neat! more info on LFSRs, fyi: https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/1309.php

>and then had Claude run git status and it fell back to Opus as if I had just broken into the pentagon itself.

Maybe it's more like you asked a lieutenant to check the weather forecast for you, and it went away and sent back a sergeant in its place.

Congratulations! Wow, you got a legendary $2.56 check....

Unfortunately, one no longer gets physical checks, instead, one gets an account in The Bank of the Island of San Seriffe:

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html

(unfortunately, I have yet to find another typo since getting my $2.88 for _Digital Typography_)

Close enough. If I ever got such a check it would be professionally framed and hung on my wall. As would most people reading this.

I have at least one Knuth check¹ from the days when they were actual checks, but to be honest, I’m not 100% sure where it (they?) are. I’m on the mailing list where potential TeX-related bugs appear and it’s crazy the level of detail people go to in looking for any remaining bugs in that software.

⸻

1. I know at least one of these came from porting lesser-known utilities to VM/CMS. By that time, DEK already had adopted a practice of having his secretary print his emails and he’d hand-write a reply and you’d get it in the mail.

Most people reading this would be hung on your wall?

After being framed, of course. You need to have a justification.

I heard philipallstar and sandbach were doing treason.

@bluGill, you owe me some money or this framing won't be professional. ;)

Wait, I thought I was going to frame you, but it turns out you're you're blackmailing me. I don't have to frame you anymore. I have evidence of a real crime.

This is some very unprofessional framing.

You still get a physical piece of paper that looks like a check; it's just not a valid check.

It can still be cashed in, though not in any bank, you need to contact Knuth beforehand.

For me it will stay framed on the wall.

I wonder if one can do the reverse? Turn in a physical check and get an account?

There’s a funny explanation at the bottom:

> It turns out that only 9 of the first 275 checks that I've sent out since the beginning of 2006 have actually been cashed. The others have apparently been cached. So this change in policy will probably not affect too many people. On the other hand, I don't like to renege on promises, so I shall do my best to find a suitable way to send money to anyone who really prefers legal tender.

But but... that's all serif.

Hopefully framed it and put it on the wall.

>by implying that situational awareness directly caused losses at JS.

Correlation is not causation.

Well, they did because JS owned a economics interest in SA, which led to the loss. So it was poor capital allocation, but really a systemic failure to delete leverage from the equation.

> Of course you will see it, the same way you saw a lot of Arial in the 1990s, or Calibri today.

Well, that didn't last long; Aptos enters the chat.

Came here to say this too. :-)

Thanks OP for making it so readable.

Ten Little Algorithms, Part 2: The Single-Pole Low-Pass Filter (https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/779.php)

OT but I've always appreciated your posts, Jason -- you should think about expanding them into a book, or at least an e-book. It would end up on my shelf next to Lyons.

That being said, it'd be good to update this post to clarify the difference between angular frequency and plain old cycles-per-second frequency, as one of the commenters calls out.

OK so this article is sort of about formal proof automation, but it seems more practically about Zstandard, which I very much enjoyed reading.

Yeah, this is really cool. I'm now deep in the rabbit hole of FSE encoding and ANS & tANS. The last time I poked my head in here, range encoding and arithmetic encoding were the state of the art for fractional entropy representations, but they both sucked. This is a million times better and so simple that I feel like I should have invented it myself.

Could you please use a more readable variable-width font?

>Von Neumann is an interesting historical character that nobody has ever heard of

huh? He's pretty famous to anyone who has studied either the history of computing or of the development of the atomic bomb.