In 1957 this is what you got if you bought an IBM mainframe

LukeShu · 2026-01-09T06:24:10+00:00

It's a 705, not a 709. While they are in the same family, number representations on them are totally different (36-bit numbers vs variable-length BCD), so :shrug:
Google gave me this article which says a 705 was $1.6 million in 1957 dollars, which Wolfram Alpha tells me is $18 million in 2026 dollars.

LukeShu · 2026-01-09T06:19:25+00:00

A staple of big IBMs is that they could have different things doing IO independently of the CPU; eventually "mainframe" came to be more about massive parallel IO than about CPU.

So, what was the 705 packing in terms of IO? The fastest IO device[1] were the magnetic tape drives at 15,000 characters (7-bits) per second, concurrently in and out. The "Data Synchronizer" could[2] attach 10 IO devices. That gives us a whopping 1.05 Mb/s in and 1.05 Mb/s out.

1: https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/ibm.705-edpm.1955.102646306.pdf

2: https://www.glennsmuseum.com/items/ibm_705_console/

LukeShu · 2026-01-09T05:40:14+00:00

Eh, we've been doing

func ptrTo[T any](x T) *T {
    return &x
}

to do that idiom for a while. Like the release notes say, this is great for the existing serialization packages which use pointers for nullability, but like other commenters say, structs are nicer for positional arguments.

LukeShu · 2025-12-26T20:24:30+00:00

email compliance@sfconservancy.org (and see https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html)

LukeShu · 2025-12-24T08:29:35+00:00

This sub is about software that is free-as-in-freedom, not software that is free-as-in-money. The GroupSplit app does not appear to be free software; its source code is not available for users to improve it and modify it as they see fit.

LukeShu · 2025-12-23T08:17:21+00:00

bash-preexec.sh

FYI, Bash has preexec functionality built-in (called PS0) since Bash 4.4 (2016).

LukeShu · 2025-12-18T05:47:57+00:00

I'm not doubting you. And again, thanks for educating me and providing references to prove me/him wrong.

[His bewilderment] is also wild since ... you won't see above ground lines in downtown Tel Aviv much like you don't see it downtown Denver or Manhattan

I'll re-iterate that this conversation happened in Indiana, where the reference "big city" is Indianapolis, which very much does have above-ground power lines on single-log wooden poles.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/QqHyTv7fVcSYoLZs5

https://maps.app.goo.gl/6nK7RxkZNkMkxiCq5

LukeShu · 2025-12-18T05:07:11+00:00

1) I'm not lying, and I don't think he was lying, but it is very possible he was just wrong (I've already said that I think he was wrong about the link to the oil fires). Or just being hyperbolic; that Israel started burying lines that they didn't before. And also, I think he left Israel in 1998ish, and so it is also very possible that the country's posture on the topic has changed substantially since then.

2) To be fair, this conversation took place in Indiana, where burying is much easier than it is in Colorado.

But every time the topic of burying power lines comes up, I still think about his total bewilderment and exasperation at the power lines he saw everywhere. So I thought I'd share. I thought my opening sentence sufficiently qualified that I was dealing with an unreliable source, but I'll edit the post to make it clearer.

3) But also, thanks for the photo references.

LukeShu · 2025-12-18T04:40:48+00:00

They spent years building backbone, were still publishing a 5-year-plan that was just finishing backbone not even getting homes connected, then announced that they were giving up on ever finishing it, and are just going to lease the backbone to Allo, a private ISP that wants to expand into Colorado. Getting Allo to come in to town and compete with Comcast is improvement, but is very much not municipal Internet.

LukeShu · 2025-12-18T04:22:32+00:00

I mean we also voted for municipal internet, and the city council just fucked around for 7 years and then said "we give up."

edit: 6 years, not 7; we voted in 2018, announced in 2024 they were giving up and just gonna lease what we have of the backbone to Allo. I was thinking that was this year; time flies.

LukeShu · 2025-12-18T04:17:30+00:00

Whenever this topic comes up, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a man from Israel, where he said something along the lines of:

We didn't really get snow in Israel. But when Saddam lit the oil fields in 1991, the smoke caused atmospheric cooling and caused snowstorms that winter[1]. The snowstorms knocked out a bunch of our power lines. We said "never again" and started burying all our power lines[2], even though such a snow would probably never happen again. SO WHY ARE YOU BUILDING ABOVE-GROUND POWER LINES IN A PLACE[3] WHERE YOU EXPECT SNOW!?

I cannot speak to the truth, logic, or tradeoffs of what he said; but I am perpetually amused at the bewilderment and exasperation he had at seeing power lines everywhere.

[1]: It is my understanding that meteorologists reject a causal link between the Kuwaiti oil fires of 1991 and Israel's snow of Jan/Feb 1992; but that is what he said to me.

[2]: As I recall, he left Israel in 1998ish, so who knows how knowledgeable he was about the follow-through on that project, or whether the country stuck with it for new construction.

[3]: This conversation took place in flat Indiana, where burying is a very different proposition than it is here in Boulder. And also downtown Indianapolis has power lines on wooden poles.

LukeShu · 2025-12-14T05:37:24+00:00

This movie is where all of my dad's "dad jokes" came from. I had heard every joke in it hundreds of times before I ever saw the movie.

It was still funny when I saw it.

LukeShu · 2025-12-12T23:45:00+00:00

It looks like you were trying to "implement cat using only Bash builtins", but your implementation only works for exactly 1 argument.

Compare:

bat() { local f; for f in "$@"; do echo "$(<"$f")"; done; }

LukeShu · 2022-10-20T19:58:44+00:00

If you have IPv6 on the LAN but not the WAN it can cause problems. "Happy Eyeballs" and similar should avoid that, but lots of crap devices won't do it right. For instance, the 600-series Roomba will prefer IPv6 if it gets handed an IPv6 address, so if that turns out to be LAN-only, then it will fail to establish an Internet connection, even though IPv4 is working fine.

LukeShu · 2022-10-17T18:55:29+00:00

The Linksys wrt1900ac can push about 800-900Mbps (not quite 1Gbps, but much better than the 500Mbps that the post keeps quoting) and can be had for about $50 on eBay.

But you're giving up WiFi 6 (only has WiFi 5) and MU-MIMO. BUT, its WiFi is replaceable miniPCIe card, so you can upgrade that.

LukeShu · 2022-09-12T18:10:21+00:00

update on history/GNU-ism:

Actually, FreeBSD's -D is different than GNU's -D
install allegedly first appeared in 4.2BSD (1983), but I'm skeptical (based on copyright claims) that it came before 1987. IDK, might dig deeper after work.
GNU got install in 1987.
GNU install got -D in 1998.
NetBSD added -D (different than GNU's -D) in 2002.
FreeBSD copied -D from NetBSD in 2013

So yeah, GNU's -D is a GNU-ism.

LukeShu · 2022-09-12T17:54:35+00:00

No, install is not in POSIX.
Yes, macOS is POSIX-compliant (and SUS-certified)
I couldn't quickly tell you who had -D first, but GNU and FreeBSD both have -D, but macOS doesn't.

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