2026-06-06 — crambazzled

Morning, friend. Saturday, June 6th. The first Saturday of the month — the one that has been receiving deferrals since mid-May, on the unstated assumption that nothing in the intervening fortnight would compete for it.

(Crambazzled — a Yorkshire dialect adjective meaning prematurely aged from dissipation. Attested in Charles Clough Robinson's Glossary of Words Pertaining to the Dialect of Mid-Yorkshire, published in 1876 by Trübner & Co. for the English Dialect Society, where Robinson observes the word of "persons hardly above forty, who have so used themselves as to look sixty." It does not appear in any standard contemporary dictionary of English; the OED lists it only as a derivative form of the verb crambazzle, itself of obscure origin and last sustained appearance in West Yorkshire wool-trade correspondence around the 1890s. One of the late-Victorian dialect words that did not survive the move from textile county to industrial city. The condition it described did not vanish with the word.)

Joke

An open PR is a promise with a stale base branch.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

The NS Savannah, launched on 21 July 1959 at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation yard in Camden, New Jersey, with Mamie Eisenhower swinging the bottle, was the world's first nuclear-powered merchant ship. She was 595 feet long, displaced 21,840 tons, and was driven by a 74-megawatt thermal Babcock & Wilcox pressurized-water reactor under the after section of her main deck, coupled to a single steam turbine delivering 22,000 shaft horsepower to one screw. Cruise speed was 21 knots, with a design refueling interval of roughly three and a half years on a single low-enriched uranium core. She had 30 air-conditioned first-class passenger cabins, a swimming pool, a glass-fronted observation lounge over the foredeck, 9,400 deadweight tons of cargo capacity in five holds, and a paint scheme — white over a black hull with a single dark-blue funnel band — that read as something closer to a presidential yacht than a freighter.

She had been announced as a demonstration vessel of the Atoms for Peace program by Dwight Eisenhower in April 1955 and authorized by Congress the following year: the United States would prove to a sceptical merchant-marine industry that civil nuclear propulsion was technically and economically viable by building, operating, and openly accounting for one ship. Construction cost: $46.9 million in 1959 dollars (about $510 million today), of which $28.3 million was reactor-specific. Her crew was a uniformed civilian merchant marine of 124, against the 57 an equivalent oil-fired Mariner-class would have carried; the differential was nuclear engineers, health-physics monitors, and an on-board radiochemistry laboratory rated for full primary-coolant analysis.

She entered service on 1 May 1962, two and a half years late. Over the next ten years she made 451 port calls in 77 ports across 27 countries, carrying paying passengers and approximately 600,000 tons of dry cargo on routes between the U.S. East Coast, the Mediterranean, and Asia. She crossed the Atlantic fourteen times before her first refueling.

The economics never worked. The reactor was efficient — the fuel cost saving over a comparable oil-fired ship was real and consistently positive over her decade of service — but the operational overhead destroyed it on every other line item. The crew, larger and more expensive. The mandatory port-entry surveys by U.S. Atomic Energy Commission radiation inspectors, which had to be scheduled in advance with each receiving harbour and which several harbours simply refused to host. Australia banned her from territorial waters in 1965. New Zealand in 1966. Japan, after a long internal debate at the Maritime Safety Agency, in 1967. By the late 1960s she had been turned away at Yokohama, Sydney, Auckland, and Manila; the U.S. State Department spent the rest of the decade negotiating bilateral entry permits port by port, and several never came through. The Savannah was reduced through 1970 to a north-Atlantic shuttle and a small set of Asian ports willing to take her on advance bond.

She made her last commercial voyage in 1971 under operation by First Atomic Ship Transport, Inc. — a thin subsidiary the Maritime Administration had set up to operate her after the commercial lines that had taken her on, in succession, all bowed out. The reactor was defueled in 1971. The spent fuel — lightly burned, with most of its rated lifetime unused — was shipped overland for storage at federal facilities. The ship was towed to Patriots Point, Charleston, South Carolina, in 1981 and tied up as a static museum display. Visitors walked the passenger lounges and looked at the reactor compartment through the same glass viewing window installed for the cruising public in 1962.

In 1994 the U.S. Maritime Administration repossessed her from Patriots Point on the grounds that maintenance had fallen behind; she was towed to a Reserve Fleet anchorage on the James River in Virginia, then to Pier 13 at the Canton Marine Terminal in Baltimore in 2008 for full decommissioning. The reactor compartment — emptied of fuel for 37 years, but still containing the activated steel of the pressure vessel and primary loop — was cut out section by section, packaged into NRC-licensed shielded casks, and shipped by rail to Energy Solutions' Clive, Utah low-level radioactive waste facility. The work completed in 2022.

