Some Fun Software Facts
16 hours ago
- In 2017, a team implemented Tetris as a Game of Life simulation using a 30 trillion pixel grid and a programmable CPU.
- Leap seconds, used to sync UTC with Earth's rotation, are set to be abolished by 2035, allowing drift between the two.
- The backslash character scarcely existed before 1930 and was added to ASCII for mathematical notation, becoming a key due to its uselessness.
- Galactic algorithms are theoretically faster but impractical at real-world scales, like the Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm for matrix multiplication.
- Cloudflare generates random numbers partly by photographing 100 lava lamps.
- Mergesort is older than bubblesort, and bubblesort has some practical uses despite its infamy.
- Most mergesort implementations before 2006 were broken due to a midpoint overflow bug for large lists.
- USB orientation follows a standard logo-side-up rule, but port orientation ambiguity led to USB-C's symmetric design.
- All spreadsheet software historically treated 1900 as a leap year due to Lotus 1-2-3 bugs, but Google Sheets now treats it normally.
- In 2020, biologists renamed 27 genes because Excel parsed their names as dates, and Microsoft fixed this three years later.
- Any valid JavaScript program can be encoded using only the characters ()+[]!, known as JSFuck, which was used for malware on eBay.