Episode Details

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 3, 2021

Mr. Leventhal, Come here I want to see you

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for May 3, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on May 3rd included Laura Abbott, Nate, Antranig Vartanian, François Baldassari, Tom Killalea, Land Belenky, and Sid?. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Before the recording started, we discussed:

• 2011 Solaris Family Reunion video ~20mins
• Katie Moussouris’s blog entry on the Clubhouse vulnerabilities
• Laura’s blog entry on the LPC55 vulnerability
• Land pointing us to the Atmega 328p MCU in a BK Medical endorectal probe
• François on the STM32F103 found in Pebble
• Intel Management Engine

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• ASPEED BMC chip
• [@1:24](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=84) So formal correctness is something that I think we are all very sympathetic with. > It’s very laudable, it’s also very hard.
  • From L3 to seL4 What Have We Learnt in 20 Years of L4 Microkernels? (paper)
  • Who guards the guards? Formal validation of the Arm v8-m architecture specification (paper) > Hardware architecture is an area where formal verification is more tenable, > a level you can readily reason about.
• Our challenge is how can we satisfy our need for formalism without getting too pedantic about it. You don’t want to lose the forest for the trees.
   A system we never deliver doesn’t actually improve anyone’s lives, that’s the challenge.
• [@5:20](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=320) Journal club experiences
  • Bootstrapping Trust in Modern Computers (book) > [@9:45](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=585) > We’ve tried to build a culture of looking to other work that’s been done. > Not because everything’s been done before, but because you don’t want to have to > relearn something that someone has already learned and talked about.
    > If you can leverage someone’s wisdom, that’s energy well spent.
• [@11:46](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=706) When systems repeat mistakes, engineers feel deprived of agency: “I suffered for nothing.” > Engineering is this complicated balance between seeing the world as it could be, > and accepting the world as it is. > As you get older as an engineer, it’s too easy to no longer see what could be, > and you get mired in the ways the world is broken. You can become pessimistic.
• Caitie McCaffrey on Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices (video ~45min)
• [@14:17](https://youtu.be/h-WSU3kiXVg?t=857) It’s dangerous to live only in the future, detached from present reality.

  Listen Now