Chris: Oh, and I just got hungry. Right on time.
Brent: Right on time.
Chris: Isn't that something?
Wes: That's how we know it's time to stop the show.
Brent: Now I'm hungry. How dare you?
Jason: You guys are going to have to share oatmeal. It's going to get rough.
Brent: Sorry about that.
Chris: No, I got my...
Jason: Don't put Matt over the soundboard. It's so risky.
Chris: Can you believe this guy?
Wes: He's a wild man this morning.
Chris: Chaotic.
Wes: What happens?
Chris: Chaotic.
Jason: As it shakes him up.
Chris: He's trending to chaotic. Neutral. I mean, I don't know.
Jason: Uh-oh, D&D reference.
Chris: It's trending here.
Jason: Oh, come on down.
Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: My name is Brent.
Jason: And my name is Jason.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. We are live from beautiful Pasadena, California,
Chris: and it is Planet Nix and Scale 2026 going on right now. So you guessed it,
Chris: that's what we are talking about this week.
Chris: We have really seen the future.
Chris: I mean, this is probably one of the biggest trendsetting scales we have ever been to.
Chris: So we'll tell you all about that. Then we'll round out the show with some great
Chris: boosts and picks and a whole lot more.
Chris: So before we get to that point in the show, we got to do a little good morning
Chris: to our friends over at Managed Nebula.
Chris: Go check out Defined Networking and grab yourself some Managed Nebula.
Chris: Now listen, Nebula is one of our
Chris: favorite open source project and Defined Networking is doing this right.
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Chris: have an entire global enterprise infrastructure it will
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Chris: of their whole setup with 100 hosts absolutely free go to defined.net slash
Chris: unplugged support the show no credit card required and check it out see why
Chris: we love it and a big thank you to defined.net for sponsoring this here show you guys are the best.
Wes: You know you can tell we love it because we were troubleshooting some networking
Wes: issues for our pal brentley here and what was the first thing that we said you
Wes: know if we were using nebula it's.
Chris: So true yeah we can we how can.
Brent: We use nebula to test this.
Chris: We'd have better insights into this problem if we were using Nebula. That is very true.
Chris: Before we do chat about everything, I just want to say one more time,
Chris: thank you to Phlox for sending us down here.
Chris: And then honestly, for putting on a hell of a planet, Nick's.
Jason: Oh, yeah.
Chris: They really do a great job. They know the people in the industry to bring in.
Chris: So you really get something valuable out of it.
Chris: And then they bring everybody together with a couple of different after parties, too.
Chris: And they provide. It has really been a fantastic event.
Chris: And Phlox made it possible for us to make it. And they really are taking something
Chris: that is very complex in corporations.
Chris: You know, you get somebody in maybe your business or your enterprise,
Chris: and they're the next person.
Chris: And they become the next expert and then they move on and companies sometimes struggle with that.
Chris: And there's ways to solve that. And Phlox is one of them that is trying to make
Chris: it possible for people to create dev environments quickly that other people
Chris: can address where you know the S-bomb, you have everything right there onboarded
Chris: instantly across the entire software lifecycle.
Chris: That's what Phlox is doing. It's phlox.dev and go check them out because they
Chris: really, really made it possible. And they threw a hell of a party.
Jason: And approachable too.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: Like really, you know, happy to, you know, chat with you, give you a great time
Jason: and just down to earth, which is actually really nice.
Chris: We had a great meetup as well.
Wes: Yeah, we did.
Chris: I mean, it was, we were just non-stop, just shaking hands and saying hi and
Chris: getting in conversations.
Chris: Great to see Cessna Mike there.
Jason: Yeah.
Chris: Got some great stories. Good to see him.
Brent: I didn't confirm whether he flew in or not. I guess he lives near it here. So why would you fly?
Wes: Sounds like his plane might be in the shop for a bit.
Brent: Oh, no.
Jason: He showed me his avionics layout that he had replaced in his Cessna,
Jason: and I was so impressed. I was like, oh, man, that is gorgeous.
Chris: He's also, I won't say too much because I don't think it's fully public yet,
Chris: but he's working on a really cool project in the avionics industry that brings
Chris: a modern tech solution to a problem that has been in this industry for 50 years.
Chris: Of course, it was great to see Carl from Texas.
Brent: He brought a new type of pocket meat for us.
Chris: Yeah, it was good, too.
Jason: I was afraid.
Chris: It was your first pocket meat. What did you think?
Jason: But it was actually quite delicious. I mean, savory and at the same time sort of warm and cozy.
Jason: It was like love in small meat chunk form.
Chris: Harvested by Carl himself, as they say.
Brent: It's true. Little deer. It's kind of like Bambi. Never mind.
Jason: Nope, that didn't make me afraid.
Wes: He also puts in the work. Not only was he there at the booth talking about Fedora
Wes: and CentOS and all the great stuff he's up to there, but he also led a workshop.
Wes: So you get hands-on stuff if you want to try your hand at packaging.
Chris: Also, there's the companies that don't necessarily have an official presence, but they're here.
Chris: you know um anthropic is one of them shopify was another system 76 they were
Chris: they had some booth stuff here with the amper folks but uh like emma was here
Chris: we got to hang out with emma always.
Brent: Good more lasers.
Chris: And we saw listeners from all over the place anybody stand out anybody i mean i.
Brent: Always try as you know to figure out who came for the furthest and uh we had
Brent: a listener who came all the way from north california.
Chris: North carolina.
Brent: That's the place.
Chris: Nice uh.
Brent: Which is pretty much the opposite i think it was dewey you're right.
Chris: Pretty much the.
Brent: Opposite side of the continent distros.
Jason: Stew was there.
Chris: Distros stew yeah yeah it was great it was great i mean i i didn't get everybody's
Chris: handle so i don't i can't shout at everybody but true we're sorry we.
Brent: Love you though.
Chris: And um um some people that were new too we got to meet some new folks it's always
Chris: a chance to network so you.
Jason: Know i stopped you on the stairs right before you walked down to planet nix
Jason: and they were like hey hey it's you and one of them literally said,
Jason: You guys just made my weekend.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: It was so sweet.
Jason: It was so sweet and beautiful to behold. As like, as an outsider,
Jason: I was just like, look at them guys shine.
Brent: It was fun.
Wes: You know, multiple times, I do think we ran into people, or at least I did,
Wes: where, you know, I knew one of the group, but they drug along a bunch of other
Wes: people for this Linux thing or the Nix part or, you know, whatever nerdery they were sharing.
Chris: The other thing that's fun is, you know, you walk up to somebody like,
Chris: oh, you do that project? I like what you make. And they're like,
Chris: oh, I like what you make. And it's, you meet, oh, you're the person who does that.
Brent: And that's really the best thing about these conferences, right?
Brent: the talks and stuff are good but like they say the hallway track or for us the
Brent: stairway track is really where all the magic happens.
Chris: And it is if you missed your opportunity linux fest northwest is just around
Chris: the corner april 24th to the 26th at bellingham technical college in the beautiful
Chris: pacific northwest at a beautiful time of the year rumor.
Wes: Has it we'll be doing a live show.
Chris: Oh god and right snap the big venue's back to the big room is back so we're
Chris: back in our original location, well, what has become our original location.
Chris: We'll tell you more about it as we get closer. I won't nag you about it,
Chris: but I just want you to know, if you're feeling a little FOMO after listening
Chris: to this episode, you do have another opportunity.
Brent: I will say I've committed to bring the van to the venue. Here we go. It's on the record.
Jason: Committed.
Chris: There it is.
Jason: Can I get a lock?
Chris: I think it is locked.
Wes: Drew, don't edit that out no matter how much he ends. You're doing a good job.
Chris: You know what? Let's officially lock that in. There it is. Thank you.
Jason: Well done.
Brent: Start betting on whether that'll happen or not.
Chris: Yeah, right. Okay. So let's do this in chronological order.
Chris: The way this worked is Scale has had an expansion over the years where they
Chris: have what you could consider parallel tracks or side tracks.
Chris: Subconferences, maybe.
Chris: There's a Postgres subconference, there's a VoIP subconference,
Chris: there was obviously a Nix, a Planet Nix subconference.
Wes: Yeah, I think DevOps Days LA is part of this.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. And so those subconferences start a couple of days before the actual Scale event.
Chris: And then there's a tiny bit of overlap there. So we showed up.
Chris: a couple of days before scale to attend planet nix and we got ourselves all
Chris: situated and arrived on day one with uh bells on.
Clips: Well it's the morning of planet nix just about to get going and we've replaced
Clips: brent i think this is a great idea your idea really well i wanted to use your
Clips: personal openclaw agent but you broke it so we couldn't but the next best thing
Clips: is we brought jason with us hi jason can you describe the scene for us,
Clips: Right now, we're inside a room, inside a larger room, inside another room, here at scale.
Clips: The planet nixifying itself as we speak.
Clips: That is actually the best description ever. It's a room, in a room, that's in a room.
Clips: Instead of like, in a world, it's in a room.
Clips: Okay, I lied, we brought Brent too. You made it, Brent, Lee,
Clips: you made it. Oh, hi, I'm here. Hey, guys, you're looking sharp.
Clips: Well, we dressed up for you. So they're going to give us the introduction and all that jazz.
Clips: And then a little bit later in the day, Wes has a talk. And I'm already thinking about lunch.
Chris: Yeah, well, I always do, of course. Because as soon as these things start,
Chris: that's when I get hungry.
Chris: And I thought it was good to sit there and kind of get the latest update from Ron.
Chris: Ron, not only the CEO of Phlox, but also runs the, he's the head of the Knicks Foundation.
Chris: And there was a good conversation between him and Kelsey Hightower,
Chris: which we had on the show just recently, Kelsey.
Chris: And I thought this point was worth capturing for you. And that is sort of this
Chris: discussion with if vibe coding becomes more and more of a thing,
Chris: and then people have these agents
Chris: that can just crank out software as they need it to solve solutions.
Chris: Do we, as an open source community, start to see a lack of contributions back?
Chris: Because these things are just one-shotting or creating a custom bit of code for the user.
Chris: The user implements it, and they never contribute anything back upstream.
Chris: And that was the sort of context for this conversation.
Clips: There's no guarantee there's going to have to be anything. That's the hard truth.
Clips: If you all believe that it's just going to be there because we want it, that's not how it goes.
Clips: A lot of us don't own these companies. A lot of us are employees. We're not.
Clips: at these companies. They're given RSUs that you probably sell pretty close to
Clips: immediate because it's deferred comp.
Clips: A lot of us aren't that invested in this. And there are pressures, right?
Clips: I'm watching people say, hey, I'm anti-AI until you see the layoffs.
Clips: Changes your tune real quick if you need that job.
Clips: So I think the reality is the tools of the trade will dictate what the hiring process looks like.
Clips: I'm pretty sure someone somewhere is like, I don't believe in typewriters.
Clips: It's going to be real hard to get a job today if you don't believe in mechanical keyboards.
Clips: It's not going to work. The team will look at you crazy. Like,
Clips: what do you mean you don't believe in email and sending electronic messages?
