I’ve had to budget a line of business app that runs on both z/OS and AWS. Reliability for both hit an asymptote somewhere around 2019. The opex price crossover happened somewhere around the same time, depending on the customer.
Nearly every installation site and their internal support director agrees that the z/OS installations are far less expensive to support, simply because the minimum level of experience for a z/OS engineer is about a magnitude more than a cloud engineer.
One client of mine has a couple repositories for non-mission critical things like their fork of an open source project, decommissioned microservices, a SVG generator for their web front-end, etc.
They also take this approach of "whatever tool works," but their coding test is "here's some symptoms of the SVG generator misbehaving, figure out what happened and fix it," which requires digging into the commit history, issues, actually looking at the SVG output, etc.
Once you've figured out how the system architecture works, and the most likely component to be causing the problem, you have to convert part of the code to use a newer, undocumented API exposed by a RPC server that speaks a serialization format that no LLM has ever seen before. Doing this is actually way faster and accurate using an AI, if you know how to centaur with it and make sure the output is tested to be correct.
This is a much more representative test of how someone's going to handle doing actual work knocking issues out.
That’s interesting, I was looking at the ICE ERO statistics and not only do they show up as not having a published data source, only metadata, the corresponding dashboards at ice.gov/statistics seem to not be working. I don’t know what the state of either of those was before I looked yesterday, so I don’t know if this is a recent change or not.
I was extremely surprised to find out that based on ICE’s annual reports, which are still up, Biden’s administration deported far more people than Trump’s did, especially in 2024 due to rule changes which roughly doubled the number of normal deportations. I was further surprised to find out that there were roughly 3.5 times more deportations under Biden than under the first Trump administration.
I suspect that what’s happening is that leadership under Biden did the sensible thing and very quietly snuck up on priority illegal aliens, whereas with Trump, all the media attention is causing similar people to circle the wagons and proactively take steps to avoid enforcement actions.
A big factor is that Trump actually got rid of the prioritization scheme in deportation courts that processes violent criminals (and similar) more quickly than people caught with a broken taillight.
He had the net effect of increasing the amount of time a dangerous immigrant would be inside the country while the system got clogged with all sorts of cases that the American public broadly agrees hardly matter.
The Tories in the UK messed up processes around immigration in a similar way.
Break the process and it looks like you have a bigger problem, so it's a political win - if you don't care about actually doing the thing you say you care about.
> guy has no capacity nor will to think in second order effects
Maybe we're looking for the wrong effects. Most crime in America is not committed by illegal immigants. Getting rid of violent criminals through immigration courts faster isn't going to result in any crime drop a voter would notice.
The part people will notice is wage inflation. And that's, simply, a numbers game. Furthermore, it's not violent criminals who are competing with Americans for jobs, it's the law-abiding hard-working ones. The ones whose worst offence since crossing the border was having a taillight out.
If you're being Machiavellian, the target is those honest migrants. The ones on dole or committing crimes aren't creating enough problems. Their role is rhetorical. (And honestly, if they get worse, it isn't like people will vote for Democrats. Perverse incentive.)
I tend to default to Hanlon's razor [1]. But it's difficult to call a guy who has won the Presidency twice, in remarkably different situations, an idiot.
Eh, “blame the minorities to get elected, fail to solve actual problems” is the easiest political play in the book.
It doesn’t take a genius to come up with that one.
Says more about voters and our information environment than it does about Trump.
Actual solutions to complex problems tend to be complex. Fake solutions can get away with being 3 word slogans. The latter has a huge structural advantage in politics, especially in our current information environment where people can’t focus on a single problem for more than 5 seconds at a time.
> I was extremely surprised to find out that based on ICE’s annual reports, which are still up, Biden’s administration deported far more people than Trump’s
There were also more deportations the year before Trump's first term than the year of his first term.
Consider the chart of border encounters. This one shows the past through 2023 [0] and in 2024 we had 2.1 million encounters at the southern border [1]. It appears that deportations are a function of border encounters, and border encounters increased substantially during Biden's administration.
From what I could gather here, the largest "deportment" are the rejected ones at southern border entry points. That number is increasing year over year, regardless of administration: same foreigner trying over and over again.
Ive constructed a Sankey diagram of all the flow of visa-less immigration.
First Trump administration had a very strong pattern of talk and maybe a few actions… and then they seem to forget what they were doing and the result is little to no action.
Trump loves to talk about trade but when it came to China he put up some token tariffs and announced “I didn’t say it would be easy” and then did nothing the rest of his term.
