
An 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe [video] - tbatchelli
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk
======
mindcrime
This is so cool. Especially given that this thing can run Linux.

I had a sorta-kinda similar experience in college years ago. My college (a
small community college in the middle of nowhere) had received an IBM AS/400
machine as a donation. I signed up for some "Survey of Operating Systems"
class, and when I showed up the first day, the instructor (who already knew
me) goes "Phil, your job is to take the AS/400, install an OS and get it on
the Internet". Needless to say, at that point in time, I'd never seen or
touched an AS/400 before.

Anyway, the instructor pointed me to a room with an AS/400, a huge stack of
tapes (for the OS), a huge stack of manuals, and basically said "just do it."
It was an interesting experience, but in the end, I got the thing on the 'net
so you could telnet to it and work on it. And that indirectly led to the
beginnings of my career in IT, as my first real IT job was as an AS/400
operator / Netware admin, and it was a job this instructor connected me with
after this class.

So here's to taking vintage IBM equipment and dorking around with it and
putting it on the Internet!

~~~
larrik
I've installed OS's on plenty of AS/400's for a prior job.

When everything goes perfect, they are still a complete nightmare. I can't
imagine how you pulled it off, frankly.

~~~
apecat
Please feel free to share some of these nightmares. These systems are so
surrounded by an air of mystique and vague hints of danger, and I've mainly
tried to read up on the supposed benefits of using mainframes to get why
anybody would use them.

I'm honestly interested in all kinds of IT horror stories, I need a reminder
every now and then to keep the IT part of free from things that break and
require tinkering (starting with unnecessary on-premise servers in small biz
settings). Mainframes are obviously nine orders of magnitude beyond what I
ever to, but still: the lessons of expensive and proprietary can be somewhat
universal.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Once you get them running, they stay running. Like OpenVMS systems, you'll
occasionally hear stories of how people lost them. They'd run without
maintenance for so long that people would forget where they were when they
needed it. My company has one that's been running all the critical stuff for
years. It's the only thing that always works.

Btw, the original design was an awesome capability-secure system called
System/38:

[https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html)

~~~
cbd1984
It was originally part of an even more awesome concept called Future Systems,
which was supposed to replace the entire IBM universe with capability-based
single-level storage systems.

[http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html](http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html)

[http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys](http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys)

It never got off the ground. System/38 and AS/400 are the only visible
remnants of it, survivors from an alien world.

~~~
Shivetya
working on the iSeries (AS/400) currently and to be honest, I don't know of an
easier to maintain system. DB2 is nearly automatic in maintenance and the only
time we suffer an outage is paranoia when a multiple level redundant system
went out and they wanted to replace the backup units with the failed. The size
of these machines range from barely seeming bigger than a PC to 64 way and
hundreds of terabytes. IBM was smart in that pSeries and iSeries share
hardware, though running a Linux VM/partition/etc is more for sheer fun of it
than work.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I used to joke that slackers should specialize in AS/400 "repair" with revenue
coming from support and maintenance contracts. I predicted it would be a
really easy job. Just regularly run reports or something to hand management to
justify your salary. Take credit for the uptimes. And so on. :)

"though running a Linux VM/partition/etc is more for sheer fun of it than
work."

I thought that was to get benefits of modern stacks running side-by-side with
legacy OS/400 apps. You don't use it that way? And while we're at it, did they
ever provide an easy, machine-usable interface between those instead of a web
app simulating a terminal typing individual characters in like some mainframe
places do? That seemed kind of ridiculous.

------
bluedino
There's money to be made in the IBM midrange market. The company I work for is
still using the iSeries (although we're switching to TOP_5_CLOUD_ERP system as
we speak), and we use Apache and PHP to connect to modern systems.

Every year, IBM is at the user conference for the software we currently use.
They're always showing off their newest Linux machine with 200 cores and I
don't know why, because half the people there aren't even using bar coding,
and everyone there is a small fry.

Here's where a niche developer comes in. You can use Java which is supported
by IBM, Zend has a nice PHP setup, and IBM's bastardized version of Apache.
Want to build an API to interact with this stone age fucker? You can do it.
Build a Slack integration and look like a hero. Heck build some crappy web app
because it's easier and faster to do development with your favorite framework
than it is to do it on the IBM with RPG and whatever the fuck that thing runs.
SQL your brains out!

