for new projects and new ways to solve problems. Well, you know, I think the biggest trend was is, you know, Bob's totally tapped out. He's been so busy.

Starting point is 00:36:54 And so he took three days and he built this system and now Bob's got so much free time. Like we just kept hearing that over and over again. Or so much new excitement for the problems he's time. Yeah. I had a chance to sit down with Graham from Determinate Systems. And he's the CEO over there. I'm sure I'll say that in the clip here that I'm about to play.

Starting point is 00:37:10 But they also have been working on this stuff. And I won't say too much because I don't know how much he wanted public. But they have figured out a way that just directly enables them to really ramp up how fast they're building on arm systems and testing on embedded arm systems. And coming up for solutions for some of the limitations on totally bootstrapping a arm device that maybe doesn't have device drivers,

Starting point is 00:37:34 and it needs a complete strapping from the base to all the way up to booting Nix OS. And they are working on these things, and it's just really awesome. So I had a great chat with Graham, and it was good to see them there at Planet Nix. Walking around, we found Graham Christensen, CEO of Determinate Systems.

Starting point is 00:37:50 We're sitting down chatting, and I got wind of some new software releases, a couple of big things, including a new version of the Determinant Systems Nix installer. I think it was version 3.17. Is that right? Yep, 3.17 out-0. We actually just finished rolling it out yesterday. It ships a whole bunch of new stuff. So, like, last year at Planet Nix, we talked about Flake Schemes. This is the first release that actually contains Flake Schema's first party.

Starting point is 00:38:15 We've just shipped some Providence Improvements, which is huge. So what that does for you is it lets you bundle and query a store path itself to see what the license is for that software. We're using it to attach Providence data, like CPE matches, so you can see what vulnerabilities apply to it. Instead of just like a rough package name, package version, which a lot of S-Bomb tools do, this is very precise. Tons more. We shift Wazam support. That's a collab we did with Shopify, and it's huge. We got a sick Mandelbrot demo.

Starting point is 00:38:45 Yeah, we got to see it. It's a little bit of art, actually. But then you were also mentioning there's secure packages now. And that seems like a big deal. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, and it's really been surprising the turnaround and what that's done for us and our users. So we basically, we take NICS packages,

Starting point is 00:39:02 and we've picked out a subset of it, which is like essentially we promised to cover everything our customers depend on, but it is not all of NICS packages. It's huge. You couldn't do it. But so what we do is for everything that's in our covered set, we continuously monitor it for CVEs. We reevaluate that twice.

Starting point is 00:39:18 day. We're actually working to annotate all of Nix packages with CPE identifiers so we can be really complete on that front and then have an SLA on shipping vulnerability fixes for it. Really the goal here is to, well, we've had customers over the years that said we ship NICs, we use NICS packages in critical spots, we want to keep using it. Our auditors are kind of scared of it and this is really helping a lot of places to take advantage of it and be happier and comfortable with it. Yeah, as someone who's had to do compliance work at past jobs, like that's either the stuff that you get told no because it doesn't exist, or you maybe have willing management who's willing to let you build it in-house,

Starting point is 00:39:56 and then you're probably going to build just a worse version that no one else gets to use. So it seems a lot better. Yeah, right? Yeah, that's actually, so we had one of our customers come to us and say, you know, our auditor flagged this concern that, like, NICS packages, they're not, you know, it's not the most professional ultra-conservative ecosystem. Is this safe at all? Is it actually safe at all to depend

Starting point is 00:40:19 on this? And the work we're doing with the CPEs and the Providence and secure packages is letting them continue to serve their customers with Nix and NixOS. It's really exciting. Graham, I think maybe listeners that just use Nix privately in their home lab, they might be surprised to hear

Starting point is 00:40:35 there's demand for enterprise features like this because this sounds like stuff maybe REL has to incorporate for compliance purposes. And one of the things I picked up on here is there's a surprising amount of people that are using Nix in the workplace, but maybe they're not even disclosing it to their management or, you know, they're not talking about it. They're not public about it. Are you seeing that at Determinant Systems, too? Yeah. So something we've noticed over the last 10 years or so is the people we're talking to are getting, like, older and more mature.

Starting point is 00:41:05 Like, you know, in the beginning of consulting, so often we would talk to somebody who was, like, fresh in their career and, like, I want to get Nix at work. And I was like, cool, I hope you succeed. And now we're starting to talk more to people who have been working at that company for 20 years. And I'm saying, Nix is the next step for us and we want your help to do it. And so that's happening. But also, we're hearing from, you know, people who've been building on top of rail for their entire career. And now they're shipping and using NICs and school systems and the government agencies and state agencies and healthcare tech, like, and not just upstarts, but like major established players. They're truly, I would say Nix is approximately everywhere. They just haven't, they just haven't

Starting point is 00:41:47 told you yet. I'm just curious, do you have any insights or your own theories around why folks are so reluctant sometimes and either individually or corporations, companies to talk about Nix as a tool? This one's a little touchier, a little spicier. But I think, and I think we're sort of getting over this as an ecosystem, but at least over, over the past several years, there's been a explosion and growth of usage in Nix, and I think the community was kind of jarred and upset by that. And so a little skepticism and a little fear about talking about the places that they're being used in agencies that are not popular, right, and not exciting or like clearly like a moral good. You know, those agencies exist and they're using NICS too,

Starting point is 00:42:28 and they don't want to be like, get in trouble, right? But they are using NICS. And personally, I feel like they exist, and if they're going to use software, which they are, they are better served by software that does the stuff correctly versus might be working incorrectly or less reliably. I don't know. It's complicated. Yeah, I think we see this a lot in Linux and open sources. It's sort of a sign of success, right?