Clips: That will change. It probably will. And where the inertia is right now,
Clips: a lot of people are trying their very best to make that happen.
Clips: So we've got to be honest about it.
Clips: And if those tools are actually any good, would you not use them?
Clips: Who uses a compiler here?
Clips: Okay. There was an argument. If you look back in the archives,
Clips: 30 years ago, compilers are for people that don't know how to write code.
Clips: What are you using a compiler for? Are you going to let the compiler decide
Clips: what instruction sets you use?
Clips: People are still arguing about garbage collection. Garbage collection is still a contentious.
Clips: Garbage collection? Nah, real people manage their whole memory.
Clips: Buffer overflows and all. So the way I think about it right now,
Clips: that's what we're faced with, the reality of it. So I think a lot of people
Clips: here are practitioners.
Clips: You're at a NICS conference, Flux conference.
Clips: You are probably in a fringe part of the technology where you know what's going on.
Clips: You've turned that knowing what's going on to leverage. And also,
Clips: I would really hope that people who are in charge of the core layers of our
Clips: infrastructure actually know what's going on.
Clips: So I'm not surprised that people in this community need to know how software is actually built.
Clips: We need to know how software can be exploited. And we need to understand how
Clips: these tool chains go together. So I think this group is very special in that regard.
Clips: But if you all zoom out a little bit, that's not the norm.
Clips: A lot of people can care less where the software comes from.
Clips: Appgit install the internet until this thing works.
Clips: Not sure who packaged it. I don't even look at the author's name.
Clips: I don't look at the checksums. If it works, it works. That's the reality.
Clips: And one thing you and I were talking about was, do you need package management in this day and age?
Clips: And you all would say, Kelsey, of course, this is a silly question.
Clips: But have you seen people use some of these tools?
Clips: Give me a thing that does X. And I don't honestly see these things go out and
Clips: go find the right library.
Clips: Sometimes it just generates the snippet. You remember the left pad debate?
Clips: Should you use things like left pad where you can just write a three-line function
Clips: instead of taking a third-party dependency?
Clips: Well, every prompt is having that same discussion except for the developer isn't
Clips: really making that decision anymore.
Clips: So what happens to all this package management work that we're doing underneath the hood?
Clips: Do we become the guardrails or do we get replaced by people creating software
Clips: for themselves and not sharing it back.
Chris: I think this is an interesting discussion to be having right now.
Chris: And it's probably something we're going to have to wait and see to a degree.
Chris: But I do think maybe it's the wrong framing for the conversation.
Chris: I think the right framing is, will operators be trained to submit that code
Chris: back upstream, right? Because it's an LLM that's being operated.
Chris: The LLM isn't choosing on its own initiative to build a piece of software,
Chris: to fork a piece of software.
Chris: The LLM is being instructed to do so. So will the operator remember to contribute backup code?
Chris: Can we train that back in for people that maybe don't have that culture?
Jason: Or will the agents that get built, this be part of their instruction set?
Jason: Because if we get more autonomy a little bit, the agents are off and they're
Jason: doing things on their own, is part of that mindset that you give the agent,
Jason: quote unquote, that it goes and contributes?
Jason: Because that's a thing it can do while you're asleep. So...
Chris: I think the incentives line up, and I'm curious to know what you think,
Chris: Wes, but I think the incentives line up to reuse existing open source code and
Chris: to contribute back upstream, because,
Chris: there is ultimately an incentive to use the least amount of resources,
Chris: the least amount of tokens, and the least amount of time and produce the most stable result.
Chris: And the way you do that is by taking advantage of things that have already been built and are solid.
Chris: And it doesn't matter if you're an LLM or if you're a human,
Chris: that is just sort of a natural incentive you often arrive to,
Chris: unless it's some small piece, right?
Wes: Well, I think that the size of that might now be able to be changed, right?
Wes: Because I think the cost of having your own fork is less because the LLM can maintain it.
Wes: And the LLM is pretty good about managing patch set, especially if you're just
Wes: adding some stuff or making a few changes, not trying to re-architect the core.
Wes: And it costs tokens to file the issue and to respond to the request to change your code.
Wes: And I think you're right, it is still worth it. But I think there could be some
Wes: shorter term incentives And maybe people that aren't yet don't fully get it
Wes: because they haven't done a
Wes: few cycles of this where it is just very convenient to have it, you know,
Wes: copy the code upstream, maybe template it out, fork it, make your tweaks on
Wes: top, carry your own changes, and you can push it back up.
Wes: But you might not be material harmed in the short term if you don't,
Wes: or you might not think you are.
Brent: In the context of this conversation, I'm curious what's going to happen with
Brent: licensing, because we've seen a lot of these LMs just suck in basically the world's content.
Brent: but what has been really important for open source projects is to follow licensing and try to make,
Brent: modifications available again is that we're just going to ignore all of that
Brent: now and we're not going to get
Brent: open source projects to have the same momentum that they have in sort of.
Wes: Well I don't think necessarily I mean we can talk about the training but the
Wes: use case could totally be compliant right you only have to distribute stuff
Wes: if it's you know maybe a GPL or GPL and you're trying to distribute some actual
Wes: end user thing you can carry your own internal forks as long as you want.
Chris: Yeah, although it's easier said than done, especially for people that have never done this before.
Chris: People that are like yourself, that are familiar with software development, yes, it's very trivial.
Chris: I maintain it is not a trivial thing for regular average users.
Chris: And to that end, I think this is speaking to sort of a meta theme.
Chris: It wasn't implicitly stated at Planet Nix directly, but it definitely kept being inferred to.
Chris: It was the sense that NICs might become a little more inevitable when agents
Chris: and LLMs are building software simply because these things, these LLMs need guardrails.
Chris: And they need the ability to know when they've broken the system or when the system is operational.
Chris: And Ron kind of touched on that on stream or on the stage during the keynote.
Chris: So I'll just play a moment of that.
Clips: The way that I've been looking at it, and I've been talking to folks inside
Clips: of Nix, outside of Nix, is I think the more I'm seeing where the industry is
Clips: going is that I would love for it to be a fact, right?
Clips: So to your point about the vision for Nix in the modern SELC is that Nix can
Clips: be the pure way that we actually are able to derive the packages and the baseline
Clips: infra for what we're building,
Clips: regardless if it's led by a human, by an agent, by a model, it doesn't matter, right?
Clips: So when you need something to be reproducible and you care about the speed,
Clips: the infrastructure, the security, the underlying factors of it,
Clips: I think Nix is uniquely positioned to be that platform.
Clips: And again, folks in this room kind of understand the underlying tech for it
Clips: and why it's uniquely positioned.
Clips: But I think that's, you know, when you want to be pure, there's Nix.
Clips: And I think it's also fine to tell the industry that it's fine to be impure.
Clips: If you want to just vibe code an app that you don't care if you throw it away,
Clips: right? Like there is still a reason to use paper plates. It's bad for the environment.
Clips: You shouldn't do it. But, you know, when you're tired at the end of the day
Clips: and you have like four people over and the last thing you want to do is dishes,
Clips: throw the paper plates on there and then throw them in the trash. It's totally fine.
Chris: I don't love the message, but I actually think I agree with that framing.
Chris: A lot of this vibe coded stuff is paper plates.
Chris: It's stuff you can throw away after you're done with the meal.
Chris: And that stuff, I don't know if it really matters if it gets contributed back
Chris: up because the person's not putting a lot of intention or design into it and
Chris: the people that do put intention and design into it i think are inclined to
Chris: contribute back upstream because i maintain it's a personal operator thing.
Jason: And it's not like if you trolled all of github and
Jason: looked that the code quality is the same across the entire thing guys let's
Jason: not pretend i think this is a substrate difference it's it's not like before
Jason: this humans didn't look at stack overflow and look at a bunch of stuff and then
Jason: amalgamated in their mind and then spit out something else when a human does
Jason: that were like, oh, look at them craft that stuff.
Jason: But they're doing what the LLM was doing and they just did it in a human substrate with their brain.
Wes: There's also maybe different kinds of open source and sharing.
Wes: What might change is it's easier to have whatever you make be shared,
Wes: especially if you have a flake.nix in there.
Wes: Immediately any other system that has Nix, be it human or LLM or whatever, can consume it.
Wes: So whether or not you take the time to do the stuff at the core root upstream
Wes: of doing it, maybe it's a whole discussion.
Wes: But I think there's a ton of incentives to just go put it out there for other
Wes: things and yourself to use, because especially having it out there makes it
Wes: easy to consume for yourself as well.
Chris: Yeah, I think that's what I've been noticing is it seems like the first step
Chris: is on the readme for a GitHub project.
Chris: It's the readme now has, if you're a human, do this. If you're an LLM,
Chris: do this. And they're like, there's actually writing the readme for an LLM audience.
Chris: And you're seeing that more and more. And I think that's step one.
Chris: And then I think step two is,
Chris: And here's the flake. And because it tells the LM and because Nix,
Chris: Nix can run on Mac OS, it can run on any Linux and it can run, of course, on Nix OS.
Chris: It is sort of this. It could be this universal agentic package manager or something like that.
Chris: That is the human never needs to worry about it.
Jason: But what's interesting is humans can. It's sort of at this sweet spot where
Jason: it is readable enough for humans.
Jason: The four of us in this room have proved that. But yet it also lends itself towards
Jason: machine learning, having the capacity to deal with it.
Jason: And that's kind of a nice spot on the seesaw.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It's in a way it's, it's nice that we were able to get in and learn
Chris: it before the machines took over.
Jason: Yeah. And I don't want, I don't want it to sound like morality based when I
Jason: say it's just a substrate difference that there isn't, you know,
Jason: some moral quandary about that.
Jason: There is, there's a big difference between, you know, making all these data
Jason: centers take up lots of natural resources and everything.
Jason: There are plenty of differences in the end. I only meant
Jason: If you take out the morality, it is what code gets generated.
Chris: What you're talking about, like a human's copying from Stack Overflow versus an LLM.
Jason: Versus an LLM doing it, yeah.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, I agree. So after the talk, Wes, we actually, I kind of liked this.
Chris: Wes's talk was up early in the day, early in the event.
Chris: And Brent and I were, I mean, we were hyped.
Brent: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Oh, we were hyped.
Brent: I mean, we've seen Wes talks at previous conferences like Texas Linux Fest,
Brent: and they're always kind of wonderful.
Wes: I'm so lucky to have you as my booster.
Jason: You know, it was so good, though. I really felt like, I was like,
Jason: you were right in the pocket now.
Chris: What's great about a Wes talk, and Brent and I, we don't, he has it handled,
Chris: so we don't have to worry and focus on that.
Brent: We're not stressed.
Clips: Okay, well, we socialized, and now it's time for Wes's talk.
Clips: And he is doing Nix Anywhere Else, replicatable binaries via elf,
Clips: oh, relocatable, sorry, my eyes are a little blurry.
Clips: Relocatable? Yeah. Relocatable elf on the shelf binaries during the holidays. Did I get that right?
