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