A lighthearted end-of-year newsletter sharing miscellaneous software fun facts, including: Tetris implemented in Conway's Game of Life, the history of the backslash character in ASCII, galactic algorithms like Coppersmith-Winograd matrix multiplication, Cloudflare's lava lamp random number generation, historical bugs in mergesort and binary search, Excel's infamous 1900 leap year bug causing biologists to rename genes, JSFuck JavaScript encoding used for malware, and the intended orientation standard for USB connectors.
5 Impressions