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Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

explorer.oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#81

Post by throwaway219450 »

dijit wrote: post #39
throwaway219450 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you truly believe you’re “scaling” you do it the Google way and have a strict loop with a good rubric for the interview so applicants are comparable. The whole point of that system is thousands of people and hundreds of interviewers, and a very standard process. I’ve always found it pretty fair even with some randomness in scoring. You shouldn’t be giving take homes unless they’re either short, or the applicant pa…

I’ve been through the Google process and I wouldn’t consider it to be the opposite of inhumane.

Well “humane” and fair aren’t necessarily the same, and some people hate loops.

I like programming problems, spending a day at Google was fun, they put me up in a fancy hotel, and the interviewers were nice. Like it was clear a lot of time and money had gone into the process (6-8 hours of dev time is not cheap), not a zoom and ghost like most companies.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#82

Post by bcantrill »

mrcwinn wrote: post #67
bcantrill wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application materials thoroughly? That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)? To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to…

I understand that all employees have equal salary pay (apart from sales people who can earn more and are valued higher). Do all have equal equity and voting rights, at least within common stock? And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?

I appreciate that our approach to compensation leaves some with overwhelming feelings of whataboutery, but no, we (of course?) do not have equal equity: as we have said (several times?) equity broadly compensates for risk -- and risk has gone down over time. (I used to tell people to "value the equity at zero"; I don't say that any longer because it plainly isn't.)

In terms of the cap table: that's a bit of an odd request? On the one hand, there are no real secrets hanging out on our cap table -- but on the other, based on your tone, it doesn't feel like the request is terrible earnest? (And, I hasten to add, transparency is a value -- not a principle.[0])

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#83

Post by [deleted] »

mrcwinn wrote: post #67
bcantrill wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application materials thoroughly? That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)? To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to…

I understand that all employees have equal salary pay (apart from sales people who can earn more and are valued higher). Do all have equal equity and voting rights, at least within common stock? And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?

[deleted]

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#84

Post by drudolph914 »

benjaminleonard wrote: post #73
drudolph914 wrote: post #53

big fan of oxide, and love the demo overall, but at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that these kinds of 3D demos are a bit gimmicky/cheap nowadays. pages like this used to be a signal for a high-end product and or a benchmark for good engineering. now though, we all know that this kind of work can be vibe-coded with threejs fairly quickly if you have the assets. idk ... it feels like it's trying to capture m…

IIRC the CAD exports were in the many millions of polygons, so there's substantial work in preparing the assets for the explorer. Kenan (the 3d artist I worked with) did fantastic work cleaning and optimising them. I'm somewhat jealous of hardware startups with products without quite so many parts! It's part of the reason I'd waited so long before making this, I knew it was going to be a lot of work. There's parts th…

I appreciate ya commenting, and let me tell ya directly that the work is great! I'm an old-head and curmudgeon - my thoughts here are about the world at large. your work here is great, please keep it up!

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#85

Post by adastra22 »

connicpu wrote: post #77
girfan wrote: post #30

Cool tour. I haven't kept up with their developments; what kind of workloads have they been pushing for? Since they don't seem to have any specialized accelerators in the Compute Sled, I am assuming they are not targeting AI workloads for now?

Hard to compete there when most of the margin is going to NVIDIA, pretty much impossible if you don't have the scale of Dell/Supermicro/etc

The Oxide approach, I think, would be to pick an open interconnect standard and work with one or more NVIDIA competitors to make hardware for it. E.g. AMD and a few of the specialized AI hardware companies. Essentially provide an open TPU standard.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#86

Post by XorNot »

baby_souffle wrote: post #20
andrewl-hn wrote: post #15

This design feels very obvious-in-hindsight . Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why? Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart…

> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, Dell and HP both have "blades" that plugged into a blade-chassis. The chassis had all the lights out mgmt as well as power/networking integrated so the blade was basically a metal box with compute/memory/storage and it just slid in to the dock. I am sure that supermico had something like this as well

Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too.

Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never.

So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware.

But how often do you need to do that, what's it worth to you? If it makes sense then the statistical window where it does is tiny.

And if you own more then 1, like an entire rack, then do you even care? Because above some scale you're just going to wheel the rack out rather then go and pull individual units.

Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#87

Post by bcantrill »

dorongrinstein wrote: post #16

I met Bryan Cantrill the CEO of Oxide many years ago. He's awesome. I am rooting for Oxide to become as big as Dell.

Thank you for rooting for us! One important point of clarification: I am the CTO -- the CEO of Oxide is my co-founder, Steve Tuck. Long before we know what we wanted to do (or had a name for the company!), Steve and I knew we wanted to do something together; it's worth getting to know Steve (and our collaboration) in his own words![0][1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_XqNYt0cY0

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#88

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

dijit wrote: post #49
jaggederest wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a simple answer, if someone is doing a substantial amount of work for your interview process, pay them an amount of money that is more than zero but less than "do job interviews for a living". Or provide that amount times two to a charity of their choice. I've done this for hiring before, for people who reached the "put substantial effort in" stage (in my case basically 2nd or 3rd round work sample stuff), an…

“put substantial effort into it” is such a personal thing. DDG hires like this, actually, and if I recall correctly I would be paid a flat fee, it would take a week , and the work I did would be part of something genuine in DDG, maybe a bug or something. Now, that probably sounds good to you, but taking a week out of my current employment is not going to happen- there’s an incentive to go “over the hours” inherent to…

>should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR

So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#89

Post by sunshowers »

marshray wrote: post #48
thraway3837 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a gentle reminder that a company may portray itself as cool to customers, but is not cool to their own current or future employees. Their interview process was shady. There was a post here about 1-2 years ago that was a link to their interview process and how open and transparent they were. The post itself was from an employee and a fellow commenter who was gaslighting folks was also an employee. Several folks c…

I'm seeing the phrases "tremendous amount of homework", "substantial amount", and "few hours". Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?

My successful application took around 12 hours of writing and editing across 3 days, though I was lucky that most of my portfolio was already open source or otherwise public. Some people spend more, some spend less.

It is worth keeping in mind that we write a _lot_. If you don't enjoy the process of writing, you might not like working here.

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