fock

300 to 4000 lines of "production like" (whatever that is) cobol code which is easily ported to a non-mainframe env. Our's sometimes uses assembler in its innards, so good luck with real legacy code spanning a dozen files and 50k loc...

I recently threw in (want to check those intelligence metrics!) some real production code into a non-agentic system (just to get a feel how things perform without a custom harness) and results where ... interesting. The particular program uses some preprocessor no LLM we have access to (newest was GPT 5.5) has any clue about - so they confabulate what it could do (Gemini 2.5 didn't even notice there was a preprocessor...). This is expected of course but it somehow seems the problem of this technology that unless you feed it masses of data or mechanically break up the tasks in rote subunits, it just doesn't do anything sensible still...

I have not researched this, but I see some 4 to 10 year olds in the family being on the phone every time I see them. Usually they stream "brainrot" on youtube on the tablet while they play roblox on the phone. From time to time there are ads.

In school they still perform ok for what is required there today, but from what happens when you say "oh, wifi doesn't work today in our place" I would argue they behave like addicts... It might be a fun addiction insofar as mental problems are usually not the cause but possibly the result if this runs for years on end.

My pet theory is that these kids will graduate to online-gambling around 12-14 because that's exactly the kind of gameplay they prefer on roblox currently. Even when I was 16 there was a noticable share of classmates gambling online - and this was pre-facebook.

Probably the best way forward would be to make KYC mandatory for large, data-selling public fora like we do with banks. Noone complains there and noone is forced to use platforms.

If you don't want to do KYC (such as on hn or a model train forum) you are liable for any criminal activity you enable (such as pedophiles using your private messages or whatever...).

well, Claude likely is not really trained on benchmarking across such systems...

are they? It's all the same company with the brand today just used for appealing to localized government funding (because we can just shutter that factory you have there!). In the small marketshare electric future these multiple brands will be useful to kill one by one without tarnishing the remaining brands too much.

- Malta is selling passports and harboring criminals who kill journalists (we all remember Daphne Caruana Galizia don't we?). - buying votes/parties there would get you 10 times the MEPs you get in Germany or France. - their mayors can veto EU policy... This EU-thing really is democratic!

so: I doubt anyone has to care about that pesky GDPR if they buy the government of Malta.

I saw those in use 20 years ago, when physics-class visited the local nuclear-science research center. It felt like Sci-Fi then and I have not yet seen this replicated anywhere else sadly...

They sell (managed) database appliances (on z and Power) and associated software (think the platform/HANA parts of SAP) - all state-of-the-art in the late 1990s but since then put on maintenance mode and it shows (a bit like oracle...). Their hardware is still cool custom built silicon and imo state of the art, but since k8s, high-speed-network and multi-TB-machines (for <100k$) are here and run Linux no new venture buys into that anymore (except for gulf states...). Before, when the competition was a cluster of Itanium/VMS or Sparc/Solaris and the associated contract, noone bought into that either at scale but also noone using IBM had a very compelling reason to switch everything around.

So essentially they sell new hardware and "support" to customers who have been in need to process tabular, multi-GB databases since when a PC was 128MB memory and have been doing electronic record-keeping since the 1970s. They also allow their ~hostages~, ehm, customers who trust them with their data to run processing near the data at a cost/in a cloud style billing model. That is so expensive though that every large IBM-shop has built an elaborate layer of JVMs, Unix and mirror-databases around their IBM appliances. Lately they bought Redhat and hashicorp and confluent thus taking a cut from the "support" of the abominiations of IT systems they helped birth for some more time to come (also remember the alternative JVM OpenJ9, do you all?).

I think the later a company started using centralized electronic record keeping, the higher the likelyhood they are not paying IBM anymore: commercial banks, governments and insurance started digitizing in the 60s (with custom software) and if the companies are old (or in US-friendly petrostates) they are all IBM customers. Corps using ERP or PLM offerings (so manufacturing and retail chains which are younger than banks) used to start digitizing a little later (Walmart only was founded in the 60s and electronic CAD started in the 80s) and while they likely used IBM in the past (SAP was big on DB2) they might not use it anymore (also it helps they usually bought the ERP or PLM from someone else). New Companies whose sole business was to run a digital-platform started on Unix (see Amazon who successfully fought to ditch Oracle even) or just built their whole platform (Google). If those companies predate Unix they usually fought hard to get rid of IBM (Microsoft, Amadeus)