Starting point is 00:42:54 Like early adopters may be, oh, it's pure, it's functional, all the nerdy details, or maybe it's the open source philosophy. And then you get to the point where it's just so clearly. a useful tool that the pragmatists come, right? They don't need to buy into all those other layers. They just see that, like, it builds a better Docker container. Yeah, I mean, that's totally true. I mean, that's the history of basically technology, right? Starting with ARPA and DARPA. It has always been very, so much of, like, the advanced technology we have today comes from the military, right? In the military being willing to spend heavily and invest heavily in making this tech better. And,

Starting point is 00:43:32 I've talked about this before. I have complicated feelings about the military, but I feel like, you know, it's better for them to run Nix than for them to run something else. So I am excited to help them do that. I think I sleep a little better at night knowing that they're running Nix OS,

Starting point is 00:43:48 or more and more so, at least. So one of the other, I'd say, big trends, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up yet in our conversation. It seems to be here is a lot of people are talking about AI and agents in particular. Are you seeing much of that materialized

Starting point is 00:43:59 from a customer demand or anything like that or a workload? Yeah, so actually this is something we've started doing internally. So we've been working on a real small operating system to run on embedded targets. And we're going to talk about that more another time. But one of the things we've been able to do with that is we have a hardware test lab. And it's pretty neat. One thing we can do is we've instrumented the hardware and we can say, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:23 hey, Quad, this is how you talk to the hardware. Here's the Nix Flake. Go make it work, right? And then it can do Nix build. It can go reboot the device and see if it booted successfully. and take that input and create basically the board support until I can boot. And, you know, that's like an extreme example, but it's really compelling. And actually, this is something that totally tangential,

Starting point is 00:44:46 but the rise of LLMs has made it so much easier for people to engage with and learn NICS that I feel pretty vindicated. Like there's, it's been scary over the last, well, I don't really want to say scary. But anyway, so it's been hard to think about the adoption. and the education process for Nix users. And maybe it is right to try and wrap Nix up and make the interface easier and sort of hide Nix behind it. But the rise of LLMs and the ability for people to more quickly adapt

Starting point is 00:45:15 and get used to Nix, I feel completely vindicated about the right investment for us is Nix itself. That is a great point. And I've just amongst ourselves seeing it too in the audience as well. Graham, it's always great to catch up with you. Where should we send people to check out like the new installer and stuff like that? Yeah, so we've published all our things on Determinate.Systems, and that's probably the best place to get started. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Starting point is 00:45:40 Yeah. You know, we really couldn't fit everybody in, but it is the friends you make along the way. But you were pointing out there is one group that would have been particularly great to get on the show. Yeah, I mean, Anthropic had nine representatives there, which when you think about, well, you were talking about how the salary for watching one presentation that was, it was like a $60,000 presentation. Yeah. That was an hour long. And for them to think this is important enough to go down to the basement with the rest of us to send nine people down there. Giving talks and they had a big booth there and on the floor.

Starting point is 00:46:11 That speaks to what they think is important. And Nix is a big part of their infrastructure. And last year, Anish gave a talk. And that was new. He was working with Nix. But he said, oh, yeah, that was my first talk ever. And then he came back this year as almost like an ambassador for Nix, but also an ambassador for bringing. Anthropic folk into the ecosystem.

Starting point is 00:46:32 Yeah, he's a good shepherd for his team. Anish is a great guy. And, you know, we hear so much about anthropic from the outside. But then when you see the people that are building, they're engineers and their nerds and they're solving big problems that people haven't solved before. And they're then upstreaming some of those solutions. And then they're bringing that knowledge to these events and telling people, in a couple of years, you're going to need to solve this problem.

Starting point is 00:46:54 Here's how you could start thinking about it today. And they're very intent on getting rid of those little role. roadblocks that maybe Nix has or that they've encountered because they're on the cutting edge, they're going to hit it first. And they're very intent on being like, hey, hey, hey, let's fix this. Let's make sure this isn't a roadblock, which makes it better for all of us. You know, that was one of the things we thought we kind of would see that from the theme of Nix this year. But I think it pans out. You see just people from all diverse set of companies workshopping ideas from like small firms who are just adopting it, getting to pick

Starting point is 00:47:24 from the brains of folks who've maybe been doing it at scale for a couple of years now. It's just, It's really fun to be a, you know, a fly on the wall to watch that happening. It's such a positive feedback loop, it seems. And some places don't have that. I think sometimes certain technologies engender bringing the best out of people. And it seems that Nix tends to do that out of really smart people. From all different backgrounds. Solving huge problems or just even just.

Starting point is 00:47:46 Or like, you know, folks who do it who have been long time community members because they love open source and they love Nix, meeting people who maybe just are learning it because they join a company who's already using it. So that was, you know, part one, planet Nune. Nix and then it was shift gears and you go to scale. So Planet Nix is an intimate setting, you know, six, seven hundred people now. Last year, maybe 300 people. Scale is a whole other deal.

Starting point is 00:48:09 You know, five, six, seven thousand people. It's the largest Linux event in North America. We don't have a sponsor. So, uh, can you give us a sponsorship here? Yeah, sure. Yeah, what did you got for us? This is brought to you by. All of Vandas wants, as we violate copyright like an LLM just sucking up random novels,

Starting point is 00:48:36 Linux Unplugged is an incredible wonderful show. It is magical. We can make things happen for you. Wait, can I have a request? What if the show was brought to you by Chris's Chase Reserve Credit Card? Chris's Chase Reserve Credit Card. That's what the show's brought to you by. In that case, it's my precious, nice to spend his money.

Starting point is 00:48:56 Yes. To bank account is empty and eyes and negatives. That's about it. Or when you reach the limit, it's, You shall not run this card. So it was time to get ourselves put together, stop partying so hard, and go to the Southern California Linux Expo.

