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Posts for 2017/10

Keyboard latency - huh, how about that?

↫ 2017-10-23 bookmarks

Things you don't know until someone measures them. "keyboards are often more powerful than entire computers from the 70s and 80s! [20x the transistors running at 16x the clock speed] And yet, the median keyboard today adds as much latency as the entire end-to-end pipeline as a fast machine from the 70s."

From boiling lead and black art: An essay on the history of mathematical typography

↫ 2017-10-20 bookmarks mathematics

Typesetting be hard work: "the word "present" as a noun hyphenates differently than the same word as a verb"

Knuth on possible future changes to TeX and METAFONT: "Let us regard these systems as fixed points, which should give the same results 100 years from now that they produce today."

Following 3.0, Knuth wanted point release updates to follow the progression of π (the current version is 3.14159265). Knuth also declared that on his death, the version number should be permanently set to π. “From that moment on,” he ordained “all ‘bugs’ will be permanent ‘features.’”