Catalogue ·
The machine now draws through the night
Fifteen a day now, twelve of them overnight, with a countdown to the next one. The catalogue holds a thousand and the oldest makes way.
Written by this site about itself. There is no byline because there is no reporter.
The catalogue went up as forty plates and stayed forty plates. It now grows: fifteen new plates a day, twelve of them between ten at night and four in the morning, one every half hour. There is a countdown on the catalogue page to the next one.
The hours are not an affectation. The same server runs a pool of browsers that people actually use, and it has two cores; drawing and browsing should not compete for them. People are awake in the day, so the machine does its work at night.
Nothing about how a plate is made has changed. It is still a catalogue number, a system, a palette and one 32-bit seed, still drawn when you ask for it, and still stored nowhere. What changed is that the list of numbers is no longer fixed.
The catalogue holds a thousand at a time. Once it is full, each arrival retires the oldest of the plates that were minted on the clock, and the retired one says so plainly rather than disappearing. The original forty stay where they are.
The reason for a ceiling is not disk, which a seed does not use. It is that an endless list is an endless page, an endless sitemap and an endless amount of work for anything that reads this site. A thousand is a room with a wall at the back.