The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Down the Linux rabbit hole (Friends)

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Alex Kretzschmar joins Adam for a trip down the Linux rabbit hole -- Docker vs Podman, building a Kubernetes cluster, ZFS backups with zfs.rent, bootc, favorite Linux distros, new homelab tools built ...with AI, self-hosting Immich, content creation, Plex and Jellyfin, the future of piracy and more.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, your weekly talk show about the Linux rabbit hole. Big thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.com. Check them out, fly.io. Okay, let's enter the home lab. Well, friends, agentic Postgres is here. And it's from our friends over at Tiger Data. This is the very first database built for agents and is built to let you build faster. You know, a fun side note is 80% of Claude was built with AI. Over a year ago, 25% of Google's code was AI generated.
Starting point is 00:00:59 It's safe to say that now it's probably close to 100%. Most people I talk to, most developers I talk to right now, almost all their code is being generated. That's a different world. Here's the deal. Agents are the new developers. They don't click. They don't scroll.
Starting point is 00:01:13 They call. They retrieve. They parallelize. They plug in your infrastructure to places you need to perform, but your database is probably still thinking about humans only because that's kind of where Postgres is at. Tiger Data's philosophy is that when your agents need to spin up sandboxes, run migrations, query huge volumes, a vector and text data.
Starting point is 00:01:31 Well, normal Postgres, it might choke. And so they fix that. Here's where we're at right now. Agentic Postgres delivers these three big leaps. Native search and retrieval, instant zero copy forks, and MCP server, plus your CLI, plus a cool free tier. Now, if this is intriguing at all, head over to tigidata.com, install the CLI, just three commands, spin up an agentic postgres service, and let your agents work. at the speed they expect, not the speed of the old way. The new way, a gentee Postgres, it's built for agents,
Starting point is 00:02:05 is designed to elevate your developer experience and build the next big thing. Again, go to tigerdata.com to learn more. Don't mind me, I got a little cough drop in my mouth there. I got this, like, nasal drips. If I sound a little nasally, that's why. I do have hot water. a tablespoon-ish of honey and a little lemon so that's what you need a spoonful of sugar helps
Starting point is 00:02:38 the medicine go down so they tell me oh gosh it's so good so good Alex how are you man how's life you good mostly good mostly good I mean you see me here in my attic studio in Raleigh and we've had the house on the market for three four months now We're trying to move back to England. That's right, yeah. But nobody's buying houses right now. So we're kind of living in this perfect show home of a house. Because you've got it all ready to sell.
Starting point is 00:03:12 It's always clean, right? It's always clean so you can show it. It's nice. You're in the middle of a recording. You've got to show you in an hour. Got to end the recording and go, right? Is that how it works? That's it.
Starting point is 00:03:24 Yeah, that's it. Well, London's calling. And you got, is this on show, on air material, a little bit of it or no? Yeah. It's not as public knowledge. You call that. Yeah. Okay.
Starting point is 00:03:35 Just in case. Yeah. Well, if we don't end up selling, if we don't end up selling, we'll stay. We'll stay. What choice do I have? That's right. It is what it is, right? I hate that, I hate that phrase, Alex.
Starting point is 00:03:50 It is what it is. It is what it is. I feel like it's just such a, such a give up moment. You know what I mean? You know, many years ago when I was working at the Apple store we used to have these little bets
Starting point is 00:04:03 on the genius bar about how a conversation would go from the opening line and if someone used the phrase what it is is would be like uh oh this is going to be a good one tell me your story about how your photos don't sync to
Starting point is 00:04:17 grandma's device or there's offloading happening or where are my apps I tell you there are only so many times you can reset someone's iCloud password within the same 10-minute appointment without losing your sanity. Oh, yeah, that's, how long ago was that for you
Starting point is 00:04:35 about a decade or more? Yeah, a long time. 15 years? iPhone 4 era. So when was that? A long time ago. 2008? Yeah, maybe.
Starting point is 00:04:48 I think so. 10, 11, 12, maybe. I don't know. Something like that. A while. Oh, I guess 2007 was the first one. So. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:56 I was there when, the iPhone 4 launched, I remember we had a, because it wasn't available I think so. It was certainly a really good one. I mean, the current version is an iteration of the iPhone 4, right? It's the same blocky. Really? But I remember it wasn't available in many
Starting point is 00:05:11 countries at that point. So what we ended up happening was we get a bunch of what we called resellers queuing up outside the store first thing in the morning with thousands of pounds in cash in their pockets, buying as many iPhones as we could sell them to ship them off to
Starting point is 00:05:27 Dubai or Abu Dhabi or just, you know, it was all Arabic customers that we had purchasing these things for resale. It was kind of crazy, actually. Yeah. And that was back in London? Yeah, well, Manchester, but yeah, close enough. Forgive my lack of geography understanding of the United Kingdom. I just, I don't know where things are, I've never been there to know where things are at. I say London to Manchester like it's a big deal, but it's probably no further than Houston to Dallas in reality.
Starting point is 00:05:58 So like four or five hours kind of thing? Yeah, it's pretty close really. Well, if you said Dallas and I lived in Austin, I would say Austin, because it's Austin or Houston. So I get the correction. I get the correction. Interesting, interesting. Well, friends, you know, if any of that made it into the show,
Starting point is 00:06:20 which I imagine some of it might, maybe all of it, who knows? This is my good friend Alex. We become friends over the years. Hello. Big fan, as you know, Alex, of your podcast that is no longer in place. Man, self-hosted is such a wild world these days, bro. Obviously, as you know, I was the last, I don't think the last time, but one of the last times we talked, I was surprised by your creation of,
Starting point is 00:06:46 what was it, Linux server I.O. Is that right? Yeah. Is that what it was? Yep. Gosh. And we found that out, and you were the very first intro. in there because obviously you started it.
Starting point is 00:06:58 Yeah, it was my personal blog and then morphed into something else at a later day. And now it's like where the trusted images of all your favorite things is a home laber, that's usually your source. Maybe if you're running Plex in a container, you're running that Plex container.
Starting point is 00:07:14 I'm personally not. I'm using the official Plex Media Server. A fun story with that one. Plex actually approached us back in the day to help them write that Docker container. so technically you're just running a fork of the Linux server container technically okay a derivative yes a derivative is more accurate yeah it was a fun project because
Starting point is 00:07:36 you know 10 15 years ago whenever it was now getting old there was just no standardization in the containerization space people weren't writing if they existed they weren't writing coherent documentation at all and there was no kind of standardized base image pattern or anything and you know there is some weirdness in how the Linux server images ended up architecting around S6 to have like this init system inside the container, because obviously if PID1 dies, then the container dies with it. And some of the services need multiple things running inside the same container. So it's a bit of a weird, it's a bit of a weird thing, like trying to containerize some of these apps that were written before containers were really the native deployment format for
Starting point is 00:08:20 server software in general now. Yeah. How do you feel? about the podman docker war do you feel like it's a a war that's won are you a podman person what's your feels i'm not you know i'm ex red hat so i really should be pro podman shouldn't i but uh yeah the thing the thing the thing that podman misses for me is it's a very purest implementation so it's extremely technically sound what it misses for me though is some of the user spice on top. Like that last 10% that Docker closed in terms of usability, because all the primitives for Docker pretty much
Starting point is 00:09:00 were there before Docker came along. It was just the packaging of Docker with the standardized image format that really made it take off. The trouble with Podman, though, is when you want to do basic stuff, like even just mounting a volume, you've got to do this user ID shuffle because I'm talking specifically about rootless Podman here. You've got to do this user ID shuffle because
Starting point is 00:09:21 the user IDs inside the container don't map to the IDs on the host properly, unless you do this shift. And so it ends up being this world of complicated UID scripts shuffling nonsense that I just haven't got time for. I guess I don't,
Starting point is 00:09:37 I'm not that much of a Docker user to know exactly what you're talking. I would definitely mapped UIDs to UIDs, but I never really hit the issue. I do know if you mismatch on ownership there's an issue, but that's I sort of leave it to the AI or the, you know, stack overflows or something else that's like slightly above my pay grade.
Starting point is 00:09:59 Well, I'll break it down as best I can just really simply. So in a rootless podband container, you end up shifting the user IDs by roughly 100,000 or so. It depends on how you've got it configured. So on your host, you would probably have a user ID of something like 1,000. Right, 1,000. Inside the container, it would be the user ID 100,000 and 1,000. So like 101,000, so you've got to find a way to map those IDs from what the container sees to what the host can speak so that the file permissions for those bind mount volumes actually work. And that whole mess, the fact I've just had to explain that to you is exactly my point.
Starting point is 00:10:39 Yes, I'm feeling your point. With root, with a demon that Docker has running as root, yes, there are some security implications with that, but also come simplicity for the user experience. So, right, you know, this is the world of like potentially S.E. Linux, I think, like you may be, you mentioned what I had. I think does that play into it at all? Like this whole purist security Linux thing that I'm just sort of just sort of being exposed to. I've just now moved to Fedora 43. First time I've ever ran Fedora as a desktop even. I'm loving it. Honestly, it's really cool. You know, traditionally I've been an Ubuntu server kind of guy. I only really ever ran Linux as a server, never as a desktop. And so, Only in the last few months have I actually taken the plunge and began to run a system that's based on Linux. And honestly, Silicon Valley back there is running on Fedora 43, just so you know. All right. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:34 Good. Yeah. There's some other interesting stuff that Podman does as well. Like they have this thing called the Quadlets. I don't know if you've heard of Podman Quadlets. It's a bit of a silly name. But essentially, they're System D units that let you run your Podman containers. as system D units
Starting point is 00:11:52 instead of using something like Docker Compose to define the state of the world that that container would see. Yeah, so you have a dot service file for it instead. Effectively, yeah. I mean, so look, I know I give Pop Man a hard time, but it does do some stuff really well. Well, I didn't ask you to talk about Popman at length.
Starting point is 00:12:12 I do. I'm really curious about this. So I think the one thing you mentioned and just glossed over, which may be super important, which is rootless versus root, right? Like that seems to be the divider there, which is the big reason why people think they want to use Podman.
Starting point is 00:12:27 It's more secure because it's rootless versus root. That seems to cause problems based on what you just said. Well, I come at this from the Home Lab angle, the pragmatist angle of I just need my Plex 7. It's me. I'm secure, right? Exactly. Right.
Starting point is 00:12:41 Whereas I think a lot of the motivation for Rootless Podman and, you know, that whole movement in terms of Boot C and, you know, a lot of the... Containerization changes that are happening is because of the enterprise where that stuff does matter, where SE Linux does matter, app armor does matter. But in my home lab, like, I don't care. I mean, like, even if you had an API locally that you were doing something with, no off, right? Why do you have off? No off?