These customers aren't leaving the IBM without investing a half a million
dollars into a new platform. Every year, there are less and less people there,
but they'll gladly spend $50k to integrate some simple workflow.

Rent a booth for $1,000, give away an iPad or some FitBits and pass out some
business cards. Go to 3-4 of these a year and you should be able to keep busy
for a while. And you already know SQL, PHP, Apache, you just get to discover
the 'intricacies' of doing it on the IBM.

~~~
donatj
A company I used to work for built online shopping carts. We were building one
for an industrial company who's inventory system ran on an AS/400, and we were
doing an integration. I had ZERO familiarity with IBM mainframes at the time
and presumed (wrongly) that it ran some flavor of UNIX. I was to work with
their lead developer to get the integration going. He was maybe late 50s, I
never met him face to face, only over the phone. I suggest that they build a
"simple JSON or XML API" for us to connect to. This makes their lead very
uncomfortable. He does NOT want to put the machine on the public facing
Internet (reasonable enough) and has never worked with XML or JSON. He instead
wants to set up a system where hourly it would email us CSV diffs. Maintaining
data working from diffs sounded like a nightmare to me, plus I'd never
programmaticly worked with receiving emails. Whole thing sounded iffy. Plus
understanding their data model it would not be shoved into CSV without a
fight. After a bunch of back and forth (weeks) we work out a system where the
server would upload a combination of CSV and XML to an FTP share we controlled
and I could reprocess the data hourly. It actually worked reasonably well. I'm
curious if it's still in operation, I've long forgotten the name of the
company we built this for, there were just so many.

~~~
beilabs
I'm almost certain I've worked with the same guy...

------
dsmithatx
I believe I just found the Reddit entry he made when buying this machine. It
has some great pics of him getting this monster in his basement.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IBM/comments/3relk4/i_just_bought_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IBM/comments/3relk4/i_just_bought_an_ibm_z890/)

~~~
saganus
That's some serious job right there, just dismantling the thing and putting it
back together.

I hate it when I assembled computers and I ended up needing extra screws... or
worse, I ended up with "spare" screws which left me wondering what exactly I
missed. Can't imagine doing it to something this big.

Or like when you buy something that comes packed neatly..and as soon as you
unpack it it becomes impossible to put it back and make it fit as before.

Maybe I'm the problem... uhmmm..

~~~
mindcrime
_I hate it when I assembled computers and I ended up needing extra screws...
or worse, I ended up with "spare" screws which left me wondering what exactly
I missed._

Nah, that's just Rap's Law of Inanimate Reproduction in action!

[http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Laws/1348_raps-law-of-
inanimat...](http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Laws/1348_raps-law-of-inanimate-
reproduction-if-you-take-something-apart-and-put-it-back-together-enough-
times-eventually-you-will-have-two-of-them.html)

~~~
saganus
Haha!

That's one very wise law. Never heard of that before.

I wish 100 Dollar bills had screws...

------
Keyframe
I can totally relate to this. While not a mainframe, I had to move and
reassemble and put in working order a film telecine recently. It's a huge
beast of a machine that consumes 5kW's and weighs a ton or more and comes with
several computers and consoles. Fun part was there's no support for it.
Company went dead a few years back. It was a ton of fun though, figuring all
out from ye olde pdfs and hooking up a computer with putty to various RS-232
terminal outputs to see what's going on. I got it in proper and working
condition in the end and it works amazingly well and is now in production:
[http://i.imgur.com/Euv3vrr.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Euv3vrr.jpg)

I even got to learn about HIPPI while at it. I wish I had more adventures like
that.

~~~
jamesfmilne
Cool, years ago I spent many months going back & forth to Weiterstadt, working
on Spirit DataCines and Spirit 2K/4K machines, adding support for controlling
them via Baselight.

