Asynchronous & Unreliable - Conversations on The Edge of Software

About Asynchronous & Unreliable - Conversations on The Edge of Software

Welcome to Asynchronous and Unreliable, the new weekly podcast where we discuss the latest and most fascinating ideas in tech and AI Our host Anne Currie is a tech veteran, co-author of O'Reilly's Building Green Software and author of the strangely prescient science fiction Panopticon series Expect animated, friendly, and lighthearted discussions with some of the most interesting thinkers and practitioners in technology. To find out about just a few of our amazing guests in 2026, visit our website (https://www.asynchronousunreliable.com/).

Publisher

Anne Currie

Category

fiction · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Mar 2026

Latest episode

25 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

33 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   25 Oct 2026

   AI, Security and eBPF: Buying Time Against the Hackers with AI & Security Expert Liz Rice

   What happens when attackers can exploit vulnerabilities faster than organisations can patch them — sometimes before the vulnerabilities have even been publicly disclosed? Anne talks to Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent (Cisco), CNCF governing board member, O’Reilly author and eBPF security expert, about how AI is changing the economics of cyberattacks, why conventional patching and firewalls are no longer sufficient on their own, and how eBPF provides another line of defence. Liz explains how Cilium and Tetragon use the Linux kernel to observe activity, enforce policies and deploy highly targeted protections against known exploits — without restarting running applications. Along the way, they revisit their early cloud-native startup, Microscaling, discuss AI agents behaving like hackers inside their own organisations, explore the eBPF verifier and Linux containers, and examine Cisco Hypershield Live Protect. They finish with a memorable example of supermarket refrigeration systems being compromised through poor access configuration: a reminder that not every security failure is a software vulnerability.

2. 

   19 Oct 2026

   Ep 31: Is Being Nice a Useful AI Mgmt Tool? With AI Expert Martin Davidson

   AI Teams, Niceness and Who's Responsible — Martin Davidson, Part 2 Martin Davidson returns for the second half of our conversation about working with AI agents. We discuss niceness, delegation and agents that negotiate with one another, as well as code optimisation, rewriting Windows 3.1 in Rust, and the growing gap between what AI can do and what people think it can do. And when automation goes wrong, who's responsible? #rustlang #AIdevelopment Transcript (https://www.asynchronousunreliable.com/episode-31-martin-davidson-part-2)

3. 

   12 Oct 2026

   Ep: 30 What Do Your Agents Do After You've Gone To Bed? With AI Experimenter Martin Davidson

   Shownotes What happens when you go to bed and your AI teams carry on working? My old friend and colleague Martin Davidson returns to Asynchronous & Unreliable to talk about his latest experiments in building software with AI. Martin has spent decades producing highly resilient systems, and more than two years exploring how to get AI to produce high-quality software. Even with that perspective, he says the pace of change over the past fortnight has been astonishing. We discuss agents that lead teams for weeks, find work to do when they are blocked, and share computing resources without waiting for Martin to organise everything. That raises some interesting questions about hiring: what skills would another person need, and would adding them actually help? We also talk about something rather familiar from working with humans: being nice. Martin finds some models much easier to work with than others, and we explore how clear communication, humour and likeability affect collaboration. Along the way there are old Unix workstations, game emulators, a cache/cash joke, and a little product placement for Jon Berger’s What Happens When You Are Not in the Room? By the end, Martin’s agents are producing enough code and commits to run into infrastructure limits that rarely troubled his human teams. This is the first half of our conversation. In this episode How quickly AI development practices are changing, even for experienced users. Recruiting for aptitude, imagination and a willingness to experiment. AI agents leading teams, helping one another and working overnight. Emulating old computers and exploring software behaviour through testing. Martin’s experience of different models, their costs and their communication styles. Whether likeability and kindness help human and AI teams work better. The cost of reopening a large conversation after its cache has gone cold. Four million lines of Rust, thousands of daily commits, and new infrastructure bottlenecks. Mentioned in the conversation Martin’s Substack: https://0x4d44.substack.com/ (https://0x4d44.substack.com/) What Happens When You Are Not in the Room? — Jon Berger. Influence — Robert Cialdini. The Unix Haters Handbook. Building Microservices — Sam Newman. Data Connection; Yanqing Cheng; EU BSDCon in Brussels. Rust, Ghidra, Windows 3.1 and Win16 applications. HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris and AIX. Doom, FreeCell, Formula One Grand Prix and Portal. Model comparisons, prices and product behaviour discussed here reflect Martin’s experience at the time of recording. Transcript (https://www.asynchronousunreliable.com/episode-30-martin-davidson-part-1)

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Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

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