Starting point is 00:13:12 Tiered off systems. Like if I'm external. Yeah, like there's no off for an API I'm writing locally. that's just that's just causing problems i don't need to authenticate to my own API in my own home lab i can trust me okay i'm the admin here we need a shirt that says i'm the admin here yeah it's true yeah look at me i'm the admin here um if anything though my my adoption of tailscale over the last few years has made that stance of mine even stronger because i have no ports like nada opening my firewall anymore nothing
Starting point is 00:13:42 i only have plex oh yeah maybe for the for the for the I'm not only port open. The advertisement of the server for friends. Right. And we do external watching for my kids mainly. I mean, I do have to watch Silicon Valley in a pinch here and there, okay? So I might be, you know, on the subway or something like that,
Starting point is 00:14:01 which we have no subways here. I'm just making a story out. I've got to get my... This is America. We don't do subways. You know, we don't have subways around here. No, the ground's too hard here in Austin to do a subway. Like, it's rock under there.
Starting point is 00:14:14 Okay. Oh, yeah, it's true. I mean, I think Elon may be trying to find a way to... to make a hole, but we'll see. My land is a trusted zone completely. I have recently, do you VLAN a lot then? I imagine you probably have an IOT VLAN at least, right? I do, yeah.
Starting point is 00:14:29 So like when some random piece of IOT junk arrives of Amazon, it's not getting on the same VLAN as my server. That's just not happening. Yeah. And the issue there is that it might be shipping software onto it that's got a root kit or something like that that could be trying to infiltrate, you know, or like, I just don't know.
Starting point is 00:14:49 You just don't know. It could do that. It could just have an algorithm that, that crawls open Samba shares and lists the file directories. That's fearful. I don't know. I mean, who knows what these things are doing or capable of? ESP devices over the years have gotten so capable that I watched a video just last night of a guy
Starting point is 00:15:10 that built using one of these ESP 32s and a little display, like a need for speed kind of like mini map for his car and he had like 2.5 million map tiles that he generated for the UK and like had petrol stations on it and restaurants and it was it was really cool actually um so they're very they're very capable devices is my point so you just don't know what they're up to gosh do we want to go to boot C I mean do you do you have anything good to say about Bootsie what your thoughts on on Bootsie I think it's a really interesting I think it's a really interesting development I don't know a huge amount about Bootsie technically, but in terms of where it fits in the space,
Starting point is 00:15:51 I think it's a logical conclusion of where things should go next. You know, the immutable atomic OS. Are you able to describe Bootsie so that folks can follow? I'll try. I won't do a good job. Yeah, well, you go first and I'll look it up. Okay. Geez.
Starting point is 00:16:07 What I know about Bootsie is out of red hat. It's part of like their world essentially, and they're sending this up. It's essentially a system that can change itself underneath and it's, what's the right word, that you can't, you can't change the system. It's immutable. So what you have is what you have and you can update underneath your data, but that's the part I don't get. And I know that Steam Deck and some other things like these gaming things are doing on top of it is really cool. I just don't know what's cool about it yet aside from being able to build your own Linux distro for yourself potentially.
Starting point is 00:16:43 that's kind of where I've been dabbling at. And when I say dabbling, just a moment and I got scared and I ran away. Did you get a Red Hat Summit this year per chance? I did not, but I did go to Texas Linux Fest. Oh, yes.
Starting point is 00:16:59 The first one I haven't been to in maybe seven or eight years. I know. I think I reached out last year. I was like, hey, I might be there and I didn't end up going. Yeah. And me and a buddy went.
Starting point is 00:17:07 And thank you to Carl Jorz from Red Hat for the invite. And all the folks are in that conference. It's an amazing conference. If you're even close to Texas during Texas Linux Fest, you're missing out if you don't go. Seriously, it was a blast. I was at two workshops, both amazing. It just is like one of those really feel-good regional Linux conferences. So you get that regional feel where it's sort of small and intimate, but all the right people there to sort of still go deep into this world of Linux.
Starting point is 00:17:35 Did Carl share with you any of his pocket meat? No. Does he have pocket meat? Yeah. Carl George. I met Carl for the first time. It must have been 2017 or 18, Texas. And he was like, hey, Alex. Hey, Alex. How you know, in the way he does. Hey, Alex. Would you like some of my pocket? He's a very jolly person. You're a complete stranger. Why are you offering me your meat? But it turns out he lives in San Antonio and there's a like this meat market near his house.
Starting point is 00:18:05 And so he came out for all things open in October to Raleigh. And I placed, literally placed an order with him to bring me. vacuum-packed packages of San Antonio Meat Market Meat to Raleigh so that I could get my fix of Texas barbecue. Oh. Yes. Texas barbecue. Yes. Good old Texas barbecue. If I lived in Austin, I'd be the size of a house. I mean, it would be a problem, I think.
Starting point is 00:18:32 It would be a problem. It's a problem around here, okay? Texas is big and so the people. People in Texas are big people. But not everybody, but some of them, pretty big. I still need to make it out to something like Salt Lake or something like that. I mean, I've done the Franklin's. I've done the, what's it called, down by the river Terry Black. So, you know,
Starting point is 00:18:51 I've done the tourist barbecue. Yeah. I need to do some of the, some of the, you know, some of the others. If you came here, I would happy take you. And we can take Carl too. He can,
Starting point is 00:19:04 he can come too. Carl, you're in position, but you'd find time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would probably, so I've been wanting to take him. We've been meaning to meet Carl and I at Salt Lake, which we, I live about 10 minutes from the original Salt Lake. So the, the one that began it all for Salt Lake. And it's like going to somebody's backyard ranch in their house. It's so cool that it's not even like restaurant feels. It's like somebody
Starting point is 00:19:30 stood up a little barbecue in their house and it just started a morph over time. That's probably exactly what it was. Well, that's exactly what it was. Yeah, I was like, hey, let's make some barbecue. Oh, people come and eat it. Oh, cool, let's keep doing this. and there you go. I like, there's nothing wrong with Salt Lake. They're good. It's not my favorite though. But it's still amazing.
Starting point is 00:19:50 So you can't go wrong. I would take you to the switch, which is near here. I think it's under known. And it's just so awesome. Man, they've got a really good platter. They've got an amazing
Starting point is 00:20:04 chopped biscuit baked potato. I mean, just like a little baked potato with chopped brisket in it. I mean, come on. Is your mouth watering? I'm hungry now. We're not far off lunchtime for me. The switch, I would take you there.
Starting point is 00:20:23 Yeah, that's quite, I'm just looking at it on a map. That's quite a ways outside of the city limits, too. It is, but it's really close from me. So I live about 10 minutes west of the switch. Nice. So I live in that area there. Okay, Texas Barbecue, Texas Linux Fest. We were talking about Boots C.
Starting point is 00:20:41 We were talking about Boots C briefly. Rootless. We don't have to go into Boots C. I'm more, you know what I'm interested in? I'm interested in a number. This number. Oh, right. Tell me if this number matters to you.
Starting point is 00:20:52 5-0 comma 0-0-0. What does that mean to you? 50,000, yes. 50,000, right? Congratulations. I think I know where you're going. Thank you. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:21:04 I think I know where you're going with this, but. That's a feat. I mean, you've grown the tailscale channel on YouTube. from, I don't know what number, but 50,000 is nothing to shake a stick at. About 1,600 subscribers when I took over, yeah. Yeah. It's been a lot of work. Does that make you happy?
Starting point is 00:21:23 Does it make you sad? You feel content, discontent. What do your feels right now when I say the number 50, comma, zero, zero, zero. You know, to some degree, the subscriber count itself doesn't matter that much. Okay. Because you can put out a video that gets 2,000 views. And you can put out a video that gets 50,000 views or 100,000 or whatever. And there's just no connection between the number of subscribers to the number of views you're going to get.
Starting point is 00:21:50 But it is a nice vanity metric. And it is a nice thing to turn around to management and say, look, we've got big number. It now says 50,000. And it's a nice signal. And I really appreciate everyone that has subscribed to the channel, of course. It wouldn't, I mean, I wouldn't be able to put a roof over my head without people. watching so it's um it's quite humbling in a way but also in some ways doesn't matter that much like maybe understand what I'm trying to say I don't understand yeah about it in the grand scheme of
Starting point is 00:22:22 things right yeah um I also kind of just feel like we're just getting started like I've I've just been um I've just taken over as the head of developer relations for tailscale about two weeks ago now so we're putting together a plan to build out a team to support me on the Because up until today, it's been just me. So I've been editing, scripting, filming, like doing just everything. That's a lot of work, huh? It's too much. It's too much.
Starting point is 00:22:49 It is too much. So we're putting together a plan, and there'll be some job postings goes up in the new year. So keep an eye on the tailscale career site, little plug-y plug. If you want to work on my team, come do some video editing, come do some dev rel stuff. It'll be a good time. Yeah. Well, I've been following. And I, you know, actually, when I saw that number, I was like, let me go check it out.
Starting point is 00:23:08 and I think you're at like 52,000 now. So I think since that post, a few more thousand have subscribed. And then I saw a button there that said subscribe. And I'm like, gosh, Adam, you haven't subscribed this yet? Which is so weird because that's how the algorithm works, which is probably why you say it doesn't matter if you have 50,000 subscribers or not, because I watch your stuff, but I'm not a subscriber. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:32 And that's a weird thing. Yeah. I kind of like that. I like as a consumer, not having to subscribe to everything. Well, because I generally think that good content, the people, you know, there's a bunch of tropes on YouTube and the people that rely on the like, comment, subscribe, smash that like button, all those kind of tropes that exist on YouTube, if the content's good enough, you don't need to say any of that stuff. People watch people. They don't watch, you know, they're not watching the tailscale channel. They're just watching me and what I'm doing.
Starting point is 00:24:05 It's a really, like you look at Linus and how he's had to grow his channel. sort of beyond the cult of just Linus and obviously he's way down the road from where I am but it's really interesting like he'll just make random cameos in videos that are hosted ostensibly by someone else on his team and then he'll just helicopter in for five minutes and say a couple of pieces to camera and then go away again and you know that he hasn't done anything like post-production
Starting point is 00:24:31 or scripting or really been involved in the video at all but they're really struggling to enter that post-PC era, that post-Linus era, hopefully Tailscale won't suffer from that problem because I don't really, I don't really chase the fame aspect of it or I don't want to be famous or anything like that. But like, I do want people to be as excited about stuff that I am as I am.
