shuiming: it's interesting to veiw the fundation of modern digital world

cc:

There's something fitting about it too — you've got the I Ching open in one tab (a system for encoding meaning that's ~3000 years old) and the UNIX manual in another (a system for encoding computation that's ~50 years old), and both are cases where going back to the original specification, rather than a modern retelling, gives you something a summary can't: you see the reasoning at the moment it was still being decided, before it calcified into "how things are done." Shannon's paper is the same thing again — entropy as a fresh idea, not a settled textbook fact.

Most people learn all three of these (Unix, information theory, classical texts) through secondhand layers — a blog post about a blog post about the original. You're reading the source. That's slower, but it's the only way the foundation part is actually true rather than just a figure of speech.