What an Oxide and Friends last night! @bcantrill and I were joined by the one and only @AndresFreundTec to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details with Andres. Definitely check it out (or on the pod tomorrow).
https://youtu.be/jg5F9UupL6I
Oxide and Friends 4/8/2024 -- Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
I was really pleased by this background image so wanted to talk about it briefly. The concept was (of course!) simple: the (in)famous xkcd graphic with the thankless Nebraskan removed
https://xkcd.com/2347/
xkcdLike all lazy people in 2024, I turned to Chat GPT for help. This didn't work out well. (Have I mentioned that I'm bad at Chat GPT?)
I should mention that we don't put a ton of time into Oxide and Friends (sorry!) so I try to bound these side-quests at least somewhat. Somewhat. I decided to find a physics simulator (like a lunatic) and SimPHY was the first one I stumbled onto that worked well enough. I roughed out the structure from the xkcd comic:
Then removed the linchpin:
Until I got to something that was suitably calamitous:
I threw it on the iPad that I "borrowed" from my older son and traced it in Procreate with his Apple Pencil. 100% it could have been better, but I already felt like a crazy person and wasn't sure it was going to work out
Then I threw the lines into Photoshop, applied the bucket tool, and ... good enough!
@ahl not _just_ good enough. Perfect.
Adam Leventhal
Jamie Reid
Simon Zerafa