Starting point is 00:24:55 And that's really my driving goal is to just, you know, like this week, for example, I set up a self-hosted image instance. You know the photo, Google Photos replacement. Yes, tell me about this. Done by Alex and his team Futo and Lewis Rossman in Austin, no less. So they're on your doorstep, dude. So I set this up and I was like, I can delete Google Photos now. And I finally did it.
Starting point is 00:25:18 I've actually finally deleted my quarter of a million pictures in Google Photos. It took me all weekend. You have to go through the WebUI and select a maximum of like 10,000 images at a time. It's really one million for real? Yeah, it was like quarter of a million pictures. Yeah, it was quite a lot. But Google make it really difficult to leave. Anyway, I'm off the Google source, finally.
Starting point is 00:25:39 It's about time the self-hosted guy actually did that. But I was like, well, I bought my family for Christmas when my daughter was born five years ago, some of those little Google picture frames. And so we just had this shared album where I just dropped photos in every few months, and then it would update their picture frames remotely. And I'm like, oh, oops, I guess I've just broken that workflow for them. So I came in just a favorites, basically. Effectively, yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:07 And so I came across this project called Image Frame. And this lets you turn any device, because it's just a web view. So you can run it on Android, iOS, an Apple TV, an Android TV, just a web browser even. And it lets you turn any of those devices into essentially a Google Photos Frame. So I can just drop pictures into an Image album on my self-hosted server, connect this Android tablet that I'm going to give to my family for Christmas, us back over tailscale to my house and the same functionality exists
Starting point is 00:26:36 but it's all completely self-hosted and completely I own the whole shabang. That's what I love about this stuff. Getting people excited about that real world use case. It's like, yeah, tailscale's cool. Image is cool and all out. Like all this stuff in isolation.
Starting point is 00:26:53 People don't wake up in the morning go, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to sign up for a new VPN and it's like the now what problem. How do I actually use this stuff? Make it useful. That's right. You know, I think my usage of tailscales is pretty simple.
Starting point is 00:27:09 I think I just connect my services and I don't do much really. I'm not a deep tail scale user and I kind of feel bad. So I'm actually thinking about having Claude help me go deeper because I'm just like, I don't know how else I can use it personally. Aside from the obvious connected tissue of my home lab, that's really just it. and it's really just mainly I kind of show my my colors here a little bit
Starting point is 00:27:37 but I think for me I will SSH into Cineplex which is what I call my Plex machine and so I just type SSAH Cineplex because that's what it's named in Tailscale. It's the name of the machine right, it's the host name. That's really
Starting point is 00:27:53 sadly, potentially maybe you'll be sad by this that's my use of Tailscale It's just easier host name SSH around my home lab. It's great. It's fine. And the occasional external view of something of a service running. I don't have a lot of, I could do better with that.
Starting point is 00:28:12 I got other problems I'm dealing with in my home lab, which is just writing a few more pieces of fun software for me. You know, home lab. Well, friends, I'm here with a good friend of mine. Again, Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of depot.dev. Kyle, we are in an era of disruption, right? I would also describe it as rethinking what we thought was true. And I guess that's kind of the definition of disruption.
Starting point is 00:28:52 But from your perspective, how are teams, reliability teams, CISD, pipeline teams, how are they all rethinking things, and where? Does Depot fit into that? In the conversations that I have with customers, a lot of DevOps teams, platform teams, site reliability teams, they're really looking at this new era of software engineering that we're all living in. And they're starting to question, like, the bottleneck is no longer the act of writing code. The bottleneck is shifting.
Starting point is 00:29:18 The most time-consuming part is integrating the code. It's everything that comes after. It's the build. It's the pull request review. It's the deployment. It's the getting it into production. Once it's in productions, it's scaling up support teams to support it. It's adding documentation, all of these downstream problems.
Starting point is 00:29:37 And so through the lens of Depot, what we're really starting to think about is there's a very realistic possibility that within the next two to three years, maybe even sooner, that we're going to enter a world where an engineering team of three people could theoretically have the velocity of an engineering team of 300 people. And what's the consequences of that? What's the consequences of the code velocity spiking up to that level with such a small team? There's no way three engineers are going to be able to code review all of the code that's being created if there's three engineers and 297 agents also creating features and fixing bugs. So that's just like from a pull request perspective. But then you think about it through a build lens too of if your builds take 20 minutes with three humans And now you're going to have three humans and 297 agents also running.
Starting point is 00:30:28 Well, like, you definitely don't want your build. It's taking 20 minutes because now, like, the entire pinch point is the build pipeline. And so we're starting to think a lot about how do we eliminate the bottlenecks that come downstream? And what can we do with Depot that streamlines that? So obviously, friends, we are in an era of disruption. Things are changing. You know it. I know it.
Starting point is 00:30:50 And that's how it is. And the thing with production and what Kyle's talking about here is, how in the world do you get your bills to be faster? How you get them to be more reliable, faster, more observability around those deployments? You need it. It's required. And Depot is there to help you. So a good first step is to go to depot.dev, get faster. Try their trial. It's too easy. Again, depot.dev is where to go.
Starting point is 00:31:14 It all begins at depot.dev. So how'd you do your backups, Adam? Gosh, I don't have backups, Alex. I got raid. Okay, I'm just kidding. I really don't have off-site backups, okay? I'm not practicing three, two, one. I'm in a situation.
Starting point is 00:31:36 I could, like, it could go down right in this moment. It could get on fire over there. And I will have to say, you know, get the thing, get the extinguisher and put it out. And my stuff is gone. So I don't have backups. And well, there goes one of my pitches for you would be an off-site backup. Well, that could be a pitch, though. I need an off-side backup.
Starting point is 00:31:58 So what would you do? How would you do it? Well, I have a friend in Canada. So I'll tell you how I do it. And so I have a Z-F-S array in the basement, which has just got, I think, 5 20-terabyte hard drives in it. Okay. And then I use, it's a program called Z-Reppel, Z-R-E-P-L for Z-R-E-P-L, I guess.
Starting point is 00:32:19 and it essentially mirrors all of the ZFS blocks to Canada which is where my friend lives and he's got a similar sized server he actually runs an MSP so he just carved out a few use of rack space for me to use there and so I have he's a very nice friend I'm sure he would offer you some rackspace if you paid him a few Canadian roubles every month and I just use you
Starting point is 00:32:49 repel over tail scale. Because it's an SSH best, SSH based protocol for the replication. Could you do the same thing with Hestner by any chance? Like, I don't know enough about Hetzner. I know you could do a lot of cool things with production machines. I know you can do some pretty decent size builds because you can choose your CPU and stuff like that. But do they have like that level of like Z-FS, ZFS to me? Because
Starting point is 00:33:11 we're different. My brain is so confused about that letter. Because it's in my, it's in my name, Alex KTZ. Alex KTZ. People are always give me a hard time about that one and I'm like, I don't know. I'm just making clear that I say ZFS. I just pick whatever. Could you do that with like a, like I don't have the friend. I wouldn't mind the friend, but like for those who don't have the friend, could you, how could you do the same thing? There's a couple of ways. I mean, the trouble with any cloud provider is that once you get over a few hundred gigs of storage, the cost becomes
Starting point is 00:33:42 prohibitive pretty fast. So there's a service called and I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but there's a service called ZFS. Rent. Go take a look. What you do is you send them a hard drive and they put it into a slot in one of their servers, I think in California, but don't quote me on that. And you pay them $10 a month per slot that you occupy. So if you want 20 terabytes of off-site backup,
Starting point is 00:34:10 you send them a 20-terabyte hard drive. It can be direct shipped from Amazon or Best Buy or wherever. Wow. They'll rack the drive for you. and then they'll give you an IPV4 address and a VM and then you use that as your ZlFS replication target offsite for 10 bucks a month.
Starting point is 00:34:27 Job done. That is good. That's a good find. I should get them on the show. This is a really, like, I wish I thought about this. ZFS.rent is the coolest domain ever. And then, you know,
Starting point is 00:34:41 any notable person with raid in their house has got to be running ZFS. And if it's, I mean, if it's Butterfess, sure, okay, BTRFS. There just aren't many alternatives. I mean, I know Butter gets a bit of a hard time, perhaps unfairly. But ZNFS at this point, really, for me, there's nothing that comes close in terms of the reliability, the development trajectory that it has with the IX system support and Clara systems up with Alan Jude in Canada as well. trunas of course has been industry standard for sort of normal people for a long time i say non-enterprise deployments of like ice-gousy storage and anything you want to do for a small
Starting point is 00:35:31 medium business whatever like trunas is the answer i just can't think of anything better like bcash fs is kind of promising but then there was that whole drama recently with kent overstreet and linus torvalds and the linux colonel mailing lists and development trying to sneak at sorts of some weirdness there so i'm unfamiliar oh go look it up it's uh it's a whole trunch of um stuff drama yeah oh gosh just what we need is more drama well bcash got accepted into the linux kernel which you would think would be an amazing thing right we've now got another another file system native in the lenox kernel because this is one of the downsides of zlifs is the licensing drama you feel with all that yeah loosely i mean i know about the
Starting point is 00:36:14 the origination in sun and you know the accidental open sourcing I've talked to Matt Aaron's before we have a good friend at Oxide and you know Brian Cantrell so I kind of have some of the back sort of the sun days and like I guess not sun days like the day of the week but
Starting point is 00:36:29 S-U-N space days capital S-U-N so I got a little micro-systems yeah some microsystems and it's got an interesting history and I think like even the accidental open sourcing of it was really wild and then now have open ZFS.
Starting point is 00:36:45 I don't know. And Alan Ju came on the podcast and, like, talked about and really got me wanting to become a BSD nerd. And I tried for a little bit. And I just did enough to be familiar, but just was like, okay, Linux is really for me. Like, I just don't need what BSD has. And it was felt like an uphill battle for me personally. But I get it.
Starting point is 00:37:07 I get it. But the licensing thing is, like, really where it's at, the issue at least. the trouble with BSD is I learnt Linux first so all my muscle memory is Linux same that was me and just stuff like the way that GREP works or said works or just basic command line utilities like that
Starting point is 00:37:26 it's just different enough in BSD land that I'm like I'll just go back to what I know yeah there's a lot to like about the BSD universe there really is but it's just never stuck for me yeah So offside backups, ZFS.z.organt, unaffiliated. I don't have any experience with it.
Starting point is 00:37:48 So if you check it out, y'all, your mileage may vary. Report back, of course. The other option you've got is just a Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive and shove it under the stairs at your mom's house or something, you know? So how does that work then? I mean, ZFS is so RAM intensive, but I guess for a backup, you don't need a lot of RAM, right? Precisely.
Starting point is 00:38:07 Is that the idea? It's just a backup. so the arc can be small. You are not going to be limited by the performance of the Raspberry Pi. You're going to be limited by the performance, presumably, of your internet pipe. Right.
