Why I built this

The first one came from a thought experiment. Imagine Doc Brown's DeLorean drops you off five hundred years in the past. You'd have so much to tell. You'd describe cars, and computers, and an invisible network that carries letters across the planet in a heartbeat. People would gather to listen. And then someone, probably the smartest person in the village, would ask the question we all dread: how does any of it actually work? Can you prove it?

Most of us would fail that question. I know I would have. We live surrounded by machines we use every day and could not begin to explain. We've outsourced understanding to the engineers and scientists who built our world, and we've quietly accepted that the inside of the box is not for us.

I disagree with that. Not because everyone needs to be an engineer, but because curiosity is its own reward, and because the inside of the box turns out to be far more elegant — and far more learnable — than it appears from the outside.

The second reason is simpler. The last few years have been an extraordinary moment for artificial intelligence, and I've spent a lot of that time tinkering: small projects, broken experiments, a lot of reading. At some point it occurred to me that the thing I find most useful when learning something new is a patient, well-paced explanation that doesn't skip the part I actually got stuck on. So I'm trying to build that — for computing, for AI, for programming — one lesson at a time.

I hope it's useful. If it isn't, tell me what's missing.