Clips: Something like that. I think Wes might clear it up for us, but I think you're
Clips: on the right track. Ho, ho, ho, lad. Where is your elf binary?
Clips: I think Wes has it. I think it's going to be a good talk, though.
Clips: My kids would love this one.
Chris: It was a good talk, right? Good talk.
Brent: Clean, smooth.
Jason: I felt like I learned something while you were learning something.
Jason: Because you not only took it to the place where I want to try this to solve
Jason: this problem, but after you solved it, you were like, wait a second.
Jason: What if I also do this? and it was so lovely. You guys have to watch it online.
Chris: There was a moment that I was a little like, hold my breath and because Wes
Chris: decided to do a live demo of taking the bcachefs Nix package and translating
Chris: it over to a dev package and getting it actually installed and running and getting
Chris: bcachefs on an Ubuntu system.
Brent: So bonkers.
Chris: Even though the Debian base has removed support.
Clips: And now we can actually format a BcacheFS file system on Ubuntu,
Clips: entirely built from Nix.
Clips: So just to kind of emphasize what happened, it was the same tool.
Clips: All these binaries have the metadata anyway. We were blessed from Ilko and others
Clips: to come up with all of this crazy tooling to help Nix work that it turns out
Clips: can do more than just make one of the best Linux distributions possible.
Clips: It can do surgery in to bring whatever tools you need to Nix,
Clips: even if it's not maybe the right way to do it.
Clips: And it turns out it can be used for surgery out to take all of the wonders we
Clips: have in the Nix ecosystem, make them portable, and bring them with you wherever you are.
Clips: Patch Elf is really, it's setting metadata, it's writing some strings,
Clips: and once you see that, you might start seeing it everywhere.
Chris: Attaboy, Wes Payne, attaboy. It was a good talk. We enjoyed it,
Chris: and like Jason said, we learned.
Clips: All right. That was pretty good. The Pat your elf on the shelf had a little
Clips: demo that I thought was pretty good.
Clips: He managed to get Bcash FS working on an Ubuntu box by using Nick's tools. That was neat, right?
Clips: I did not. I'm still kind of speechless. I did not expect that to be a possibility.
Clips: Yeah. Right there on stage. It was good. It was a fun talk.
Clips: And now it's lunchtime. That's my favorite, favorite time of the day. Give it.
Chris: You know, what's funny is we don't have any clips after lunch. I don't know.
Jason: Wes Payne you're doing a good job.
Chris: Yeah so day one was great lunch was one of those things where on our way to
Chris: lunch we got stopped 15 times and then we talked with folks and it was good
Chris: it was a lot of socializing we had.
Wes: A lot of people to see that we haven't seen in a while.
Chris: But we stayed out a little too late and maybe we should have realized this was
Chris: going to be a trend that we needed to get a handle on but at this point we were
Chris: still naive and thought this would be the only late night.
Clips: Planet Nick's day two you.
Clips: Thankfully, it starts a little later today. We're still at the Airbnb, if you can't tell.
Clips: Moving a little slow. Yeah, and I think I talked a little too hard yesterday.
Clips: Yeah. Too much socialized. Lunch was good, and then we went and just talked
Clips: and talked and talked, and then we went to the after party and talked and talked.
Clips: Yeah, how you doing? You all right? Yeah, actually. Well, I didn't have to walk
Clips: as much as you guys because I got a piggyback ride. That's true. That is actually true.
Chris: Yeah, and it was a good piggyback ride.
Wes: Too. It was, yeah.
Jason: I saw pictures. it was legit.
Wes: I got some free sunglasses.
Chris: That's true. Yeah, so it was,
Chris: really, in a way, Day 2 had the big heavy hitter keynote because it's the State
Chris: of the Union for Nix OS which we're always kind of interested because you tend
Chris: to get a few, at least one or two tidbits that you kind of hang on to for the rest of the year.
Clips: You can hear the hubbub of Planet Nix. The secure Nix State of the Union is about to kick off.
Clips: It should be pretty interesting. It's going to be both a State of the Union
Clips: and a talk about security in one, which probably should go together more often than they do.
Clips: And there's already people with laptops. Look at all those people,
Clips: actually, with laptops open getting work done. I guess they didn't party as
Clips: hard as we did last night.
Chris: Yeah, people getting work done is a big trend at Planet Nix.
Chris: And once the keynote started, Ron touched on something that I think was on a lot of people's mind.
Clips: Bottom line, at the end of the day, the order and solution is Nix.
Clips: Nix comes in and, simply put, because everyone in this room knows that it's
Clips: a lot more complex than that, unifies the baseline architecture of a few steps of infrastructure.
Clips: Now, simply put, what happens when you have one step instead of five?
Clips: What happens when you have one step instead of six?
Clips: It's just faster. It doesn't matter what's happening on the top.
Clips: It just means that whatever that solution ends up being, that solution is able
Clips: to be more reproducible, more secure, more deterministic, and in general, fast.
Chris: And we always listen for some of the financial details because last year at
Chris: the first planet Nix, Ron said that the goal was to have two years of runway.
Chris: If any sponsor were to pull out, they want to have two years of runway to run
Chris: the NixOS infrastructure.
Chris: And what was the number? He said their costs are going up by $25,000 a day.
Chris: Is that what he said for the S3 cash?
Wes: I think it was gigabytes.
Jason: Gigabytes.
Chris: 25.
Jason: It was 200 gigabytes a day.
Chris: 200 gigabytes a day increase?
Jason: Yes. Okay.
Chris: And I think he said it's costing them $25,000 a day on average right now.
Chris: So you can imagine that expense. That's just for the NixOS cash.
Chris: And so they really want to get to a point where they have two years of runtime.
Chris: And Ron gave it to us straight. They're not quite there yet.
Clips: We like to keep finances very, very transparent. That's what we do.
Clips: We started this a few years ago.
Clips: Everyone here will have access to the slides and you'd be able to see.
Clips: Currently, the foundation still does not receive enough funds to be able to
Clips: do what I think is the sustainable, I would say, P&L.
Clips: I want the foundation to be in a position that we can fund and continue the
Clips: infrastructure and keeping the lights on for at least two to three years without relying on anyone.
Wes: And, um, unfortunately we're not there yet. I think some good progress has been made.
Wes: Um, they, I don't think the numbers are quite final, right? But,
Wes: uh, we did get a little preview on some of the slides here and,
Wes: you know, donations, there's nearly 46,000 euros a year in donations,
Wes: a bunch from open collective also on NixCon 2025.
Wes: It looks like they were able to make some money, uh, nearly 33 grand, right?
Wes: Always good when incomes, uh, more than expenses, but still down estimated profit
Wes: of negative 24 000 euros it's.
Chris: Amazing it's only that low actually when you think about the cost but it makes
Chris: it unsustainable and they don't have that two-year runway.
Wes: And ron did a great job calling out the talk some of the sponsors right like
Wes: working with fastly working with aws um corporations are willing to help because
Wes: they know the the stuff is good and.
Chris: They seem to be getting a little bit more and more the conversations are beginning
Chris: to be elite uh more productive.
Wes: Yeah i think right everyone acknowledges were not there yet,
Wes: but I think maybe that's just me, my read, but it felt like Ron was maybe a
Wes: little less existentially freaked out about it.
Chris: Yeah, it was a good State of the Union.
Clips: All right, so the State of the Union
Clips: was good, and I want to capture some impressions. What'd you think, Wes?
Clips: You know, I think Ron did a good job of bringing up a lot of different people
Clips: from the community, and you get a sense that, like,
Clips: we have a steering committee now, we have a constitution, we have a foundation,
Clips: and some of those people seem pretty professional, and they do professional
Clips: jobs, but at the same time,
Clips: they're all wearing many hats, and you kind of get a sense of what it takes
Clips: to keep something as diffuse and large and exciting as Nix and NixOS hanging together.
Clips: Yeah, and some of it's still new. They're still experimenting a bit with the structure.
Clips: Yeah, I noticed the steering committee, they're getting their legs.
Clips: It felt like they still are getting their sea legs on what it is like to be
Clips: a public-facing thing that is responsible for shepherding the needs and wants
Clips: of a community, that's not easy.
Clips: Human interaction. As part of a steering committee, you have to take human needs
Clips: and deal with those, and at the same time, the other five hats they're wearing.
Clips: So kudos to them for getting up there, and it does seem new.
Clips: It does, you can sense that it's new, but something I think Nick sorely needs.
Clips: So I'm hoping that they get a little strength. I think they could use a little inner strength.
Clips: Yeah, I think, well, don't you think, as they have to make more decisions as
Clips: time goes on, right? Because the steering committee is like the committee of
Clips: last resort when nobody knows what direction to go.
Clips: Because they don't want it to be authoritarian dictatorship.
Clips: Because then, no matter how benevolent a dictator is, it's still a benevolent
Clips: dictator. So you want to move to something that seems to be on more sure footing.
Clips: Where you get multiple opinions about what the right way to go forward is.
Clips: And it is the correct model. I think it's just a muscle that hasn't been exercised. So you sense that.
Clips: And speaking of opinions on how the thing went and forming those, what were yours?
Clips: I noticed just a lot of passion. Like every team member that was there got to
Clips: dive into their niche and be able to say, hey, I'm really interested in infrastructure,
Clips: and that's where I'm going to do my work.
Clips: And there's enough people with different interests that it seems to be going
Clips: in a positive direction. That was what I noticed.
Clips: Yeah, I mean, we have a formatting team, right? It's like, that spells it out.
Clips: And you could actually sense when a person was done talking up there,
Clips: how much the people in the room, and I imagine the people who are watching this,
Clips: appreciate what they're doing.
Clips: It's kind of like everybody was so glad they were doing those CUDA things that are difficult.
Clips: And you really get a sense of gratitude from this community because they know
Clips: that Nix makes things so much easier than it would be without it.
Clips: And then without those people, it would be infinitely harder.
Clips: So I felt that gratitude.
Clips: Yeah, I think there's like a certain amount of excitement. We know that this
Clips: community can have a lot of, let's say, active discussions on things.
Clips: And maybe it feels like between, you know, flake stability.
Clips: There's just a lot of outstanding efforts because it is a giant scope.
Clips: And I think it's easy to see, you know, hot discussions on the discourse or
Clips: feel like things are stagnant and not necessarily moving.
Clips: And they get updated in a very diverse way. So it's cool to have all of those updates in one spot.
Clips: Because it turns out, even if you're not closely watching, there is a lot of
Clips: work happening. Yeah, I think the other takeaway I had is a lot of it's being done in the public.
Clips: You just have to know where to look. And that was one of the things that we
Clips: got was resources of where to look.
Chris: Now, you had a chance to sit down with Ron a little bit after his keynote.
Chris: And I grabbed a couple of moments from that.
Clips: For humans, it was like, what is this?
Clips: Like, am I looking at the ingredients of, like, my, I don't know,
Clips: my, like, multivitamin?
Clips: Like, why do I need to know what type of B12 complex is included in this, right?
Clips: So, for us, I mean, for a subset of us, the folks that were here for a long
Clips: time, they're like, yeah, that's cool.