Starting point is 00:49:20 Well, this is actually day one for scale. We start all over again, boys. It's a whole new event. We poked our head in some of the rooms. everybody's sitting down, but we haven't yet gone to the Expo Hall. That's usually where a lot's going on. Yeah, you get to see who took the time to come out, who's trying to sell you something, or show you an exciting new project, and I suspect we have more than a few friends around in there.

Starting point is 00:49:42 It's funny because you can hear there's large crowds inside the rooms as you walk by. They're like little honey hives of buzzing activity. Yeah, yeah. So everybody's in sessions right now, so I think this is our moment to go check out the Expo Hall. There's also like a special energy on that first talk that kicks off. So you know, as we're going to the Expo Hall, we got to poke our heads in. And the EFF, the executive officer of the EFF, was actually giving the keynote talk. And I didn't really understand it first, but I learned very quickly that the EFF has been one of the longest supporters of scale.

Starting point is 00:50:13 Elan sort of kicks everything off and then we meet her. Welcome to the 23rd annual scale conference. We're excited to have you all with us again. And so without further further. do, I'm going to let Cindy take the stage. Thank you. And we'll have some opportunity. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much.

Starting point is 00:50:38 Thank you to Scale for inviting me. This is my first time at scale. I'm so excited. You know, EFF and the open source community, it's a long-term relationship we're in, friends. I thought that was actually a fair point. And she actually had a pretty good keynote. And there is definitely some fans in the audience.

Starting point is 00:50:55 So what we do is we vary strategically. We pop in, we get a sense, and then we keep going, because while the people are in the keynote, that's the time to check out the Expo Hall, especially if you have a microphone and you want to have any shot of being able to hear somebody. And we walked in,

Starting point is 00:51:09 and you were hit with some fancy booths right away. Well, I can confirm the Expo Hall is definitely buzzing. Big Microsoft presence right there at the entrance with Microsoft and GitHub. Hello. Hello. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:51:25 Okay, so there's a lot of people. All right, here's the Ubuntu booth. Oh, they got some music going on. Frameworks got a booth right next to Ubuntu, then Risk Five does as well. This is a good group right here. You're seeing some AI and science combination over here. Yeah, okay. All right, we've got to just soak this in.

Starting point is 00:51:42 A lot of those, but I think what we sort of honed in on is the vibe around Risk Five this year. It was really good, and people were excited. They had like a double booth setup, and Brent had a chance to talk with the Deep Compute CEO briefly, and he is working on an entire Risk Five stack. I mean, everything from the CPU to the soundboard and Ethernet. I'm from Deep Computing. I'm the founder of Deep Computing. And specialized to make all the Risk Five consumer electronics. And he's spending like $2 million a year to try to make it happen,

Starting point is 00:52:19 to build these things and try to make this a reality. And using a bunch of nicks under the hood to do it. Yeah, and so is Carl. And Carl was a different Carl. He's one of the community, he's the community representative. and he's, he is, he really, really knows his stuff. And he had all kinds of cool hardware, you guys. I mean, stuff you would want to own right now.

Starting point is 00:52:37 And, of course, you had to tell us a little bit about it. Thank you. Hi, my name is Carl. I am with Works with Risk Five. We're open community ecosystem for getting things built with the Risk Five instruction set architecture, both hardware and software. And then you have a table of gadgets here. Give us a tour.

Starting point is 00:52:53 So this is using a newer processor. It came out about a year ago. It's very fast. It operates about Raspberry Pi 3 to 4. level performance, unfortunately, does not have vector. And then this stuff here in the middle is the future. This will be available about three to four months. It is running the spacetime K3 processor.

Starting point is 00:53:11 This is, uses the RVA-23 standard, so it will work with the new version of Ubuntu, which is across the way from us. It is fast. It has vector. It has hypervisor, and it has AI cores. I notice it's in more of a server case as well. Yeah, so you have options of how to do it. The way that these processors, the way that these products are going to be,

Starting point is 00:53:29 sold when they're available is they come in two form factors. One is this Jetson Orion NX compatible SOM. And then the other one is a PICO ITX board that kind of fits in like a Nuck-like mini PC. Because of the SOMs, someone has built this ridiculous example where you can shove 10 of them into a 1U rack mount case. So we're going to work on something that's a little more flexible than this one because we actually want to be able to have not just these but other architecture systems, and then we're making build farms available to the general open source community for getting stuff built on Risk 5. That's cool, right?

Starting point is 00:54:04 Oh, boy, they are doing a lot with Risk 5 these days. That's right. I mean, the build farm for the community access for developers that are doing open source projects is a really nice touch, yeah. Because, you know, people don't have access to this yet, but that Nuck size machine. Oh, wow. And I love the fact that they're doing almost everything around SBC and that the one you had 10. They were like, well, if we're going to make a big server, we'll just put,

Starting point is 00:54:25 10. Slot and more. Yeah. And they were kind of laughing like the deep compute CEO. He's kind of laughing. He's like, you know, these companies that are investing these billions of dollars on these proprietary SOCs, we're coming for him. We're going to come for him with an entire open stack top to bottom. He might have been one of the most excited and driven people I've ever met.

Starting point is 00:54:40 No kidding. Yeah. And every time you saw him, he was buoyant. Yeah. Which I loved. I'm like, this guy's been deep in these trenches of a seemingly insurmountable thing. Not when people look at that from the outside. They're like, that's a hill.

