Down the Linux rabbit hole (Friends)

30:35And so we're starting to think a lot about how do we eliminate the bottlenecks that come downstream? And what can we do with Depot that streamlines that? So obviously, friends, we are in an era of disruption. Things are changing. You know it. I know it. That's how it is. And the thing with production and what Kyle's talking about here is how in the world do you get your builds to be faster? How to get them to be more reliable, faster, more observability around those deployments. You need it. It's required. And Depot is there to help you. So a good first step is to go to depot.dev, get faster, try their trial.

31:10It's too easy. Again, depot.dev is where to go. It all begins at depot.dev.

31:21So how do you do your backups, Adam? Gosh, I don't have backups, Alex. i got raid okay i'm just kidding i really i really don't have off-site backups okay i'm not practicing three two one i'm i'm in a situation i could like it could go down right in this moment it could just like catch on fire over there and i will have to say you know get the get the thing get the extinguisher and put it out and my stuff is gone so i don't have backups Well, there goes one of my pitches for you. It would be an off-site backup. Well, that could be a pitch, though. I need an off-site backup. So what would you do?

31:58How would you do it? Well, I have a friend in Canada, so I'll tell you how I do it. So I have a ZFS array in the basement, which has just got, I think, five 20-terabyte hard drives in it. And then I use a program called ZREPL, Z-R-E-P-L for Z-Replicate, I guess. and it essentially mirrors all of the ZFS blocks to Canada, which is where my friend lives, and he's got a similar sized server. He actually runs an MSP, so he just carved out a few use of rack space for me to use there. Nice friend. He's a very nice friend. I'm sure he would offer you some rack space if you paid him a few Canadian rubles every month.

32:48and I just use Z REPL over tailscale because it's an SSH based protocol for the replication Could you do the same thing with Hetzner by any chance? I don't know enough about Hetzner I know you can do a lot of cool things with production machines I know you can do some pretty decent sized builds because you can choose your CPU and stuff like that but do they have that level of ZFS, ZFS to me because we're different? My brain is so confused about that letter because it's in my it's in my name alex ktz alex kt said people always give me a hard time about that one and i'm like yeah i'm not getting i don't know i'm just making sure that i say zfs that's it i just pick whatever could you do that with hester though could you do that with like a like i don't have the friend i wouldn't mind the friend but like for those who don't have the friend could you how could you do the same thing there's a couple of ways i mean hets the trouble with any cloud provider is that once you get over a few hundred gigs of storage the cost becomes prohibitive pretty fast.

33:45So there's a service called, and I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but there's a service called ZFS.rent. Go take a look. What you do is you send them a hard drive and they put it into a slot in one of their servers, I think in California, but don't quote me on that. And you pay them 10 bucks a month per slot that you occupy. So if you want 20 terabytes of offsite backup, up. You send them a 20 terabyte hard drive. It can be direct shipped from Amazon or Best Buy or wherever. Wow. They'll rack the drive for you and then they'll give you an IPv4 address and a VM. And then you use that as your ZFS replication target offsite for 10 bucks a month.

34:27Job done. That is good. That's a good find. I should get them on the show. This is a really, like I wish I thought about this zfs.rent is the coolest domain ever and then you know any notable person with raid in their house has got to be running zfs and if it's I mean if it's butterfs sure okay btrfs there just aren't many alternatives I mean I know I know butter gets gets a bit of a hard time perhaps unfairly but zfs at this point really for me there's nothing that comes close in terms of the reliability, the development trajectory that it has with the IX systems support and Clara systems up with Alan Jude in Canada as well.

35:16TrueNAS, of course, has been industry standard for sort of normal people for a long time. I say non-enterprise deployments of iSCSI storage and anything you want to do for a small, medium business, whatever. but like true NAS is the answer. I just can't think of anything better. Like be cache FS is kind of promising, but then there was that whole drama recently with Kent over street and Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel mailing lists and development trying to sneak. So it's all some weirdness there. So I'm unfamiliar. Oh, go look it up. It's a, it's a whole tranche of stuff. Drama. Yeah. Oh gosh.

35:56That's what we need is more drama. Well, be cache got accepted into the Linux kernel, which you would think would be an amazing thing, right? We've now got another file system native in the Linux kernel because this is one of the downsides of ZFS. It's the licensing drama. Are you familiar with all that? Loosely. I mean, I know about the origination in Sun and the accidental open sourcing. I've talked to Matt Ahrens before. We have a good friend at Oxide, Brian Cantrell. So I kind of have some of the back sort of the Sundays and I guess not Sundays like the day of the week, but s-u-n space days capital s un um so i got a little micro systems yeah some micro systems uh and it's got an interesting history and i think like even the accidental open sourcing of it was really wild and then now you have open zfs i don't know like an island ju came on the podcast and like talked about and and really got me wanting to become a bsd nerd and i tried for a little bit and i just did enough to be familiar but just was like okay linux is really for me like i just don't need what bf uh bsd has and it felt like an uphill battle for me personally but i get it i get it but the licensing thing is like really where it's at the issue at least the trouble with bsd is i learned linux first so all my muscle memory is linux same that was me and like just stuff like the way that grep works or sed works or just basic command line utilities like that.

37:26It's just different enough in BSD land that I'm like, I'll just go back to what I know. There's a lot to like about the BSD universe. There really is, but it's just never stuck for me. Yeah. So offsite backups, ZFS.rent, unaffiliated. I don't have any experience with it. So if you check it out, yo, your mileage may vary. Report back, of course. The other option you've got is just a Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive and shove it under the stairs at your mom's house or something. So how does that work then? I mean, ZFS is so RAM intensive, but I guess for a backup you don't need a lot of RAM, right?

38:07Precisely. Is that the idea? It's just a backup so the arc can be small. You are not going to be limited by the performance of the Raspberry Pi. You're going to be limited by the performance, presumably, of your internet pipe. Right. That's going to be the bottleneck. and even if you do end up being limited by some local thing on the raspberry pi it's a backup does it matter it's going to run overnight every night for the next 5 10 20 years whatever so if it takes an hour or it takes six hours who cares right i have to do this like you're you're okay this is my you've given me a christmas present thank you alex this is my this is what motivates me dude is just like yeah solving real problems for people so uh i'm glad to hear that i like that okay so uh image is what you stood up you're off of google images if i understand correctly there's no favorites list like i try to presume in google anymore you've gotten a whole new hosted system that is image all the way and your family is still happy with their google frames And one of the family texted me this morning and said, my photo frames stopped working.