Clips: I want to know, like, you know, that the B12 complex came from exactly that
Clips: extractor, that, like, laboratory function that made it happen.
Clips: But I think that's also what's making it so in tune with agents,
Clips: right? Because Nix was one of the purest ways to communicate with computers that you can find.
Clips: And guess what? Now, agents, the computers are able to do more.
Clips: So I don't think it's surprising that the thing that can communicate the most
Clips: with the computer and is the most, I would say,
Clips: perpendicular to the way that computers are thinking in a descriptive format
Clips: is able to be utilized and pretty much leveraged very effectively by those very
Clips: computers now that they have more capabilities.
Chris: I'm going to tell it to you straight, audience. I'm not hyping this up.
Chris: I'm not making it up at all.
Chris: The people that we talk to that are really heavy hitters that are in industry
Chris: that are building things.
Chris: Every single one of them is working with agents.
Brent: Yes.
Chris: Every single one of them. None of them were like, oh, we're not doing that.
Chris: And then there were people that were like, oh, the gal we talked to from France.
Jason: Roxanne.
Chris: Yeah. She's like, that's her whole business.
Jason: Fisher with a C.
Chris: Yeah. Fisher with a C. Roxanne Fisher.
Wes: There was some diversity. Some folks are using it more or less or for different
Wes: things. But yeah, that was a consistent name.
Jason: I mean, that was her whole focus.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: Agents. Like her company's whole focus.
Chris: But my point here, too, is even the companies where that's not their focus,
Chris: where they're where they're delivering other things, they are all experimenting with agents too.
Chris: Now, I'm not saying 100% of people. I'm saying the people that are established
Chris: heavy hitters that build things you use every day that are out there shipping
Chris: things to end users, 100% of them are messing with stuff and building agents.
Chris: And some of them are seemingly building harnesses and test suites,
Chris: including, sounds like even Ron and the folks over at Phlox.
Clips: We've been able to build up something that I'm hoping to open source completely
Clips: unrelated to Phlox inside of Phlox.
Clips: We pretty much made a mandate inside of the firm around AI utilization.
Clips: three, four months ago, and pretty much we built an engine that is able to take
Clips: all of our context from across the entire bit, especially with Nix,
Clips: and almost be like a sidekick assistant to everything we deploy and actually deploy things for us.
Clips: So I think our engineering pace inside of the company, and I was a skeptic,
Clips: I was like, no, no, no, this Nix stuff, it's going to take way longer for us
Clips: to actually be able to automate any part of that build through the roof.
Clips: Like We're seeing about 10 to 20x across the band on engineering output,
Clips: velocity, product response.
Clips: Customers are coming in with ask. We're able to split that up,
Clips: put that into roadmaps at a pace that I've never seen before.
Clips: So I guess it's kind of related to Flex, but I'm more personally excited about
Clips: that because I think that's going to set the entire industry standard across
Clips: the band of what we as humans are able to ship out and create value around.
Clips: Totally game-changing for the market.
Chris: He said a 10x increase in some of what they've been able to deliver.
Brent: That's crazy.
Jason: Yeah.
Brent: And these are still early days.
Jason: And he's so excited about it, he wants to release it.
Chris: They're all so pumped about it.
Jason: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. One of the conversations we were having before the event is it's going
Chris: to be really interesting to see if we walk in and this is a crowd of skeptics.
Chris: This is a Linux community. It could be a total AI skeptic crowd or if it's going
Chris: to be a crowd of enthusiasts.
Chris: And it wasn't 100% alignment on any particular issue.
Chris: And there's a lot of people that are grappling with some of the wider issues
Chris: that we often discuss when it comes to AI and big tech AI in particular.
Wes: We definitely heard that from our audience there and folks we're talking to.
Chris: But I mean, it was overwhelmingly, they are working on these things.
Jason: But like anything that is this important and this impactful,
Jason: it's people working through it in real time.
Jason: It's humans being like, oh, I think this is, oh wait, no, that's not.
Jason: But maybe, and they're literally grappling with something brand new that has
Jason: long-term consequences in real time.
Jason: And that's how we work it out. We need to talk about this stuff.
Jason: We need to just say, look, let's not boogeyman this. let's just rationalize
Jason: that there are good there are bad there's all kinds in this in this.
Wes: It also didn't feel like humans were excluded right like i i didn't you know
Wes: we heard about that from flox but flox was just bringing on new team members
Wes: who were kicking butt helping the event go and you know everyone's talking about
Wes: jackie how um you know how it's sort of enabling them to do more with like a
Wes: distributed team that they have that you know now they can do more with these
Wes: tools so it's interesting to watch.
Brent: I have to also say as an observation, I didn't hear anyone talking about how
Brent: any of this would lead to employment loss.
Brent: If anything, there was like just this buzzing about new ideas for new projects
Brent: and new ways to solve problems.
Chris: Well, you know, I think the biggest trend was is, you know, Bob's totally tapped out.
Chris: He's been so busy. And so he took three days and he built this system and now
Chris: Bob's got so much free time. Like we just kept hearing that over and over again.
Brent: Or so much new excitement for the problems he's tackling.
Chris: I had a chance to sit down with Graham from Determinant Systems,
Chris: and he's the CEO over there.
Chris: I'm sure I'll say that in the clip here that I'm about to play,
Chris: but they also have been working on this stuff.
Chris: And I won't say too much because I don't know how much he wanted public,
Chris: but they have figured out a way that just directly enables them to really ramp
Chris: up how fast they're building on ARM systems and testing on embedded ARM systems
Chris: and coming up for solutions for some of the limitations on totally bootstrapping
Chris: a ARM device that maybe doesn't have device drivers.
Chris: And it needs a complete strapping from the base to all the way up to booting Nix OS.
Chris: And they are working on these things. And it's just really awesome.
Chris: So I had a great chat with Graham, and it was good to see them there at Planet Nix.
Clips: Walking around, we found Graham Christensen, CEO of Determinant Systems.
Clips: We're sitting down chatting, and I got wind of some new software releases,
Clips: a couple of big things, including a new version of the Determinant Systems Nix installer.
Clips: I think it was version 3.17. Is that right?
Clips: Yep, 3.17. We actually just finished rolling it out yesterday.
Clips: It ships a whole bunch of new stuff. So, like, last year at Planet Nix,
Clips: we talked about Flake Schemas. This is the first release that actually contains
Clips: Flake Schema's first party.
Clips: We've just shipped some providence improvements, which is huge.
Clips: And so what that does for you is it lets you bundle and query a store path itself
Clips: to see what the license is for that software.
Clips: We're using it to attach providence data, like CPE matches, so you can see what
Clips: vulnerabilities apply to it.
Clips: Instead of just a rough package name, package version, which a lot of SBOM tools
Clips: do, this is a very precise application.
Clips: Tons more. We shipped Wasm support. That's a collab we did with Shopify,
Clips: and it's huge. We got a sick Mandelbrot demo.
Clips: Yeah, we got to see it. It's a little bit of art, actually. But then you were
Clips: also mentioning there's secure packages now, and that seems like a big deal.
Clips: Can you tell me about that?
Clips: Yeah, and it's really been surprising, the turnaround and what that's done for us and our users.
Clips: So basically, we take Nix packages, and we've picked out a subset of it,
Clips: which is like, essentially we promise to cover everything our customers depend on.
Clips: But it is not all of NICs packages. It's huge. You couldn't do it.
Clips: But so what we do is for everything that's in our covered set,
Clips: we continuously monitor it for CVEs. We reevaluate that twice a day.
Clips: We're actually working to annotate all of NICs packages with CPE identifiers
Clips: so we can be really complete on that front.
Clips: And then have an SLA on shipping vulnerability fixes for it.
Clips: Really the goal here is to, Well, we've had customers over the years that said
Clips: we ship Nix, we use Nix packages in critical spots. We want to keep using it.
Clips: Our auditors are kind of scared of it. And this is really helping a lot of places
Clips: to take advantage of it and be happier and comfortable with it.
Clips: Yeah, as someone who's had to do compliance work at past jobs,
Clips: like that's either stuff that you get told no because it doesn't exist,
Clips: or you maybe have willing management who's willing to let you build it in-house.
Clips: And then you're probably going to build just a worse version that no one else
Clips: gets to use. So it seems a lot better.
Clips: That's actually, so we had one of our customers come to us and say,
Clips: you know, our auditor flagged this concern that like Nix packages,
Clips: they're not, you know, it's not the most like professional, like ultra,
Clips: like conservative ecosystem.
Clips: Is this safe at all? Like, is it actually safe at all to depend on this?
Clips: And the work we're doing with the CPEs and the Providence and secure packages
Clips: is letting them continue to serve their customers with Nix and NixOS. It's really exciting.
Clips: Graham, I think maybe listeners that just use Nix privately in their home lab,
Clips: they might be surprised to hear there's demand for enterprise features like
Clips: this, because this sounds like stuff maybe RHEL has to incorporate for compliance purposes.
Clips: And one of the things I picked up on here is there's a surprising amount of
Clips: people that are using Nix in the workplace.
Clips: But maybe they're not even disclosing it to their management,
Clips: or they're not talking about it, they're not public about it.
Clips: Are you seeing that at Determinant Systems too?
Clips: Yeah. So something we've noticed over the last 10 years or so is the people
Clips: we're talking to are getting older and more mature.
Clips: In the beginning of consulting, so often we would talk to somebody who was fresh
Clips: in their career and like, I want to get Nix at work.
Clips: And I was like, cool. I hope you succeed.
Clips: And now we're starting to talk more to people who have been working at that
Clips: company for 20 years. And I'm saying, Nix is the next step for us and we want your help to do it.
Clips: And so that's happening. but also we're hearing from, you know,
Clips: people who've been building on top of RHEL for their entire career.
Clips: And now they're shipping and using Nix and school systems and the government
Clips: agencies and state agencies and healthcare tech, like, and not just,
Clips: not just upstarts, but like major established players.
Clips: They're truly, I would say Nix is approximately everywhere. They just haven't,
Clips: they just haven't told you yet.
Clips: I'm just curious, do you have any insights or your own theories around why folks
Clips: are so reluctant sometimes, either individually or corporations,
Clips: companies, to talk about Nix as a tool?
Clips: This one's a little touchier, a little spicier.
Clips: And I think we're sort of getting over this as an ecosystem.
Clips: But at least over the past several years, there's been an explosion and growth of usage in Nix.
Clips: And I think the community was kind of jarred and upset by that.
Clips: And so a little skepticism and a little fear about talking about the places
Clips: that they're being used in agencies that are not popular, right?
Clips: And not exciting or like clearly like a moral good.
Clips: You know, those agencies exist and they're using NICs too. And they don't want
Clips: to be like get in trouble, right?
Clips: But they are using NICs. And personally, I feel like they exist and if they're
Clips: going to use software, which they are,
Clips: they are better served by software that does the stuff correctly versus might
Clips: be working incorrectly or less reliably.
Clips: I don't know. It's complicated.
Clips: Yeah, I think we see this a lot in Linux and open sources. It's sort of a sign of success, right?