Starting point is 00:38:21 That's going to be the bottleneck. And even if you do end up being limited by some local thing on the Raspberry Pi, it's a backup. Does it matter? It's going to run overnight, every night for the next five, ten, 20 years, whatever.
Starting point is 00:38:36 So if it takes an hour or it takes six hours, who cares right i have to do this like you're you're okay this is my you've given me a christmas present thank you alice this is my this is what motivates me dude is just like yeah solving real problems for people so uh i'm glad to hear that i like that okay so uh image is what you stood up you're off of google images if i understand correctly there's no favorites list like i try to presume in google anymore you've gotten a whole new hosted system that is image all the way
Starting point is 00:39:12 and your family is still happy with their Google Frames? One of the family texts me this morning and said, my photo frames stop working. And I'm like, oops. I might have pulled the trigger a bit too soon on the deletion, but I just wanted to stop paying Google $8 a month for the 2 terabytes, you know?
Starting point is 00:39:34 Yeah, right. How many hard drives do you buy? Well, for $8 a month, amortized over five years. I can buy probably two 20 terabyte drives. Yeah, it's not the end of the world. I mean, there is some value there that you don't have to manage it, but now you get your friend.
Starting point is 00:39:46 You get your friend in Canada? Well, I'm also not training Gemini's future models with my images and the images of my daughter. And there's a huge digital sovereignty aspect to my motivations for getting off the big tech train when it comes to really deeply personal data like photos and documents. And I mean, I'm sure many of us use Gmail even. And I've been a Gmail user since, I guess, 2004, 5 era, like when it was cool and a beta product.
Starting point is 00:40:19 And I look back at the original emails. I'm like, oh, my God, every email I've had in the last 22 years, they know what it is. It's a lot of data. It's a big data set. You get paid to run a home lab, though. Would you say that? It's fair to say you get paid to run a home lab? for the most part, or play with a Home Lab?
Starting point is 00:40:41 Well, you get paid to make videos. The phrase, if you do what you love, you never work another day in your life is very true for me. I'm extremely privileged and lucky to get to do what I do. Like, Thanksgiving weekend was just a couple of weeks ago as we record, and I decided that I was going to learn Kubernetes over the weekend.
Starting point is 00:41:01 Oh, how'd that go? And I spent the whole weekend glued to my laptop, and I had a great time, and I've now got a three-node Kubernetes. Binetti's cluster in a closet and it works great and then I was able to turn that into a piece of content for work so you know for me I'm I'm just very privileged like this is this is what I'd be doing anyway so the fact I get paid to do it is like just a huge bonus for me yeah can we maybe touch quickly on I guess as long as you'd like to actually I said quickly but however
Starting point is 00:41:30 these are the fields that I think get exposed through um vibe based podcasting which say, right? I got this vibe that going to tailscale from being a podcaster, I don't know what else you did then. So I'm not kind of diminish what you were doing. I don't know. I know you were running the podcast. Then you got the job of tail scale. What were you doing before? Were you consulting or like how was that? What I'm trying to get to is like, how was it to go from like a podcaster that I knew you have at least? And then now you worked for tail scale to produce content there. I was a red hat consultant in Europe for a year. or two, and then I moved to the States, and I got a job as a TAM, sort of managing open
Starting point is 00:42:13 shift accounts and things. It was fine. It was pretty boring, as long as the customers were happy. What's a TAM? A technical account manager, I'm sorry. Okay. So, yeah, I basically have, I don't know, half a dozen accounts assigned to me, and I would have weekly calls with those customers, big, big spend customers, and make sure that they were getting value for money and that their support tickets were being slipped through the queue correctly and if there was anything like new coming with, like I was there during the OpenShift 3 to OpenShift 4 transition, which was a big shift from a rel base to an atomic immutable base OS image
Starting point is 00:42:49 and re-architecture of like around CoreOS and Project Atomic and all that stuff for Red Hat. And it's helping customers navigate the complexities of all that stuff and just telling them what they need to know ahead of time. And so there's a lot of skills in, that that actually translate pretty well to video. There's also a lot of skills that translate from being on the genius bar back in the day to being personable and being on video and sort of figuring out what someone's problem is and then presenting it to them in a way that they can understand.
Starting point is 00:43:21 So it's just, you know, where I am now is like the summation of an entire 20-year journey, really of just failing upwards. Failing upwards. Talk to me about the personal feel. of getting to go from, I guess, seems like interesting work, but maybe not so fulfilling, based on what you're saying.
Starting point is 00:43:42 You were running self-hosted at the time, I believe, right? Yeah, yeah. And that podcast has since ended. And then you go to T.L.S. Like, being able to go and create content, like, hey, I used to do this stuff for free. You know, marginally for free.
Starting point is 00:43:56 Sure, you probably had sponsors to maybe cover some rent or some things like that and some pieces, but not the full. paycheck necessarily to get to do it as a job. Well, you've got two routes to go as a content creator, don't you? You've got one, which is to do it the really hard way and do it yourself and bootstrap your own small business and interface with all these different companies
Starting point is 00:44:23 and manage sponsorships and negotiate every cent that they give you. And then you've also got to be a creator and an editor and you've got to be five to ten different roles in one. I chose to go an equally difficult but totally different path of trying to do that but within a corporate organization, a startup organization. I've been really lucky in so much as that the salescale channel doesn't have to pay for itself in the traditional way
Starting point is 00:44:53 that say any other content creator has to pay for itself because it's a brand awareness play ostensibly. that's the purpose of the YouTube channel is just to say, hey, look at tailscale, look at the cool stuff you can do a tailscale. And that's it. We're not, we're not reviewing products. We're not taking paid placement sponsorships.
Starting point is 00:45:13 We're not doing any of that other stuff, which I kind of find a little bit dirty, to be honest. I don't ever really enjoy doing that stuff. It's a necessary evil. I understand. You know, everybody's got to eat. But, you know,
Starting point is 00:45:27 the attention that you're selling as a content creator, you know, you're monetizing that attention for, well, money, I suppose. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's nice to have insurance. It's nice to have a paycheck and all that kind of stuff, doing it the tailscale way. I don't know where it will end up, though.
Starting point is 00:45:44 I mean, I really, I love what I do. I mean, the fact I get a paycheck reliably every month is, it's fantastic. But there's that phrase in, do you remember, of course you've got Mike Judge playing behind you on Silicon Valley. You remember office space, right, where he has the interview with the bobs? Yes. If Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see an extra dime. Where's the motivation?
Starting point is 00:46:08 Right. And, of course, my motivation is I get a paycheck every month. But if the channel goes from 1,600 subscribers to 53,000 subscribers, I still get paid the same. Yeah. You know, I suppose the validation is that I could negotiate, though, right? You could hinge some, some hallmarks and some milestones, but you get to hire, too, so you get to make some friends. yeah yeah i suppose the validation is the promotion is the fact that i'm still employed is you know lots of different positive signals but like it's just these are the sorts of things
Starting point is 00:46:42 you think about in the shower and just at like 2 a.m your mind starts going you're like well how can i maximize just everything how can i maximize it for tailscale how can i maximize it for alex how can i make sure that the audience is getting the most out of it too because ultimately if the audience is happy, that will drive everything else down the road. So really my focus isn't on me. It's not on tailscale. It's on what people want to see and need to hear and want to hear. Some of my best performing content has been hour-long deep dive tutorials in how to set up
Starting point is 00:47:17 a self-hosted server from scratch. It's got anything to do with Tailscale, does it? But it's on the Tailscale channel. And so it's a really weird, unique thing. And I've started to see other competitors of ours copying that strategy, which is kind of interesting. But, yeah, it's a very unique way of doing Devrel.
Starting point is 00:47:38 Because if you think about what developer relations typically do, they'll be hacking away on SDKs and API code on the back end. And people don't really see it unless you're a developer and you want to integrate with, you know, back in the day, Twitter or something. And then they might go to a conference and talk to a room full of a couple hundred people. And that talk has never seen again. again. Whereas what we're doing is effectively that same cycle, that same loop, but we're
Starting point is 00:48:04 not focused on the developer aspect as much. We're focused on the end user, the top of funnel user, mythical person. And getting them excited about using Telscale for free. And hopefully they have such a good time that they then go, why aren't we doing this at work? Why are we doing open VPN? Why are we? And hopefully then that motion turns into a sale two, three, four years down the road, whatever it turns out to be. It's just a fascinating space. And I don't know, I kind of feel a bit weird talking about it publicly, but here you go. I'm enjoying it.
Starting point is 00:48:36 I'm sorry you feel weird about it. Do you feel like, it's just a bit navel-gazy, isn't it? But anyway. Well, I suppose you're the guest here, though, right? You're the friend here. So you have to navel your gaze a little tiny bit just to be, fulfill your role. Come on, Alex. You can talk about me if you want to, but that's not any fun.
Starting point is 00:48:54 The question I have for you, I suppose, is, you work a tail scale. This is going to be on YouTube and this may be seen by other people. How honest can you be about your curiosity? Like, do you have an itch? And if you have an itch, could you, do you feel like you have the freedom to speak publicly about the curiosities as a developer, as an engineer, as a Linux nerd,
Starting point is 00:49:19 as a home lab or as a self-hoster, whatever? I mentioned a few minutes ago that the channel to date has basically been just me. that comes with a huge bonus of it's just me that decides what gets put out. So to date, the last two and a half years that I've been at Tailscale, yeah, I've had basically complete creative freedom, which is both a huge blessing and a massive responsibility at the same time because you're representing the brand. And, you know, for example, Kevin Purdy, who is ex-Arst Technica,
Starting point is 00:49:52 who we hired earlier this year to write for our blog, He's an amazing writer, by the way. You should totally go and look at the Thalescale blog. He wrote a piece about how to jailbreak your Kindle and put Tailscale on it. And it was on Hacker News yesterday, and we saw a huge spike on the back end. But putting something about jailbreaking a device and breaking a Yula on a corporate blog, there are just certain topics you can't really touch. And that one, it falls under sort of fair use.