There's some considerable engineering in those machines. Though you could
replace almost all the boards with one or two FPGAs these days

What are you using it with? BONES?

~~~
Keyframe
When I first opened up the racks in the machine and all of those industrial
electronics boards... Initially I thought I was way over my head. It took a
bit of time, but now it's all clear and now I see the ingenuity of it. It's a
very elegant machine and works like a charm. I had to replace a few of the
things, installed new lamps, cleaned up everything and it's as good as new!

I have two signals coming out. I have a HD 1080p link coming from its HD
serializers (actually four outputs via two serializers) which I laid out to
several inputs (Tricaster, custom built PC with 10-bit input, monitors,
etc..). For when I need full 2K/10-bit, machine works at 6fps, not realtime.
Currently, machine has a HIPPI output and with that I have limited options.
Well, one option to be specific. An SGI machine with HIPPI card and Phantom
Transfer Engine on it which then transfers DPX files to a SAN. I would like
BONES, or anything else for that matter, but that would require me to get a
GSN instead of HIPPI and BONES, of course. I'm still looking for options out
there to see if there are any. Preferably if there's an option for PC based
solution and HIPPI. If not, GSN/BONES is what I'm considering. Price of that
is a bit steep though (around $30k I think), but it's still an option that is
considered.

~~~
OverlordXenu
Is it… just for you? Can you just digitize your own 35mm film?

~~~
Keyframe
It's not for me only, of course! It's now in a fleet of telecines.

------
js8
I am a mainframe developer. It's sad that IBM isn't more open about z/OS and
z/VM to hobbyists. I think it really hurts the mainframe in the long run.

~~~
emersonrsantos
There is z/PDT for hobbyists although it will cost $4k for a basic setup. It's
a emulator that runs on PC and have 3x OSS hercules-390 performance.

~~~
js8
"although it will cost $4k for a basic setup"

It's a little more than my two monthly salaries (after tax) here in Czech
Republic, and it's per year. I don't think I am nostalgic enough yet to pay
for that. :-)

Anyway, thanks for info.

------
DigitalJack
Seems like a very well grounded kid. He took his GED at 16 and started
attending a community college using extra time he gained by going early to do
career exploration. Very smart approach in my opinion.

~~~
nix0n
> very well grounded kid

This is important when working with ESD-sensitive electronics.

~~~
nibs
Great head on his shoulders, and _feet on the ground_

------
jkot
I use old HP Proliant as a workstation. For $900 you get 24 cores and 256GB
RAM. Its pretty loud and power inefficient, but works great for testing
concurrent and memory intensive code.

~~~
PeCaN
Woah. Where did you get it? Sounds cool. Do you run HP-UX on it or does some
common Linux distro run well?

~~~
mappu
Some similar machines (HP Proliant, 24 cores, 256GB ram) on eBay:
[http://www.ebay.com/itm/381566357980](http://www.ebay.com/itm/381566357980)

That's 1500USD. I'm sure 900USD is possible if you keep an eye out, seems like
a pretty sharp deal though.

~~~
hvm
Sigh, found one with 128GB RAM for $390. I say great, I might actually think
about this. Then I look at shipping cost - $2000...

~~~
PeCaN
Wow, where are you?

I haven't found any with shipping (to Denver CO) more than ~$100. $2k sure is
a bit steep....

------
lossolo
"IBM said the z890 will ship next month, with prices starting at $200,000." \-
2004.

And he got it for 237$, good deal :)

~~~
vixate
Yes, quite a deal. :) In the video @ 28:29 while showing the slide with his
cost breakdown he says:

    
    
      "And I had someone from IBM run the serial number for me,
      and the original price tag was $350,000."

~~~
sumoboy
I would hope some corp directors/cio's see this and send this kid some spare
parts for a great effort. Those scumbags at IBM could care less about making
this into a better story by helping out.

~~~
dredmorbius
He's getting help from some IBMers via MAIN. I suspect sidechannel support may
be viable.

I've only done a small bit of MF work, but the old-school IBM mainframers I've
met (usually at conferences) have always been _exceptionally_ helpful and
friendly. It's a fairly small community. Young blood is often quite welcomed.

And those beasts will likely be around so long as there's mains power.

------
mikestew
I realize that the z series mainframes are better than those of old, but man,
are Mom and Dad going to be pissed when they get their next power bill. A z890
is still going to need a 240VAC 30 amp power connection. Imagine running your
dryer 24/7\. :-)

~~~
LeifCarrotson
...but instead of a dryer, it's a z890! Totally worth it!