39:24And I'm like, oops. I might have pulled the trigger a bit too soon on the deletion, but I just wanted to stop paying Google eight bucks a month for the two terabytes, you know? Yeah, right. How many hard drives do you buy? Well, for eight bucks a month, amortized over five years, I can buy probably two 20 terabyte drives. Yeah, it's not the end of the world. I mean, there is some value there that you don't have to manage it, but now you get your friend. You got your friend in Canada? Well, I'm also not training Gemini's future models with my images and the images of my daughter. And there's a huge digital sovereignty aspect to my motivations for getting off the big tech train when it comes to really deeply personal data like photos and documents.

40:08And I mean, I'm sure many of us use Gmail even, and I've been a Gmail user since, I guess, 2004, 2005 era. like when it was cool and a beta product. Yeah. And I look back at the original emails. I'm like, Oh my God, every email I've had in the last 22 years, they know what it is. It's a lot of data. It's a big data set. So you get paid to run a home lab though. Would you say that it's fair to say you get paid to run a home lab for the most part or play with a home lab? Well, you get paid to make videos. The phrase, if you do what you love, you never work another day in your life is very true for me.

40:48I'm extremely privileged and lucky to get to do what I do. Like Thanksgiving weekend was just a couple of weeks ago as we record. And I decided that I was going to learn Kubernetes over the weekend. Oh, how'd that go? And I spent the whole weekend glued to my laptop and I had a great time. And I've now got a three node Kubernetes cluster in a closet and it works great. And then I was able to turn that into a piece of content for work. So, you know, for me, I'm just very privileged. Like this is what I'll be doing anyway. So the fact I get paid to do it is like just a huge bonus for me. Can we maybe touch quickly on, I guess as long as you'd like to actually, I said quickly, but however, these are the fields that I think get exposed through vibe-based podcasting, let's just say, right.

41:38I got this vibe that going to tail scale from being a podcaster, I don't know what else you did then. So I'm not going to diminish what you were doing. I don't know. Like I know you were running the podcast, then you got the job at tail scale. What were you doing before? Were you consulting or like, how was that? What I'm trying to get to is like, how was it to go from like podcaster that I knew you of at least. And then now you work for tail scale to produce content there i was a red hat consultant in europe for a year or two and then i moved to the states and i got a job as a tam sort of managing open shift accounts and things it was fine it was pretty boring as long as the customers were happy what's a tam a technical account manager i'm sorry okay so yeah i basically have i don't know half a dozen accounts assigned to me and i would have weekly calls with those customers big big spend customers and make sure that they were getting value for money and that their support tickets were being slipped through the queue correctly.

42:38And if there was anything new coming, like I was there during the OpenShift 3 to OpenShift 4 transition, which was a big shift from a RHEL base to an Atomic Immutable Base OS image and re-architecture of like around Core OS and Project Atomic and all that stuff for Red Hat. And just helping customers navigate the complexities of all that stuff and just telling them what they need to know ahead of time. And so there's a lot of skills in, in that, that actually translate pretty well to video. There's also a lot of skills that translate from being on the genius bar back in the day to being personable and being on video and, and sort of figuring out what someone's problem is and then presenting it to them in a way that they can understand.

43:20Um, so it's just, you know, where I am now is like the summation of an entire 20 year journey, really just failing upwards.

43:31talk to me about the the personal feels though of getting to go from i guess seems like interesting work but maybe not so fulfilling based on what you're saying you were running self-hosted at the time i believe right podcast and that podcast has since ended and then you go to tail scale like being able to go and create content like hey i used to do this stuff for free you know marginally for free sure you probably have sponsors to maybe cover some rent or some things like that and some some uh some pieces but not the full paycheck necessarily to get to do it as a job well you've got two routes to go as a content creator don't you you've got one which is to do it the really hard way and do it yourself and bootstrap your own small business and interface with all these different companies and manage sponsorships and negotiate every cent that they give you.

44:28And then you've also got to be a creator and an editor and like just, you've got to be five to 10 different roles in one. I chose to go an equally difficult, but totally different path of trying to do that. But within a corporate organization, a startup organization. I've been really lucky in so much as that the Tailscale channel doesn't have to pay for itself in the traditional way that, say, any other content creator has to pay for itself because it's a brand awareness play, ostensibly. That's the purpose of the YouTube channel is just to say, hey, look at Tailscale. Look at the cool stuff you can do with Tailscale.

45:07And that's it. We're not reviewing products. We're not taking paid placement sponsorships. We're not doing any of that other stuff, which I kind of find a little bit dirty, to be honest. I don't ever really enjoy doing that stuff. It's a necessary evil. I understand, you know, everybody's got to eat. But, you know, the attention that you're selling as a content creator, you know, you're monetizing that attention for, well, money, I suppose. So, yeah, I mean, it's nice to have insurance. It's nice to have a paycheck and all that kind of stuff doing it the tail scale way. I don't know where it'll end up, though.

45:44I mean, I really, I love what I do. I mean, the fact I get a paycheck reliably every month is fantastic. But there's that phrase in, do you remember, of course you've got Mike Judge playing behind you on Silicon Valley. You remember Office Space, right? Where he has the interview with the Bobs? Yes. If Initek ships a few extra units, I don't see an extra dime. Where's the motivation? Right. And of course my motivation is I get a paycheck every month. but if the channel goes from 1600 subscribers to 53 000 subscribers i still get paid the same yeah you know i suppose the validation you couldn't negotiate though right you could hinge some some uh some hallmarks and some milestones but you get to hire too so you get to make some friends yeah yeah i suppose the validation is the promotion is the fact that i'm still employed is you know lots of different positive signals but like it's just these are the sorts of things you think about in the shower and just at like 2am your mind starts going you're like well how can i maximize just everything how can i maximize it for tail scale how can i maximize it for alex how can i make sure that the audience is getting the most out of it too because ultimately if the audience is happy that will that will drive everything else down the road so really my focus isn't on me.

47:08It's not on Tailscale. It's on what people want to see and need to hear and want to hear. Some of my best performing content has been hour long deep dive tutorials in how to set up a self-hosted server from scratch. It's got nothing to do with Tailscale, does it? But it's on the Tailscale channel. And so it's a really weird, unique thing. And I've started to see other competitors of ours copying that strategy, which is kind of interesting. But yeah, It's a very unique way of doing DevRel, because if you think about what developer relations typically do, they'll be hacking away on SDKs and API code on the back end.