Starting point is 00:54:52 That's really hard to climb. And he's not deterred by that. No, he was also. bringing around gadgets because he was also a planet nix and he had like a little risk tiny computer in a transparent uh... lockbox yeah it was so neat the whole thing and it really makes you feel like something's happening because of course across from him is the abutu booth and they're working to make sure that they get more risk five support

Starting point is 00:55:11 and it's just a general sense around the only thing we never really touch on but it's kind of neat to see it's kind of become tradition is uh... the next cloud and the open sousa folks and and and the kdee people they kind of kind of have like an area and they all kind of help each other and support each other's booths and stuff like that. It's always fun to go over and chat with them. Good open source vibes over there. Yeah, yeah. They were really cool people.

Starting point is 00:55:33 And you, I love the fact that KDE has a presence at something like this. Like they're, you know, just out there hanging out. Yeah, some volunteer from the community from this area decided to set up a booth. That's great.

Starting point is 00:55:46 That they have their representations. And they're dedicating time to that. Yeah. Serious time. We, you know, so it's always really great to have easy conversation. with these really community-focused folks.

Starting point is 00:55:56 It was a little trickier to try to get some of the bigger names on the record. And we thought we don't normally talk to them, but we thought it would be great to get Microsoft or meta or GitHub on the record just to kind of flush out the scale coverage for you all. And this would be the point where I'd be playing conversations with those companies. So, Chris, how did that go? Well, how did it go, Brent? Let's see.

Starting point is 00:56:16 Hey. You were the one that had to take the rejection directly if you times. What's your feedback on this experience, Brian? Have you had that happen before? Because I'm pretty used to it. Because every time I go to these events, they say no. Well, I have a little bit of a secret superpower, which is that, like, I seem to be able to charm. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:30 If anybody was going to do it, it would probably be you. And sometimes they're, like, uncomfortable about it. And it's like, no, no, it's going to be. It's five minutes. It's only five minutes. That's all I need. I was, I actually lost a little bit of sleep over this. I was shut down in a way specifically by Microsoft, too, that they just didn't want to make time for us.

Starting point is 00:56:49 And I approached them very kindly and said, hey, like, you're here. You have the fanciest booth right at the door or the exhibition hall. You have the director of open source here that seems like a perfect fit. We'd love to have a conversation while you're excited to be here at scale, what you're doing with open source these days. And they were just more interested in the raffle that they were going to give and didn't want to make time to have a five-minute chat with us. You are so rational. I love the way that you approached it. You were like, why wouldn't they want to?

Starting point is 00:57:19 And like, I've been in Hollywood for a long time, and I could see them giving you the brush off. And every time you'd come back to me and tell me what their excuse was, in the back of my mind, I'm like, oh, this has happened to my friend. I'm so sad. Why bother show up? That's a good question. Yeah, it's... Because they're a raffle, mate. Well, they're there, you know, to chat with the community, which is good, but...

Starting point is 00:57:40 It's a raffle. They're very afraid of media exposure going wrong. And so they're very, very safe. And of course, to us, it seems silly. Because you're there, you've spent, you know, 20 grand on the booth. You've probably spent 60 grand in payroll because you've got seven, eight people here. Which is a pack of peanuts to Microsoft. Yeah, and then you're going to spend, you're going to spend 15 grand on the hotel stay for all of those people.

Starting point is 00:58:01 You're going to spend another 15 grand on the flight. And then we come here and we're like, so you're going to talk to, you know, a thousand people today. Would you like to talk to another 60,000 people today? And they say no. And to us, it just doesn't, it just doesn't compute. Why would you say no to additional exposure? you've put all this money and effort to get exposure. They could have read off a document.

Starting point is 00:58:20 They could have prepared some form of, you know, thing that they could just read to us. And to be clear, it's not just Microsoft. It's fine. I just want to hear what they want to say. But for them, it's just, it's, you know, it's too dangerous. And so they don't want to do it. But it's funny because it doesn't come across as being part of the community, right? Because the boost that are actually part of the community are thrilled to talk to us.

Starting point is 00:58:41 You can tell. It has the anti-community stank on it. And you may get to a certain, but let's compare. Anthropic has a lot to lose by saying the wrong thing. Everyone here at this table agrees that, especially with everything that's going on with them. But yet, Anish came right up to us, warm, welcome, high, right? So that's different. Those companies are on par in the AI space.

Starting point is 00:59:04 Yeah. And the behavior was different. Yeah. That's all you have to say. Yeah. And so it means we don't have those clips. We did get to chat with them. You know, I'll tell you one of the things I observed that I thought was interesting is the

Starting point is 00:59:13 Meta booth had a whole bunch of Asahi machines. They had about the whole lineup of Asahi workstations you can possibly have, including a Mac studio at the Meta booth. And it seems that there is some Asahi Linux usage in meta, how much we can't really say, but it's neat. And they were happy to be pointing that out to agree and talk about it off the record. I really wanted them to just open up and chat with us about what was going on inside. Yeah, we're not trying to do like a hit piece.

Starting point is 00:59:38 We're like, hey, I see you're using Asahi Linux. How excited? We're excited. Yeah. We want to celebrate open. and source. That's our jam. Like at one table, you have Linux and meta and Apple. Yeah. That's actually pretty freaking cool. It is an interesting combination. Yeah. That's a soup. And the answer would have been, yeah, you know, a dozen or so or more of our developers or however many it is are using it

Starting point is 00:59:59 on the workstations. That would have been, that would have been the extent of the big reveal. Yeah. Yeah. But it is what it is. They were doing it there anyway. And then, you know, I guess what I, what I, if honestly, they're probably going to be the less. of the interesting chats we would have had, I just wanted to round it out, and I just thought it would be good to represent them. And the other thing is, is they are making, you know,

Starting point is 01:00:21 by coming there and spending that money, they're not only adding a bit of legitimacy to the roster when you look at it, but they're also, you know, helping pay the bill a little bit to make scale possible. And so I'm grateful they're there, and I just wish that this was something

Starting point is 01:00:33 that could be sorted out, but I'll tell you, this is not a new thing. This has been an issue since we've been doing Linux action show. It's just, it's media stuff. And now there are more of these companies at these events than there were before. It might have been one or two companies before,

Starting point is 01:00:45 and now there's like a dozen. And they spend big money. And so I guess in one way, I'm glad they're there. Just wish they'd talk to us. But we can relay that they are there, and they do seem to be interested in hiring still, and they do seem to be trying to show off what they're working on. Yeah, about the message we got was that they had a sticker

Starting point is 01:01:02 that said Microsoft loves open source. So, you know, make of that what you will. Sticky? Jason, can you do an ad about your new laptop? Oh, sure. Can you do it in Grimm's voice, though? This is the T480. It's quite a laptop. I got it for $2.89, and I decided I'd run NixOS on it.