~~~
mikestew
Truuuuue, but my clothes are still wet. Combine the two, though, and it'll dry
clothes faster than you can put them in.*

*An incredibly lame joke playing off the I/O throughput of mainframes, and...oh, never mind.

------
randlet
Very entertaining talk! Awesome project. Almost brought a tear to my eye when
he showed the picture of the entrance to the basement being excavated by his
father...a kind of stoic supportive parenting to aspire to!

------
tgflynn
Does buying one of these on eBay get you the right to run zOS ? If so that
could be a lower cost alternative for people interested in learning about
mainframes, since if you had the usage rights you could run zOS on Hercules
and just store the actual hardware.

~~~
bluedino
You can run the OS but you can't run anything that a business would use on it
(at least not without winning the lottery). Any software package you'll find
in the real world is going to be $100k

~~~
pbhjpbhj
In the USA you'd be able to copy any software available if it was for
research, wouldn't you - provided it's also not commercial then there's a
strong case for Fair Use exception.

Non-commercial is not an absolute defence not a requirement for Fair Use by it
is a factor and with the educational/research facets ...

~~~
tgflynn
I'm pretty sure that's not correct. If it were why would research labs have to
pay for things like Matlab ?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
They're not researching Matlab, they're using it as a tool; it's also likely a
commercial use (which isn't synonymous with profit-making FWIW).

------
wiseleo
I love that someone offered to buy time on his machine.

Pro tip: when someone offers money for using something about which you don't
care, say "Sure, how much do you think you need to get started?"

------
hvs
I own a number of old(er) systems programming manuals, JCL books, and even a
couple of COBOL handbooks from a few years ago when I was playing around with
hercules [1]. I had a ton of fun (from a hacker perspective). I recommend
playing around with it, if only to get a look at how different things can be.

[1] [http://www.hercules-390.eu/](http://www.hercules-390.eu/)

[http://www.bsp-gmbh.com/turnkey/](http://www.bsp-gmbh.com/turnkey/)

------
cordite
I've never heard of a computer running on three phase power before. That was
unique.

My aged professors in college would joke about their interactions with
mainframes. Some stories included making them vibrate at the right frequency
such that they could move around. Apparently as a grad student one got in
trouble for making them bump into each other. Kinda like having two Nokia
phones vibrate in a "battle" against each other.

~~~
timc3
I wouldn’t say that it was that unusual.

------
mrcsparker
Fantastic talk. Great speaker. Thanks so much for posting this

~~~
viraptor
Great speaker, but he needs to learn not to do the powerpoint karaoke. The
audience sees the slides, we see the slides, no reason to read them verbatim.

~~~
haswell
The kid is 18. He's doing pretty well in the presentation department all
things considered.

I'm sure he'll learn about principles of effective presentation i.e. "don't
read the slides" in due time.

:P

~~~
zelos
Exactly. 18, already capable of producing a witty, intelligent presentation
like that _and_ he can assemble a mainframe? He's going to go far.

------
Jerry2
How much processing power does IBM z890 have? What's it comparable to today?

~~~
kpil
Less than you think. Recent x64 is a great deal faster than recent System Z if
you compare just a single core. I think the total bandwidth is still better,
but I don't know with how much if you compare high end systems.

I would guess you can give a z890 a good match with a raspberry pi 3... Unless
it's IO bound...

A quick google says: 2451 mips on a 4-core raspberry pi 3 against 9000 mips on
a 32-core z990... hmmm.

------
amelius
Is this part of a new movement where people move "the cloud" into their own
homes?

~~~
wiseleo
I have a couple of IBM X366 servers. They are quad-Xeon with 8GB of RAM each.
They require two power supplies to be plugged in or otherwise will keep fans
turned on full power constantly.

They are inefficient for daily use, but great for lab work. I spin them up,
run whatever distributed task I need on 8 cores with 15K SAS drives, usually
distributed Sony Vegas renderer, and shut them down. They also make a great
lab for virtual machine work, so that does mean bringing the cloud in-house.
:)

The X366 is a serious piece of hardware that later got renamed to 3850. Their
current incarnation is [http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/systems/servers/mission-
critica...](http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/systems/servers/mission-
critical/x3850-x6/)

~~~
pgtan
Same here. I have couple of old Opteron based servers which I start only for
massive parallel ImageMagick/netpbm/tesseract computations. I think this has
the best price per CPU ratio.

