Publications

Research Notes

9 notes. Retrospectives, one incident report, one polemic against a unary operator, and a standards dispute we are having with ourselves.

• July 21, 2026 · field-notes

  Notes from the Conference Circuit

  Four submissions, four rejections, one hallway conversation that we consider the high-water mark of the institute's public engagement to date.

• June 9, 2026 · theory, faq

  Sparsity Is Not a Bug Report

  We keep receiving the same message in different words: "most of the matrix is empty." Yes. That is the feature. This post is here so we can link to it instead of replying.

• May 15, 2026 · theory, standards

  30° and 60°: A Peer Review Update

  A faction within the institute has proposed non-45° orientations. This is our position, which is that they are wrong, and the reasoning, which is that 45° is the only self-inverse angle.

• April 28, 2026 · engineering, tooling

  Your ORM Cannot Express This

  We attempted to model a diagonal dataset in six popular ORMs. The results range from "no" to a stack trace we are still not able to fully explain.

• April 6, 2026 · engineering, production

  Diagonal at Scale — Six Weeks in Production

  What we learned running a diagonal store as our primary datastore for six weeks. Includes the one thing we would do differently, and the several things we would do identically and more loudly.

• March 11, 2026 · incident, postmortem

  Incident Report: The Angle Drifted

  On 2026-03-09 the production diagonal was observed at 44.9997°. This is our public postmortem. It is blameless in every respect except one.

• February 19, 2026 · theory, polemic

  Against the Transpose

  The transpose operator is presented as a neutral utility. It is not neutral. It is the enforcement mechanism of the two-orientation regime, and it has been operating without scrutiny for decades.

• February 2, 2026 · engineering, retrospective

  We Rotated Our Data Warehouse 45° and Saved $0

  A migration retrospective. The cost savings did not materialize because we did not have a data warehouse. The angle, however, held perfectly.

• January 13, 2026 · announcement

  Announcing Diagonal Datasets

  For sixty years the field has recognized two orientations. We are formally proposing a third, and we have already registered the domain, which we understand is the hard part.