How about "Attention Is All You Need"?

Quick, get your own copy before Apple takes them all to put them in the next version of the Mac!

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf

That is exactly what came to mind for me.

The Bitcoin whitepaper was the “Attention Is All You Need” of 2019.

2009*

That's when it was released but it was not widely-known until years later. So maybe you're both kind of correct.

2018 is when someone was looking for a pdf and found this one, which is probably what they were referring to?

release date has a concrete date to refer to, 'widely-known' does not.

wtf, I remember using bitcoin back 1999, and now wikipedia says it began in 2009

I mean, it's not just wikipedia - the genesis block itself contained a news headline from 2009. So whatever it is you remember, it is not using bitcoin in 1999.

> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

"Digital Cash" was a big buzzword prior to the dot-com crash, but Bitcoin was definitely started later.

Might be egold or ecash

The first surge towards 20k was at the end of 2017. It was down to about 4k in the first half of 2019 and up to about 10k in the second half of 2019. It went up and down between 30k and 60k in 2021. It's almost 30k now.

So 2019 was a good time to buy but maybe the mind share moment for bitcoin was 2017, when even TV news were talking about it every night.

There were bitcoin meetups in my small major city in 2012

Waiters in the exurbs were giving me opinions on bitcoin in 2015

I can't think of a PDF but there are images like this. "Lenna". There are also really famous datasets that are used for examples in similar ways (iris).

Lenna is copyright-encumbered (despite its widespread use, Apple is a commercial operator and can't do that sort of thing) and it's not very inclusive to use a playboy centerfold image (even cropped) and it's taking some heat on the sexism front these days.

The "Lenna" is also low dynamic range, low resolution (512x512), low chromatic range, does not have a color profile, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

"In today’s age of high-resolution digital image technology, it seems difficult to argue that a 512 × 512 image produced with a 1970s-era analog scanner is the best we have to offer as an image quality test standard".[2]

I’d be willing to bet that there have been significantly more viewings of that image this century as a result of the documentary. What a ridiculous way to try to end cultural awareness of a meme.

And I’m sorry but I just can’t fathom the controversy. The cropped version is the only one I’ve ever seen used in the context of a sample image. It is utterly unremarkable unless you’re aware of the image’s provenance, (which I bet most people didn’t). Even the uncropped version, which I have only ever saw because of the controversy, isn’t any more racy than many historically important paintings hanging in art galleries.

I’m not saying this is an appropriate canonical test image. But I am saying that it’s disingenuous to single it out as a problem. There is so much of mainstream culture that is orders of magnitude more degrading of women than this image.

I am certainly not equating the two, but I do see parallels in the hysterics around “Lenna” and hysterics around David of Michelangelo’s little noodle.

Are other photographs of similar provenance in widespread use as test images in places of work/education/research?

If not, in what way is this image being singled out?

That’s not the point. It’s being singled out among the millions of instances where very slightly racy depictions of women have entered into mainstream culture. Except in this instance it never did break into mainstream culture; it was only ever a meme among a comically narrow set of programmers and researchers.

Bringing mainstream attention to it was an extreme example of the Streisand Effect.

You seem to have the idea that the intended outcome was to prevent people seeing the image (it's going to be online forever, no chance of that), while I believe it was for people to stop using it in the places I described, as a part of scientific papers, etc., and help bring about a wider discussion of such imagery.

e.g. see the final quote in this piece https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/arts-entertainment/ho...

Forsén was interviewed in a documentary that featured the image. The entire point of which was to bring more attention to the fact the image existed and how it had been/was being used. Claiming this is an example of the Streisand effect is nonsense.

I'd be interested to hear what other specific images you feel should be getting a similar amount of discussion.

The documentary is literally called "Losing Lena" and tried to advocate for the removal of a meme image from an academic context. And it did so by immensely amplifying its exposure in a mainstream context.

The supposedly "deeper" part of their argument is even more pathetic, maternalistic, infantilising nonsense. Are they seriously claiming that women are so fragile that they will forego pursuit of their intellectual passion because sometimes, some academic papers use the image of a women wearing a fancy hat and bare shoulders? What a low view of women these documentarians have. What a vile insult to half the population.

I can only imagine that the movie was made by freak puritanical zealots who would literally explode if they ever saw a television advertisement for shampoo. And these zealots seem to have zero concept of how technology works. The movie's tagline falsely claims that "There's a secret hidden in almost every website and every digital image you've ever seen." The fact that anyone took it seriously is itself a sick joke.

...wow.

Careful, there is someone whose name I shall not mention who is suing people claiming he is Satoshi and has copyright over the Whitepaper. He even got it banned from Bitcoin.org in the UK

What about the famous "Lorem Ipsum"?

What is the MD5 checksum of the canonical version of the famous Lorem Ipsum PDF?

Ask Apple, I'd guess they'd use the one that they used to hide in their skeumorphic application icons.