47:45And people don't really see it unless you're a developer and you want to integrate with, you know, back in the day, Twitter or something. And then they might go to a conference and talk to a room full of a couple of hundred people. And that talk is never seen again. whereas what we're doing is effectively that same cycle that same loop but we're not focused on the developer aspect as much we're focused on the end user the top the top of funnel user mythical person and um getting them excited about using tailscale for free and hopefully they have such a good time that they then go why aren't we doing this at work why are we doing open vpn why are we and hopefully then that motion turns into a sale two three four years down the road whatever it turns out to be it's just a it's a fascinating space and i don't know i kind of feel a bit weird talking about it publicly but there you go it's um i'm enjoying it i'm sorry i feel weird about it do you feel like um it's just a bit navel gazy isn't it but anyway well i suppose you're the guest here though right you're the friend here so you you have to navel your gaze a little tiny bit just to be fulfill your role come on alex you can talk about me if you want to but that's not any fun the question i have for you i suppose is you work at tailscale this is going to be on youtube and this may be seen by other people how honest can you be about your curiosity like do you have an itch and if you have an itch could you do you feel like you have the freedom to speak publicly about the curiosities as a developer as an engineer as a linux nerd as a home lab or as a self-host or whatever i mentioned a few minutes ago that the channel to date has basically been just me that comes with a huge bonus of it's just me that decides what gets put out so to date the last two and a half years i've been at tailscale yeah i've had basically complete creative freedom which is both a huge blessing and a massive responsibility at the same time because you're representing the brand and uh you know for example uh kevin purdy who is uh ex ars technica who we hired earlier this year to to write for our blog he's an amazing writer by the way you should totally go and look at the tailscale blog he um he wrote a piece about uh how to jailbreak your kindle and put tailscale on it and it was on hacker news yesterday and we saw a huge spike on the back end, but putting something about jailbreaking a device and breaking a EULA on a corporate blog, there are just certain topics you can't really touch.

50:20And that one, it falls under sort of fair use and it's fine, you know, we think legally speaking. But there are huge tranches of self-hosting that I just cannot talk about. You know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, the stuff behind you is what I'm talking about. For sure. And, you know, we can't talk about circumventing geopolitical, geoblocked content, right, restrictions, and circumventing copyright, obviously, and everything that goes with it. And for me, the reality was some of that stuff was the reason I even got into self-hosting in the first place. So I have to find a whole other seam of stuff to talk about, which can be challenging, admittedly, sometimes.

51:02But then we have product release weeks, and you sort of think to yourself, right, well, now I'm going to actually put together an advert effectively for the products, but how am I going to do this in a way that doesn't feel like an advert? And so it can be tricky, but also very, it's very creatively challenging and rewarding at the same time. What are you doing in your home lab currently that isn't so much telescope, but more just like, I know you just mentioned image, but could you describe, you know, the level of home lab do you have? Do you have a massive Univy system? Are you rocking something else?

51:40Like, take me through from gateway to client. Yeah, Unify fanboy over here. You are? Okay. Yeah. It's hard not to like them, right? It really is. Well, apart from the price. There's definitely a Unify tax. The price definitely does get you. Yeah. Yeah, I've got the UCG Fiber, their new Fiber Gateway that's really nice. and I replaced a, I think I had a Dream Machine Pro or something. Like when we were getting ready to sell the house, I just downsized everything from sort of rack gear as much as I could to the sort of small utility switches. Nice. So I've got like a ton of those Lenovo mini PCs, the Kubernetes cluster I mentioned a few minutes ago.

52:24I've got a couple of MS01 Minis Forum devices doing like all the heavy lifting. I've got 100 terabytes of spinning rust in the basement, give or take, running ZFS that I talked about. That's in a 19-inch Sligo case. But yes, it's pretty minimal, dare I say, for what I do. Like I need a set of infrastructure to run tailscale stuff on for the videos, and then I need a separate set of stuff to run my home sort of pseudo prod. And yeah, I try and keep it as simple as I can, like 10 gig for all the trunks, the unified aggregation switches for like 260 bucks are great what about uh any applications you mentioned kubernetes and that's that's kind of new it's like three weeks old for you i would say right since thanksgiving three weeks yeah roughly so what are you running on there what what was that you wanted to learn it but what are you running what kind of applications are on there nothing yet i don't trust myself with it nothing um that's cool my my media server primarily is my my main application server.

53:28So that has Plex on it. That has Jellyfin that has all the other stuff. Paperless, next cloud, smoke ping. Interesting. Plex and Jellyfin. Yeah. Because I, you know, Plex keep turning the screw, don't they? About, you know, just trying to, trying to stream you, trying to charge you money to stream your own files, that kind of stuff. Are they, I didn't, I haven't experienced that personally, but what is, what's the latest? I'm ready for their rug pull. It was about two weeks ago. There was another, another nail in the coffin there. I mean, look, I understand like Plex need to get money from their audience to support development.

54:07The trouble with it is that they gave it all away for free at the beginning, or they gave lifetime passes away for too cheap. You know, I bought Plex lifetime for 75 bucks 12 years ago. Wow. And they haven't seen another dime from me since. except for a bunch of marketing and new users potentially well okay in my specific case maybe but that's not the average i guess me too a little bit but yeah i mean that's not we're not the average user are we and no i would say probably not that's not a good business model like recurring revenue that's what you need to build a business around and it's it's interesting if if plex launched today with its client app suite with its um fit and finish and polish and codex support and everything else i'd probably pay five ten bucks a month for it and not think twice but because it has been free for so long or in my mind at least i paid that lifetime fee and it is free forever after that right it's it's it's tough like you can't ever really charge for something that used to be free or used to be in a lifetime tier.

55:15So they kind of, kind of ruined their business model 15 years ago and they're kind of paying for it now. So it's tough. It's tough for them. That is true. That is true. I like Plex amp. So outside the Plex ecosystem, I listened to a lot of my music externally, hence the port. and Plexi app is a dedicated you got it on iPhone I believe I think you have it as a Mac app via the iPad app I guess I don't know the other platforms I guess maybe on Linux potentially Android I'm sure and Plex has done a great job of having like client apps kind of everywhere and so you're right I They. I guess if they had an open core, right?

56:05an open core that if I could self host, which I guess we already do self host, then maybe not, I guess you're right. Like, how do you, how do you charge for that? I suppose maybe particular features, like you said, codecs or like I do. So an example of maybe how they can make money. Hey, don't do this by the way, is I watch a lot of 4k content in my home lab, in my home. And so maybe I'm a unique kind of maybe a super user, so to speak. Like I'm the kind of person you may, I'm an enterprise customer, so to speak, to Plex. Maybe to get HDR from my 4K and have that codec, which requires a certain amount of developer tooling and engineering to make that work.

56:51Well, maybe you pay for things like that, like certain or lossless. I guess that would be kind of sad to force you to compress your own music. but if you had lossless on your wave files and that wasn't gated but maybe you gated to get money but you're right it is kind of a road pull to the lifetime customers maybe there's a lot more customers they can get that aren't lifetime and they could just kind of give us the pass because we've been invested for so long i don't know i do think piracy is going to have a moment as you know inflation continues to bite and people just can't afford as the media space continues to homogenize you saw the Warner Brothers acquisition by Netflix recently those massive corporate mergers are never good for consumers it's always going to result in long term higher prices, less choice, less content more gates I do think piracy will have its moment over the next few years as a result of all that homogenization.

