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"$((" arithmetic expansion is POSIX (XCU 2.6.4 "Arithmetic Expansion").

But if I'm not mistaken, it originated in csh.


This doesn't include the oddest of all: sigma.

When lowercasing Σ (U+03A3 Greek capital letter sigma) it is context-sensitive (on whether it is at the end of a word) whether it becomes σ (U+03C3 Greek small letter sigma) or ς (U+03C2 Greek small letter final sigma).


That reminds me of the old 'long S'[1] that used to exist in English and survives in the symbol for integration. That worked in a ſimlar way for writing Engliſh, at the ſtart and middle of words you'd use the long s but not at the end so you end up with 'poſſeſs' for 'possess'. There were other rules around it too, I think you'd always use the usual S for a capital.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s


Not only in English. My local newspaper (in Trondheim, Norway) shows its name as Adresſeaviſen on the front page (in a fractur font to boot).

True! This list could more accurately be described as "Unicode codepoints that expand or contract when case is changed in UTF-8", which is exactly what I was testing in my program. I had built a parser that was relying on some assumptions that I felt was not correct, so I built some tests with this data.

For those interested, this was the generation script. I'm sure there was a way to do it better or simpler, and I wish I could just say this was a quick-and-dirty script, but in fact I spent quite a few hours on it (this is the fourth rewrite):

https://gist.github.com/rendello/b06ca3d976d26fa011897bd1603...


Σ now shows up on my Unicode round-trip horror show ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42020476


" is imperial inches, ' is imperial feet.


Sixel graphics on the vt220 (1983) worked by defining a custom font of 10x10 px characters (9x10 in high-resolution mode), which you could then switch to for any given character.

As far as I know, there is no terminal emulator that supports this flavor if sixel graphics.


By default, mpv has vertical-scroll bound to volume and horizontal-scroll bound to scrubbing.


I don't.

Just 3 AI spiders put more load on our servers than all search engine spiders and all human traffic combined.

Some numbers I have handy from before I blocked the bots:

ClaudeBot drove more requests through our Redmine in a month than it saw in the combined 5 years prior to ClaudeBot.

Bytespider accounted for 59% of the total traffic to our Git server.

Amazonbot accounted for 21% of the total traffic to our Git server.

Google has never even been close to breaking out of the single-digit-percentages of any metric.


Generally Googlebot is well behaved and efficient these days, though I have discovered that it is currently horribly broken around 429 / 503 response codes... And pays no attention to Retry-After either... Also Google-Podcast which is meant to have been turned off!


Someone needs to start adding all these AI's homepages to the browser "malware" lists.


Sticker Mule is one of the major internet-order small-batch/on-demand custom sticker/T-shirt/swag suppliers. You may know them from "unixstickers".

Following Trump getting shot, Sticker Mule send out a marketing email to customers encouraging them to buy a T-shirt that "shows you support Trump."

This has caused many Sticker Mule customers to seek alternatives. Sticker Ninja has benefited greatly from this (they are "slammed", as TFA says). Sticker Ninja hasn't done anything political here, and that's sort of the point; they haven't while Sticker Mule has.


I'm not sure what you're thinking of, but there at least 3 prominent and still-relevant awk implementations:

nawk (One True Awk / AT&T awk / BWK awk): the original awk, still maintained; is used by macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk

mawk (Mike's awk): the default awk on Debian https://invisible-island.net/mawk/

gawk (GNU awk): the default awk in lots of other places https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/


But that doesn't refute the parent's point, does it? (If it has been edited since you wrote that, the version I see is "Unix's involvement with the development of the Internet was mainly through BSD, which was a UC Berkeley joint, not Bell Labs.")

They were responding to the statement:

> "why can't we [Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, other folks at Bell Labs] work on the the future of a global inter-net? Why do we have to hide it [Unix] as a text processing system?"

Whether or not the BSD TCP/IP implementation was the first or most influential, the point is that it wasn't the Bell Labs Unix folks driving Unix networking forward. UNET was from 3Com.


The Bell Labs people had their own approach - Datakit.[1] This was a circuit-switched network as seen by the user but a packet switch inside the central-office switches. Bell Labs used it internally, and it was deployed in the 1980s.

Pure IP on the backbone was highly controversial at the time. The only reason pure IP works is cheap backbone bandwidth. We still don't have a good solution to datagram congestion in the middle of the network. Cheap backbone bandwidth didn't appear until the 1990s, as fiber brought long-distance data transfer costs way, way down. There was a real question in the 1980s and 1990s over whether IP would scale. A circuit-switched network, with phone numbers and phone bills, was something AT&T understood. Hence Datakit.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1013879.802670


As far as I know, there were only 5 PPro computers that could take >4GB: Axil Northbridge NX801, Data General AV8600, HP NetServer LXr Pro8, NCR Worldmark 4380, or Unisys XR/6

Interestingly, while the Intel 450GX chipset was designed to daisy-chain DRAM controllers (1 controller chip per 4GB of RAM), none of the boards that actually could take >4GB used that, instead building their own solutions. Presumably that meant that there was a bug in the chipset.

Anyway, each of those 5 computers would have run you at least $500k in 1998.

(I've been on-and-off trying to acquire one of those boxes for a few years now.)


Had fun googling those system names. NX801: https://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/axil/axil.nx8...

200 9.1GB SCSI disks for 1.8TB!

And still only 4GB RAM on that SQL Server 6.5 box they used for TPC-C. Wild.

And yeah, $770k for that server.

Edit: I guess whilst I'm at it...

Data General AV8600: https://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/dg/dg.8600.es...

HP NetServer LXr Pro8: https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/hp/netserverlxrpor8.pdf


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