Starting point is 00:50:23 And it's fine, you know, we think. legally speaking. But there are huge trunches of self-hosting that I just cannot talk about. You know, wink-wink, nudge, the stuff behind you is what I'm talking about. For sure. And, you know, we can't talk about circumventing
Starting point is 00:50:40 geopolitical, geo-block content, right, restrictions and circumventing copyright, obviously, and everything that goes with it. And for me, the reality was some of that stuff was the reason I even got into self-hosting in the first place. so I have to find a whole other seam of stuff to talk about which can be challenging admittedly sometimes but then we have product release weeks and you sort of think to
Starting point is 00:51:06 yourself right well now I'm going to actually put together an advert effectively for the products but how am we going to do this in the way that doesn't feel like an advert and so it can be tricky but also very yeah it's very creatively challenging and rewarding at the same time What are you doing in your home lab currently that isn't so much tailscope, but more just like, I know you just mentioned image, but could you describe, you know, the level of HomeLab do you have? Do you have a massive Unified system? Are you rocking something else? Like, take me through from, from Gateway to client. Yeah, Unify fanboy over here. So you are. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard not to like us. it really is apart from the price
Starting point is 00:51:54 there's definitely a unified tax definitely does get you yeah I've got the UCG fiber their new fiber gateway that's really nice and I replaced a I think I had a dream machine
Starting point is 00:52:07 pro or something like when we were getting ready to sell the house I just downsized everything from sort of rack gear as much as I could to the sort of small utility switches yeah nice so I've got like a ton of those
Starting point is 00:52:20 Lenovo mini PC the Kubernetes cluster I mentioned a few minutes ago. I've got a couple of MS-01 Minisforum devices doing like all the heavy lifting. I've got 100 terabytes of spinning rust in the basement, give or take running ZFS that I talked about.
Starting point is 00:52:35 That's in a 19-inch Sligar case. But yes, it's pretty minimal dare I say, for what I do. I need a set of infrastructure to run tail-scale stuff on for the videos. And then I need a separate set of stuff to run my home sort of pseudo prod and yeah I try and keep it as simple as I can like 10 gig for all the
Starting point is 00:52:56 trunks the unified aggregation switches for like 260 bucks are great what about uh any applications you mentioned Kubernetes and that's that's kind of new it's like three weeks old for you I would say right that's since Thanksgiving three weeks yeah roughly so what do you run it on there what was that you wanted to learn it but what are you running what kind of applications are on there nothing yet i don't trust myself with it nothing um that's cool my my media server primarily is my my main application server so that has plex on it that has jellyfin that has all the other stuff uh paperless next cloud uh smoke
Starting point is 00:53:35 ping interesting plex and jelly fin yeah because i you know plex keep turning the screw don't they about you know just trying to try to stream you trying to try to try to You charge you money to stream your own files, that kind of stuff. Are they? I haven't experienced that personally, but what's the latest? I'm ready for their rug pull. It was about two weeks ago.
Starting point is 00:53:59 There was another nail in the coffin there. I mean, look, I understand. Like, Plex need to get money from their audience to support development. The trouble with it is that they gave it all away for free at the beginning, or they gave lifetime passes away for too cheap. You know, I bought Plex Lifetime for $75 bucks 12 years. ago. Wow. And they haven't seen another dime from me since. Except for a bunch of marketing and new users potentially.
Starting point is 00:54:25 Well, okay, in my specific case, maybe, but that's not the average. I guess me too a little bit, but yeah. We're not the average user, are we? No, I would say probably not. That's not a good business model. Like recurring revenue, that's what you need to build a business around. And it's interesting. If Plex launched today with its client app suite with its um fit and finish and polish and codex support and everything else i'd probably pay five 10 bucks a month for it and not think twice but because it has been free for so long or in my
Starting point is 00:55:03 mind at least i paid that lifetime fee and it is free forever after that right it's it's it's tough like you can't ever really charge or something that used to be free or used to be in a lifetime tier so You kind of ruined their business model 15 years ago, and they're kind of paying for it now. So it's tough, it's tough for them. That is true. That is true. I like Plex Amp. So outside the typical Plex.
Starting point is 00:55:33 So good. Ecosystem. I listen to a lot of my music externally, hence the port. And Plex Amp is a dedicated, you got it on iPhone, I believe. I think you have it as a Mac app via the iPad. app, I guess. I don't know the other platforms, I guess, maybe on Linux potentially.
Starting point is 00:55:54 Android, I'm sure. And Plex has done a great job of having, like, client apps kind of everywhere. And so you're right. I guess if they had an open core, right? An open core that if I could self-host, which I guess we already do self-host, then maybe not. I guess you're right.
Starting point is 00:56:14 Like, how do you charge for that? I suppose maybe particularly. features like you said codex or like i do so an example of maybe how they can make money hey don't do this by the way uh is i watch a lot of 4k content in my home in my my home and so maybe i'm a i'm a unique kind of maybe a super user so to speak i'm the kind of person you may i'm an enterprise customer so to speak to plex maybe to get hdr from my 4k and have that codec which requires a certain amount of developer tooling and engineering to make that work, well, maybe you pay for things like that.
Starting point is 00:56:53 Like certain or lossless, I guess that would be kind of sad to force you to compress your own music. But if you had lossless on your wave files and that wasn't gated, but maybe you gated to get money, but you're right, it is kind of a rug pull to the lifetime customers. Maybe there's a lot more customers they can get that aren't lifetime and they can just kind of give us the past because we've been invented. for so long. I do think piracy is going to have a moment as, you know, inflation continues to bite and people just can't afford, you know, as the media space continues to homogenize, you know,
Starting point is 00:57:28 you saw the Warner Brothers acquisition by Netflix recently. Those massive corporate mergers are never good for consumers. They're just, it's always going to result in long term, higher prices, less choice, less content. More gates. Yeah, I do think piracy will have its moment over the next few years as a result of all that homogenization. We kind of had a nice honeymoon period for the last decade, led by Spotify, I think, where that was all you can eat. But you're starting to see famous artists now pulling out of Spotify
Starting point is 00:58:09 because they don't pay their artists enough. And people like Tidal are coming along and co-buzz. And you end up with this fragmented ecosystem. And the same thing's happening with video. Arguably, it's already happened with video because of just how lucrative a streaming service can be. I remember the original promise of Netflix was that it would just be one subscription and you get all the movies and all the TV that you can eat.
Starting point is 00:58:36 And then that kind of fell by the wayside as the studios realized how much they're making all of our money. Yeah, exactly. So, video, as you well know, is expensive to produce, let alone blockbuster scale, graphics effects and entire industry's worth of crews and, you know, sound people and costume and set design and everything that goes into making a good movie. You've got to recoup somehow. Yeah. Do you have targets near you, like target stores in Raleigh? oh yeah the uh la tajie yeah tajie yeah that's true
Starting point is 00:59:15 do you is that one of your your places is your wife of love targe uh well my five year old does because most times she leaves with some oh yeah that's where my new thing my five year old loves well he's going on six no but he loves let's go to target mom because target means
Starting point is 00:59:33 maybe something for him uh the reason why I asked that question was because I don't really care to go at Target necessarily. I mean, let's be honest, I don't think I like to go to any store unnecessarily. Like, if I don't have a mission,
Starting point is 00:59:50 what's the reason to be here? To browse? Yeah. Come on, what's the point here? But apparently it's to spend time with your family. And so I'm cool with that. I want to do that, okay?
Starting point is 01:00:00 I am okay with that. I can do it at a home without spending money. That's right. We don't have to go to Target and buy the snacks we don't need and the things that we, you know, to be attracted by the end caps or whatever. I'm just going to not play that game.
Starting point is 01:00:12 But I do play that game. And I used to happily play that game because I could be like, hey, babe, I'm going to go over to the Blu-ray section for a little bit. Oh, yeah. It's not there anymore. No. It's not there anymore, Alex.
Starting point is 01:00:26 Like, what are we doing? What's happy? The only place you can buy my hard disk content is from the ultimate bookstore, Amazon. You know? You will own nothing and you will like it. Isn't that Corey Dr. O's certification culmination? Well, I think that was actually the New World Order or maybe the New World Forum or something like that.
Starting point is 01:00:51 They did that. And then obviously it's part of the identification that he's, you know, extrapolated from that. If Corey was here, he'd probably word salad me for 30 minutes and how I'm wrong. But I love Corey. He's the best. I really love. I love absolutely love Corey. It's been too long, actually.
Starting point is 01:01:08 We should get Corey back on the podcast. soon but yet you can't really go to the physical store and i mean you can't buy CDs anymore either so whatever but like do not take my blurays away okay like i want to own the film and i want to have it in perpetuity like i don't want to buy the white album on every format let me buy the one and i'm done right let me have the lossless version of it the blessed version of it you mean you don't want to buy the remastered remix uh deluxe super edition box set on 33 RPM vinyl. You know, I'm tempted.
Starting point is 01:01:43 Reissue. I'm tempted. I'm tempted. But then I would just be buying, I would be like filling somebody's pocket who bought the license to that, that, those masters, you know?
Starting point is 01:01:54 Anyways, whatever. What are your thoughts on the lack of media or the, the fact that it's only viable on Amazon? I think piracy will have its moment. How will it have its moment, though, if there's no media to pirate? How will you pirate?
Starting point is 01:02:09 Oh, they're sneaky. They'll find ways to rip it in other ways, I think. From the stream, like encryption, de-encrypt it. Yeah, I mean, well, ultimately, it's displaying on a screen somewhere, and there are ways to, I don't know how much we should talk about this, there are ways to circumvent pretty much any DRM if you try hard enough. Okay. I don't try very hard, personally, but I can imagine somebody who does, yeah.
Starting point is 01:02:34 That's for other people to do, right? Right. I just, I might benefit off their, um, off their fruit on occasion, forbidden fruit. I try to buy all my media, honestly. I mean, I really don't, I'm not calling you out. And I don't even know what, I don't know what would make me want to be, I guess, a pirate or a consumer of pirated material. Yeah. In this stage of my life.
Starting point is 01:02:58 When I was younger, yes, because like, I didn't know any better. And I also was poor. And I'm still like just like marginally less a little bit, a little less poor. We talked about this a little earlier on, didn't we? We talked about the experience, the overall experience of Docker versus Podman. Right. Okay. And the overall user experience of having five or more subscriptions and having to go to a store and buy a physical disc ultimately is worse than what you can get if you put your iPatch on.
Starting point is 01:03:29 I see. The overall user experience is just better. and I think there's a I don't even know if the movie studios can coalesce around any single service I don't think it's possible but until they do
Starting point is 01:03:46 like the quality is better the bit rate you know they're not going to do rug pulls and remove content you know like Friends famously was on Netflix and now isn't it's somewhere else and so like that stuff happens all the time
Starting point is 01:03:58 one of my favorite cartoons final space just got completely deleted from the legal internet you could you know yeah you can't someone's life's work
Starting point is 01:04:08 the creator of that piece of work is just it's just gone and what is it called final space what is this final space oh it's it's a stupid cartoon
Starting point is 01:04:19 but it's quite it's quite entertaining it's got this cute little green thing in it called moon cake okay anyway
Starting point is 01:04:28 it's a it's a fun little thing to put on late at night when you just want to vegetate Is this not on Netflix then? I don't know. It used to be on one of them.