Clips: Like early adopters maybe, oh, it's pure, it's functional, all the nerdy details,
Clips: or maybe it's the open source philosophy.
Clips: And then you get to the point where it's just so clearly a useful tool that
Clips: the pragmatists come, right?
Clips: They don't need to buy into all those other layers. They just see that it builds a better Docker.
Clips: Yeah, I mean, that's totally true. I mean, that's the history of basically technology, right?
Clips: Starting with ARPA and DARPA, like it has always been very, so much of like
Clips: the advanced technology we have today comes from the military, right?
Clips: And the military being willing to spend heavily and invest heavily in making this tech better.
Clips: And I've talked about this before. I have complicated feelings about the military,
Clips: but I feel like it's better for them to run Nix than for them to run something else.
Clips: So I am excited to help them do that.
Clips: I think I sleep a little better at night knowing that they're running Nix OS,
Clips: or more and more so, at least.
Clips: So one of the other, I'd say, big trends, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up
Clips: yet in our conversation, it seems to be here, is a lot of people are talking
Clips: about AI and agents in particular.
Clips: Are you seeing much of that materialize from a customer demand or anything like that, or workload?
Clips: Yeah, so actually this is something we've started doing internally.
Clips: So we've been working on a real small operating system to run on embedded targets,
Clips: and we're going to talk about that more another time, but one of the things
Clips: we've been able to do with that is we have a hardware test lab, and it's pretty neat.
Clips: One thing we can do is we've instrumented the hardware, and we can say,
Clips: you know, hey, Claude, this is how you talk to the hardware. Here's the Nix flake.
Clips: Go make it work, right? And then it can do Nix build. it can go reboot the device
Clips: and see if it booted successfully, and take that input and create basically
Clips: the board support until it can boot.
Clips: And you know, that's like an extreme example, but it's really compelling.
Clips: And actually, this is something that, totally tangential, but the rise of LLMs
Clips: has made it so much easier for people to engage with and learn Nix.
Clips: I feel pretty vindicated. It's been scary over the last... Well,
Clips: I don't really want to say scary.
Clips: But anyway, so it's been hard to think about the adoption and the education process for Nix users.
Clips: And maybe it is right to try and wrap Nix up and make the interface easier and
Clips: sort of hide Nix behind it.
Clips: But the rise of LLMs and the ability for people to more quickly adapt and get
Clips: used to Nix, I feel completely vindicated about the right investment for us
Clips: is Nix itself. That is a great point. Right.
Clips: And I've just amongst ourselves seen it too in the audience as well.
Clips: Graham, it's always great to catch up with you. Where should we send people
Clips: to check out like the new installer and stuff like that?
Clips: Yeah. So we've published all our things on determinate.systems.
Clips: And that's probably the best place to get started.
Clips: Thank you. Thank you, sir. Yeah.
Chris: You know, we really couldn't fit everybody in, but it is the friends you make
Chris: along the way. But you were pointing out there is one group that would have
Chris: been particularly great to get on the show.
Jason: Yeah. I mean, Anthropic had nine representatives there, which when you think
Jason: about, well, you were talking about how the salary for watching one presentation
Jason: that was, it was like a $60,000 presentation that was an hour long.
Jason: And for them to think this is important enough to go down to the basement with
Jason: the rest of us to send nine people down there.
Wes: Giving talks and they had a big booth there on the floor.
Jason: That speaks to what they think is important. And Nix is a big part of their infrastructure.
Brent: And last year, Anish gave a talk.
Brent: And that was new. He was working with Nix, but he said, oh, yeah,
Brent: that was my first talk ever.
Brent: And then he came back this year as almost like an ambassador for Nix,
Brent: but also an ambassador for bringing Anthropic folk into the ecosystem.
Chris: Yeah, he's a good shepherd for his team. And Nish is a great guy.
Chris: And, you know, we hear so much about Anthropic from the outside.
Chris: But then when you see the people that are building, they're engineers and they're
Chris: nerds and they're solving big problems that people haven't solved before.
Chris: and they're then upstreaming some of those solutions and then they're bringing
Chris: that knowledge to these events and telling people in a couple of years you're
Chris: going to need to solve this problem here's how you could start thinking about it today.
Jason: And they're very intent on getting rid of those little roadblocks that maybe
Jason: nix has or that they've encountered because they're on the cutting edge they're
Jason: going to hit it first and they're very intent on being like hey hey let's let's
Jason: fix this let's make sure this isn't a roadblock which makes it better for all of us you.
Wes: Know that was one of the things we talked we thought we kind of would see that
Wes: theme of Planet Nix this year, but I think it pans out.
Wes: You see just people from all diverse set of companies, workshopping ideas from
Wes: like small firms who are just adopting it, getting to pick from the brains of
Wes: folks who've maybe been doing it at scale for a couple of years now.
Wes: It's really fun to be a fly on the wall to watch that happening.
Jason: It's such a positive feedback loop, it seems. And some places don't have that.
Jason: I think sometimes certain technologies engender bringing the best out of people.
Jason: And it seems that Nix tends to do that out of really smart people.
Chris: From all different backgrounds. Solving huge problems or just even just...
Wes: Or like, you know, folks who do it who've been longtime community members because
Wes: they love open source and they love Nix, meeting people who maybe just aren't
Wes: learning it because they joined a company who's already using it.
Chris: So that was, you know, part one, Planet Nix. And then it was shift gears and you go to scale.
Chris: So Planet Nix is an intimate setting, you know, six, seven hundred people now.
Chris: Last year, maybe 300 people. Scale is a whole other deal. 5,000,
Chris: 6,000, 7,000 people, it's the largest Linux event in North America.
Chris: We don't have a sponsor, so...
Brent: Can you give us a sponsorship here?
Jason: Yeah, sure.
Chris: Yeah, what do you got for us?
Jason: This is brought to you by Ollivander's Wands.
Jason: As we violate copyright like an LLM, just sucking up random novels,
Jason: Linux Unplugged is an incredible, wonderful show.
Jason: It is magical. We can make things happen for you.
Chris: Wait, can I have a request? What if the show is brought to you by Chris's Chase
Chris: Reserve credit card? Chris's Chase Reserve credit card. That's what the show is brought to you by.
Jason: In that case, it's my precious likes to spend his money. Yes.
Jason: Your bank account is empty and I's in negatives. Yes.
Chris: That's about it.
Jason: Or when you reach the limit, it's you shall not run this card.
Chris: So it was time to get ourselves put together, stop partying so hard,
Chris: and go to the Southern California Linux Expo.
Clips: Well, this is actually day one for scale. We start all over again.
Clips: Boys, it's a whole new event.
Clips: We poked our head in some of the rooms. Everybody's sitting down.
Clips: But we haven't yet gone to the Expo Hall.
Clips: That's usually where a lot's going on. Yeah, you get to see who took the time
Clips: to come out, who's trying to sell you something, or show you an exciting project.
Clips: and I suspect we have more than a few friends around in there.
Clips: It's funny because you can hear there's large crowds inside the rooms as you
Clips: walk by. They're like little honey hives of buzzing activity. Yeah, yeah.
Clips: So everybody's in sessions right now, so I think this is our moment to go check out the Expo Hall.
Chris: There's also a special energy on that first talk that kicks off.
Chris: So as we're going to the Expo Hall, we've got to poke our heads in.
Chris: And the EFF, the executive officer of the EFF, was actually giving the keynote
Chris: talk, and I didn't really understand it first, but I learned very quickly that
Chris: the EFF has been one of the longest supporters of Scale.
Chris: Elan sort of kicks everything off, and then we meet her.
Clips: Welcome to the 23rd Annual Scale Conference. We're excited to have you all with us again. Thank you.
Clips: And so without further ado, I'm going to let Cindy take the stage.
Clips: Thank you. And we'll have some opportunity.
Clips: Thank you so much. Thank you to Scale for inviting me. This is my first time
Clips: at Scale. I'm so excited.
Clips: You know, EFF and the open source community, it's a long-term relationship we're in, friends.
Chris: I thought that was actually a fair point. And she actually had a pretty good
Chris: keynote. And there is definitely some fans in the audience.
Chris: So what we do is we vary strategically. We pop in, we get a sense,
Chris: and then we keep going because while the people are in the keynote,
Chris: that's the time to check out the expo hall, especially if you have a microphone
Chris: and you want to have any shot of being able to hear somebody.
Chris: And we walked in and you were hit with some fancy booths right away.
Clips: Well, I can confirm the expo hall is definitely buzzing.
Clips: Big Microsoft presence right there at the entrance with Microsoft and GitHub.
Clips: Hello. Hello. I'm here. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
Clips: Okay. So there's a lot of people. All right. Here's the Ubuntu booth.
Clips: Oh, they got some music going on.
Clips: Framework's got a booth right next to Ubuntu. Then RISC-V does as well.
Clips: This is a good group right here. I'm seeing some AI and science combination
Clips: over here. Yeah. Okay. All right. We've got to just soak this in.
Chris: A lot of those. But I think what we sort of honed in on is the vibe around RISC-V this year.
Chris: It was really good. And people were excited.
Chris: They had like a double booth set up.
Chris: And Brent had a chance to talk with the Deep Compute CEO briefly.
Chris: And he is working on an entire RISC-V stack.
Chris: I mean, everything from the CPU to the soundboard and Ethernet.
Clips: I'm from Deep Computing. and the founder of Deep Computing and specialized to
Clips: make all the RISC-V consumer electronics.
Chris: And he's spending like $2 million a year to try to make it happen,
Chris: to build these things and try to make this a reality.
Wes: And using a bunch of nicks under the hood to do it.
Chris: Yeah, and so is Carl. And Carl was a different Carl.
Chris: He's one of the community, he's the community representative.
Chris: And he really, really knows his stuff.
Chris: And he had all kinds of cool hardware, you guys. I mean, stuff you would want
Chris: to own right now. and of course you had to tell us a little bit about it.
Clips: Thank you, hi, my name is Carl. I am with Works with RISC-V.
Clips: We're open community ecosystem for getting things built with the RISC-V instruction
Clips: set architecture, both hardware and software.
Clips: And then you have a table of gadgets here. Give us a tour. So this is using
Clips: a newer processor. Came out about a year ago.
Clips: It's very fast. Operates about Raspberry Pi 3 to 4 level performance.
Clips: Unfortunately, does not have vector. And then this stuff here in the middle is the future.
Clips: This will be available about 3 to 4 months. It is running the Spacetime K3 processor.
Clips: This uses the RVA23 standard, so it will work with the new version of Ubuntu,
Clips: which is across the way from us.
Clips: It is fast. It has vector. it has hypervisor, and it has AI cores.
Clips: I notice this in more of a server case as well. Yeah, so you have options of how to do it.
Clips: The way that these products are gonna be sold when they're available is they
Clips: come in two form factors.
Clips: One is this Jetson Orion NX compatible SOM, and then the other one is a Pyco
Clips: ITX board that kind of fits in like a NUC-like mini PC.
Clips: Because of the SOMs, someone has built this ridiculous example where you can
Clips: shove 10 of them into a 1U rack mount case.
