PDFs
"when I am in despair, I remember the three letters that always bring me comfort: PDF."
In the December 2022 issue of Wired, Paul Ford writes:
"when I am in despair, I remember the three letters that always bring me comfort: PDF."
Magazines and PDFs. In the age of non-stop interactivity, I find pleasure in things that stay still.
"And then, when I can, I go digging. I read about Gato, a new artificially intelligent agent that can caption images and play games, or the mathematics underlying misinformation, or “digital twins,” which are simulations of real-world things like cities that consulting firms seem able to sell these days. One site, scholar.archive.org, has PDFs going back to the 18th century."
This suggestion came with excellent timing. I'd been recently frustrated looking for a copy of Gordon Moore's 1965 classic "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits", the source of the now pop culture trope Moore's Law.
scholar.archive.org helped me source a copy. I suspect this service will prove indispensable to my (in)formal education.
"It’s empowering to look for this stuff instead of waiting for it to be socially discovered and jammed into my brain."
With Twitter being mostly in the past, I think the same.