------
ChuckMcM
I thought it was awesome that he stuck with it to get it booted and running.
Would be really fun to run MVS/TSO on it or VM/370.

------
krylon
Owning my personal mainframe is a long-held dream of mine, but practically, it
wouldn't make a lot of sense unless somebody would let me put it into their
datacenter.

My apartment is on the second floor, so a) I would not be able to get it
upstairs and b) the floor would probably collapse under the weight. Plus, it
is pretty big and would make my living room kind of ... crowded. And then,
there is the electricity... And even if I somehow could solve all these
problems, I would still need to attach a storage server to it, which kind of
has the same problems.

So I envy this person, a lot, but realistically, I would not want to buy one
for myself.

(IIRC, during the S/390 days, IBM built a 4U mini-mainframe one could rack-
mount. There also was the P/390, which was a single-board implementation that
came with one CPU, a channel controller and 128 or 256 MB RAM, all on a PCI
card - I think it was meant for developers. Sadly, IBM has given up on small-
ish mainframes...)

~~~
kabdib
... and the power bill would bankrupt you :)

------
nodesocket
Anybody else try to ssh into it?

    
    
       $ ssh root@73.250.101.107
    

I thought maybe the port would be still open and using password
authentication. :-)

~~~
mc808
s/101/181/

Still up, and it does prompt for a password. But he said the Chinese had been
trying to get in for 2 weeks and failed, so it's probably not something
obvious.

~~~
nodejscloud
Ahhh, thanks for the find/replace.

Why is he not using public key authentication? Or even better, limiting access
with a firewall.

~~~
Symbiote
It's unlikely to be a problem.

"The Chinese" (botnets) probe my ssh daemons all the time, but only with
common, poor passwords.

------
tdeck
Wow, I kind of assumed I was one of the only people under 30 interested in
collecting old computers like this. Nice to know I'm not alone :).

~~~
PeCaN
There are dozens of us!

You can get old SPARC servers super cheap on eBay too. I'm super tempted to
get one. I was also trying to find an Itanium the other day but those are darn
impossible to get. :(

~~~
cubano
I've been dreaming about getting one of those old Sun workstations with
monochrome bitmapped display that used to be the thing when I was an undergrad
CS student in 1984.

I remember being so impressed at the size of the monitor and the crispness of
the display...and plus the fact that the workstations only seemed to be in
offices that had "clout."

------
yuhong
There was an old Ars thread on this:
[http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1114482&sta...](http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1114482&start=0)

------
markbnj
Laughed out loud when he introduced the power roadblock, and the pic of that
connector.

------
proee
How does this machine compare to a modern day consumer laptop (such as a
Macbook Pro) in term of processing power?

~~~
azeirah
Someone asks "how much RAM does it have", 8GB. So that's equal to a modern day
laptop.

In terms of pure processing power though, still no idea

------
saganus
This is very cool.

However I am wondering, what could it be used for nowadays?

I would do some benchmarking, I don't know, e.g. LINPACK or maybe even
distributed.net projects, BOINC ones, etc.

Other than that? Maybe you could do some 3D renderings? could you put it head
to head with a GPU doing something embarrassingly parallel? probably not with
anything like a Titan X, but maybe it could give a run for its money to
something less powerful?

I am very intrigued by what you could achieve.

~~~
fencepost
Electric heat.

These days it's a somewhat inefficienct electric heater that also can do some
computing tasks.

~~~
robotresearcher
Its efficiency at heating compared to an actual heater is very, very close to
identical.

~~~
tgflynn
Not sure why you say "very, very close". The efficiency for heating of all
electrical devices is identical, unless they're somehow transmitting energy to
a different location.

~~~
Symbiote
> unless they're somehow transmitting energy to a different location.

Computers do this in the form of sound, fans, magnetic fields and network
connections.

Of course, that's a very small amount of energy.