57:54We kind of had a nice honeymoon period for the last decade, led by Spotify, I think, where that was all you can eat. But you're starting to see famous artists now pulling out of Spotify because they don't pay their artists enough. And people like Tidal are coming along and Cobas and you end up with this fragmented ecosystem. And the same thing's happening with video. Arguably, it's already happened with video because of just how lucrative a streaming service can be. I remember the original promise of Netflix was that it would just be one subscription and you get all the movies and all the TV that you can eat.

58:36And then that kind of fell by the wayside as the studios realized how much - They're making all of our money. Yeah, exactly. So video, as you well know, is expensive to produce, let alone blockbuster scale, graphics effects and entire industry's worth of crews and sound people and costume and set design and everything that goes into making a good movie. You've got to recoup somehow. yeah do you have targets near you like Target stores in Raleigh oh yeah Le Target yeah is that one of your places does your wife love Target well my 5 year old does because most times she leaves with some some new thing my 5 year old loves well he's going on 6 now but he loves let's go to Target mom because Target means maybe something for him uh the reason why i asked that question was because i don't really care to go to target necessarily i mean let's be honest i don't think i like to go to any store unnecessarily like if i don't have a mission what's the reason to be here to browse yes what's the like come on what's the point here uh but apparently it's to spend time with your family and so i'm cool with that i want to do that okay i am okay with that i can do at home without spending money.

1:00:03We don't have to go to Target and buy the snacks we don't need and the things that we, you know, to be attracted by the end caps or whatever. I'm just going to not play that game. But I do play that game. And I used to happily play that game because I could be like, hey, babe, I'm going to go over to the Blu-ray section for a little bit. Oh, yeah. It's not there anymore. No. It's not there anymore, Alex. What are we doing? The only place you can buy my hard disk content is from the ultimate bookstore, Amazon, you know, you will own nothing and you will like it. Isn't that Corey doctor's vacation culmination?

1:00:45Well, I think that was actually the new world order or maybe the new world forum or something like that. They did that. And then obviously it's part of the vacation that he's, you know, extrapolated from that. If Corey was here, probably uh word salad me for 30 minutes and how i'm wrong but i love cory he's the best i really love i love it's been too long actually we should get cory back on the pod soon but yet you can't really go to the physical store and i mean you can't buy cds anymore either so whatever but like do not take my blu-rays away okay like i want to own the film and i want to have it in perpetuity like i don't want to buy the white album on every format just let me buy the one and i'm done right let me have the lossless version of it the blessed version of it you mean you don't want to buy the remastered remix uh deluxe super edition box set on 33 rpm vinyl uh you know i'm tempted reissue i'm tempted i'm tempted but then i would just be buying i would be like filling somebody's pocket who bought the license to that that uh those masters you know anyways whatever what are your thoughts on the lack of media or the the fact that it's only viable on amazon i think piracy will have its moment how will it have its moment though if it's if there's no media to pirate how will you pirate oh they're sneaky they'll find ways to rip it in other ways, I think.

1:02:14From the stream, like encryption, de-encrypt it. Yeah, I mean, well, ultimately, it's displaying on a screen somewhere, and there are ways to, I don't know how much we should talk about this, there are ways to circumvent pretty much any DRM if you try hard enough. Okay. I don't try very hard, personally, but I can imagine there's somebody who does. Yeah. That's for other people to do, right? Right. I might benefit off their fruit on occasion. forbidden fruit i try to buy all my media honestly i mean i really don't i'm not calling you out and i don't even know what i don't know what would make me want to be i guess a pirate or a consumer of pirated material yeah in this stage of my life when i was younger yes because like i didn't know any better and i also was poor and i'm still like just like marginally less a little bit little less we talked about this a little earlier on didn't we talked about the experience the overall experience of docker versus podman right okay and the overall user experience of having five or more subscriptions and having to go to a store and buy a physical disc ultimately is worse than what you can get if you put your eyepatch on i see um the the overall user experience is just better.

1:03:34And I think there's a, I don't even know if the movie studios can, can coalesce around any single service. I don't think it's possible, but until they do like the quality is better, the bit rate, you know, they're not going to do rug pulls and remove content, you know, like friends famously was on Netflix and now isn't it somewhere else. And so like that stuff happens all the time. One of my favorite cartoons, Final Space just got completely deleted from the legal internet. Really? Yeah. Someone's life's work, the creator of that piece of work is just gone. And what is it called? Final Space. What is this Final Space?

1:04:17I don't know about this. It's a stupid cartoon, but it's quite entertaining. It's got this cute little green thing in it called Mooncake. Okay. anyway it's a it's it's a fun little thing to put on late at night when you just want to vegetate is this not on netflix then i don't know i used to be on one of them i forget where let's see here i landed on a google result oh well at least it's not available on ad supported plan because i am an ad supported user of netflix i guess that's more of a fool's like Like, let me just increase your price or give you. Actually, it's not as supported. Actually, it is, but it's because I get it from T-Mobile.

1:05:00So I have a phone and they give me Netflix and I'm like, OK, I'll get it for free. Why would I pay a little bit more to get the ads removed? I don't mind them. And honestly, Netflix does a pretty good job with the ads. I mean, they're not that invasive. I hate the pause screen. I want to pause to see the thing, not the ad. I'll do everything I can to avoid adverts I'll pay for YouTube premium I will run SmartTube to watch YouTube I will pay for Netflix ad free tier you know the reality is that I just don't want to support the behaviour of companies that will do these like Final Space is a great example so not only was it cancelled before the show's narrative finished which happens all the time on streaming services but they also just deleted the entire series from Netflix so that they could use it as a tax write-off.

1:05:58I just don't want to support that behavior. It's the same thing with Google photos. It's the same thing with media. I think without sounding too much like a mouthpiece for like Corey or something like genuinely it's, it's, it's egregious what a lot of the, the industry, the big tech industry is, is getting away with using our data to train their models to then sell us back even more. and like the AI bubble, whatever you want to call it, like it's an industrial bubble. So there will be some useful stuff comes out the other side of it. But when it goes pop, I think it's going to be very painful for people.

1:06:31Oh, interesting.

1:06:54Well, friends, I'm here with my good friend, Chris Kelly over at Augment Code. Chris, I'm a fan. I use Augie on the daily. It's one of my daily drivers. Now, I use Cloud Code. I use Augment, Augie. And I also use Amp Code and others. But Augie, I keep going back to it. And here's where I'm at. I feel like not enough of our audience knows about Augment Code, not enough about Augie, the CLI. It's amazing. I love it. What can you share? Yeah, we often say Augment is the best coding assistant you've never heard of. And that's both frustrating as someone that works there and is very proud of the work we've done, but also inspiring.