Consulting/outsourcing services have been spun out to Kyndryl, so nowadays IBM only sells hardware, support for their products and ostensibly has some people left to develop their products... The days when that was a big thing and IBM produced all the stuff they sell support for now, have been long gone. A fun link to see how their "product development" operates nowadays is this discussion to bring gitlab-runners to z/OS: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/work_items/275... - tl;dr "hey you opensource company, we are IBM and managed to pay someone to port a go compiler to z/OS. Now we have a customer who wants to use gitlab with z/OS. Would you like to make your software part of our product offering?". A fun fact is that - even within IBM - access to the real mainframe seems to be very limited which shows a bit in the discussion linked above and also with an ex-Kyndryl-person saying: "oh, I once had a contract where we replaced the mainframe and we ran that on Linux-boxes inside IBM, because it was just cheaper that way. Just the big reporting was a bit slow, but the reliability was just fine"

https://github.com/blues/jsonata-go hmmm

very cool and the person has the skills to do that. sad to see how the fully AI generated "why this matters" section in the blog gives a lingering vibe of slop.

if you rip out linux from your linux distribution you usually end up with GNU.

well, maybe you should own your agent and fund a cooperative for that purpose?

so: where do you go and what do you do? All your land and food is subject to property laws and the way things are going the owners will be allowed violence to enforce their rights. Essentially you'll be a serf again just like 99% of other people and 95% on this site (which sadly has owners very much intent to become our lords)

look at grist! I played around with it and it seemed quite awesome.

TIL hn will tell me about archeology just a bikeride from my office.

very fun!

probably the likes of Enics and GPV - nowadays this is likely a field overrun by military demand and private equity squeezing the supply side... Also I doubt that they can/want to compete with jlcpcb et al.

Good to see that hands are still not solved...

> It also strikes me as a uniquely difficult challenge to track down the decision maker who is willing to take the risk on revamping these systems (AI or not).

here that person is a manager which got demoted from ~500 reports to ~40 and then convinced his new boss that it's good to reuse his team for his personal AI strategy which will make him great again.

I work at a shop (a specialized provider for finance in your eyes) which still has the "transaction" workload on IBM z/OS (IMS/DB2). The parts we manage (in Openshift) interface with that (as well as other systems) and I have heard of people/seen the commits moving PL/I to Cobol. In 2021. Given Cobol's nature, those apps have more than 1k LoC easily.

We also sublease our mainframes to at least 3 other ventures; one of which is very outspoken they have left the mainframe behind. I guess that's true if you view outsourcing as (literally) leaving it behind with the competitor of your new system... It seems to be the same for most banks, none of which are having mainframes anymore publicly, but for weird reasons they still hire people for it offshore.

Given that our (and IBM's!) services are not cheap I think either a) our customers are horribly dysfunctional in anything but earning money slow and steady (...) and b) they actually might depend on those mainframe jobs. So if you are IBM or a startup adding AI to IBM I guess the numbers might add up to the claims.

how large are the clusters then?

we have on-prem with heavy spikes (our batch workload can utilize the 20TB of memory in the cluster easily) and we just don't care much and add 10% every year to the hardware requested. Compared to employing people or paying other vendors (relational databases with many TB-sized tables...) this is just irrelevant.

Sadly devs are incentivized by that and going towards the cloud might be a fun story. Given the environment I hope they scrap the effort sooner rather than later, buy some Oxide systems for the people who need to iterate faster than the usual process of getting a VM and replace/reuse the 10% of the company occupied with the cloud (mind you: no real workload runs there yet...) to actually improve local processes...

And incidentally all documentation recommends not extending your LPARs beyond what is available on a single CPC-"node" (see [0]-2-23 for a nice (and honest...) block-diagram). If you extend your LPAR across all CPCs I doubt that many of the HA and hotswap-features continue to work (also there is bugs...). E.g.: you won't hotswap memory when it's all utilized: > Removing a CPC drawer often results in removing active memory. With the flexible memory option, removing the affected memory and reallocating its use elsewhere in the system is possible.

So while you can have single-system-images on a relatively large multinode setup I doubt many people are doing that (at the place I know, no LPARs have TB of memory...). Also in the given price-range you easily can get SSI-images for Linux too: https://www.servethehome.com/inventec-96-dimm-cxl-expansion-...

