Why Latently exists

Most of what I know, someone else found out first. They were curious about something, spent a long time on it, and wrote down what they found. For an afternoon of reading I get to have it too. I don't think there is a better deal anywhere.

I read papers on my phone. For a long while it was mostly all I had. A few months before I enlisted, I worried about falling behind on research, so I built a bot that sent me new papers every day. The bot worked. Inside camp I could open everything it sent and read almost none of it. The reading experience was terrible, especially on two-column PDFs. By page 3 I gave up reading.

I believe the depth of a paper was never the problem. The way I had to read it was. Every tool I tried assumes the understanding is the chore, so it shortens the paper, summarises it, hands me the gist and calls it done. A summary tells me whether the paper is worth my afternoon. The afternoon is the part I came for.

So I built the reader I needed. Latently takes a paper apart and sets it again for any screen. One column, as wide as your screen. Equations as type, not pictures of type. Figures beside the sentence that mentions them. And it remembers the paragraph you stopped at, so you can pick up where you left off.

Latently is a paid service. Free tools die when the person maintaining them has to feed a family, and I want this one to still be here in 25 years. A price is a promise of that.

I don't know yet whether many people read whole papers on a phone, or whether I'm just the one who had no choice. The alpha is how I find out. Some papers still come out wrong. If you read papers on your phone, or gave up trying, come break it and tell me what you find.

Stay curious, keep asking, and read on.