bcantrill

4 ms·

1.
by bcantrill 5d ago
Well, definitely read Jason's blog entry that I linked to[0], which gets into the structural problems. To be clear, there were some extraordinary sales folks at Sun (as was said to me when I first came to Sun: "Remember that our
2.
by bcantrill 5d ago
Heh, yeah, we're hearing that a lot. We'll find a way of getting these out to people, but we're still debating the best way to do that (running an online store isn't zero work -- but it's also not an unsolved proble
3.
by bcantrill 5d ago
Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wro
4.
by bcantrill 5d ago
I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company i
5.
by bcantrill 12d ago
Saying that we don't need to fear human extinction in the next ten years (or even the next hundred?) does not feel like an extraordinary claim?
6.
by bcantrill 20d ago
I mean, fine, it's anecdotal -- but the numbers are also overwhelming (and don't seem to disagree with the tenor here). And look: you're obviously free to ignore me because you feel that the survey data is "completely wo
7.
by bcantrill 20d ago
And in that piece, I think I explained why it's important to take it seriously even though (and in fact, because!) it's self-reported?
8.
by bcantrill 20d ago
Interesting! Amusingly, if I feed that detector this blog post, it identifies it as confidently robot (97 out of 100 test passages). And running through my last five blog entries, they are all over the map, with three deemed at least "
9.
by bcantrill 20d ago
My experience is using Pangram quite often with lots of writing of all flavors (including a bunch of known origin). As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 year
10.
by bcantrill 20d ago
Well, give it a shot -- you'll likely find that that technique doesn't work nearly as well (at least with Pangram 4) as you think it might. When we had Max on the podcast[0], Adam explicitly asked him about exactly this (after all
11.
by bcantrill 20d ago
Right?! When I hit "That work was genuinely valuable" I literally hollered in exasperation.
12.
by bcantrill 20d ago
Yeah, fair -- and definitely not: I am earnestly just a fan of what they built (and I also think it's really important as a way of getting a check against rampant LLM use).
13.
by bcantrill 20d ago
This is (obviously?) false, but considering how well-capitalized we are at the moment, you do have me wondering what a quid pro quo would be for; perhaps in this fictional universe Pangram has lucked into some of the PCIe clock buffers th
14.
by bcantrill 20d ago
That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I
15.
by bcantrill 1mo ago
Wow, thanks for that shout out! When we started Oxide in 2019[0], my kids were 15, 12, and 7, so out of those time-consuming younger years. But when we started Fishworks[1] inside of Sun in 2006, that 15-year-old (now nearly 22) was not ye
16.
by bcantrill 1mo ago
"Light on details" is not often a criticism that we get, but I think you might be looking in the wrong place: for the kind of detail that you're looking for, you should be heading into our RFDs -- specifically (for the issue
17.
by bcantrill 1mo ago
(I think you meant "like hotcakes", not "like cupcakes"?) In any event: from the beginning, we have always been targeted at the enterprise buyer who is looking at annual public cloud bills in the tens, hundreds or (in so
18.
by bcantrill 1mo ago
Are you referring to our RFD system?[0][1] Because if so, good news![2] [0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001 [1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-ba... [2] http
19.
by bcantrill 2mo ago
Ironically, not only are you entirely wrong on the facts themselves, but the historical record in this case is incredibly (and unusually) crisp: the Merger Proxy Statement that Sun had to file with the SEC[0] has, in accordance with Delawar
20.
by bcantrill 2mo ago
This all became pretty personal over here! To answer these questions (or accusations?): Yes, I was at Joyent for the acquisition by Samsung -- but I also was not a founder, did not have a board seat, etc., so the involvement that I had, whi
21.
by bcantrill 3mo ago
Clearly, you find Oxide's approach very upsetting; in the words of Laurie Bream, "look inward."
22.
by bcantrill 3mo ago
Thank you for rooting for us! One important point of clarification: I am the CTO -- the CEO of Oxide is my co-founder, Steve Tuck. Long before we know what we wanted to do (or had a name for the company!), Steve and I knew we wanted to d
23.
by bcantrill 3mo ago
I appreciate that our approach to compensation leaves some with overwhelming feelings of whataboutery, but no, we (of course?) do not have equal equity: as we have said (several times?) equity broadly compensates for risk -- and risk has g
24.
by bcantrill 3mo ago
I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application material
25.
by bcantrill 4mo ago
We have taken funding from In-Q-Tel, yes. The idea that taking funding from IQT amounts to "CIA roots" is preposterous: aside from the fact that IQT writes very small checks (<$1M), an IQT investment does not necessarily even
26.
by bcantrill 4mo ago
I have died.
27.
by bcantrill 4mo ago
I'm not sure what else you're looking for; we are already explicit about the fact that we (like YC!) don't give detailed feedback. If you would like to DM me, I will look at the reviews of your materials and tell you what I c
28.
by bcantrill 4mo ago
Sorry to hear that you viewed it as a "litany of crap", but if it's of any solace, if you had slopped it, the result would not have been immediately different -- but you would be marked in our system in such a way that subseq
29.
by bcantrill 4mo ago
I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehu
30.
by bcantrill 5mo ago
This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential. As an aside on Sun R

More ›