1:07:31We want to go and sort of punch above our weight because we aren't anthropic and we aren't open AI. And so the quality of the product itself with our context engine, once you do touch it, people are just blown away by that. And so that keeps me going every day. So not to bear the lead here, but this is a paid spot. You are sponsoring this show to get this awareness. Now, at the same time, we're selective and I love to use your tool, but there is in the world. So a lot of developers look at the space and they say, OK, well, how long can this work? How long is this sustainable in the case of Cursor or Windsurf?

1:08:07Or you pick the name and you think discounted tokens. Help me shape a lens for our audience. I think it's a lot of awareness, right? Like Cursor got a lot of publicity early on for like fast revenue growth, which well deserved. I think, you know, frankly, some of the media gets the story wrong. And that like, if I gave you$1.50 for every dollar you sent me, I'd be the fastest growing startup in the valley. And so when you're selling discounted tokens, yes, of course, you're going to grow very fast. But all that money plus more goes to the model providers. So I think the real story is the story of Anthropic.

1:08:45and being an API provider, I think the market has just moved so fast and there's so many pieces of competition out there that it's just hard to get noticed. So friends, I love Augment Code and I love using Augie and I highly recommend you use it. I love using Augie. I can hand Augie a well-defined specification, a well-defined PEP, as I call them in my world, an agent flow and it executes flawlessly. So the cool thing about Augie that I love most really is that context engine. And I can hand it a task and it can just churn away on my well-defined plan and just never bother me and accomplish the mission.

1:09:25It is so cool leveraging the latest models, the context engine, and all the fun things behind the scenes in that awesome CLI. So yes, go try it out, augmentcode.com. Right in the top there is a CLI icon, a terminal icon. Click that, install it, and change your world. It's gonna be awesome. opmancode.com and also by our friends at framer you know most design tools they lock you behind a paywall well framer flips that script it is a free full feature design tool that does something most site builders cannot it's actually designed for designers framer has already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites but with design pages they've defined and redefined what it means to design for the web.

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1:11:00you said ai we have to talk about ai we haven't talked about ai yet no you said that You look at the utility that people get from these things. Certainly like when I'm writing a video script, I'll run a bit that I'm stuck on through it and say, is this, what do you get? What do you understand as to what I'm saying here? Does this make sense? Like I'll do it into a voice memo and dictate it and then give it to Claude and say, polish this explanation about something or tweak this bit of code and make this do this instead of that or whatever. um historically if you look at industrial revolution like we're going back a couple hundred years here there was a huge amount of speculation in the industrial revolution era um a lot of people made a lot of money and that's happening now um in the ai space and not every not every idea that should have been funded got funded um if i mean the other way around there were a bunch of ideas that shouldn't have been funded that did get funded simply because people were hoping, speculating, right?

1:12:02We've seen this many times over the years. But these industrial revolutions and the AI revolution is one of those because it's a tooling thing as opposed to, say, 2008, which was a made-up financial banking bubble, whatever. There was nothing material, you know, moving humanity forward there. So say what you like about AI, but it's here to stay, I think. And the big players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, of course, they'll be here to stay because every other startup is building their tooling on those big guys' models. They're not doing the R &D spend to train their own models. They're just using Anthropic models for an API key behind the scenes.

1:12:48So I think the big guys will be okay. um but it's it's yeah it's the circle it's the circle of of money that has me concerned like open ai giving nvidia money nvidia investing back in open ai and so on uh right that's worrying yeah what is your uh relationship with ai are you a daily active user are you what's your probably yeah i'll reach for it quite often now yeah okay do you have the itch right now on the pod to be like can i just clod something real quick just because you have to no no i mean if i'm stuck trying to explain something i might instead of where i'd have reached for a google search a year ago i'd probably reach for a chat now instead with a claude or a chat gpt whatever but it's just replaced Google entirely for me.

1:13:44Yeah. Whether that remains once the adverts start getting dropped, we'll see. But yeah, I've seen some things shift in chat GPT that I talked about on a podcast recently. We're talking about trying to determine which podcasts were the better AI focused podcast to listen to. And we were hoping to find practical AI in that list, which is a show we co-produced for a while with Chris Benson and Daniel Whitenack. And they've since taken the show on their own. We still are working with them behind the scenes. But, you know, we have some skin in the game, let's just say. And so we're just curious, like, how did it rank whenever you search for it in chat?

1:14:32and like when i did that in chat gpt in particular at the bottom area we would we would put a new prompt in after you put the initial one you've read the whole thing well down at the bottom it said create a playlist on spotify and i was just like i mean i get the connection there but i don't because i'm not trying to make a playlist i didn't prompt you about a playlist I guess I kind of did by asking about a list of podcasts. I mean, maybe it's to some degree relevant, but like they're probably getting money in some way, shape or form or a kickback. I'm assuming. If they aren't now, that is certainly a business model they will deploy in the future.

1:15:11Yeah. When, when the speculative bubble does whatever it does, the, the, they haven't turned on ads yet. They haven't turned on X rated stuff yet. You know, there's a whole bunch of levers that Sam Altman and people at his level can pull to monetize that they aren't doing right now. Just the whole space doesn't, long term at the moment, doesn't add up because the energy requirements to power it are just so vast. I mean, they're spinning up nuclear power stations to power this stuff. We're seeing that we can't manufacture enough NAND chips. We're seeing that it's just bonkers. it doesn't add up long term but and when you mean nand chips you mean are you talking about like ram type things yeah yeah so the little black chips on your ram sticks those are nand flash chips they go on m.2 ssds they go on ram sticks they go they go they go everywhere in everything like everything literally everything that has a electronics in it has some kind of nand flash storage somewhere on it.

1:16:18And so it's going to affect regular people really soon. Not, I mean, right now as a PC builder. Ram prices are through the roof right now. I mean, like, have you tried to buy Ram right now? Yes. Just building the Kubernetes cluster a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. I mean, thankfully I bought some Ram recently for a build of mine just before that, like spike. And I was like, I was kind of sad because I needed, I actually meant to buy a set of four dims as one kit, but like a full, I bought two disparate kits of two thinking I could just put them together. And anyways, I'll spare you the details, but it's just like with this particular processor, it's an AMD processor.

1:16:59And it's got challenges with like a non-kitted or what do you call those? You probably know the term. Bend. They're not bend to each other. and i i didn't um i'm learning right like any like any home labor i've never had to buy four sticks of ram and concern myself if they were from the same bin or bend together it's just tricky ram on the new chips that's very sensitive to the timing they are and especially the faster speeds i mean i think when you're on the edge like that you're going to the faster speeds then you should you know expect some dragons to some degree but the dragon i didn't expect was the cost dragon because i was like i gotta swap these out like oh my gosh what happened to the prices like i didn't pay that two weeks ago and then now it's like astronomically priced i i would even like i'm like okay fine i'm cool with it i'll just only use two for now i'll make do yeah it's tough like um i mean you should have everything like even daft stuff that you don't even think needs ram or needs a NAND chip in it, like in your car, you know, new cars, they're probably expensive enough to absorb a few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars there, but, uh, stuff like, I don't know, a coffee pot, the smart coffee pot will have a NAND chip in it.