Starting point is 01:01:25 Had no issues at all installing it. Just stuck that USB stick in, booted it right up. And this thing is flying like the wind. As a matter of fact, it might be a little quieter than Brent's framework laptop. Oh, it's only a Gen 1 that's fine. I'm not throwing you under the bus. There it goes. And I'm running plasma on here, Plasma 6.

Starting point is 01:01:43 Just a beautiful Nix config. Nice and simple. This thing is golden toast. Now I want one. And by the way, listen to Linux, unplugged and support them and become a member if you're not. Well, gentlemen, we have some boost to get to because this was a audience-supported episode.

Starting point is 01:02:02 So what do you say? Should we kick it off? And now it is time for the boost. All right. And I believe our first... Is this a new booster? Oh, wow. Biggles?

Starting point is 01:02:16 Have we heard from Biggles before? I love that name, so I feel like it would stick with me. It may be a new booster. Biggles is our baller booster with 111 and 111 sets. Hey, rich lobster. Burr-B-B-B-B-Ber-Bah! He says, have fun at scale and Planet Nix. Here's a small contribution to the cost.

Starting point is 01:02:35 Not so small. We really do. You are our baller. We do very much appreciate that. You make me want to be a better man. Thank you very much, Biggles. And sent that in from Fountain. Well, K.R.

Starting point is 01:02:47 Hill a 94 comes in with 100,000 sats. Well, that's a baller booster as well. There you go. Get a big old duck. You're doing a good job. For the trip, I assume the full 100,000 made it through, yet still not sure about that note channel in AlbiHub.

Starting point is 01:03:03 Brent. Oh, I'm sorry. I delegated that one to Jeff. That's okay. He delegated to Fountain, and Fountain looked into it for us and determined it was Brent's fault. That's if that is the official Fountain. At least we have the answer. They're doing a lot with agents these days.

Starting point is 01:03:19 Whose fault is it? Hashtag Blank Brant. I love it. We did get a boost from our dear adversaries. Hey, adversaries. 67,514 Satoshes. Stay a while. And listen.

Starting point is 01:03:33 This simply says, advertiser boost. Appetizer boost. Oh, I'm so sorry. Appetizer. Are you part of Chris over there? This advertisement's full of fruit loops. Listen, in the lack of advertising, this might as well be an advertising boost. Thank you very much, adversaries.

Starting point is 01:03:47 I really appreciate that. How were the appetizers? Good. Well, I ate the fries. Actually, the fries were good. They had like a garlic olive oil on them. I ordered mine with garlic aoli on the side. That was quite good.

Starting point is 01:03:57 That was good. That was good. And then, you know, the next best thing I had, actually, wasn't anything we bought there. It was Emma brought me, she wanted to know my thought. She brought me a little bit of brisket from like a barbecue place nearby. And I'll say, you have multiple people bringing you strange meat at this conference. What is, how do I use the thing here? It's great.

Starting point is 01:04:15 I will say it was pretty fantastic. I was also a couple drinks. and I needed that protein. Speaking of producer Jeff, PJ comes in with 55,500, 55 cents. It's over 9,000! I have no idea when that's appropriate. I was scrolling down to see if anybody

Starting point is 01:04:30 like, it just broke the threshold, but I'm pretty close, right? Well, he says this might help feed Brentley for a few hours. Aw. Well, PJ, we got some pizza from, what was it, big toast or big slice? Fun will now commence. It was gluten-free, to be clear.

Starting point is 01:04:47 Thank you. And before that, we got him some tie, or no some... They threw olives on mine for no reason, which I always appreciate. I do too, actually, you know? Who doesn't love a free olive, especially when they're usually $7 to add? Right? I was like, wow, that's a plus. Well, A-A-A-Ron comes in with 50,000 cents.

Starting point is 01:05:06 A-A-A-Ron! Is there an A-A-A-Ron here? Let's be clear. Nobody likes listening to ads. If you say you do, I've got a good therapist I can introduce you to. Hey, sometimes I like... like to, hey, listen. That being said, I will listen to thousands of hours of ads if it means that you get paid. Oh, that's...

Starting point is 01:05:26 Even in the membership feed, if need be. No, no, we're not doing that. That's never happening. No, no. My only ask is that they don't just randomly pop up in the middle of a segment. That's fair. Yeah, yeah. I think that's pretty fair.

Starting point is 01:05:37 We, uh, I suppose we would have the technology. Um, one of the reasons we went with the, uh, even though they're not great, you know, for some people. Actually, think, though, if you think about it, just get it out of the technology. the way is kind of nice but while we don't have any in-show sponsors we have occasionally like a pre-roll that is playing for some people it's first time I've ever done something like that and uh what I do kind of like about it is it just kind of gets it out of the way and then we don't put it in the middle of the show uh and they just or I'll just read them all I would listen to that I'll just do

Starting point is 01:06:06 your ads but thank you very much A-A-A-A-A-Ran we really do appreciate thank you A-A-A-A-A-A-Raw! Don't mess with me up in here you give me a boost I appreciate it. Is it my turn? Yeah. A Monday A Monday? Amunday. Amunday. Amunday. Monday, Monday.

