Notes from a living library
Dispatches, essays and field notes — on learning with AI, the questions worth asking, and a curriculum that keeps growing. 10 entries so far.
For 250 years the scarce, precious thing was the answer. AI changed that overnight — which is exactly why ModernEncyclopedia hands you the questions.
Read →Most people use AI as a vending machine for answers and learn nothing. Six shifts turn the same model into a patient, Socratic tutor.
Read →The 54th subject is live: Linguistics, the science of language itself — and the field underneath every large language model.
Read →Your AI tutor degrades over a long conversation — not because the model gets dumber, but because of how it remembers. Knowing when to start fresh is a genuine skill.
Read →In 1984 Benjamin Bloom found that tutoring works spectacularly — and that we could never afford it. AI is the first technology that might change the second half of that sentence.
Read →AI is the fastest way ever to produce code you don't understand. If your goal is to actually learn to program, that's a trap — here's how to use it to build the skill instead.
Read →The library reached 54 subjects this week. Here's why that's a milestone, not a finish line — and why it never will be.
Read →The thing language learners have always lacked is someone to talk to. Voice mode is exactly that — a patient conversation partner, on demand. Here's how to use it well.
Read →AI invents quotes, dates and whole books with total confidence — which is why people distrust it for history. Handled right, it's actually one of the best subjects to study with it.
Read →This site takes the 1751 Encyclopédie as its model. So it's worth being precise about what to inherit from Diderot — and what the age of AI forces you to change.
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