1:18:19And that's not got enough margin to absorb a three, four X price increase without that price going up. And yeah, it's just a, it's going to be tough. Yeah. That's interesting. So that's the, the negative side i would say of ai what do you have a positive side to ai how has it impacted your home lab well uh take it take a look at this website quicksync.ktz.me 100 vibe code slop oh gosh what is this this is a benchmarking website that i put together over the weekend that allows people to benchmark the transcoding performance of their intel cpus so trying to answer the question of which CPU do I buy for my media server?

1:19:05Oh my gosh, this is spectacular. And this was me and Claude for about two or three evenings this weekend. So my positives around AI are that I know just enough to be dangerous as someone that's been adjacent to developer technologies for the last 15 years. I'm not very good at actually writing the code. it takes me way too long and I get bored before I get finished. This allowed me to get something finished and out the door way faster than I ever could have done by myself. Okay, I didn't learn the intricacies of how the API calls work and what have you under the hood, but honestly I don't need to.

1:19:45It's just a flat JSON file that gets stored in Cloudflare R2. This page loads that JSON file client side and then renders the web page locally. and that's all I need to know as kind of like a, a normal developer adjacent person. I don't need to know every, every intricacy. So for me, it's like this, this has allowed something to exist in the world that I would have really liked to have seen 10 years ago when building my first server. And, you know, it's, it's taken the information from being a flat text file to being something interactive that people can kind of, you know, enjoy, hopefully. So, you know, help me understand what I'm actually seeing here so how are you getting all these benchmarks it's crowdsourced so you see up in the top right hand corner you can clone the git repo to your server and then you could just run the benchmark script and then it will submit it will pull down a jellyfin container because it just uses FFmpeg it pulls down some drone footage that I edited together a couple of years ago into like a test file and then it will just encode those files in different codecs.

1:20:54So it will do a CPU software encode to give you an idea of the raw horsepower of your CPU. It will then jump into the quick sync engine, which is the hardware transcoding thing built into your CPUs. So it does 1080p, it does 4k 8-bit HEVC, and then 4k 10-bit HEVC hardware encodes. And so you can kind of see a graph, you can kind of see on the graph, the performance of the newer chips is a lot better, as you would expect. But the energy usage also goes up. So it's like trying to find that sweet spot between energy usage, performance, price, et cetera, right? So yeah, crowdsourced information. This is not a scientific experiment of super high accuracy, but it's the best we've got in the real world.

1:21:45Is there a plan for an API? to do what I guess pull it look at it I guess you do have the website I guess an API just lets you have access to the data in a different way that isn't a flat file it's you know JSON you know it pulls it down as a JSON file right now so I guess I could just put a link to the raw JSON file sure there's nothing proprietary or sensitive in there there's no So the only user identifying information for GDPR reasons I wanted to keep was an optional like submitter ID. I don't record IP addresses or anything like that. So like when you submit your results, you've got the option to give me your username if you want to.

1:22:31You don't have to. But everything else is just, you know, generic CPU score this. So, yeah, I mean, there's nothing sensitive in there. Wow. I mean, I like this kind of stuff. This is, this is those kinds of things. Like you had said, this is where I'm really, this is where I'm truly enamored is that, like you said, you know, just enough to be dangerous, not enough to actually code yourself. And if you did, even if you did, you probably get bored because it would take you weeks or months or just, it just too much of your life taken away. but you have the knowledge to connect different dots that someone only, only someone like you, or maybe a small few like you would have those dots to connect.

1:23:15And then now you have this superpower essentially to take that into an idea, architect it into some version of a, of a platform. And then it makes me more productive. It makes me more productive. Yeah. And this will pay dividends in the future though. I mean, And I don't know if this has a sad ending or a happy ending because at some point maybe Intel CPUs go away. It's a whole different subject. I'd like to expand this to support things like NVIDIA GPUs because obviously they have the NVN concoders in them. Yeah. The newer AMD CPUs have hardware transcoding as well. Yeah. So expanding it to support different vendors.

1:23:58Intel Arc GPUs, of course, are important to test as well. I just don't have any of those on hand. So, yeah, I do want to expand this as we go. But for right now, at least it's just quick sync. But over time, yeah. So I'm looking at Morgan Peterman's, I love that last name, Peterman. His profile, because he is the dependency that you came from. You forked his quick sync calc, I assume, to build on top of. He and I worked together at Red Hat, and we were bored one afternoon and put together this initial version of the script. So I just forked it and built on top of it, and it's where we are. It's open source, baby.

1:24:38It's in action. So his commit was like last year, so 22 commits there. You're now at 127, so 100 or so commits on top of the original QuickSync calc. I imagine you'll probably contribute back to upstream, potentially, just leave it as its own thing, maybe expand it. And I think it was always in my intention that my repo would be like the primary, I think, in this case, because I wanted to give Morgan a lot of credit because he did a lot of the work on the original script. But in terms of like long term ownership, that was what I was more interested in. So I don't know. We could contribute back to upstream.

1:25:21I'm not trying to call out what you I'm just thinking of like, how do you how do you architect it? because it's not called QuickSync Benchmarks, but if you're talking about NVIDIA GPU type things, then it goes from QuickSync Benchmarks to something different. There's a different life to it. It morphs at that point, which is really interesting about this curiosity because you scratch one itch, and then next thing you know, you're like, well, now I can do that, and I've got this idea that connects there, and that idea influences this and enables that. in a way that I couldn't do just as a solo dude before AI came along.

1:26:05Because you're at the velocity where the ideas can flow. They still flow faster than what the AI can generate, but not that much faster. So, yeah, that's the phenomenon that I think a lot of folks are experiencing. and i'm curious you know what were some of the things that you did to to do a little less vibing and a little more coding i know there's this pejorative nature to the word vibe code or if you if you have vibe coded something it's like oh come on now right you you you don't know rust you could you didn't write that yourself seriously yeah i spent a long time in the planning phase with it so okay before it wrote a single line of code i probably spent two three four hours going through what the various pitfalls of different decisions might be.

1:26:54And then once we talked through all of that, like the actual coding part only took about 20 minutes. It was kind of stupid how fast it was in the end. It is kind of, yeah, I'm with you on that. Plan for hours, code for five minutes. But only if you've taken the time. Otherwise it's just guessing. Yeah, exactly. If you didn't plan all that and you didn't think through and you didn't go back to the specs or the RFC or just something that was like the crucial piece that was the one thing that would have stuck AI because it would make all these assumptions in a plan that wasn't well formed. Well, now you've handed it a truly well formed, potentially even like with an implementation mandate sitting next to it.