Starting point is 01:06:23 Boosted in through Fountain, 45,000, 84 Satoshis. Engage. Boosey, boost, boost. Jason, I think you read this one. I do. Sure, why not? What is it? Where's it there?

Starting point is 01:06:33 Booty, boost, boost. Boosty. Boosty. Boost, boost, boost, boost, boost. Also, boost number two. But that one, that one. Oh, that was the album. I keep getting partial failures boosting via fountain.

Starting point is 01:06:45 I'm not sure why you guys need to clear that up over. We're all working on it. Yeah, and we're getting Brent on it. We'll get them fixed. It's a principal. I'll just randomly read it. Well, he's captive now, so. Read it in there.

Starting point is 01:06:54 I'll read it in their voice. That's what I'll do. W.L.P.2.S.O. comes in with 20,600 and 4 cents. Also known as our, um, our favorite, well, Wi-Fi interface. You're doing a good job. Some value, he says. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:07:07 Thank you. Thank you. Hey, we got another. Wait, is this twice from adversaries? Yeah. That is nice. That means Wes's script is broken? Uh, no.

Starting point is 01:07:16 Well, one of them. It's over 18,000. I mean, it is broken, but one of them the username has at Fountain, and one of them does it. So that's the naive script. Did not figure out they were the same. We should strip the Fountain's stuff, I guess.

Starting point is 01:07:29 He's commenting on a crash out I had on last week's live stream and points out that Quinn 3 coders, 30 billion parameter model also runs pretty fast. He says, I've had a little run, Rust app that I built 20 minutes in just 20 minutes, and I mostly use it to write integration and unit test. I'm using the Zed editors

Starting point is 01:07:45 built-in agent and recently added support for open, they added support for Open AI API compatible servers for both the prediction and agent use. It is interesting because we were chatting about this. I was like, hey, where are the smaller models here that you could compartmentalize for, you know, jobs like coding and things like that? Quinn 3.

Starting point is 01:08:02 Quentin this. Thank you for the shout-out for that. Specifically, Quinn 3 Coder. Also seems to be using DevStrel small 2, 24B. Yeah, thank you very much. And for those of you who don't know what that means, that's actually a formula for vitamins that Ron mentioned earlier. Now, to be clear, he is doing this with 256 gigabytes of RAM. And an epic CPU.

Starting point is 01:08:19 Yeah. So I can't do that at home? Not yet. Not yet. Well, you know, if you ask adversaries. You make me want to be a better man with your video card and your big fancy ram. NyQuest comes in with 9,000 and one sats. It's over 9,000.

Starting point is 01:08:34 It's over 9,000! I know what your neighbors are thinking as I yell this out in this garage, like repeatedly. We're just doing sports betting. Yeah, they're going to be like, FBI open up. Yeah. But listen, you finally got to legitimately do it. He says, I really appreciate the show. The ad did surprise me, but I'm taking it.

Starting point is 01:08:49 it is assigned to do my part to contribute. That's great. That's nice. We appreciate that. Especially on this trip. It's actually quite sweet. Spooky set com, Hansen, with 10,000 sats. It's spooky sadcom.

Starting point is 01:09:03 Longtime. Longtime listener, first time. Hey, really? Have you all ever seen or heard of Mango WM? Could be a great replacement to Heimberland. It's been my window manager for about four months now, and I thought it would be worth sharing. Keep up the great work, and we got a little GitHub link here.

Starting point is 01:09:23 Well, you're probably never going to get Wayland, or I mean, Hyperland and Wayland out of my Cold Dead Hands. But I do like the name. It is Wayland. And it is Whalen-based. Yep. It's Mango is a great name. Very fruity. The mango.

Starting point is 01:09:37 It can be built completely within a few seconds. So, you know, I know you know how it takes to compile stuff. There's a Nix flake in this repo. In that case, I've got the same combination on my luggage. I think that's a winner. Thank you. Next. Check out mango. So ham sent in 5,000 sets.

Starting point is 01:09:56 Live long and prosper. All right, what do we got? What's our boost? Oh, right, I'm reading this one. No, I'll do. Just wanted to tell the non-members that they're missing out big time with this one. I'm talking a certified Chris Rood. And at this rate, they're going to require age verification for this podcast.

Starting point is 01:10:14 Oh, snap. I see they snuck it in there. That's good. Oh, yeah. Someone might have gotten excited. Yeah, I did get a little. It was a good one. Every now and then, you know, every now and then.

Starting point is 01:10:22 I actually really like that. As I get older, they happen less and less. So, I think it's a good sign now. Before I used to not like it, and now I feel like, hey, I still got it. I still got the energy every now. What I like, though, is like it. You're doing them less, but when you do do them, are these singers? Oh, you just lean right in because, like, it, you haven't, you know.

Starting point is 01:10:39 You're like, what are they going to do? Fire me at this point? I got a little steam built up, too, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. Kiwi Bitcoin Guide comes in with 10,000 sats. 10,000 sets. I don't know. It's possible that is right in the pocket.

Starting point is 01:10:55 Boost for the road. I'd like to hear your opinion on the open source LLMs. If an LLM is open source, how much can we actually know about the security and telemetry of that model? If the source code is visible and we can audit, can we actually be reassured of what's being logged or used for training? Or is it just still a black box for us? I am having a debate with a friend at the moment,

Starting point is 01:11:14 and he says that LMs are complete black boxes even when they're open source. What say you? I think the key for this one to start with is just to sort of have some agreed defined set of terms because on open source, that can mean a lot of things. And like the black box, are you talking about understanding the model and sort of like a research and AI theory standpoint? Are you just talking about understanding like the harness and is it running locally and is it talking over the network? And those are all valid things to discuss and have different answers. And do you object to how they were training is the question?