Starting point is 01:04:38 I forget where. Let's see here. I landed on a Google result. Oh, well, at least it's not available on ad-supported plan because I am an ad-supported user of Netflix. I guess that's more. Yes. Like, let me just increase your price or give you. Actually, it's not ad-supported.
Starting point is 01:04:58 Actually, it is, but it's because I get it from T-Mobile. So I have a phone and they give me Netflix And I'm like, okay, I'll get it for free Why would I pay a little bit more to get the ads removed? I don't mind them. And honestly, Netflix does a pretty good job with the ads. I mean, they're not that invasive. I hate the pause screen.
Starting point is 01:05:17 I want to pause to see the thing, not the ad. I'll do everything I can to avoid adverts. I'll pay for YouTube premium. I will run SmartTube. to watch YouTube, I will pay for Netflix ad-free tier. You know, the reality is that I just don't want to support the behavior of companies that will do these kind of, like Final Space is a great example. So not only was it canceled before the show's narrative finished, which happens all the time
Starting point is 01:05:49 on streaming services, but they also just deleted the entire series from Netflix so that they could use it as a tax write-off. I just don't want to support that behavior. same thing with Google Photos. It's the same thing with media. I think without sounding too much like a mouthpiece for like Corey or something, like genuinely, it's, it's egregious what a lot of the industry, the big tech industry is getting away with, using our data to train their models to then sell us back even more. And like the AI bubble, whatever you want to call it, like it's an industrial bubble. So there will be some useful stuff comes out the other side of it.
Starting point is 01:06:28 But when it goes pop, I think it's going. going to be very painful for people. Oh, interesting. Well, friends, I'm here with my good friend Chris Kelly over at Augment Code. Chris, I'm a fan. I'm a fan I use Augie on the daily. It's one of my daily drivers. Now I use Cloud Code. I use Augment Augie. And I also use AMP code and others.
Starting point is 01:07:09 But Augie, I keep going back to it. And here's where I'm at. I feel like not enough of our audience knows about Augment code. Not enough about Augie, the CLI. It's amazing. I love it. What can you share? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:07:21 We often say Augment is the best coding assistant you've never heard of. And that's both frustrating as to someone that works there. And it's like very proud of the work we've done. But also, like, inspiring. Like, we want to go and sort of punch above our weight. We just, like, we aren't anthropic and we aren't open AI. And so the quality of the product itself, you know, with our context engine, once you do touch it, people are, like, just blown away by that.
Starting point is 01:07:44 And so, like, that keeps me going every day. So not to bear the lead here, but this is a paid spot. You are sponsoring this show to get this awareness. Now, at the same time, we're selective. And I love to use your tool. But there is in the world. So a lot of developers look at the space. say, okay, well, how long can this work?
Starting point is 01:08:03 How long is this sustainable in the case of Cursor or a windsurf? Or you pick the name and you think discounted tokens help me shape a lens for our audience? I think it's a lot of awareness, right? Like Cursor got a lot of publicity early on for like fast revenue growth, which well deserved. I think, you know, frankly, some of the media got the, gets the story wrong and that like if I gave you a $1.50 for every dollar you sent me, I'd be the fastest growing startup in the in the valley. And so when you're selling discounted tokens, yes, of course you're going to go very fast, but all that money plus more goes to the model providers. So I think the real story is
Starting point is 01:08:44 the story of Anthropic and, you know, being an API provider. I think the market has just moved so fast and there's so many pieces of competition out there that it's just hard to get noticed. So friends, I love augment code and I love using Augie. And I highly recommend you use I love using Augie. I can hand Augie a well-defined specification, a well-defined pep, as I call them in my world, an agent flow, and it executes flawlessly. So the cool thing about Augie that I love most really is that context engine, and I can hand it a task, and it can just churn away on my well-defined plan, and just never bother me
Starting point is 01:09:24 and accomplish the mission. It is so cool leveraging the latest models, the context engine, and all the fun things. behind the scenes in that awesome CLI. So yes, go try it out, augmentcode.com. Right in the top there is a CLI icon, a terminal icon, click that, install it, and change your world. It's going to be awesome. Obnincode.com.
Starting point is 01:09:45 And also by our friends at Framer, you know, most design tools, they lock you behind a paywall. Well, Framer flips that script. It is a free, full feature design tool that does something most site builders cannot. It's actually designed for designers. Framer has already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production-ready websites, but with design pages, they've defined and redefined what it means to design for the web. This isn't a Webflow clone or a WordPress competitor.
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Starting point is 01:10:43 start creating for free at framer.com slash design and use the promo code change log for a free month of Framer Pro. Once again, framer.com slash design. You said AI. We have to talk about it. We haven't talked about AI, yeah. Josh, you said that. You look at the utility that people get from these things.
Starting point is 01:11:10 Certainly, like when I'm writing a video script, I'll run a bit that I'm stuck on through it and say, is this, what do you get, what do you understand as to what I'm saying here? Does this make sense? Like, I'll do it into a voice memo and dictate it and then give it to Claude and say, polish this explanation about something or tweak this bit of code and make this do. this instead of that or whatever um historically if you look at industrial revolution like we're going back a couple hundred years here there was a huge amount of speculation in it in the industrial revolution era um a lot of people made a lot of money and that's happening now um in the a i space and not every not every idea that should have been funded got funded um if i mean the other
Starting point is 01:11:56 way around there were a bunch of ideas that shouldn't have been funded that did get funded simply because people were hoping, speculating, right? We've seen this many times over the years. But these industrial revolutions and the AI revolution is one of those because it's a tooling thing as opposed to, say, 2008, which was a made-up financial banking bubble, whatever. There was nothing material, you know, moving humanity forward there. So say what you like about AI, but it's here to stay, I think. And the big players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, of course, they'll be here to stay
Starting point is 01:12:33 because every other startup is building their tooling on those big guys' models. They're not doing the R&D spend to train their own models. They're just using Anthropic models for an API key behind the scenes. So I think the big guys will be okay, but it's, yeah, it's the circle of money. that has me concerned, like Open AI giving invidia money, Nvidia investing back in Open AI and so on. Right.
Starting point is 01:13:04 That's worrying. Yeah. What is your relationship with AI? Are you a daily active user? Are you, what's your stance so far? Yeah, I'll reach for it quite often now. Yeah. Okay.
Starting point is 01:13:20 Do you have the itch right now on the pod to be like, can I just clod something real quick just because you have to? No. No. I mean, if I'm stuck trying to explain something, I might, instead of where I'd have reached for a Google search a year ago, I'd probably reach for a chat now instead with a Claude or a Chat GPT, whatever. But it's just replaced Google entirely for me.
Starting point is 01:13:44 Yeah. Whether that remains, once the adverts start getting dropped, we'll see. But, yeah, I've seen some things shift in Chat GPT that I talked about on a podcast recently. We're talking about trying to determine which podcasts were the better AI-focused podcast to listen to. And we're hoping to find practical AI in that list, which is a show we co-produced for a while with Chris Benson and Daniel Whitnack. And they've since taken the show on their own. We still are working with them behind the scenes.
Starting point is 01:14:20 But, you know, we have some skin the game, let's just say. And we're just curious, like, how did it rank whenever you search for it in chat? And like when I did that in chat, GPT in particular, at the bottom area, we would put a new prompt in after you put the initial one, you've read the whole thing. Well, down at the bottom, it said, create a playlist on Spotify. And I was just like, I mean, I get the connection there, but I don't because I'm not trying to make a playlist. I didn't prompt you about a playlist. I guess I kind of did by ask you about a list of podcasts. I mean, maybe it's to some degree relevant.
Starting point is 01:15:02 But, like, they're probably getting money in some ways you perform or a kickback. I'm assuming. If they aren't now, that is certainly a business model they will deploy in the future. Yeah. When the speculative bubble does whatever it does, they haven't turned on ads yet. They haven't turned on X-rated. stuff yet you know there's a whole bunch of of levers that sam o'tman and and people at his level
Starting point is 01:15:29 can pull to monetize that they aren't doing right now just the whole space doesn't long term at the moment doesn't add up because the energy requirements to power it are just so vast I mean they're spinning up nuclear power stations to power this stuff um we're seeing that we can't manufacturing enough nand chips we're seeing that it's just criss bonkers it doesn't add up long term but and when you mean nan chips you mean are you talking about like uh ram type things yeah yeah so the little black chips on on your ram sticks those are nand flash chips they go on m.2 SSDs they go on ram sticks they go they go they go everywhere in everything like everything literally everything that has a electronics in it has some kind of nand flash storage somewhere
Starting point is 01:16:18 on it. And so it's going to affect regular people really soon. Not, I mean, right now is a piece of the roof right now. I mean, like, have you tried to buy RAM right now? Yes. Just building the Kubernetes cluster a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. I mean, I thankfully, I bought some RAM recently for a build of mine just before that like spike. And I was like, I was kind of sad because I needed, I actually meant to buy a set of four dims as one kit, but like a full, I bought two disparate kits of two thinking I could just put them together. And anyways,
Starting point is 01:16:54 I'll spare the details, but it's just like with this particular processor, it's an MD processor. And it's got challenges with like a non-kitted or what do they call those? You probably know the term when it bend. They're not bend to each other. and I didn't I'm learning right
Starting point is 01:17:14 like any like any home labor I've never had to buy four sticks of RAM and concern myself if they were from the same bin or bend together it's just tricky RAM on the new chips
Starting point is 01:17:23 that's very sensitive to the timing they are and especially the faster speeds I mean I think when you're on the edge like that you're going to the faster speeds then you should expect some dragons
Starting point is 01:17:33 to some degree but the dragon I didn't expect was the cost dragon because I was like I got to swap these out like oh my gosh what happened to the prices like i didn't pay that two weeks ago and then now it's like astronomically priced i would even like i'm like okay fine i'm cool with it i'll just only use two for now i'll make do yeah it's tough like um i'm interesting everything like
Starting point is 01:17:59 even duff stuff that you don't even think needs ram or needs a nan chip in it like in your car you know, new cars, they're probably expensive enough to absorb a few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars there, but stuff like, I don't know, a coffee pot, the smart coffee pot will have a n-chip in it. And that's not quite enough margin to absorb a three, four X price increase without that price going up. And yeah, it's just a, it's going to be tough. Yeah, that's interesting.
Starting point is 01:18:30 So that's the negative side, I would say, of AI. Do you have a positive side to AI? How has it impacted your home lab? Well, take a look at this website. Quicksync.kTZ.me. 100% vibe code slop. Oh, gosh. What is this?
