DIAGONAL DATASETS

Colophon

Colophon

What is true

  • The domain is real and was purchased on purpose.
  • The angle is 45 degrees. That part is arithmetic.
  • Diagonal data does compress better when consecutive values are related. That is the one straightforwardly true technical claim on this website.
  • Banded matrices are a real and genuinely useful technique from numerical linear algebra. We spend a paragraph in the founding note asking people to stop bringing this up, which is a joke about how research programs defend their novelty, not a claim about the mathematics.
  • Every workload listed under "where diagonal shines" really does exhibit band structure. That is why the joke works.

What is not true

Everything else. The institute, the node, the rack, the incident, the protractors, the shims, the landlord, the conference rejections, the reviewer who could not tell whether it was satire, the eleven subscribers, and all six benchmark tables.

There is no diagonal package. There is no tpc-d45 repository. RFC-D45 is not a standards-track document and IANA has not been contacted, in this world or in the fictional one.

Do not cite this in a design review

People have tried. That sentence is in the footer of every page and it is the closest thing this site has to a warning label.

How it is built

A static site generator of about 200 lines, no dependencies, running on Node. Content is Markdown with a hand-rolled subset renderer. Output is plain HTML and one stylesheet.

Deployed as a Cloudflare Worker with static assets. The Worker exists only for /api/*, which computes the band at request time because the diagonal is a living thing and cannot be pre-rendered.

Palette and typography are lifted directly from the original PowerPoint that started this: near-black #05070D, cyan #00F0FF, magenta #FF2BD6, and a monospace face throughout.

Provenance

This began as a seven-slide deck titled A rigorously unserious technical briefing. The deck is the source text. Everything here is an elaboration of it, and the elaboration got out of hand in the specific way that is the entire point.