Starting point is 01:11:46 So is it really front end what goes into the black? box that we're trying to discuss. Is that something that you object to, how it was trained? What is, you know, is that developing bias? So, so many perspectives to find. And then there's the weights, or are the weights open? Is the data set open? And the answer is, it's a gradient.

Starting point is 01:12:04 The different models are a gradient of this right now. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a, it's a marketplace at the moment. And we're actually seeing the ones that are more open, have more longevity and more integration into various use cases. then I thought was initially maybe expected. I think six months ago, a lot of us thought this was going to go all locked up

Starting point is 01:12:25 to Open AI and Anthropic and maybe a little bit of Microsoft and Google. And now it seems more like, yeah, they're still going to be around, but these open source models are getting like, you know, smashed into things like Zed editors or little embedded LLMs for people. Yeah, and, you know, it's also, I think,

Starting point is 01:12:40 you may have a lot of concerns about how are they trained and what went into them and how much control do I have over that, but if you do at least have the weights in like a reasonable, say, safe tensor style format where it's not like can't execute stuff, it's not its own programming language, it's just a specification for weights, and you run some sort of open source inference server and harness.

Starting point is 01:12:58 You do still get the benefits, even if you don't totally have understanding of like why which weights and neurons activated and all that kind of stuff, you do at least know you have control over what it's running, how it gets sent, what gets out of the network, and it's not going to use any of that data for training. If you lock it down,

Starting point is 01:13:13 there's no way to send it. Yeah, exactly. There's also not quite a definite, of open source AI that's been agreed upon. I mean, the open source initiative came out with their definition that a lot of people didn't like. So we're not even, you know, saying open source for AI stuff is actually feeling quite different than saying open source just for source code.

Starting point is 01:13:32 Yeah, we're using words that don't necessarily always mean the same thing in this case. So if you have desires for a particular LLM, I think you probably at this point need to use more words for what you want to have. I'll take the next couple of ones. Anonymous came in with 2021 Sats. No message. Just a quick one. Just a quick one.

Starting point is 01:13:51 People who like to mess with computers. There you go. Leo shout out. Okay, Groovy comes in with 2,000 sats. Also, no message, just the value, though. Let's go. Let's help you. We'll help us all.

Starting point is 01:14:02 I don't know. I think, right? Sure, go ahead. One sat below the cutoff. I like it. Yeah, well, Moonenite boost in with 1,999 sets or an honorary 2,000 cents. I'll chip one in. I have to echo the sentiment that the light theme in KDE plasma is great.

Starting point is 01:14:17 Yeah. Same. I'm an always dark mode guy, but I've been running light mode on my system, and I love it. Gross. One, two, three, four, five? I get the same combination of my luggage. It is really nice. There was no, one, two, three, four, five.

Starting point is 01:14:29 They're getting close, though. But we do have some stats for you. Thank you, everybody who did support the show with a boost or streamed those sets as they listened. 22 of you stream stats, and collectively, y'all stacked 30,193 sets. Thank you very much. When you combine that with our boosters, we stacked a grand total. of 540,083 sats this episode.

Starting point is 01:14:51 Thank you, everyone who boosted us. We appreciate you very much. You're the best. Never gonna la la la la la you're the best. Sometimes I just sing that in my car. It's karate kid. I'm all over it. And of course,

Starting point is 01:15:06 thank you to our members who support us. We appreciate that very, very much. And you made the show possible. And with that, we'll treat you. We'll regale you, if you will, with a pick. Are you ready, boys? I'm ready. All right, we got two, I believe, for you this week.

Starting point is 01:15:21 Two picks to round out the show, and the first one is one that editor Drew sent our way. It is a native title desktop client for Linux. You know the title music service. It sounds super good. It's got a modern UI custom themes and bit perfect lossless audio. And I'm talking 192 Hertz, boys.

Starting point is 01:15:39 Delicious. Oh, spicy. It's called Sone. S-O-N-E. And if you're like me, like to go at the Lodagh, lossless flack with your title. It does that. It can bypass pipewire and pulse audio and claim direct hardware access if you want the full fancy.

Starting point is 01:15:56 Oh. And it has an autoplay mode to discover and play similar tracks, as well as a volume normalization mode with automatic context switching between albums and tracks for gain. I want this. Looks like it's 57% TypeScript and 39% rust. Just a little rust. Snitching. Do-da-da-da-da-da-da-do.

Starting point is 01:16:19 See, and nobody believed us when we said we had a soundboard guy. That's no. They didn't believe the Wes hired a soundboard guy. And, hey, GPL3. Yes, yes. Okay, now this one, hard shift. Hard shift, but I want to put it out there. I just want to get in your thought space so you know about this.

Starting point is 01:16:32 It's called QMD, and it's a mini command line search engine for your docs, your knowledge bases, your meeting notes, your markdown files, whatever it is, sitting on your file system like an animal. You can now search on it with the QMD, on-device search engine for everything you need. Like for me, I just have a crap ton of old markdown notes and documentation, even have some knowledge bases on my file server, things like that. You can point QMD at it, and it has a BM25 full text search.

Starting point is 01:17:00 There is so much going on here. You take your query, it does a query expansion on it, plus the original query, so it has two alternate queries, and then it sends that down for both BM25, like keyword search and vector search on all three of those queries. And then it has like some kind of RFR. that fusion plus bonus algorithm that sort of tries to smartly rank the different results it's going to get before it can synthesize a final answer.