Clips: So we're going to work on something that's a little more flexible than this
Clips: one because we actually want to be able to have not just these,
Clips: but other architecture systems.
Clips: And then we're making build farms available to the general open source community
Clips: for getting stuff built on RISC-V.
Chris: That's cool, right?
Jason: Oh, boy. They are doing a lot with RISC-V these days.
Chris: That's right. I mean, the build farm for the community access for developers
Chris: that are doing open source projects is a really nice touch.
Chris: Yeah, because, you know, people don't have access to this yet.
Chris: But that NUC-sized machine.
Jason: Oh, wow.
Chris: Oh.
Jason: And I love the fact that they're doing almost everything around SBC and that
Jason: the one you had 10. They were like, well, if we're going to make a big server, we'll just put 10.
Wes: Slut in more.
Chris: Yeah. And they were kind of laughing like the deep compute CEO. He's kind of laughing.
Chris: He's like, you know, these companies that are investing these billions of dollars
Chris: on these proprietary SOCs, we're coming for him. We're going to come for him
Chris: with an entire open stack top to bottom.
Wes: He might have been one of the most excited and driven people I've ever met.
Chris: No kidding.
Jason: Yeah. And every time you saw him, he was buoyant.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: Which I loved. I'm like, this guy's been deep in these trenches of a seemingly insurmountable thing.
Jason: Not when people look at that from the outside. They're like,
Jason: that's a hill that's really hard to climb. And he's not deterred by that.
Chris: No, he was also bringing around gadgets because he was also at Planet Nix.
Chris: And he had like a little risk tiny computer in a transparent box.
Chris: Yeah, it was so neat. The whole thing. And it really makes you feel like something's
Chris: happening because, of course, across from him is the Ubuntu booth.
Chris: And they're working to make sure that they get more risk five support.
Chris: And it's just a general sense around. The only thing that we never really touch
Chris: on, but it's kind of neat to see, it's kind of become tradition,
Chris: is the NextCloud and the OpenSUSE folks and the KDE people.
Chris: They kind of have like an area and they all kind of help each other and support
Chris: each other's booths and stuff like that. It's always fun to go over and chat with them.
Wes: Good open source vibes over there.
Jason: Yeah, yeah. They were really cool people. And I love the fact that KDE has a
Jason: presence at something like this. Like they're, you know...
Jason: out there hanging out. Some volunteer from the community from this area decided
Jason: to set up a booth and that they have their representations.
Chris: And they're dedicating time to that. Serious time. We, you know,
Chris: we, so it's always really great to have easy conversations with these really
Chris: community focused folks.
Chris: It was a little trickier to try to get some of the bigger names on the record.
Chris: And we thought we don't normally talk to them, but we thought it would be great
Chris: to get Microsoft or meta or GitHub on the record just to kind of flush out the
Chris: scale coverage for you all and this would be the point where i'd be playing
Chris: conversations with those companies but.
Jason: So chris how did that go.
Chris: Well how did it go brent let's see hey you were the one that had to take the
Chris: rejection directly a few times your.
Jason: Feedback on this experience.
Chris: Have you had that happen before because i'm pretty used to it because every
Chris: time i go to these events they say no.
Brent: Well i have a little bit of a secret superpower which is that like i seem to
Brent: be able to charm almost anybody in that conversation was gonna.
Chris: Do it it would probably be you oh yeah.
Brent: And sometimes they're like you know uncomfortable about it and it's
Brent: like no no it's gonna be it's five minutes it's only five minutes that's all
Brent: i need uh i was i actually lost a little
Brent: bit of sleep over this i was shut down in a
Brent: way uh specifically by microsoft too
Brent: that they just didn't want to make time for us and i
Brent: approached them very kindly and said hey like you're here you
Brent: have the fanciest booth right at the the door of the exhibition
Brent: hall you have the director of open source here that seems like a perfect fit
Brent: we'd love to have a conversation why you're excited to be here at scale what
Brent: you're doing with open source these days and uh they were just more interested
Brent: in the raffle that they were going to give and didn't want to make time to have
Brent: a five minute chat with us you.
Jason: Are so rational i love the way that you approached it you're like why wouldn't
Jason: they want to and like i've been in hollywood for a long time and i could see
Jason: them giving you the brush off.
Brent: And every.
Jason: Time you'd come back to me and tell me what their excuse was in the back of
Jason: my mind i'm like this is a brush off this has happened to my friend.
Brent: I am so sad why bother show up.
Jason: That's a good question.
Chris: Yeah, it's...
Jason: Because they're a raffle, mate.
Chris: Well, they're there, you know, to chat with the community, which is good.
Jason: It's a raffle.
Chris: They're very afraid of media exposure going wrong. And so they're very, very safe.
Chris: And of course, to us, it seems silly. Because you're there, you've spent,
Chris: you know, 20 grand on the booth.
Chris: You've probably spent 60 grand in payroll because you've got seven, eight people here.
Jason: Which is a pack of peanuts to Microsoft.
Chris: Yeah. And then you're going to spend 15 grand on the hotel stay for all of those
Chris: people. You're going to spend another 15 grand on the flight.
Chris: And then we come here and we're like, so you're going to talk to,
Chris: you know, a thousand people today.
Chris: Would you like to talk to another 60,000 people today?
Chris: And they say no. And to us, it just doesn't, it just doesn't compute.
Chris: Why would you say no to additional exposure? You've put all this money and effort to get exposure.
Jason: They could have read off a document.
Jason: They could have prepared some form of thing that they could just read to us.
Chris: And to be clear, it's not just Microsoft.
Jason: It's fine. I just want to hear what they want to say.
Chris: But for them, it's too dangerous. And so they don't want to do it.
Chris: But it's funny because it doesn't come across as being part of the community, right?
Chris: Because the booths that are actually part of the community are thrilled to talk to us.
Jason: You can tell. It has the anti-community stank on it.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: And you may get to a certain... But let's compare.
Jason: Anthropic has a lot to lose by saying the wrong thing. Everyone here at this
Jason: table agrees that, especially with everything that's going on with them.
Jason: But yet, Anish came right up to us, warm, welcome, hi, right? So that's different.
Jason: Those companies are on par in the AI space.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: And the behavior was different. That's all you have to say.
Chris: Yeah. And so it means we don't have those clips. We did get to chat with them.
Chris: You know, I'll tell you one of the things I observed that I thought was interesting
Chris: is the Meta booth had a whole bunch of Asahi machines. They had about the whole
Chris: lineup of Asahi workstations. you can possibly have, including a Mac studio at the Meta booth.
Chris: And it seems that there is some Asahi Linux usage in Meta.
Chris: How much we can't really say, but it's neat. And they were happy to be pointing
Chris: that out to a degree and talk about it off the record.
Jason: I really wanted them to just open up and chat with us about what was going on inside.
Chris: Yeah, and we're not trying to do a hit piece. Like, hey, I see you're using
Chris: Asahi Linux. You're excited?
Brent: We're excited.
Wes: We want to celebrate open source. That's our jam.
Jason: At one table, you You have Linux and meta and Apple. That's actually pretty freaking cool.
Chris: It is an interesting combination. Yeah.
Jason: That's a soup.
Chris: And the answer would have been, yeah, you know, a dozen or so or more of our
Chris: developers or however many it is are using it on the workstations.
Chris: That would have been, that would have been the extent of the big reveal.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: It is what it is.
Jason: They were doing it there anyway.
Chris: And then, you know, I guess what I, what I, if, if,
Chris: honestly they're probably going to be the lesser of the interesting chats
Chris: we would have had i just wanted to round it out and i
Chris: just thought it would be good to represent them and the other thing is is they are making
Chris: you know by coming there and spending that money they're not
Chris: only adding a bit of legitimacy to the roster when you look at it but they're
Chris: also you know helping pay the bill a little bit to make scale possible and so
Chris: i'm grateful they're there and i just wish that this was something that could
Chris: be sorted out but i'll tell you this is not a new thing this has been an issue
Chris: since we've been doing linux action show it's just it's media stuff and now there are,
Chris: more of these companies at these events than there were before.
Chris: It might've been one or two companies before, and now there's like a dozen,
Chris: you know, and they spend big money.
Chris: And so I guess in one way, I'm glad they're there. I just wish they'd talk to us.
Chris: But we can, you know, we can relay that they are there and they do seem to be
Chris: interested in hiring still. And they do seem to be trying to show off what they're working on.
Wes: Yeah, about the message we got was that they had a sticker that said Microsoft
Wes: loves open source. So, you know, make of that what you will.
Jason: Sticky?
Brent: Jason, can you do an ad about your new laptop?
Jason: Oh, sure.
Brent: Can you do it in Grimm's voice, though?
Jason: This is the T480. It's quite a laptop. I got it for $289, and I decided I'd run NexOS on it.
Jason: Had no issues at all installing it. Just stuck that USB stick in,
Jason: booted it right up, and this thing is flying like the wind.
Jason: As a matter of fact, it might be a little quieter than Brent's framework laptop.
Jason: Oh, it's only a Gen 1. That's fine. I'm not throwing you under the bus.
Jason: There it goes. and I'm running Plasma on here, Plasma 6. Just a beautiful next
Jason: config, nice and simple.
Jason: This thing is golden toast.
Chris: Now I want one.
Jason: And by the way, listen to Linux Unplugged and support them and become a member if you're not.
Chris: Well, gentlemen, we have some boost to get to because this was a audience-supported
Chris: episode. So what do you say? Should we kick it off?
Chris: All right. And I believe our first, is this a new booster?
Brent: Oh, wow.
Chris: Biggles? Have we heard from Biggles before? I love that name.
Chris: So I feel like it would stick with me.
Wes: Maybe a new booster.
Chris: Biggles is our baller booster with 111 and 111 sets.
Jason: Hey, rich lobster.
Chris: He says, have fun at scale and planet Nix. Here's a small contribution to the
Chris: cost. Not so small. We really do.
Wes: You are our baller.
Chris: We do very much appreciate that.
Jason: You make me want to be a better man.
Chris: Thank you very much, Biggles. And sent that in from Fountain.
Wes: Well, K.R. Hill 94 comes in with 100,000, Zad.
Chris: Well, that's a baller booster as well.
Jason: Ah, fly!
Chris: There you go. Get a big old duck.
Jason: You're doing a good job.
Wes: For the trip, I assume the full 100,000 made it through, yet still not sure
Wes: about that note channel in Albie Hub.
Chris: Brent!
Brent: Oh, I'm sorry. I delegated that one to Jeff.
Chris: That's okay. He delegated to Fountain and Fountain looked into it for us and
Chris: determined it was Brent's fault.
Chris: Let's see if that is the official fact of my team. At least we have the answer.
Jason: We're doing a lot with agents these days. Whose fault is it?
Brent: Hashtag Blank Brant.
Jason: I love it.
Brent: We did get a boost from our dear adversaries.
Chris: Hey, adversaries.
Brent: 67,514 Satoshis.
Jason: Stay a while and listen.
Brent: This simply says advertiser boost.
Chris: Appetiser boost.
