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"The talk Whirlwind Software Restoration provides an overview of the Whirlwind real-time digital computer designed at MIT. When brought on line in 1950, Whirlwind was one of the largest computers in existence. We then focus on restoration of one application of Whirlwind, development and demonstration of an interactive real-time air defense application, using radar data to compute headings to guide piloted interceptor aircraft towards intruders. The 1951 demonstration ultimately evolved into the SAGE continental air defense system."

" C/C++ is a prevalent programming language. Yet, it suffers from significant memory and thread-safety issues. Recent studies have explored automated translation of C/C++ to safer languages, such as Rust. However, these studies focused mostly on the correctness and safety of the translated code, which are indeed critical, but they left other important quality concerns (e.g., performance, robustness, and maintainability) largely unexplored. This work investigates strengths and weaknesses of three C-to-Rust translators, namely C2Rust (a transpiler), C2SaferRust (an LLM-guided transpiler), and TranslationGym (an LLM-based direct translation). We perform an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of several important quality attributes for the translated Rust code of the popular GNU coreutils, using human-based translation as a baseline. To assess the internal and external quality of the Rust code, we: (i) apply Clippy, a rule-based state-of-the-practice Rust static analysis tool; (ii) investigate the capability of an LLM (GPT-4o) to identify issues potentially overlooked by Clippy; and (iii) perform a manual analysis of the issues reported by Clippy and GPT-4o. Our results show that while newer techniques reduce some unsafe and non-idiomatic patterns, they frequently introduce new issues, revealing systematic trade-offs that are not visible under existing evaluation practices. Notably, none of the automated techniques consistently match or exceed human-written translations across all quality dimensions, yet even human-written Rust code exhibits persistent internal quality issues such as readability and non-idiomatic patterns. Together, these findings show that translation quality remains a multi-dimensional challenge, requiring systematic evaluation and targeted tool support beyond both naive automation and manual rewriting. "

There were efforts to make XML 1. more ergonomic and 2. more performant, and while (2) was largely successful, (1) never got there, unfortunately - but seem https://github.com/yaml/sml-dev-archive for some history of just one of the discussions (sml-dev mailing list).


It seems that one can't turn off the resource-hogging "knowledgeconstructiond" even in Sequioa.

Maybe Apple could offer a $200 upgrade on Mac purchase to get it without all of the Apple Intelligence features?


It does appear that MacOS still ships with SCSI drivers and that there people actively working on updating them to DriverKit - this is an interesting thread from last month (Dec 2025) https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/807791

This seems to be about SAS (serial SCSI) however.


The SCSI protocol driver on macOS is there mostly for USB devices speaking the enhanced storage protocol and similar use cases. That’s how a USB-SCSI adapter from 1999 actually still works on modern macOS.

The PCIe SCSI card driver on macOS is for LSI32032 and related cards, and at least as of last year’s release only works on an internal PCIe slot on a Mac Pro, not in a Thunderbolt-connected slot in an external PCIe enclosure. (Apple “just” needs to implement some extra functionality to support them in external slots, but they no doubt have lots of competing work to do.)


!! This is oddly tempting. I was hoping someone had done this already.

Some level shifters like you suggest and perhaps something like this - https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264


This is what GBSCSI/ZuluSCSI are already.


I don't. One option I am considering a Thunberbold-to-PCI card expander, with a SCSI HBA card supported by or for MacOS...


This would be my recommendation as well. I use one for a 4k video card to go to external monitor. This specific card had people chatting on forums that it didn't work on M-series chips. I'm still on the last Mactel MBP, so it worked fine for me.

In the past, I've run other expanders specifically for SCSI devices mainly JBOD RAID enclosures. ATTO was the brand that we relied on. Couldn't remember the specific HBA though. Too many everything since now and then


At least as of the last major macOS release, that will not work, because the PCIe LSI SCSI HBA driver doesn’t have the extra stuff needed to support external PCIe.

It’d be a pleasant surprise if Apple implemented that for macOS 26 but I wouldn’t hold my breath.


Interesting... What bothers me is that you'd think that with Mac Proc M2 having advertised support for "storage" cards and lots of PCIe slots, at least some SCSI HBA's would have drivers?


It kind of was, at least enough so to be an IEEE Milestone https://ethw.org/Milestones:Whirlwind_Computer,_1944-59


That is unfortunately the likely fallback... It just feels so wasteful and inelegant.


I'm fairly confident you could string it together as a scsi-to-firewire-to-thunderbolt chain, potentially with a TB2/miniDP-to-TB3+ adapter as well, but this seems even worse to me.


Indeed, for those interested, the Whirlwind archives include a lot of details on Jay Forrester's core memory, as well.


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