Gappy is one of the more decorated, public figures in the space. That PDF gives a candid overview of what it's like to interview/work in the industry.

Gappy is very good but occupies a slightly odd role in that he's sort of a jobbing philosopher for hedge funds at this point

The exception rather than the norm, yeah but IMO his takes are refreshing/insightful.

What's a convenient and safe way to open PDFs safely?

Some options seem to be: Upload to google drive (inconvenient), use some open-source tool (LLM suggests DangerZone), use a VM (very inconvenient)

I use markitdown[0] religiously. You’ll lose fidelity for anything complex (math equations, images), but it does a great job 95% of the time in my experience.

I’m assuming the attack surface is reduced. I invoke it through a docker container. But this might be a misplaced sense of safety.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

A one-way link (data diode) transmits it to a box with simplified hardware (eg RISC architecture). The box has a dedicated monitor and keyboard. Once you're finished, you sell the box on Craiglist. Then, buy a new, sealed replacement from Best Buy.

Pay per view was an expensive, business model for cable. For PDF's, it's even more expensive.

Note: It's more convenient than full, per-app, physical security.

Open it with Firefox. The Firefox PDF renderer is implemented in Javascript and sandbox-restricted like any unknown web site.

Dropbox is rendering that pdf as html, so using that link should be safer than downloading the pdf.