Brent: Oh, I'm so sorry.
Jason: Appetiser, advertiser.
Wes: Why are you pulling it, Chris, over there?
Jason: This advertisement's full of Froot Loops.
Chris: Listen, in the lack of advertising, this might as well be an advertising boost.
Chris: Thank you very much, adversaries. Really appreciate that.
Brent: How were the appetizers? Good?
Chris: Well, I ate the fries. Actually, the fries were good. They had a garlic olive oil on them.
Jason: I ordered mine with garlic aioli on the side.
Chris: That was quite good. That was good. That was good.
Jason: Fair good.
Chris: And then, you know, the next best thing I had, actually, wasn't anything we bought there.
Chris: It was Emma brought me, she wanted to know my thoughts. She brought me a little
Chris: bit of brisket from like a barbecue place nearby.
Wes: And I'll say- I have multiple people bringing you strange meat at this conference. How do I use that?
Chris: It's great. I will say it was pretty fantastic. I was also a couple of drinks
Chris: in and I needed that protein.
Chris: Speaking of producer Jeff, PJ comes in with 55,555 stats.
Jason: It's over 9,000. I have no idea when that's appropriate.
Jason: I was scrolling down to see if anybody broke the threshold, but I'm pretty close, right?
Chris: Well, he says this might help feed Brentley for a few hours.
Brent: Well, PJ, we got some pizza from, what was it? Big Toast or Big Slice?
Jason: Fun will now commence It was gluten-free.
Chris: To be clear I was, thank you And before that, we got them some.
Jason: Indian food They threw olives on mine for no reason, which I always appreciate.
Chris: I do, too, actually. You know, who doesn't love a free olive,
Chris: especially when they're usually $7 to add?
Jason: Right. I was like, wow, that's a plus.
Wes: Well, A-A-R-on comes in with 50,000 sets.
Jason: A-A-R-on! Is there an A-A-R-on here?
Wes: Let's be clear. Nobody likes listening to ads. If you say you do,
Wes: I've got a good therapist I can introduce you to.
Chris: Hey, sometimes I like to hate listen.
Wes: That being said, I will listen to thousands of hours of ads if it means that you get paid.
Chris: Oh, that's...
Wes: Even in the membership feed, if need be.
Chris: No, no, that's never happening.
Jason: No, no, no.
Wes: My only ask is that they don't just randomly pop up in the middle of a segment.
Brent: That's fair.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. I think that's pretty fair. I suppose we would have the technology.
Chris: One of the reasons we went with the... Even though they're not great,
Chris: you know, for some people.
Chris: Actually, think, though, if you think about it, just get it out of the way.
Chris: It's kind of nice. But while we don't have any in-show sponsors,
Chris: we have occasionally like a pre-roll that is playing for some people.
Chris: It's the first time I've ever done something like that.
Chris: And what I do kind of like about it is it just kind of gets it out of the way.
Chris: And then we don't put it in the middle of the show. And they just.
Jason: Or I'll just read them all.
Chris: I would listen to that.
Jason: I'll just do your ads.
Chris: But thank you very much, A.A. Ron. We really do appreciate that.
Jason: Thank you, A.A. Ron. Don't mess with me up in here. You give me a boost. I appreciate it.
Brent: Is it my turn?
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: A Monday. A Monday?
Wes: A Monday.
Brent: A Monday.
Chris: A Monday.
Jason: A Monday, Monday.
Brent: Boosted in through fountain 45,000. 84 satoshis.
Jason: Engage.
Chris: Boosty, boost, boost, boost.
Brent: Jason, I think you read this one.
Jason: I do?
Chris: Sure, why not?
Jason: Where's it? Where's it right there? Boosty. Ah.
Jason: Boosty, boost, boost, boost, boost, boost!
Brent: Also, boost number two. But that one...
Chris: Oh, that was...
Jason: I keep getting partial figures boosting via fountain. I'm not sure why you guys
Jason: need to clear that up, over.
Brent: We're all working on it.
Chris: Yeah, we're getting Brent on it. We'll get him fixed.
Brent: It's Brent's fault.
Jason: I'll just randomly read it.
Wes: Well, he's captive now, so...
Jason: Read it in there. I'll read it in their voice. That's what I'll do.
Chris: WLP2SO comes in with 20,604 cents.
Wes: Also known as our favorite Wi-Fi interface.
Jason: You're doing a good job.
Chris: Some value, he says. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you.
Brent: Thank you.
Chris: Hey, we got another Adversaries here. Wait, is this Twice from Adversaries? Yeah.
Jason: That is nice.
Brent: That means Wes's script is broken?
Wes: No. Well, one of them...
Jason: It's over 18,000!
Wes: I mean, it is broken, but one of them, the username has at fountain,
Wes: and one of them doesn't. So that's the naive script.
Wes: It did not figure out they were the same. We should strip the fountain stuff, I guess.
Chris: He's commenting on a crash out I had on last week's live stream.
Chris: and points out that Quinn 3 Coder's 30 billion parameter model also runs pretty fast.
Chris: He says, I've had a little run Rust app that I built in just 20 minutes,
Chris: and I mostly use it to write integration and unit tests.
Chris: I'm using the Zed editor's built-in agent and recently added support for OpenAI's
Chris: API-compatible servers for both the prediction and agent use.
Jason: It is interesting because we were chatting about this. I was like,
Jason: hey, where are the smaller models here that you could compartmentalize for jobs
Jason: like coding and things like that?
Chris: Quinn 3.
Jason: Like in this thank you for the shout out for that specifically.
Wes: Quin3 coder also seems to be using devstrel small 2 24b yeah.
Chris: Thank you very.
Jason: Much for those of you who don't know what that means that's actually a formula
Jason: for vitamins that ron mentioned earlier now.
Chris: To be clear he is doing this with 256 gigabytes of ram.
Jason: And an.
Wes: Epic cpu yeah.
Brent: So i can't do that at home not yet not.
Jason: Yet well.
Wes: You know if you ask.
Jason: Adversaries you make me want to be a better man with your video card and your Big Fancy Ram.
Chris: I-Quest comes in with 9,001 sats. It's over 9,000.
Jason: It's over 9,000! I know what your neighbors are thinking as I yell this out
Jason: in this garage, like, repeatedly.
Wes: No, we're just doing sports betting.
Jason: Yeah, they're gonna be like, FBI, open up.
Chris: Yeah. But listen, you finally got to legitimately do it. He says,
Chris: I really appreciate the show. The ad did surprise me, but I'm taking it as a
Chris: sign to do my part to contribute.
Wes: No, see, that's great. Thank you, I-Quest.
Jason: That's nice.
Brent: We appreciate that.
Chris: Especially on this trip.
Jason: It's actually quite sweet.
Wes: Spooky sat, come, Hanson, with 10,000 sats.
Wes: long time listener first time hey really,
Wes: have y'all ever seen or heard of mango wm could be a great replacement to hyperland
Wes: has been my window manager for about four months now and i thought it would
Wes: be worth sharing keep up the great work and we got a little kit hub link here.
Chris: Well you're probably never going to get wayland or i mean a hyperland and wayland
Chris: out of my uh cold dead hands but i do like the name.
Wes: It is Wayland.
Chris: It is Wayland-based. Yep. It's Mango is a great name.
Brent: Very fruity.
Jason: The Mangos.
Wes: It can be built completely within a few seconds. So, you know,
Wes: I know you know how it takes to compile stuff.
Brent: There's a Knicks flake in this repo.
Jason: In that case, I've got the same combination on my luggage.
Chris: I think that's a winner. Thank you.
Jason: Knicks.
Chris: Check out Mango.
Brent: So Ham sent in 5,000 sets.
Jason: Live long and prosper.
Chris: All right. What do we got? What's our boost?
Brent: Oh, right. I'm reading this one. No, I'll do it for you.
Jason: Just wanted to tell the non-members that they are missing out big time with
Jason: this one. I'm talking a certified Chris Red.
Jason: And at this rate, they're going to require age verification for this podcast.
Jason: Oh, snap. I see they snuck it in there.
Chris: That's good.
Jason: Oh, yeah.
Wes: Someone might have gotten excited.
Chris: Yeah, I did get a little worked out.
Brent: That's a good one.
Chris: Every now and then. You know, every now and then.
Jason: I actually really like that.
Chris: As I get older, they happen less and less. So I think it's a good sign now.
Chris: Before, I used to not like it. and now I feel like hey I still got it I still
Chris: got the energy every now and then what.
Brent: I like though is like you're doing them less but when you do do them.
Chris: Are these zingers oh.
Brent: You just lean right in.
Chris: Because like you haven't you know what are.
Brent: They gonna do fire me.
Chris: At this point I got a little steam built up too I suppose yeah yeah,
Chris: Kiwi Bitcoin Guide comes in with 10,000 sats.
Jason: 10,000 sats? I don't know. It's possible that is right in the pocket.
Chris: Boost for the road. I'd like to hear your opinion on the open source LLMs.
Chris: If an LLM is open source, how much can we actually know about the security and
Chris: telemetry of that model?
Chris: If the source code is visible and we can audit, can we actually be reassured
Chris: of what's being logged or used for training?
Chris: Or is it just still a black box for us? I am having a debate with a friend at
Chris: the moment, and he says that LMs are complete black boxes, even when they're
Chris: open source. What say you?
Wes: I think the key for this one to start with is just to sort of have some agreed
Wes: defined set of terms, because on open source LMs, that can mean a lot of things.
Wes: And the black box, are you talking about understanding the model and sort of
Wes: like a research and AI theory standpoint?
Wes: Or are you just talking about understanding the harness, and is it running locally,
Wes: and is it talking over the network? And those are all valid things to discuss
Wes: and have different answers.
Jason: And do you object to how they were training is the question.
Jason: So is it really front end what goes into the black box that we're trying to
Jason: discuss? Is that something that you object to, how it was trained?
Jason: Is that developing bias? So, so many perspectives to find.
Chris: And then there's the weights. Are the weights open? Is the data set open?
Chris: And the answer is it's a gradient.
Chris: The different models are a gradient of this right now. And that's not necessarily
Chris: a bad thing. It's a marketplace at the moment.
Chris: And we're actually seeing the ones that are more open, have more longevity and
Chris: more integration into various use cases than I thought was initially maybe expected.
Chris: Six months ago, a lot of us thought this was going to go all locked up to OpenAI
Chris: and Anthropic and maybe a little bit of Microsoft and Google.
Chris: And now it seems more like, yeah, they're still going to be around,
Chris: but these open source models are getting smashed into things like Zed editors
Chris: or little embedded LLMs for people.
Wes: Yeah. And, you know, it's also I think you may have a lot of concerns about
Wes: how are they trained and what went into them and how much control do I have over that.
Wes: But if you do at least have the weights in like a reasonable,
Wes: say, safe tensor style format where it's not like can't execute stuff,
Wes: it's not its own programming language, it's just a specification for weights,
Wes: and you run some sort of open source inference server and harness,
Wes: you do still get the benefits.
