Published on: 2025-05-02 08:36:24
On April 8, 2020, John Horton Conway developed symptoms of COVID-19. On April 11, 2020, he succumbed to the disease. Like so very, very many, I mourn Conway’s passing, and yet I also celebrate his life. I celebrate his accomplishments, I celebrate his curiosity, and I celebrate his skill at making important topics in mathematics engaging and interesting. One of the finest examples of that skill is the programming language FRACTRAN, the subject of this essay. Prelude John Horton Conway in 199
Keywords: const machine minsky state tape
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-07 04:15:00
Why it matters: Many users, including staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), likely consider magnetic tape storage severely outdated. Despite being around for several decades, the technology still enjoys widespread use, is still evolving, and retains certain advantages over optical and solid-state media. DOGE recently announced that it has replaced 14,000 magnetic storage tapes used by the US General Services Administration (USGSA) with unspecified "modern" digital formats.
Keywords: government lto magnetic storage tapes
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-07 09:25:52
While the move may at first seem like a logical decision to modernize government services, critics were quick to point out the benefits of magnetic tapes over digital. The post by DOGE features a Community Note highlighting a few reasons to use magnetic tape, including the fact that they can store data much more efficiently and offer a physical “airgap” so that data cannot be stolen by cybercriminals. Back in 2020, IBM published an article explaining that as the amount of data stored on the int
Keywords: data digital like magnetic tape
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-08 03:20:44
Earlier this year, The Iconfactory launched a new social feeds app called Tapestry. The app pulls together Bluesky, Mastodon, and other feeds into a unified timeline. And Tapestry’s latest addition, Crosstalk, solves an especially annoying quirk of our fractured social app landscape: duplicate posts. Crosstalk removes duplicate posts from your Tapestry timeline across Bluesky, Mastodon, more Tapestry version 1.1 just arrived on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. The update is packed with a bu
Keywords: app crosstalk posts tapestry timeline
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-08 11:25:46
Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you won’t have to see their post appear twice in your feed if they’ve shared it in multiple places. The new feature, called Crosstalk, is rolling out with the Tapestry 1.1 iOS update on Tues
Keywords: app feed like tapestry users
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-25 15:10:27
JSON is the most common serialization format used in streaming pipelines, so it pays to be able to deserialize it fast. This post covers in detail how the arrow-json library works to perform very efficient columnar JSON decoding, and the additions we've made for streaming use cases. My day job is working on the Arroyo stream processing engine, which executes complex, stateful queries over high-scale streams of events. Computing things like windowed aggregates, stream joins, and incrementally-co
Keywords: data json like string tape
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-31 19:34:07
Optimizing Brainfuck interpreter in the C preprocessor A C99 confirming* optimizing Brainfuck implementation written (and executed) only using the C preprocessor. *If you find something that does not confirm to the standard or is unspecified/undefined, please open an issue. Example Hello World Output #include "bf.c" BF (, I , I , I , I , I , I , I , I , B , R , I , I , I , I , B , R , I , I , R , I , I , I , R , I , I , I , R , I , L , L , L , L , D , E , R , I , R , I , R , D , R , R , I ,
Keywords: head preprocessor tape tcc use
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-16 06:46:27
IO devices and latency By Benjamin Dicken | March 13, 2025 Non-volatile storage is a cornerstone of modern computer systems. Every modern photo, email, bank balance, medical record, and other critical pieces of data are kept on digital storage devices, often replicated many times over for added durability. Non-volatile storage, or colloquially just "disk", can store binary data even when the computer it is attached to is powered off. Computers have other forms of volatile storage such as CPU
Keywords: data pages read storage tape
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-07 22:03:00
Cassettes do have a warm and distinctive sound, though—once you have a taste for light hiss, you may find yourself missing it in cleaner formats. The unique difficulty of skipping songs gives the album format a primacy no other medium can—you may find yourself learning to like songs you'd have skipped. (While writing this review I realized Liz Phair's “Crater Lake” is an absolute banger.) For the collector, cassettes are still relatively cheap and affordable in an era when you see a vinyl copy
Keywords: cassette headphones player rewind tape
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-11 11:11:03
TR25-017 | 24th February 2025 05:09 Simulating Time in Square-Root Space We show that for all functions $t(n) \geq n$, every multitape Turing machine running in time $t$ can be simulated in space only $O(\sqrt{t \log t})$. This is a substantial improvement over Hopcroft, Paul, and Valiant's simulation of time $t$ in $O(t/\log t)$ space from 50 years ago [FOCS 1975, JACM 1977]. Among other results, our simulation implies that bounded fan-in circuits of size $s$ can be evaluated on any input in
Keywords: log multitape space time turing
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-15 10:37:21
Automattic-owned blogging site and social platform Tumblr has financially backed Tapestry, the newly launched app designed to organize feeds from across the open web, including RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others. Launched as a Kickstarter project in January 2024, Tapestry went on to raise over $177,000 via crowdfunding for its app, which opened up to the public earlier this month with its App Store debut. On Tuesday, the company behind the app shared that Tumblr had also backed its project wit
Keywords: app feeds iconfactory tapestry tumblr
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