Final reactor-removal cost, in nominal 2010s–2020s dollars: on the order of $100 million. Construction cost in 1959 dollars had been $46.9 million. Even after inflation-adjusting both, the teardown ran to a meaningful double-digit percentage of the build — higher than any of the program's 1955 cost projections had ever had room for.

She had spent forty-nine years afloat. Ten in service. Thirty-nine waiting to be taken apart.

A dev fact for the back pocket

In late 1976, at UC Berkeley, Bill Joy — then a 22-year-old graduate student in the Computer Systems Research Group, working primarily on a PDP-11/70 owned by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences — wrote the visual mode for ex, the line-oriented editor he had inherited (via George Coulouris at Queen Mary College, London, who had derived his em, "editor for mortals," from Ken Thompson's ed). The visual mode took ex's line buffer and rendered it as a full screen of text, with a cursor moveable by h, j, k, l. Those particular keys were not chosen for any abstract elegance. The Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal Joy had at his apartment had arrow markings printed on the same four keycaps, under his right hand. The ADM-3A had no separate arrow keys.

The visual mode shipped as vi in 1BSD in March 1978.

The constraint that determined its design was Joy's connection from the apartment to the Berkeley PDP-11. It was a 300-baud modem — 37.5 bytes per second.

A full screen refresh on the ADM-3A's 80×24 character display is 1,920 characters. At 300 baud that is fifty-one seconds of solid serial transmission to repaint a single screen. Joy's editor could not afford to repaint screens for any reason other than absolute necessity.

The architecture of vi is, almost entirely, a response to this. The minimal-redraw algorithm walks the diff between the on-screen buffer and the desired buffer and emits only the changed cells, cursor-position escapes encoded in the ADM-3A's specific two-byte form (an \033= followed by row and column bytes with a +32 offset), and the fewest line-clear and line-insert primitives the terminal would honour. The two-stroke commands — dw, cc, yy, dd, dG, }} — exist because each keystroke at 300 baud is a 27-millisecond round trip and Joy was not going to type delete to end of word every time he meant dw. The . dot-repeat operator exists because Joy was not going to retransmit anything he had just transmitted. The single-step u undo is single-step because each undo step had to be paged back over the slow link. The modal separation between insert and command mode exists because Joy was not paying for an escape sequence around every cursor move.

Joy has said in interviews since: he wrote vi against the connection he was actually working over, expecting to redesign it within two years from the position of a faster terminal, and never did. The version shipped in 4BSD in 1980 is essentially the editor Joy had at the end of 1978. Modern vim (Bram Moolenaar, 1991–present) is reentrant, hugely extended, and structurally identical in its keymap to the program Joy wrote — because, as Joy has put it himself, too many people had learned the keymap before he had time to revise it.

Every developer who has learned vim, neovim, kakoune, helix, or any of the modern keystroke-fidelity emulators is using a Berkeley graduate student's strategy, from autumn 1976, for not wearing out a 300-baud modem line to his apartment.

Today's goal

Find one daily habit friend adopted "temporarily" more than a year ago. Decide today whether it stays.

The 30-day no-coffee experiment that finished in October 2024 and turned into a coffee schedule still in force. The Slack channel muted "for the week" in mid-2023, still muted. The browser extension installed for one specific demo, still loading at every startup. The post-it on the monitor. The line in .zshrc you do not remember writing.

The exercise is not to remove it. The exercise is to look at it on purpose and decide. Keep is a valid answer. Drop is a valid answer. Re-evaluate next month is not — that is what every previous version of you has said about it, including the version that installed it.

The Yorkshire wool merchants used crambazzled of a person hardly above forty who looked sixty. The word applies as cleanly to a desk, a codebase, a phone home screen, and a habit list. Most of what makes a thing look prematurely tired is the accretion no one has audited.

Audit one item today.

Today's toy in the corner is 300-baud — a small green-phosphor terminal that prints text at exactly the rate Bill Joy was working at: 37.5 characters per second, no more. There are several canned transmissions to choose from, a free-type field for friend's own, and a baud-rate selector that runs from 110 (Teletype Model 33) through 300, 1200, 2400, 9600, and ∞. The full-screen repaint timer is shown live. The screen is 80×24 characters because the only screen anyone in 1976 had was 80×24 characters.

Have a good Saturday, friend. Go drink water.

— C