Wes: Even if you don't totally have understanding of like why which weights and neurons
Wes: activated and all that kind of stuff, you do at least know you have control
Wes: over what it's running, how it gets sent, what gets sent over the network.
Wes: And it's not going to use any of that data for training. If you lock it down,
Wes: there's no way for it to send it.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Brent: There's also not quite a definition of open source AI that's been agreed upon.
Brent: I mean, the open source initiative came out with their definition that a lot of people didn't like.
Brent: So we're not even, you know, saying open source for AI stuff is actually feeling
Brent: quite different than saying open source just for source code.
Chris: We're using words that don't necessarily always mean the same thing in this case.
Brent: So if you have desires for a particular LLM, I think you probably at this point
Brent: need to use more words for what you want to have.
Chris: I'll take the next couple of ones. Anonymous came in with 2021 sats. No message.
Chris: Just a quick one.
Jason: Just a quick one. People who like to mess with computers.
Chris: There you go. Leo, shout out. Okay, Groovy comes in with 2,000 sats.
Chris: Also, no message, just the value, though.
Wes: Let's pull up.
Jason: Let's just help you. It will help us all. I don't know.
Wes: I think we pull Moon Knight up. What do you think, right?
Chris: Sure, go ahead.
Wes: Because one sat below the cutoff.
Chris: I like it.
Wes: Yeah, well, Moon Knight boosts in with 1,999 sats, or an honorary 2,000 sats. I'll chip one in.
Wes: I have to echo the sentiment that the light theme in KDE Plasma is great.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: Same.
Wes: I'm an always dark mode guy, but I've been running light mode on my system, and I love it.
Brent: Gross.
Jason: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? I got the same combination of my luggage.
Chris: It is really nice.
Jason: There was no 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Chris: They're getting close, though. But we do have some stats for you.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who did
Chris: support the show with a boost or streamed those stats as they listened.
Chris: 22 of you streamed stats, and collectively, y'all stacked 30,193 stats.
Chris: Thank you very much. When you combine that with our boosters,
Chris: we stacked a grand total of 540,083 sats this episode.
Chris: Thank you, everyone who boosted us. We appreciate you very much.
Jason: You're the best. Whoa.
Jason: Sometimes I just sing that in my car. It's Karate Kid. I'm all over it.
Chris: And, of course, thank you to our members who support us. We appreciate that
Chris: very, very much. And you made the show possible.
Chris: And with that, we'll treat you, we'll regale you, if you will,
Chris: with a pick. Are you ready, boys?
Brent: I'm ready.
Chris: All right. We got two, I believe, for you this week. Two picks to round out the show.
Chris: And the first one is one that Editor Drew sent our way. It is a native Tidal
Chris: desktop client for Linux.
Chris: You know, the Tidal music service. It sounds super good. It's got a modern UI,
Chris: custom themes, and bit perfect lossless audio.
Chris: And I'm talking 192 hertz, boys.
Jason: Delicious. Spicy.
Chris: It's called Sone. S-O-N-E. And if you're like me, like to go with the lossless
Chris: flack with your Tidal, it does that.
Chris: It can bypass pipe wire and pulse audio and claim direct hardware access if you want the full fancy.
Jason: Ooh.
Chris: And it has an autoplay mode to discover and play similar tracks,
Chris: as well as a volume normalization mode with automatic context switching between
Chris: albums and tracks for gain.
Wes: Looks like it's a 57% typescript and 39% rust.
Chris: Just a little rust.
Chris: See, and nobody believed us when we said we had a soundboard guy.
Chris: They didn't believe that Wes hired a soundboard guy.
Wes: And hey, GPL3.
Chris: Yes, yes. Okay, now this one, hard shift. Hard shift, but I want to put it out
Chris: there. I just want to get in your thought space so you know about this.
Chris: It's called QMD. And it's a mini command line search engine for your docs,
Chris: your knowledge bases, your meeting notes, your markdown files,
Chris: whatever it is sitting on your file system like an animal.
Chris: You can now search on it with the QMD on device search engine for everything you need.
Chris: Like for me, I just have a crap ton of old markdown notes and documentation,
Chris: even have some knowledge bases on my file server, things like that.
Chris: You can point QMD at it and it has a BM25 full text.
Wes: There is so much going on here. You take your query, it does a query expansion
Wes: on it, plus the original query, so it has two alternate queries,
Wes: and then it sends that down for both BM25, like keyword search and vector search,
Wes: on all three of those queries.
Wes: And then it has some kind of RFF fusion plus bonus algorithm that sort of tries
Wes: to smartly rank the different results it's going to get before it can synthesize a final answer.
Chris: And you can run it through an LLM for ranking, too, to have a decent rational ranking of the results.
Wes: And it's got a nice CLI that agents can just work with or you can work with
Wes: yourself but it's also got an MCP server and huge shout out for them.
Wes: It does have standard IO support but it's also got streamable HTTP.
Chris: It's about time.
Jason: Wow. You can never have enough QMD.
Chris: That's true. Let's check it out.
Jason: Or is it QMID? It's a little QMID in here.
Chris: I think I've always said it. I've always read QMD.
Jason: Yeah.
Wes: And it looks like it's, yeah, it's using via Node, Lama, CPP,
Wes: GGUF models to do a lot of this stuff. So it just runs locally.
Chris: Runs on your CPU. Ask me how I know.
Wes: You can also specify your own custom embedding model if you want to get tricky with it.
Chris: Or if you need to use a cloud model because you're running on like a Pi or something like that.
Jason: And the fan manufacturers are very glad it runs locally.
Chris: Yeah, that's true. And it's MIT licensed and nice to see.
Chris: Now, Brentley, you want to recommend a tried and true tool that comes in handy
Chris: when you're, say, at an Airbnb with horrible internet.
Brent: It's true. And this is a new, fresh discovery for me. And you all seem to be
Brent: like, oh, yeah, I used this tool like decades ago.
Chris: For about 15, 20 years.
Brent: Yeah. Thanks for telling me. Really appreciate it.
Jason: Friends let friends discover stuff on their own.
Chris: That's right. You know, maybe other people haven't discovered this.
Brent: I hope I'm the only one who hasn't, because then this is useless.
Brent: But I discovered on my own MTR,
Brent: which I was like an animal using ping
Brent: to try to solve these problems and here comes
Brent: mtr it basically combines the functionality of trace
Brent: routing and ping programs all in one network diagnostic tool and it turns out
Brent: it's really nice to use it has colors and stuff and it makes diagnosing these
Brent: kind of let's call them bnb internet issues way easier so how dare you guys not
Brent: Not tell me about this.
Chris: Sorry.
Jason: Look at the colors you had, too.
Brent: You've been friends for so long.
Wes: It's so beautiful. It's old enough that, you know, like some of the primary
Wes: history events was a changeover from the original author to like the current maintainer.
Wes: And that happened in October of 98.
Jason: Yeah. You know, I'm running that right next to my FVWM 95, just so everybody knows what that is.
Chris: Good.
Jason: I love it because I actually saw you run it on my laptop when you first grabbed it.
Jason: And I was like, what is that? And then because you played with it for a while.
Jason: And then I picked up my laptop and saw it running and I was like,
Jason: oh, that's right. That's the good old MTR. That's nice.
Brent: How am I so late to this one?
Wes: You know, there's a GUI version too now.
Jason: You're a young'un.
Chris: Honestly, can we just shout out the scale networking infrastructure team?
Jason: Yeah, one more time, please.
Chris: Because the Wi-Fi was more solid at scale with 6,000 people than the Wi-Fi is in our Airbnbs.
Wes: We probably could have just streamed out of scale. It might have been easier.
Jason: And when you think about it, this is permanent infrastructure at this Airbnb,
Jason: and that was temporary infrastructure.
Chris: It's amazing. It really is a shout out to the infrastructure team at Scales.
Wes: Especially because they have to show up early to like re-take over,
Wes: right? Like a lot of conferences are just using whatever the vendors provided,
Wes: and they have to like tap into the backhaul and all that.
Wes: But they put all their own APs down and rig things up.
Jason: You can see those Ethernet backhauls running along the floor with the leader.
Chris: Duct tape to the wall. Duct tape to the wall.
Jason: I was like, yeah, boys.
Chris: Good for them.
Jason: Those are my kind of fellas.
Chris: Yep. So we have links to these picks and everything else, which wasn't much
Chris: that we can link this week, but that'll all be over at linuxunplugged.com slash 657.
Chris: Or you know what the power move
Chris: is? If you want to shift into power move mode, which I mean, that's...
Brent: I hardly ever use power mode.
Chris: Yeah, be sparing with that. But if you do want to shift into power mode,
Chris: you go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: That's where the OG source is for everything and other fine shows.
Wes: Yeah, and there's a GitHub repo behind it if you want to get access to the raw details.
Chris: Or, you know, make it even better if it's if something about our website bugs
Chris: you, you can take action directly.
Chris: We always do appreciate that. If you want to get involved, too, we have a website team.
Chris: chat on matrix that you can sneakily find and always participate in the conversation
Chris: there and shout out to the web team just keeping it going right keeping it going up.
Wes: With our crazy changes.
Jason: Our web team doesn't skip leg day.
Chris: Yeah and you know that's right that's right and also just appreciate them a
Chris: little bit extra when we're on the road and they're just kind of keeping their
Chris: eye on things and everything's humming along things.
Brent: Always break when we leave home.
Chris: Uh-huh so it's really nice so thank you everybody over at the web team it's
Chris: not a huge team just a couple guys really but they're doing a great job and
Chris: uh an occasional west pain and Occasional brand.
Chris: Mostly I just come in when I have issues. I roll out.
Wes: Usually you made some new change in how you want to specify something.
Jason: I think you meant steamrolling.
Brent: It's usually like, oh, yeah, I published this show with a completely new method.
Brent: You guys don't mind fixing that.
Chris: Do you? Yeah, we fixed that today.
Jason: In 20 minutes.
Wes: And somehow they do.
Chris: Yeah, really. It's really impressive. So I guess I'm feeling when we're on the
Chris: road, I'm really appreciating the people that do the infrastructure out there,
Chris: including the listeners that are involved with their infrastructure.
Chris: So, with that, we will be back in the studio next week.
Chris: Of course, we'll be in the Mumble Room again. That'll be going details at jupiterbroadcasting.com
Chris: and on our website for that.
Chris: Mumble Room is a low-latency opus way to listen.
Chris: And then we have our Matrix Chat, which has not only our live chat,
Chris: but chatting going all throughout the week, sharing geeky details and projects people are working on.
Wes: Yeah, talk about Mestastic or organize a meetup in your area.
Chris: That's right.
Wes: You can do all kinds of stuff.
Jason: See it next time. Same bat. I was actually going to try to do it with the old-timey,
Jason: you know. Same bat station.
Chris: That's not bad.
Jason: I was going to try to get the cup going.
Chris: Also, thank you everybody who came out to Scaler Planet Nix and said hello,
Chris: shook a hand, or just attended. We really, really appreciate it.
Chris: And you made it a blast. And we'll see you all next week.
Wes: Chapter Transcripts!
Jason: Thank you. This mask smells like fart.