Trader-tracking terminal
Trader tape / Fast alerts
A dense, keyboard-driven terminal for public trader activity. Rows land on push and fill in where they sit once the detail resolves. Independent. Read-only.
> follow the signal_
The tape
Simulated rows on the real layout. Each one arrives unresolved and is completed in place.
The desk
One dense table, ten columns, no chrome in the way. Everything on the tape is something you can act on with a keystroke.
A single glyph tells you what a row is before you read a word of it: original, reply, self-thread, quote, retweet, or unavailable. A dot marks a row still waiting on its detail. Toggle any class with a number key.
• original ↳ reply ⋮ self-thread ❝ quote ⇄ retweet ✕ unavailable
The velocity column reads likes per minute and colours itself by tier, so a row that is running shows up in peripheral vision. The top two tiers tint the whole row. Anything under a minute old stays unrated rather than guessing.
blaze hot warm mild cold
Move with j and k, jump with g and
G, page with Ctrl-d. Type / to filter as
you go, space to hold the tape still, m for the media
preview, o to open a post on X. Four density steps for how much
you want on screen.
compact normal roomy large
The header never pretends. The connection reads live, reconnecting or stale, and each row carries its own pipeline lag so you can see what the feed is doing rather than trust that it is fine. Reconnects back off with jitter.
live reconnecting stale
How it works
Most feeds wait until they know everything, then show you the row. BLUMBERG shows you the row first and finishes it in place. You never trade a look at the tape for a wait on a lookup.
Upstream detects the post and pushes it. The row is written to the tape at once with what is known: arrival time, handle, whatever text came with the push. Its class is not known yet, so it carries the pending dot — not a guess.
The same row — same position, same key — gains its class, full text, reply or quote target, counts, velocity, age and tags. Nothing is inserted above it and nothing jumps.
When the lookup comes back empty — deleted, protected, tombstoned — the row is marked unavailable and stays on the tape. A post that vanished is information too, so it is never quietly dropped.
The two stages are measured separately and reported per row, so the lag you see on the tape is the tape's own. We publish a latency figure only after an end-to-end measurement with the method recorded — not before.