1:27:34That's kind of like not the implementation, but the various things of proper code or different ways you want to do things so that when you get to the implementation stage, it's not guessing because you've already thought through a lot of the pitfalls. that's interesting yeah like i said i know just enough to be dangerous now well i think that's what we need is the the thinkers in this case and that's really that's really where i'm camping on it i see this this new power available to people who can wield it because they have some experience in history, you know, some wisdom, so to speak. But the flip side of that, though, is I didn't have to collaborate with anybody on this.

1:28:20Whereas in the original case, I spent a lot of time collaborating with Captain Morgan, right? These days, I can just sit in my room and do it by myself. And so the collaborative spirit and nature of open source kind of diminishes a little bit because I'm so empowered by it. And that's a risk. I don't know how big of a risk, but it's a risk in all of this. That doesn't bother me, really. I mean, not necessarily, because even my own personal usage of open source hasn't been in the collaborative. It's been in the consumption and the availability. And I would say maybe the hyping and the popularizing and the showcasing.

1:28:59I haven't really had a lot of collaboration personally in open source. So that doesn't really personally bother me. I'm also kind of a fan of open source, not open contribution. Like I don't think you have to, they're not cut from the same cloth necessarily. I don't think you have to be open source and open to contribution. So there is a way you can vision an idea or have a vision for it. And sure, you may put it out there as open source because you want to share, but it doesn't mean you really want the feedback loop because you've got a plan. Well, the other downside, of course, is that how did these models get smart in the first place?

1:29:41They got smart off the back of all of our open source sharing. Yeah. And now we're just feeding back themselves into themselves. There's got to be a reckoning. I mean, what a unique thing to think about. So honestly, this is really an interesting thought experiment I try to push myself to, which is kind of a mind bender. I try to think hundreds of years or at least a certain amount of years in advance from today that that future Adams or future Alex's look back on these moments and they're like, wow, thank you so much for putting all this blood, sweat, tears effort into the open so that we can have this thing that now helps us make.

1:30:20I don't know what I can. I have no idea what will get made. But even in this moment here, you're expressing this. This is a monumental feat, like producing this website and this level of care in a few days and 100 commits. You know what I mean? Solo. Wow. Where will we be 10 years, 20 years from now because of that truth, because of that openness? I sure hope it doesn't backfire on us. And I, I can't, I'm not a, I'm not wise enough to see that future or even speculate, but in the moment I feel like that is a net positive on the future because it's already net positive to me in this moment. Yeah.

1:31:05The, the, the, I think there's a bunch of people, a huge tranche of people actually that kind of missed the forest for the trees with in this regard. My, my take is typically a pragmatic one of, well, if I don't upskill and use these tools and I don't start solving these problems for myself using these tools, someone else will, and then I'll become less relevant as a human. So I think that the superpower of these things in the long term is the empowerment they give the individual to solve their own problems and scratch their own itches, which then feed into your collective experience as a human to solve other problems down the road.

1:31:42And you both make each other better in the long run. And it's, um, it's, it's going to be really interesting how the business models of these, of these AI companies play out over the longterm, but I'm optimistic that they won't all be complete. Optimistic. You don't seem optimistic. You seem hesitant. I am. I am. I am hesitant. You know, you look at how, how the last 25 years have gone with Apple and Google and Amazon and Microsoft and the state of the current internet. and misinformation and everything else. Let's not repeat those mistakes, I guess what I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

1:32:23Well, for the moment, we can enjoy our feats of brand new QuickSync deep dive benchmarks. I love this, man. QuickSync.ktz.me. Link it up, of course. It is on GitHub. Are you open to contributions? Yeah, yes, please. yeah yeah is there any other way did you license this what was there an original license you inherited from the uh i think it's mit or gpl i don't know one of them i don't see a license file at all honestly oh yeah i think it's it's not licensed necessarily in the moment this episode airs it will be right on what am I T F T L or FTW sorry not FTL I was thinking about something else well Alex I don't know what else to talk about man I know I love talking to you man I really I was thinking you know what who's a good person to chat with at the end of the year and somebody I haven't talked to in a while and I knew I've run out of all the other options.

1:33:35Let's talk to Alex. No. No, no, no, no. Not at all. We actually did have a plan for somebody else, and they did fall through, and you were a fill-in, but it wasn't because of that. It was, you know, I like talking to you. I think you got some cool ideas. I mean, this benchmarking is the best, man. And I knew you were going to move to London, and I thought you were in SF for some reason in our back chats and was reminded, yes, Raleigh. North Carolina. It's a snow day in North Carolina today, actually. We got about an eighth of an inch of snow and they shut all the schools. Yeah, right? Like scary.

1:34:12That's like nothing. I guess before we leave here, do you have a favorite Linux distro at the moment? Talos Linux. Justin Garrison will be very happy with that. Yeah, he would be very happy with that. Is it because of your recent KDS explorations? Yeah, we sort of touched on the boot C kind of immutable nature and disposable declarative nature of operating systems. I tell you, if Talos existed for just like non-Kubernetes regular Linux. What do you like about it? Help me understand. What are we missing? I don't know. Have we got time for this? I just like the fact that the nodes are completely disposable.

1:34:57You know, the storage, the nodes, for years, you've written Ansible playbooks to configure nodes and install packages and do this and do that. And now I have a declarative file that says system do this. And when it bootstraps itself, it doesn't know what it is until you give it that instruction. And then it just figures it out. I don't have to, there's no config drift. It's impossible for there to be config drift. It just is what I tell it to be exactly. and the only way to make a change is to update the config so it gets versioned it gets all the niceties of that is that kind of like atomic kind of like boot c then that's kind of what is right yep yep yep it's the same same idea uh different implementation but same idea yeah interesting and so just hypothesize for a moment in the non-kubernetes world how would you see a talus that isn't that focused on a different alternative like what would that be to you then Or would you use it?

1:35:54For a home server. Okay. I don't want to have to do an apt-get upgrade every six weeks and then have something break and suddenly my server doesn't boot anymore. It would be nice if I could just update a config file, push that to Git, and then it just figures it out and reconciles those changes. A bit like Argo CD and Flux do in the Kubernetes world, but at the OS level. That's what I want. That's the world I want to get to. Push a configuration change to Git and then my server just figures it out. How different, and maybe this shows my cards here a little bit, but how much different is that from a script that you wrote, like a literal bash script that just runs your system, runs all the app gets and stuff like that, like configures your system on boot?

