I hear you on writing out explanations taking even longer than grokking the material yourself. But hopefully the path you describe will already help me find an

I hear you on writing out explanations taking even longer than grokking the material yourself. But hopefully the path you describe will already help me find an angle to get into the material even if you never get around to it (would love to read such a series though). I have only done Huffman encoding/decoding in "toy" contexts, although I do think I understand the theory. Also I was not fully aware that ANS and FSE aren't quite the same thing, I thought the latter was "just" the finite-state machine formulation of the concepts described by the former. Perhaps trying to make sense of FSE first will be an easier entrypoint. Thanks for taking the time to write out all of that advice, it's really appreciated!