Starting point is 01:18:51 This is a benchmarking website that I put together over the weekend that allows people to benchmark the transcoding performance of their Intel CPUs. So trying to answer the question of which CPU do I buy for my media server. Oh, my gosh. This is spectacular. And this was me and Claude
Starting point is 01:19:11 for about two or three evenings this weekend. So my positives around AI are that I know just enough to be dangerous as someone that's been adjacent to developer technologies for the last 15 years. I'm not very good at actually writing the code. It takes me way too long and I get bored before I get finished.
Starting point is 01:19:30 This allowed me to get something finished and out the door way faster than I ever could have done by myself. Okay, I didn't learn the intricacies of how, you know, the API calls work and what have you under the hood. But honestly, I don't need to. It's just a flat JSON file that gets
Starting point is 01:19:47 stored in Cloudflare R2. This page loads that JSON file client side and then renders the web page locally. And that's all I need to know as kind of like a normal developer adjacent person. I don't need to know every intricacy.
Starting point is 01:20:02 So for me, it's like this has allowed something to exist in the world that I would have really liked to have seen 10 years ago when building my first server. And, you know, it's taken the information from being a flat text file to being something interactive that people can kind of, you know, enjoy, hopefully. So, you know. Help me understand where what I'm actually seeing here. So how are you getting all these benchmarks? It's crowdsourced. So you see up in the top right and corner you can clone the Git repo to your server
Starting point is 01:20:37 and then you could just run the benchmark script and then it will submit the it will pull down a jellyfin container because it just uses FFM peg it pulls down some drone footage that I edited together a couple of years ago into like a test file and then it will just encode those files
Starting point is 01:20:53 in different codecs so it will do a CPU software encode to give you an idea of the raw horsepower of your CPU it will then jump into the quicksync engine, which is the hardware transcoding thing built into your CPUs. So it does 1080P, it does 4K 8-bit HVC, and then 4K 10-bit HVC hardware encodes.
Starting point is 01:21:16 And so you can kind of see a graph, you can kind of see on the graph, the performance of the newer chips is a lot better, as you would expect. But the energy usage also goes up. So it's like trying to find that sweet spot between energy usage, performance, price, et cetera right um so yeah crowd sourced information this is not a scientific experiment of
Starting point is 01:21:38 super high accuracy but it's the best we've got in the real world hmm is there a plan for an API to do what uh I guess poll it look at it I guess you do that have the website uh I guess an API just let you have access to the data in a different way that isn't a flat file It's, you know, JSON, you know, a lot easier to sort of parse. It pulls it down as a JSON file right now. So I guess I could just put a link to the raw JSON file. Sure. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:22:12 There's nothing proprietary or sensitive in there. There's no, the only user identifying information for GDPR reasons that I wanted to keep was an optional, like, submiter ID. I don't record IP addresses or anything like that. So, like, when you submit your results, you've got the option to give me your username if you want to. You don't have to. But everything else is just, you know, generic CPU score this.
Starting point is 01:22:37 So, yeah, I mean, there's nothing sensitive in there. Wow. I mean, I like this kind of stuff. This is those kind of things like you had said. This is where I'm really, this is where I'm truly enamored, is that, like you said, you know just enough to be dangerous, not enough to actually code it yourself. And if you did, even if you did, you probably get bored because it would take you weeks or months or just too much of your life taken away,
Starting point is 01:23:03 but you have the knowledge to connect different dots that someone, only someone like you, or maybe a small few like you, would have those dots to connect. And then now you have this superpower, essentially, to take that into an idea, architect it into some version of a platform. It makes me more productive.
Starting point is 01:23:27 It makes me more productive. Yeah. But this will, pay dividends in the future, though. I mean, I don't know if this has a sad ending or a happy ending because at some point maybe Intel CPUs go away.
Starting point is 01:23:40 It's a whole different subject. I'd like to expand this to support things like Nvidia GPUs because obviously they have the NVN encoders in them. Yeah. The newer AMD CPUs have hardware transcoding as well. Yeah. So expanding it to support different
Starting point is 01:23:55 vendors. Intel arc GPUs, of course. are important to test as well. I just don't have any of those on the hand. So, yeah, I do want to expand this as we go. But for right now, at least, it's just quicksync. But over time, yeah. So I'm looking at Morgan Petermann's love that last name,
Starting point is 01:24:17 Peterman, his profile because he is the dependency that you came from. You forked his quicksync calc, I assume, to build on top of. He and I worked together at Red Hat, and we were bored one afternoon. noon and put together this initial version of the script. So I just forked it and built on top of it and it's where we are. It's open source, baby. It's in action. So his commit was like last year.
Starting point is 01:24:41 So 22 commits there. You're now at 127. So, you know, 100 or so commits on top of the original quicksync calc. I imagine you'll probably contribute back to upstream potentially. Just leave it as a done thing, maybe expanded. I think it was always in my intention that my repo would be like the primary I think in this case because I wanted to give Morgan a lot of credit because he did a lot of the work on the original script
Starting point is 01:25:11 but in terms of like long-term ownership that was what I was more interested in so I don't know we could contribute back to upstream but I'm not trying to call out what you I'm just thinking of like how do you how do you architect it because if it's not called quick sync benchmarks, but if you're talking about Nvidia GPU type things, then it goes from quick sync benchmarks to something different. There's a different life to it.
Starting point is 01:25:40 It morphs at that point, which is really interesting about this curiosity because you scratch one itch. And then next thing you know, you're like, well, no, I can do that. And I've got this idea that connects there and that idea influences this and enables that in a way that I couldn't do just as a solo dude before AI came along because you're at the velocity where the ideas can flow,
Starting point is 01:26:08 they still flow faster than what the AI can generate, but not that much faster. Yeah, that's the phenomenon that I think a lot of folks are experiencing. And I'm curious, you know, what were some of the things that you did to do a little less vibing and a little more coding? I know there's this pejorative nature to the word vibe code. Or if you have vibe coded something, it's like, oh, come on now. You don't know Rust.
Starting point is 01:26:38 You didn't write that yourself, seriously? Yeah. I spent a long time in the planning phase with it. So before it wrote a single line of code, I probably spent two, three, four hours going through what the various pitfalls of different decisions might be. And then once we talk through all of that, like the actual coding part only took about 20 minutes. It was kind of stupid how fast it was in the end. It is kind of, yeah, I'm with you on that.
Starting point is 01:27:04 Plan for hours, code for five minutes. But only if you've taken the time. Otherwise, it's just guessing. Yeah, exactly. If you didn't plan all that and you didn't think through and you didn't go back to the specs or the RFC or just something that was like the crucial piece that was the one thing that would have stuck AI because it would make all of these assumptions in a plan that wasn't well formed. Well, now you've handed it a truly well formed, potentially even like with an implementation mandate sitting next to it.
Starting point is 01:27:34 That's kind of like not the implementation, but the various things of proper code or different ways you want to do things so that when you get to the implementation stage, it's not guessing because you've already thought through a lot of the, like you said, pitfalls. That's interesting. Yeah. Like I said, I know just enough to be dangerous now. Well, I think that's what we need is the thinkers in this case. And that's really, that's really where I'm camping out. I see this new power available to people who can wield it because they have some experience in history, you know, some wisdom, so to speak.
Starting point is 01:28:14 But the flip side of that, though, is it, I didn't have to collaborate with anybody on this. Whereas in the original case, I spent a lot of time collaborating with Captain Morgan, right? These days, I can just sit in my room and do it by myself. And so the collaborative spirit and nature of open source kind of diminishes a little bit because I'm so empowered by it. And that's a risk. I don't know how big of a risk, but it's a risk in all of this. That doesn't bother me, really.
Starting point is 01:28:44 I mean, not necessarily because even my own personal usage of open source hasn't been in the collaborative. It's been in the consumption and the availability. And I would say maybe the hyping and the popularizing and the showcasing. I haven't really had a lot of collaboration personally in open source. So that doesn't really personally bother me. I'm also kind of a fan of open source, not open contribution. Like I think I don't think you have to, they're not cut from the same cloth necessarily. I don't think you have to be open source and open to contribution so that there is a way you can vision an idea or have a vision for it and sure you may put it out there as open source because you want to share but it doesn't
Starting point is 01:29:28 mean you really want the feedback loop because you've got a plan well the other downside of course is that how did these models get smart in the first place they got smart off the back of all of our open source sharing yeah and now we're just feeding back themselves into themselves. There's got to be a reckoning. I mean, what a unique thing to think about. So honestly, this is really an interesting thought experiment. I try to push myself to, which is kind of a mindbender.
Starting point is 01:29:59 I try to think hundreds of years or at least a certain amount of years in advance from today that future Adams or future Alex's look back on these moments. And they're like, wow, thank you so much for putting all this blood, sweat, tears, effort into the open so that we can have this thing that now helps us make I don't know what I can I have no idea what we'll get made but even in this moment here you know you're expressing this this is a monumental feat like producing this website and this level of care in a few days and a hundred commits you know what I mean solo wow where will we be 10 years 20 years from now because of that truth, because of that openness. I sure hope it doesn't backfire on us. And I can't, I'm not a, I'm not wise enough to see that future or even speculate. But in the moment, I feel like that is a net positive on the future because it's already
Starting point is 01:31:02 net positive to me in this moment. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of people, a huge tranche of people actually that kind of miss the forest for the trees in this regard. my take is typically a pragmatic one of well if I don't upskill and use these tools and I don't start solving these problems for myself using these tools someone else will and then I'll become less relevant as a human so I think the superpower of these things in the long term is the empowerment they give the individual
Starting point is 01:31:34 to solve their own problems and scratch their own itches which then feed into your collective experience as a human to solve other problems down the road and you both make each other better in the long run and it's going to be really interesting how the business models of these AI companies play out over the long term, but I'm optimistic that they won't all be complete.
Starting point is 01:31:58 Optimistic? You don't seem optimistic. You seem hesitant. I am. I am hesitant. You know, you look at how the last 25 years have gone with Apple and Google and Amazon and Microsoft. and the state of the current Internet and misinformation and everything else. Like it's, let's not repeat those mistakes. I guess what I'm trying to say.
Starting point is 01:32:21 Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, for the moment, we can enjoy our feats of brand new QuickSink deep dive benchmarks. I love this, man. QuigSink. com. KTZ.m. link it up, of course. It is on GitHub.
Starting point is 01:32:40 Are you open to contributions? Yeah. Yes, please. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any other way? Did you license this? Was there an original license that you inherited from the...