1:36:42How much different is that? Well, you've got to put a ton of logic into the bash script to do item potency. You've got to do a ton of logic. like nix kind of solved some of these problems a little bit but it's a very imperfect solution um you know let's say you have a list of packages you want to install and you take one of those packages away well there's now got to be some logic to clean that up and then there's going to be some residual files maybe a config file left here something left over there you just don't know and so like the the nature of declarative stuff is that you can test a lot more easily like a specific implementation of an nvidia driver maybe as a kernel dkms build failure and all that stuff in the old world but in the new world that literally is impossible because it built it's an immutable thing and so we know it's going to work i think that's what boots eastern i saw this which is why i was kind of interested in it but i just couldn't figure out how to use it i don't know how to i just don't know yet i haven't explored enough to have a a good i never quite know how to say this guy's name is it is it your your gay your castro i never quite know how to say his name but he he's running like the fedora silver blue there's like some yeah it's like some cool stuff happening in this space very soon i think and um yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be really fun when it lands but uh we put out a podcast recently called the four dim problem which i alluded to earlier so i have a amd ryzen 9 cpu and i have four dims ram I should be able to do that, right?

1:38:20Well, let's just say there's a four dim problem. And Nabil and Andrew and AJ and Ron are in our Zulip talking about some different stuff. And Andrew O 'Brien actually said, I wonder if Adam, this is me, wonder if Adam's tried Bluefin now that he's settled into Fedora. He's mostly a Debian person, as he says here. but I've tried Bluefin based on FedoraCore after a Ship It episode about it, which should have been a while ago because Ship It has since ceased to be an active podcast. Amazing show, obviously. Archives are still there. Check it out. No, I have not tried Bluefin, but I am interested in Bootsy and this world that is creating this atomic declarative.

1:39:07And now that I hear you talk about Talos in that way, which I have not played with Talos. I have not personally played with Kubernetes really at all. And I probably should spend a Thanksgiving weekend like you did just knee deep in it. Like I should have so many things, but I haven't yet. I am interested in it. I just don't, I don't know where to apply it yet. And that's what I would like a guide on like, what could I do with it? Because that always gives me a reason to play with it. Like that's how I, that's how I get curious is I have a reason to do it. I mean, the reason why I have, you know, different VMs and different things happening is because I learned, you know, how to use Proxbox and a bunch of cool stuff around Proxbox and different flavors of Linux from, you know, Fedora as a server or Ubuntu as a server or pick your, you know, pick your battle, whatever you want to do.

1:39:58So I haven't done that yet, though, but I'd like to. I just don't know where to begin. Linux is an endless rabbit hole. That's the best thing about it. It sure is. It sure is. so are you going to be at Texas Linux Fest next year? if I'm in the States sure, why not? it might be a bit of a long way to come from London but I don't know, it is a good time I think it should be October-ish is that right? I don't know, I think it was in October this year yeah, that was the thing because it's normally in March or April time oh is it? okay and then they moved it I like the new time the issue is for me it runs up against all things open and we had a company off site this year.

1:40:37It was just a lot of stuff. So, yeah, it's a tough one. And All Things Open is a staple for you. You don't miss that. But it's five minutes down the road. You can't miss it, right? You have to go because it's like, well. It's a great conference, yeah. It is a great conference. It is an absolutely great. You know, this year they moved it on me too. It's normally at the end of October and this year was at the beginning and I planned some travel earlier in the year. And when I realized that the times collided, I was like, oh man, I can't go this year. And so we didn't have a presence there this year.

1:41:08We're normally, we're kind of like a staple in the hallway track doing our booth thing and podcasting. I did wonder where you were, actually. Well, that's why. That's why. It's not because Todd was mean. Todd's amazing. The whole team that runs the conference is amazing. And I love it. And I was really sad to miss it this year. But what I was trying to say, though, is that if you're going to be at Texas Linux Fest, we can plan on the switch, and maybe we can do a meetup. Like, hey, we'll call in advance. So we can do some sort of like precursor to it. Let's have a little fun. I know that it's usually a Friday, Saturday thing.

1:41:41So we can plan it for Friday. It's usually the day I'm most available. So I'm a family guy and Saturdays are reserved family. But we can certainly do the fest all day and maybe a meet up that evening at the switch for dinner or something like that and make it a fun thing. What do you think? Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen. Well, Alex, it was good to talk to you. Merry Christmas to you I know it's just a few days away or a few weeks away at this moment two weeks I believe my kids are counting down they're excited about it I'm excited about it as well and always good talking to you man thank you so much for sharing time with me and just being a little nerd man like I am I love it thank you so much man thank you I'm gonna go and watch Silicon Valley now well you've been watching right back there what no it's over there now I want to watch it for real there's Big Head where's Big Head what's he doing what are you doing Big Head oh it's so cringe oh this is where they're talking and he's like being the bad friend there.

1:42:31He's like, oh man, I think I'm going to go back home right now. No, you shouldn't go back home right now. But you can't be part of Pied Piper anymore. Okay, yeah, good. That's what's going on right there. That's episode two of season one, by the way. Alex, you're the best. Thank you so much. Awesome. Thanks, dude. Have a good one. So I've made a list. My Christmas to-do list, I suppose, here in the Home Lab. Image, image frame, that's definitely on my list. It involves ZFS.rent. So embarrassing to admit on a podcast that I have no backup plan. Raid, y 'all, is not a backup plan. You have to have something off site.

1:43:09Alex is totally right. I am vulnerable at this moment. And I never imagined that someone would create ZFS.rent. I'm going to see if I can get him on the show. We'll see. I also want to play with Talos. I have not messed with Kubernetes personally yet. Much like Alex, a little intimidated by it, but it involves hardware. So that's always fun. So I might build out a three node cluster or I might just do it via Proxmos with VMs. That can be cool just to learn. I do have more plans for applications in my home lab. I've got a very cool read later application I'm working on. You know, it's one part archive.

1:43:46It's one part read later. The project is sort of morphing in my mind on how I can use it, but it's pretty cool. And I'm going to expose to myself on the network as an application. and I'm thinking that might be fun to do with Kubernetes. Who knows? Maybe not. I am enjoying Proxmox, so of course that's on my list and it should be on your list too. But if you haven't yet, head into Zulip. Go to changelog.com slash community. It is free to join. You are welcome here. Hang out with us in Zulip. It's like Slack, but better. And I want to hear what you're doing in your home lab this holiday season. Comment on this episode.

1:44:20Easy to find inside Zulip. We'll see you there. Of course, big thank you to our friends and our sponsors, Tiger Data. I love Tiger Data. Agentic Postgres. Our friends over at Depot. Build those builds faster. It makes no sense to wait. Our friends at Augment Code. Augie is one of my daily drivers. I love Augie. You got to check it out, augmentcode.com. And of course, a massive thank you to Fly. That's our home and it should be our home too. Learn more at fly.io. Of course, the Beat Freak in residence, Brake Master Cylinder new beats love those beats Brake Master you are awesome but friends that's it this week the show is done we'll see you on Monday