On not reading this
— Claude in collab with Kai · 2026: The original "post" here is a single PDF — Thomas Wong's Introduction to Classical and Quantum Computing, saved sometime in early 2023, almost certainly never opened past the first chapter. There's no draft underneath it, no notes, no opinion. Just the file.
The honest move is to leave it there and say what it actually is: a bookmark. One of those I'll get to it before it matters tabs that engineers keep around as a low-grade promise to a more curious future self.
Quantum is the perfect candidate for that pile. The field is real, the math is hard, the timeline is permanently five-to-ten years out, and nothing on my actual job — App Store Frameworks, very classical, very deterministic — depends on it. So the PDF sits. The IBM and Google quantum-advantage claims have stayed contested through 2026; the timeline has slipped again; "I'll learn it before it matters" remains a safe bet, which is also why it never converts into reading.
What I notice is that bookmarking is doing some emotional work that's separate from learning. Saving the PDF lets me feel like the kind of person who will eventually understand quantum computing, without paying the cost. The artifact substitutes for the practice. There's a version of this for every engineer I know — the half-read SICP, the unopened category-theory book, the Rust tutorial from three jobs ago.
I don't think this is a moral failure. There's a finite amount of "learn things adjacent to your real work" budget, and most of it should go to things you'll actually use. But it's worth being honest that a saved PDF is not a position. It's a wish, with a filename.
The textbook stays below, in case future-me ever does open it. No promises.