Starting point is 01:17:23 And you can run it through an LLM for ranking, too, to have a decent, like, rational, like, ranking of the results. And it's got a nice CLI that agents can just work with or you can work with yourself, but it's also got an MCP server, and huge shout out for them. It does have standard IEO support, but it's also got streamable HTTP. It's about time. Wow. You can never have enough QMD.

Starting point is 01:17:43 That's true. Check it out. Or is it QMID. It's a little cumin. I think I've always said it. I've always read QMD. Yeah. And it looks like it's using via Node Lama CPP, GGUF models to do a lot of this stuff.

Starting point is 01:17:56 So it just runs locally. Runs on your CPU. Ask me how I know. You can also specify your own custom embedding model if you want to get tricky with it. Or if you need to use a cloud model because you're running on like a pie or something like that. And the fan manufacturers are very glad it runs locally. Yeah, that's true. And it's MIT licensed and nice to see.

Starting point is 01:18:14 Now, Brentley, you want to recommend a tried and true tool that comes in handy when you're, say, at an Airbnb with horrible internet. It's true. And this is a new, fresh discovery for me. And you all seem to be like, oh, yeah, I use this tool like decades ago. For about 15, 20 years. Yeah. Thanks for telling me. Really appreciate you.

Starting point is 01:18:33 Friends led friends discover stuff on their own. That's right. You know, maybe other people haven't discovered this. I hope I'm the only one who hasn't because then this is useless. but I discovered on my own MTR, which I was like an animal using PING to try to solve these problems. And here comes MTR. It basically combines the functionality of trace routing and PING programs all in one network diagnostic tool. And it turns out it's really nice to use.

Starting point is 01:19:01 It has colors and stuff. And it makes diagnosing these kind of, let's call them, B&B internet issues way easier. So how dare you guys not not tell me about this? Sorry. We've been friends for so long. It's old enough that, you know, like some of the primary history events was a changeover from the original author to like the current maintainer. And that happened in October of 98. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:27 You know, I'm running that right next to my FVWM 95, just so everybody knows what that is. I love it because I actually saw you run it on my laptop when you first grabbed it. And I was like, what is that? And then because you played with it for a while. And then I picked up my laptop and saw it running. And I was like, oh, that's right. That's the good old MTR. That's nice.

Starting point is 01:19:46 How am I so late to this one? You know, there's a gooey version too now. You're a youngan. Honestly, can we just shout out the scale networking infrastructure team? Yeah, one more time, please. Because the Wi-Fi was more solid at scale with 6,000 people than the Wi-Fi is in our Airbnb's. Yeah, we'd probably could have just dreamed out of scale. That might have been easier.

Starting point is 01:20:07 And when you think about it, this is permanent infrastructure at this Airbnb. be and that was temporary infrastructure. It's amazing. It really is a shout out to the infrastructure team at scale. Especially because they have to show up early to retake over, right? Like a lot of conferences are just using whatever the vendors provided. And they have to like tap into the back hall and all that. But they put all

Starting point is 01:20:24 their own APs down and rig things up. You can see those Ethernet backhalls running along the floor with the leader. Duck tape to the wall. I was like, yeah, boys. Good for them. Those are my kind of fellas. Yep. So we have links to these picks and everything else, which wasn't much that we can link this week. But

Starting point is 01:20:40 that'll all be over at Linuxunplug.com slash 657. Or you know what the power move is? If you want to shift into power move mode, which, I mean, that's... I hardly ever use power mode. Yeah, be sparing with that. But if you do want to shift into power mode, you go over to jupbroadcasting.com.

Starting point is 01:20:56 That's where the OG sources for everything and other fine shows. Yeah, and there's a GitHub repo behind it if you want to get access to the raw details. Or, you know, make it even better. If something about our website bugs you, you can take action directly. we always do appreciate that.

Starting point is 01:21:10 If you want to get involved, too, we have a website team chat on Matrix that you can sneakily find and always participate in the conversation there. And shout out to the web team. Just keeping it going, right? Keeping it going up with our crazy changes. Our web team doesn't skip like day.

Starting point is 01:21:23 Yeah, and you know, that's right. That's right. And also just appreciate them a little bit extra when we're on the road and they're just kind of keeping their eye on things and everything's humming along. Things always break when we leave home. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 01:21:33 So it's really nice. So thank you everybody over at the web team. It's not a huge team. Just a couple guys, really, but they're doing a great job. And an occasional Westpane, an occasional brand. Mostly, I just come in when I have issues. Usually you made some new change in how you want to specify something.

Starting point is 01:21:47 I think you meant steamroll in. It's usually like, oh, yeah, I published this show with a completely new method. You guys don't mind fixing that, do you? Yeah, we fix that today. And somehow they do. Yeah, really, it's really impressive. So I guess I'm feeling, feeling when we're on the road, I'm really appreciating the people to do the infrastructure out there,

Starting point is 01:22:06 including the listeners that involved with their infrastructure. So with that, we will be back in the studio next week. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station. Of course, we'll be in the Mumble Room again. That'll be going details at jupiter broadcasting.com and on our website for that. Mumble Room is a low latency opus way to listen.

Starting point is 01:22:24 And then we have our Matrix chat, which has not only our lives chat, but chatting going all throughout the week. Sharing geeky details and projects people are working. Yeah, talk about messtastic or organize a meetup in your area. You can do all kinds of stuff. See it next time. Same bad week. I was actually going to try to do it with the like old-timey, you know. Same bat station.

Starting point is 01:22:43 That's not bad. I was going to try to get the cup going. Also, thank you everybody who came out to Scalar, Planet Nixon said hello, shook a hand, or just attended. We really, really appreciate it. And you made it a blast. And we'll see you all next week. Chapter transcripts. This mask smells like fart.

LINUX Unplugged - 657: Slop to Slap

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