If you don't need the single-system-images, VMWARE and Xen advertise literally the same features on a blade chassis minus redundant hardware per blade, which is not really necessary when you just migrate the whole VM...

Also if you define the whole chassis as having 120% capacity, running it at 100% capacity becomes trivial too. And this is exactly what IBM is doing keeping around spare CPUs and memory in all setups spec'ed correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent...

You are right though that the hardware was and is pretty cool and that kind of building for reliability has largely died out. Also up until ARM/Epyc arrived maximum capacity was over-average, but that is gone too. Together with the market-segment likely not buying for performance I doubt many people today are running workloads which "require" a mainframe...

[0] https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248951.pdf

I guess for IMS/CICS/TPF/... the IBM mainframe is a just fine appliance compared to the alternatives. While not exactly transaction processors, SAP HANA, Oracle Exadata and co. all market themselves towards the same customer groups; SAP even sells full banking systems for medium-sized banks.

Your point that TCO is lower than a well executed alternative seems very dubious to me though. Maybe lower than cloud and also certainly lower than whatever crap F100-consultants sold you, but running database unloads with basic ETL for a few dozen terrabytes per month creating a MSU-bill in the millions is just ridiculous. The thing which probably lowers the TCO is that EVERY mainframe-dev/ops-person in existence is essentially a fin-ops-expert formed by decades of cloud-style billing. Also experience on a platform where your transaction processing historically has KB-range size limits, data-set-qualifiers are max. 44 chars, files (which you allocate by cylinders) don't expand by default and whatever else you miss from your 80ties computing experience naturally leads to people creating relatively efficient software.

In general even large customers seem to agree with me on that (see Amadeus throwing out TPF years ago) with even banks mostly outrunning the milking machine called IBM. What is and will be left is governments. Captured by inertia and corruption (at the top) and being kept alive by underpaid lifelong experts (at the bottom) who have never seen anything else.

> during the AWS outage this week.

Also the reliability promises around mainframes are "interesting" from what I've seen so far. The (IBM) mainframe today is a distributed system (many LPARs/VMs and software making use of it) which people are encouraged to run on maximum load. Now when one LPAR goes down (and might pull down your distributed storage subystem) and you don't act fast to drop the load you end up in a situation not at all unlike what AWS experienced this week: critical systems are limping on, while the remaining workload has random latency spikes which your customers (mostly Unix systems...) are definitely going to notice...

The non-IBM-way of running VMs on a Linux box and calling it a mainframe just seems like a scam if sold for anything but decommissioning. So I guess those vendors are left with governments at this point.

Quite some time ago I implemented NFS for a small HPC-cluster on a 40GBe network. A colleague set up RDMA later, since at start it didn't work with the Ubuntu kernel available. Full nVME on the file server too. While the raw performance using ZFS was kind of underwhelming (mdadm+XFS about 2x faster), network performance was fine I'd argue: serial transfers easily hit ~4GB/s on a single node and 4K-benchmarking with fio was comparable to a good SATA-SSD (IOPS + throughput) on multiple clients in parallel!

and of course this didn't take into account you posted that, because I got directed straight here by AI!

and there have been continous ports since then: https://github.com/Godzil/ftape/tree/master - note the caveats which apparently all disappeared here...

no. In the short time I work at a z/OS-shop, they had to IPL twice. And the IPL takes ages...

Now, if you can live with the weird environment and your people know how to programm what is essentially a distributed system described in terms noone else uses: I guess it's still ok, given the competition is all executing IBMs playbook too.

and sadly not too many words on how they made sure those shelves don't vibrate and squeak horribly - which they will if no placed on perfectly smooth surfaces... I somehow could picture something like this to work out nice using metal structural framing - but the pricepoint then probably comes close to quite nice carpentry if you add some bells and whistles.

Does this have a CVE or something? I have the weird feeling the cloud initiative here won't notice this ever otherwise...

looking at the russian sponsors linked on the russian site I suppose this is mostly for the people putting these things on drones or in trenches... I suppose they obtain their cameras somewhere...

I was on the train when some executive support staff joined my car (train ran late and they were easy to find on the internet ...). They behaved like misogynistic ogres and I can vividly imagine those people laugh about this. 0 regard for other people or their societal responsibility.