TextEdit's icon used to have a copy of "Here's to the Crazy Ones" letter/poem/whatever. It was barely legible in the days of 256px icons but was extremely legible in the 512px version. I forget when it was first added, IIRC early versions of the icon used Lorem Ipsum text.

"Lorem Ipsum" completely confused me the first time I ran into it.

I was trying to make a document for work, using Apple Pages for the first time. Pages had a template that seemed good for the kind of document I had to make so I used that.

The template included "Lorem Ipsum" text. But since I hadn't heard of it before I thought it was some sort of sample document showing how to use the template but in a language I didn't recognize.

I figured that I'd somehow gotten Pages configured to default to a foreign language and spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out how to set it to English. Eventually it occurred to me to search for some of the exact text from the template, hoping to find someone else had already dealt with this problem, and found the Wikipedia article that explained what "Lorem Ipsum" is.

"Why is my website in Spanish? I thought it was supposed to be in English!"

Italien

Is there a PDF? I thought it was just filler text. Along those same lines:

* holoalphabetic sentences like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." or "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs."

* Etaoin shrdlu

* Hamburgevons

* New Petitions Against Tax. Building Code Under Fire.

* foo, bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, and thud

* famous texts like Alice in Wonderland, Kafka, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, etc

* Postmodernism generator, snarXiv, Chomskybot, etc

Which is dolorem ipsum, to friends of Cicero.

Alan Turing's 1950 article in Mind proposing the Turing Test (Computing Machinery and Intelligence)

IRS Tax Form 1040

The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence

The Treaty of Versailles

The Paris Treaty

The Kyoto Protocol

The Bible, King James Version

Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech

Martin Luther's 95 Theses

The Communist Manifesto

The Arnell Group’s Pepsi Rebrand doc

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

This is a glorious one

Finally replaced this week!

https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_log...

Where are the perimeter oscillations???

"The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. This new identity manifests itself in an authentic geometry that is to become proprietary to the Pepsi culture."

Apple and Pepsi don’t mix well ;)

None of those are famous PDFs.

OK fine, except for IRS Tax Form 1040. Each year's form is probably the most intentionally distributed PDF on the planet (so excluding PDFs bundled with software like this story). I don't think there is a country larger than the US that requires its citizens (or their tax agents/software) to download a form and submit it each year.

> Each year's form is probably the most intentionally distributed PDF on the planet

In the US*. The Bitcoin paper has surely been distributed far wider than any US-specific tax forms.

No. We're talking in the hundreds of millions of people who either make a 1040 PDF themselves or have one made for them, and every year. The number of people who have used a cryptocurrency is probably larger than but within one order of magnitude of the number of people who have filled out a US 1040. But the number of people who have intentionally downloaded the original Bitcoin whitepaper? That's a tiny, tiny fraction of cryptocurrency users.

Edit: Now that I think about it, the W-2 probably is even larger than 1040, because you get one from each employer, plus families can file jointly, and not everyone has to file taxes if they make below a certain amount. So a household with 4 people working 2 jobs each generates one 1040 but 8 W-2s per year.

Even if only half the people in China or India did that, they would be double the numbers of the US for such tasks. They have taxes, work and PDFs too.

For Google search numbers, that would be different considering PDF searches in China wouldn't be done using Google. But perhaps taxes aren't done using PDFs either, that important detail I don't know.

> Even if only half the people in China or India did that, they would be double the numbers of the US for such tasks.

Well, no, because each is more than double the US population, and only half the US population files tax forms (2021 had 165 million individual filers, on 332 million US population.)

Yeah the us is not that numerous in terms of people living there.

There are significant percentages of people in China and India that have never used the internet on any device at all, let alone opened any PDF. A quarter of India is illiterate.

> And 97+% of them don't make enough money to owe tax.

I believe the actual situation is 3% file for income tax and the majority of the rest don’t need to, but tax evasion is quite common there.

The linked article is 10 years old, and the situation on ground has changed a lot, specifically due to concentrated efforts by the central government to prevent tax evasion. I'm not aware of the figures, and a majority chunk of income-earners still doesn't pay income tax, but it's most definitely much less than the 97% that you mentioned.

Tax evasion as I know it, and as has been informed to me by many financial consultants I've talked to, is now increasingly difficult. You really need to have back-channel contacts with the right people and spectacular know-how of the loopholes to pull it off. I'm talking about large-scale evasion here, but much of it stands true for small-scale as well.

Outside of US most famous document produced by fed would be W-8BEN.

Basically anyone who ever opened investment account know about it.

I'm fairly certain most people outside of the US never even heard of that form at all, as most people don't work with/in US companies, nor deal with the US government at all.

W-8BEN has nothing to do about dealing with US companies or government.

If you open investment account to buy any US stock, index funds or a some other US-based financial instruments you have to fill W-8BEN. Otherwise you might be charged 30% tax on your investment income by IRS.

So even if you open brokerage account in UK, EU, India, Russia or any other country you'll surely know about this form.

> W-8BEN has nothing to do about dealing with US companies or government.