> Because of the copyright enforcement section of the TPP
The point of TPP was containing China. China wasn't invited. Trump blew it up resulting in a trade bloc designed to exclude China turning into one that excludes us [1].
I agree it's good we have archives of all the sensible takes on deporting criminals with due process and not mass rounding up people based on skin color or last name at a very high expense to the taxpayers with poor results.
I think this is one of those times where two people agree on the evidence but not the resulting position.
It's very easy to fight straw men like all progressives are against all deportation and border enforcement.
> I was extremely surprised to find out that based on ICE’s annual reports, which are still up, Biden’s administration deported far more people than Trump’s did
Really? It was very widely reported. Just wait until you see how many people Obama deported
"I was extremely surprised to find out that based on ICE’s annual reports, which are still up, Biden’s administration deported far more people than Trump’s did..."
I think this is an essentially meaningless number until you also include the total number of illegals that were let in during the same period for each administration.
The more important number is how many people attempted crossing, which jumped significantly during Biden. This probably has something to do with their phenomenally cratered economies during COVID, multiple destabilized governments in LatAm, and severe climate migration.
That's a big part of why the Biden administration (on day one) proposed a bill that created a large economic development grant for LatAm while also modernizing border security.
No, 85% of apprehensions don't result in release into the country. That is a number that you'll have a hard time substantiating. Allegedly Mayorkas said it to the CBP union, according to the CBP union.
Below is an actual analysis of actual data from the right-leaning Cato Institute. The real number is somewhere in the 40-50% range and has been stable through most administrations (and, shockingly, Trump released more illegal immigrants into the country than Biden).
In addition to letting immigrants into the country at a higher rate, Trump also specifically slowed down deportation processing for violent immigrants, keeping them in the country, free (as is required by the Constitution's Equal Protection and Due Process clauses) for longer.
When trying to understand non-localized, large scale phenomena, yeah, you should defer to data and statistics. That’s literally why we invented them. We discovered over and over that people’s intuitions about what they were seeing were completely unreliable.
Why do you think statistics exists and all this machinery for capturing and processing data?
Statistics often exist to bamboozle and provide false and misleading context to otherwise extremely unpopular policy.
In this case, for example, to justify actions (or lack thereof) that will sway voter demographics in your favor over the medium term.
The equal sign is a required character for anything base64 encoded, which includes some things you’d expect to be in a config file, like ssh public keys and x509 certs.
The “CC” in the TI part numbers stands for “ChipCon”, who TI acquired for these wireless products. The CC1100, one of their earliest parts, has a documented but unsupported debug mode which dumps raw quadrature samples out some of the I/O pins. Later parts do not mention such a feature in their documentation, but it’s not proven it was removed.
Those are great in a professional context, but the CC3200s never had a <$10 Chinese breakout board.
And they're programmed in IAR or CCS instead of in the Arduino IDE, and they're programmed with an RTOS and the Cortex M4's powerful ISR engine instead of just a "while" loop.
ESP32/ESP8266 are basically optimized to be hobbyist-friendly, while most other wireless systems are not.
That’s interesting, it’s like the difference between code used at runtime (protein coding DNA) and initialization code (lncRNAs). Both have to be there for the program to work, but the initialization code is only used at startup to look at the environment and set up flags and data structures for the rest of the code. There’s probably signaling pathways that interact with the lncRNA genes which are part of cell differentiation.
OpenVMS and all its predecessors are still useful and, I think, ideal for real-time control applications and clustered high-reliability setups. The OS is structured much differently than pretty much everything else, so you can treat an OpenVMS machine as a completely dedicated embedded system where direct control of the hardware is possible without needing to deal with writing a complex kernel driver. It's a bit like if you crossed the low-level control guarantees of DOS with all the modern stuff you want like a network stack, Java, web servers, etc.
Despite having all the conveniences of a modern OS, the overall complexity is way lower than a typical Linux distribution. It was all designed by a single firm under tight resource constraints, so the amount of shared common code is way higher, the number of parts is way lower, and it's much more feasible to keep the whole design in your head all at once.
The clustering technology is also state-of-the-art, and has been for decades, even if you treat the cluster members as real-time control machines. Everything you need to build what most people think requires a whole k8s cluster and several helm charts is already built in to the OS. This includes stuff that most people don't think of until later, or try to reinvent on top of the DB. Distributed transactions, propagating the OS security model into the application, industrial-strength audit logs, autodiscovery, it's all built in and works out of the box. Pretty much everyone from a k8s or borg background that I've had to onboard to legacy apps running on OpenVMS clusters is blown away by how simple everything is. Even though there's fine-grained resource quotas and support for bin packing workloads throughout the cluster, it's rarely needed because of how efficient everything is since applications all use a common runtime designed around async paradigms instead of six zillion third party libraries and multiple C runtime libraries per container that can't share memory pages.
Because it has fewer moving parts, almost never needs to be patched, and they kind of got everything right the first time, it's much more deterministic than any other non-embedded operating system you can practically use on modern hardware today. It would absolutely be my first choice, today, if I had to build some kind of highly reliable control system cluster that had to stay up beyond my lifetime. To this day, I see absolutely ancient installs on a regular basis that simply will not die because they keep swapping out cluster members when they fail. Itaniums and Alpha Galaxies with RPS are extremely reliable by themselves too, and their biggest reliability threat is availability of replacement PSUs and memory. The OS was designed in a pre-Internet era where putting a control host out in the boonies somewhere to control some satellite ground station, feeder dam for a hydroelectric system, or military radar had to work, had to stay up, and had to be as reliable as the hardware of the time would allow. There really isn't anything else like it that will give you those kinds of guarantees in a disconnected, IoT-type edge environment, yet also run on modern gear.
One of the major downsides is that learning how to work with the OS to do modern things isn't well documented anywhere (e.g. how to use logical names to emulate Linux namespaces/container technology). DECNet in particular is a real sticking point for everyone, even though Linux has supported it since forever. I think I might be the only person I know with the enterprise networking, Linux, and OpenVMS background to do all the network plumbing required to integrate DECNet with a modern hybrid cloud or hyperconverged stack. It's not hard, but you have to make sure you check off a bunch of stuff from a checklist to make sure everything works. It's getting harder to find Cisco gear that natively supports it too, but using VMs to NFV some vyos routers or whatever to create brouters works just as well as it does for managing all the usual IP north-south and east-west flows in a big production system.
Despite its age, DECNet is a big feature of OpenVMS because of how it supports the clustering technology, MOP, and things like LAT. LAT is a standardized remote serial protocol that lets you do stuff like add a serial port somewhere that the OpenVMS host can see on the network, and it shows up as a native comm device in the operating system. You can open it, toggle the control lines, all that stuff just like a normal serial port connected to the host. This is unbelievably convenient for distributed control systems because everything was designed by a single firm instead of e.g. trying to integrate digi's remote serial drivers into your product or trying to reinvent autodiscovery of RFC2217 devices. There's a lot more serial ports around than you might think, like the QXDM port on your phone, BMCs, deaf TTYs, the console port on your RPis, etc. Having an infinitely expandable host capable of doing real-time control of hundreds of serial ports all at once isn't something I'd consider any other operating system for.
You kind of have had to work at a shop where they built a lot of stuff on top of OpenVMS within the Internet era to get that knowledge, because I'm not aware of any books or other reading material which explains how modern things map onto the corresponding OpenVMS concepts. I should probably write a book or something, because it would be a shame if the underlying concepts faded from our collective memory and the open source community ended up reinventing all this stuff in a much less efficient way spread over a dozen open source projects that don't have a central architectural authority beating everyone up about centralizing common code.
Cutler and his original team really did deliver a complete OS that got everything right the first time, and I can't think of any modern requirements that OpenVMS can't handle from an architectural perspective. I guess the filesystem isn't capable of doing really big work like a huge z/OS data set or a petabyte sized ZFS pool, but then you just use NFS with EFS or a netapp if you have a fortune 500 IT budget. It sounds wrong, but OpenVMS I/O still sets speed records compared to everything else because of the first-class async I/O support in the OS, and how simple the file I/O layer in the OS is. You can explain the entire write() to disk driver sequence of events to someone in 5 minutes for VMS, but I can't imagine trying to explain just the linux dcache in less than an hour. Just walking through all the filter drivers and everything else touching an IRP in a typical Windows machine is like a semester-long course.
I use a Helium Mobile eSIM, which I pay with crypto. I set it up in something like 10 minutes when I became eligible for an account. No problems so far.
I've also had eSIMs from FirstNet and AT&T, no problems there either. Running dual-sim hasn't been a problem either on any of my Galaxy or iPhones.
Nearly every installation site and their internal support director agrees that the z/OS installations are far less expensive to support, simply because the minimum level of experience for a z/OS engineer is about a magnitude more than a cloud engineer.