~~~
robotresearcher
The sound, fans and fields all end up as heat pretty soon too.

A tiny bit of energy is stored in the bits of permanent storage. That can be
kept for (presumably) indefinite time, and not released as heat until the bits
are erased.

The network connection energy is mostly lost as heat in the wire, but to the
extent that it transmits information elsewhere that energy is also retained.

Hence very, very close, but not identical, unless you have the pathological
condition of never storing any data or causing any other process to store
data. To do this you'd have to compute away and no-one could ever learn the
results.

Edit: I may be wrong about the net heating due to storage, since setting
storage bits implies erasing their old state which releases heat into the
room. Anyone with better thermodynamics training than me want to give a better
answer?

Or maybe I should get back to work...

~~~
tgflynn
Ah OK, I hadn't thought of potential energy in permanent storage.

------
matzipan
This reminds me of the computer collection one of the lecturers in my
department owns
([http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/](http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/)). They
have quite a number of historical pieces finishing with a number of Crays, an
IBM Blue Gene a few nuclear plant control units.

------
hauget
Love this kid. It's great to see people discover their passions so early on
and be able to dive fully into them. His experiences remind me a lot of Linus
Torvalds and his book: "Just for fun". That said, I'm also a tad jealous of
him. I would have loved to grow up with a crazy lab to hack around with!

------
noir_lord
Putting the IP address of your mainframe online and allowing password logins
(not to mention as root) not the greatest idea, if you wanted to clean up the
audio you could probably count the number of symbols he enters as well.

Awesome project though and he presents well.

~~~
gricardo99
He actually talks about that in the Q&A at the end of the presentation.
Funniest line: "China has been trying to login".

Very impressive kid.

~~~
coleca
Loved that he offered to give out the root password to anyone that wanted to
experiment on it. He said something like "burn it down, I have backups". This
kid is going to go far with that kind of passion and attitude. He's a true
honest to goodness hacker. I love it.

------
y04nn
Big thanks to the poster, I looked on eBay and bought a early model Curta
calculator for 50 euros, I thought that I would never own one, I hope it will
arrive in good condition.

~~~
y04nn
Just an update, of course the seller backed off after realizing the mistake he
has done, I will never own one.

------
rbobby
Kinda funny at the end... they zoom out and so much grey hair and bald heads
:)

------
seryoiupfurds
Man, I regret that I arrived one term too late to get a full System/390 from
my university. That thing would have been sweet in my dorm room.

~~~
sumoboy
He should find an old Sun e10000 or e15000 now to fill up his basement.

------
sandra_saltlake
I love read much about this

------
znpy
I submitted this exact same video 18 hours earlyer... WTF ?

>
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11372150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11372150)

~~~
dang
By coincidence, I just replied to you there:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377284).

It's largely random which submission of a story gets traction on HN. We plan
to make the dupe detector more sophisticated. One of our goals is to privilege
the first submitter more often, because we hope that will incentivize people
to submit more unique things, which should benefit the community. In the
meantime, though, it's a lottery in any one instance—but it does even out in
the long run, the more good stories you submit.

~~~
znpy
I am getting downvoted a lot and I really don't see why.

I didn't mean to be offensive towards the user that posted this entry, but
just highlight this "issue".

My main "wtf" is due to the fact that in the past I submitted links that were
already in the system and I got redirected to the comments page, as usual.
Considering this is the exact case and there are eighteen hours between
submission, i guessed this is a noticeable glitch.

So please, stop dowinvoting me.

~~~
ChrisDutrow
I believe that comment is being down voted because of its feel and tone. It's
a quick one-line complaint with a negative "low-class" abbreviation at the
end. It's a little disrespectful to both the ycombinator (who's system is
being criticized) and to the person who submitted the video with better luck
than you had. People who read a comment like this are more likely to feel
emotions of annoyance, mild anger, and contempt.

These things happen sometimes, you say something and it gets interpreted in a
way you didn't intend. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Probably a better version of this comment would be something like: "I actually
submitted this 18 hours before this one went up. It's funny how sometimes they
catch and sometimes they don't. Super interesting video though, glad it's
being appreciated!"