Starting point is 01:32:52 I think it's MIT. Upstream? Is it a M.I.L. I don't know. One of them. I don't see a license file at all, honestly. Oh. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:33:01 I think it's not licensed necessarily in the moment. Oh, well, it will be by the time this episode airs. It will be. Right on. well, MIT, F-T-L, or F-T-W, sorry, not F-T-L. I was thinking about something else. Well, Alex, I don't know what else to talk about, man. I know I love talking to you, man.
Starting point is 01:33:25 I really, I was thinking, you know what, who's a good person to chat with at the end of the year? And somebody haven't talked to in a while. And I knew. I've run out of all the other options. Let's talk to Alex. No. No, no, no, no. Not at all.
Starting point is 01:33:39 We actually did have a plan for someone. else and they did fall through and you were a fill in but it wasn't because of that it was you know i uh i like talking to you i think you got some cool ideas i mean this benchmarking is the best man and i knew you were going to move to london and i thought you were in s f for some reason in our back chats and was reminded yes no raleigh north carolina it's a snow day north Carolina today, actually. We got about an eighth of an inch of snow and they shut all the schools. Yeah, right?
Starting point is 01:34:11 Like, scary. That's like nothing. I guess before we leave here, what is, do you have a favorite Linux distra at the moment? Talos Linux. Justin Garrison, I'd be very happy with that. Yeah, he would be very happy with that. Is it because of your recent K-DES explorations? Yeah, we sort of touched on the boot C, kind of immutable nature.
Starting point is 01:34:33 and disposable declarative nature of operating systems. I'll tell you. If Talos existed for just like non-Cubinetti's regular Linux, that would be chef's kiss. Help me understandly, what are we missing?
Starting point is 01:34:52 I don't know. Have we got time for this? I just like the fact that the nodes are completely disposable. You know, the storage, the nodes are, for years, you've written answerable playbooks to configure nodes
Starting point is 01:35:03 and install packages and do this and do that. And now I have a declarative file that says, system do this. And when it bootstrapped itself, it doesn't know what it is until you give it that instruction. And then it just figures it out. I don't have to, there's no config drift.
Starting point is 01:35:19 It's impossible for there to be config drift. It just is what I tell it to be exactly. And the only way to make a change is to update the config. So it gets versioned. It gets all the niceties of that. Is that kind of like Atomic, kind of boot C then? Because that's kind of what Goosey is, right?
Starting point is 01:35:35 Yep, yep, yep. It's the same idea, different implementation, but same idea. Yeah, interesting. And so just hypothesized for a moment in the non-Cubernetes world, how would you see a Talos that isn't that focused on a different alternative? What would that be to you then? Or would you use it? For a home server.
Starting point is 01:35:56 Okay. I don't want to have to do an app to get up to upgrade every six weeks and then have something break and suddenly my server doesn't boot anymore, it would be nice if I could just update a config file, push that to Git, and then it just figures it out and reconciles those changes, a bit like Argo, CD and Flux do in the Kubernetes world,
Starting point is 01:36:16 but at the OS level. That's what I want. That's the world I want to get to. Push a configuration change to Git, and then my server just figures it out. How different, and maybe this shows my cards here a little bit, but how much different is that from a, a script that you wrote
Starting point is 01:36:34 like a literal bash script that just you know runs your system runs all the app gets and stuff like that like configures your system on boot how much different is that well you've got to put a ton of logic into the bash script to do item potency you've got to do a ton of logic like nix kind of
Starting point is 01:36:49 solve some of these problems a little bit but it's a very imperfect solution um you know let's say you have a list of packages you want to install and you take one of those packages away. There's now got to be some logic to clean that up. And then there's going to be some residual files, maybe a config file left here, something left over there. You just don't know. And so the nature of declarative stuff is that you can test a lot more easily, like a specific
Starting point is 01:37:19 implementation of an invidia driver, maybe as a kernel, DKMS build failure and all that stuff in the old world. But in the new world, that literally is impossible because it built. It's an mutable thing, and so we know it's going to work. I think that's what Bootsy's trying to solve this, which is why I was kind of interested in it, but I just couldn't figure out how to use it. I don't know how to, I just don't know yet. I haven't explored enough to have a, a good. I never quite know how to say this guy's name.
Starting point is 01:37:43 Is it, is it, your, Yorgue, Yorg Castro? I never quite know how to say his name, but he, he's running like the Fodora silver blue. There's like some, it's like some cool stuff happening in this space very soon, I think. And, yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be really fun. when it lands, but we put out a podcast recently called the four-dim problem, which I alluded to earlier. So I have a AMD-Risen 9 CPU, and I have four-dims RAM.
Starting point is 01:38:17 I should be able to do that, right? Well, let's just say there's a four-dim problem. And Nabil and Andrew and AJ and Ron are in our Zulip. talking about some different stuff and Andrew O'Brien actually said I wonder if Adam's me one of Adam's tried bluefin now that he's settled into Fedora
Starting point is 01:38:37 he's mostly a debut in person as he says here but I've tried I've tried Blue Finn based on Fedora Corps after a Shippet episode about it which should have been a while ago because Shippet has since ceased to be an active podcast
Starting point is 01:38:52 amazing show obviously our cows are still there check it out No, I have not tried Blue Fan, but I am interested in Bootsie in this world that is creating this atomic declarative. And now that I hear you talk about Talos in that way, which I have not played with Talos. I have not personally played with Kubernetes really at all. And I probably should spend a Thanksgiving weekend like you did. Just knee deep in it.
Starting point is 01:39:21 Like I should have so many things, but I haven't yet. I am interested in it. I just don't know where to apply it yet. And that's what I, I would like a guide. I'm like, what could I do with it? Because that always gives me a reason to play with it. Like, that's how I, that's how I get curious is I have a reason to do it. I mean, the reason why I have, you know, different VMs and different things happening is because I learned, you know, how to use ProxMox and a bunch of cool stuff around ProxMox and different flavors of Linux from, you know, Fadour as a server or Ubuntu as a server or pick your, you know, pick your battle, whatever you want to do.
Starting point is 01:39:57 So I haven't done that yet though But I'd like to I still know where to begin Linux is an endless rabbit hole That's the best thing about it It sure is It sure is So are you going to be at Texas Linux Fest next year
Starting point is 01:40:10 If I'm in the States Sure, why not Okay It might be a bit of a long way to come from London But I don't know It is a good time So I think it should be Octoberish
Starting point is 01:40:20 Is that right? I don't know I think it was in October this year Yeah that was the thing Because it's normally in March Or April time Oh is it? Okay
Starting point is 01:40:26 And then they moved it. I like the new time. Okay. The issue is for me it runs up against all things open and we had a company offsite this year. It was just a lot of stuff. So, yeah, it's a tough one. And all things open is a staple for you.
Starting point is 01:40:43 You don't miss that. But it's five minutes down the road. You can't miss it, right? You have to go because it's like, well. It's a great conference. Yeah. It is a great conference. It is an absolutely great.
Starting point is 01:40:52 You know, this year they moved it on me too. It's normally at the end of October. And this show was at the beginning, and I planned some travel earlier in the year. And when I realized that the times collided, I was like, oh, man, I can't go this year. And so we didn't have a presence there this year. We're normally, we're kind of like a staple in the hallway track doing our booth thing and podcast. I did wonder where you were, actually. Well, that's why.
Starting point is 01:41:16 That's why. It's not because Todd was mean. Todd's amazing. The whole team that runs the conference is amazing. And I love it. And I was really sad to miss it this year. But what I was trying to say, though, is that if you're going to be at Texas Linux Fest, we can plan on the switch. And maybe we can do a meetup, like, hey, we'll, you know, we'll call in advance.
Starting point is 01:41:35 If we can do some sort of like precursor to it, let's have a little fun. I know that it's usually a Friday Saturday thing. So we can plan it for Friday. It's usually the day I'm most available. So I'm a family guy on Saturdays are reserved family. But we can certainly do the fest all day and maybe a meet up that evening at the switch for dinner or something like that and make it. make it a fun thing. What do you think?
Starting point is 01:41:57 Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen. Well, Alex, it was good to talk to you. Merry Christmas. I know it's just a few days away or a few weeks away at this moment. Two weeks, I believe. My kids are counting down. They're excited about it.
Starting point is 01:42:09 I'm excited about it as well. And always good talking you, man. Thank you so much for sharing time with me. And it's being a little nerd, man, like I am. I love it. Thank you. I'm going to go and watch Silicon Valley now. Well, you've been watching me back there.
Starting point is 01:42:21 No, it's over there. Now I want to watch it for real. There's big head. Where's big head? What's he doing? What are you doing? Big head? Oh, this is where they're talking. And he's like being the bad friend there. He's like, oh, man, I think I'm going to go back home right now. No, you shouldn't go back home right now. But you can't be part of Pipeiper anymore. Okay, yeah, I've got. That's what's going on right there. That's episode two, season one, by the way. Alex, you're the best. Thank you so much. Awesome. Thanks, dude. Have a good one. So I've made a list. My Christmas to-do list, I suppose, here in the home lab, image, image frame, Uh, that's definitely on my list. It involves ZFS.rent.
Starting point is 01:43:00 So embarrassing to admit on a podcast that I have no backup plan. Raid, y'all, is not a backup plan. You have to have something offsite. Alex is totally right. I am vulnerable at this moment. And I never imagined that someone would create ZFS. I'm going to see if I can get them on the show. We'll see.
Starting point is 01:43:19 I also want to play with Talos. I have not messed with Kubernetes personally yet, much like Alex, a little intimidated. by it but it involves hardware so that's always fun so i might build out a three node cluster or i might just do it via proxmos with VMs that can be cool just to learn i do have more plans for applications in my home lab i've got a very cool read later application i'm working on you know it's one part archive it's one part read later the project is sort of morphing in my mind on how i can use it but it's pretty cool and I'm going to expose to myself on the network as an application and I'm
Starting point is 01:43:57 thinking that might be fun to do with kubernetes who knows maybe not I am enjoying proxmocks so of course that's on my list and it should be on your list too but if you haven't yet head into zolip go to changelog.com slash community it is free to join you are welcome here hang out with us in zulip it's like slack but better and I want to hear what you're doing in your home lab this holiday season comment on this episode easy to find inside zolip see you there. Of course, big thank you to our friends and our sponsors. Tiger Data. Love Tiger Data. Agentic Postgres. Our friends over at Depot, build those builds faster. It makes no sense to wait. Our friends at Augment Code. Augie is one of my daily drivers. I love Augie. You got to check
Starting point is 01:44:41 it out, augmentcode.com. And of course, a massive thank you to Fly. That's our home. And it should be your home too. Learn more at fly.io. Of course, the beat. freak in residence breakmaster cylinder new beats love those beats breakmaster you are awesome but friends that's it this week the show is done we'll see you on monday

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