> If you open investment account to buy any US stock, index funds or a some other US-based financial instruments you have to fill W-8BEN

You seem to directly contradict yourself. Dealing with any US-based financial instrument obviously has to do with dealing with something US related.

In contrast, if I only invest in any non-US financial instruments, I don't have to deal with W-8BEN.

>> ... on the planet Bzzz ... Reminder US is not the only country on this planet. IRS can keep its arms inside.

So, something that a small minority of the planet's population would have even heard of?

Neither is the bitcoin one, other than for a specific bubble.

The shitstorm using the communist manifesto would cause would be glorious.

Also likely a "career-limiting move" at AAPL

There's also the Jolly Roger's Cookbook.

Ahh..one of the most dowloaded text files on every BBS I joined in the early 1990s.

The Lyrics of the U2 Discography

Note that none of these documents originated as pdfs. Digitalization happened after their creation.

Treaty of Lisbon?

Wasn't it signed by hand ? (Maybe that's too "Euro" for apple anyway...)

“R.I.P Good Times” might work for this particular community too.

I'd suggest "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work" but that might be a bit too on the nose

For a long time Form 1040 was the top Google result for "pdf".

And being produced by the federal government, unencumbered by copyright.

It wouldn’t surprise me if you couldn’t distribute the form globally due to US export restrictions to Iran, NK, etcetera. Obviously not a problem for Apple since it is already restricted/tainted.

It's in the public domain, so the limits are not on the content itself. The media, and the facilitation of the transfer might be limited, but this is a question for the legal department, which I'm not part of.

But changes every year.

If you're not using for it intended purpose, do you actually care which version of the form you use?

Older versions might be difficult to get in the future, difficulty reproducing results due to that, yadda yadda.

It works for most cases, but I can see why changing every year might be a deal breaker for some.

I can think of nothing more important and famous than chicken.pdf

https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf

Context please?

chicken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk

Wow 16 year ago

This clarifies nothing. Yet, I now understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIi74DKWErA , it's what's for dinner

"Made for kids" YT is a terrible idea, cannot even add to favourites. Triggers each time when I see such video

If this is new to you, make sure you watch the whole presentation!

Ah isotropic.org, once the home of the best ever online version of Dominion. The mobile version is now good enough, but it took nearly a decade and multiple development teams to catch up to what one developer did in his spare time.

But the new ones are prettier.

Actually I just wnat the card information and text as per isotropic plus the statistics generated e.g. how good or bad were you if a particular card was in the kingdom.

* * *

I bet that PDF compresses nicely.

I was surprised that the 52 KB PDF compressed to only 45 KB on my machine. There seems to be about 13 KB of text; perhaps the rest is the illustrations?

Well, that was hilarious. Thank you for starting my day with a chuckle.

You mean a cluckle.

Came here to say this hahahaha. This is the dummy PDF I use for PDF testing whenever I need one.

I did use that PDF for testing at my previous workplace, although I didn't commit it to CI.

Man, I might sneak a reference to that paper in my next technical report.

I imagine the word frequencies in that paper are somewhat less than respresentative.

Oh, I was expecting https://sebastiancarlos.com/how-i-quit-my-programmer-job-to-... in PDF form. But it's a different document.

I like bwok quook more.

I would’ve went with Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” (converted to PDF via a faithful rendition of the original open letter, assuming it wasn’t available as a PDF originally.)

How about "GOTO Statement Considered Harmful"

http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/agbkb/lehre/programmiers...

The resource is password-protected.

I would take Ken Thompson’s “Trusting Trust” over Djikstra’s “GOTO”. Djikstra’s “GOTO” is a rare lowlight, but as Torvalds said, we don’t speak ill of the dead.

I've used the sheet music for 'Still Alive' from Portal whenever I need a test PDF. The original blog post linking to it is gone, but Valve has kept it up on their CDN: https://steamstore-a.akamaihd.net/public/images/whatsnew/Sti...

This is fun. I needed a test with many different sized PDFs. Originally I tried project gutenberg but it didn't have the variety I wanted. I ended up going to the Anarchist Library which checked all the boxes w.r.t. file size variety and ease of download (as well as minimizing fear of downloading copyrighted material on a work computer)

> the sheet music for 'Still Alive'

Dang. That's just an arrangement for voice and one guitar (or ukulele?). The song pretty clearly includes accompaniment from a cymbal and some kind of metallic pitched percussion too.

Really!?

"Smashing the stack for fun and profit" by aleph1??

A TPS report, but I guess that would only work if there were many distributed copies.

I typically use “on trusting trust”

Yup.

A while back we figured that the system we work on technically allows loading nigh anything as a texture, including stuff like SVG and PDF. So we also ended up with a bitcoin whitepaper textured surface used as a test, even though the actual project formed in part around opposition to cryptocurrency.

The darn thing is just that famous.

There are probably some important Apple patents that would have been good candidates for this use case.

Perhaps the ResNet paper, which has the most citations of all time.

Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken