The Library
5955 books, papers, essays, lectures and reports, each filed against the directory and summarised by what it actually argues — not by what its jacket copy claims. Where a work is freely and legally readable online, the title links straight to it.
24 of 5955 works
Claude Shannon
Defines information quantitatively and proves the limits of compression and error-free transmission over noisy channels.
Assumes probability and logarithms, plus the patience to let the opening pages define everything they use
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRichard Feynman
Management estimated failure probability a thousandfold better than engineers did; reality cannot be fooled by public relations.
Assumes no engineering background — Feynman explains each part before he uses it
≈10 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Vannevar Bush
Proposes the memex, an associative trail-following machine, and anticipates hypertext by two decades.
≈8,000 wordslink checked 17 Sept 2026E. M. Forster
Separates story from plot and flat characters from round ones — distinctions so useful they are now invisible.
about 3 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Vaswani et al.
Replaces recurrence with self-attention, producing the Transformer architecture that underpins essentially all current language models.
15 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Gelman, Carlin, Stern, Dunson, Vehtari & Rubin
The reference for applied Bayesian work, and unusually candid about model checking and the ways a posterior can be confidently wrong.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Friedrich Nietzsche
Attacks the assumption that moral categories are given rather than made, and asks whose interests each morality has served.
Assumes some prior philosophy, since Nietzsche mostly attacks positions he does not stop to explain
about 4 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Satoshi Nakamoto
Nine pages solving double-spending without a trusted third party by making history expensive to rewrite.
9 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Richard Feynman
Scientific integrity means bending over backwards to show how you might be wrong — everything else is imitation.
Assumes no prior reading at all — it is a commencement address about honesty, not a physics paper
≈4,000 wordslink checked 17 Sept 2026Lawrence Lessig
Code is law: architecture regulates behaviour online more effectively than statute, and it is written by people nobody elected.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alan Turing
Replaces 'can machines think' with an operational imitation game, and answers the standard objections in advance.
Assumes no mathematics and no philosophy training; Turing wrote it to be argued with
28 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Amodei et al.
Reframes AI safety as five tractable engineering problems rather than a speculative long-term concern.
29 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Augustine of Hippo
The first Western autobiography, and still the sharpest account of wanting to want something different from what you want.
about 7.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026John Dewey
Education is not preparation for life but life itself; a democracy needs schools that practise it rather than describe it.
about 9 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Miguel de Cervantes
Generally taken as the first modern novel: a book about a man ruined by reading, which knows it is a book.
about 28 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyEuclid
Derives the whole of classical geometry from five postulates, and in doing so invents the axiomatic method every later mathematics is written in.
Assumes nothing but a straight edge, a compass, and the willingness to be shown rather than told
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyMichel de Montaigne
Invents the essay by using himself as the subject under investigation, and stays honest enough to keep contradicting himself.
about 35 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyOpen Science Collaboration
Replicated 100 psychology studies; roughly a third produced significant effects, and effect sizes halved on average.
8 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyLawrence Lessig
Copyright expanded from a narrow commercial regulation into general control over derivative use, and the cost lands on the culture that follows.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Immanuel Kant
Grounds morality in what any rational agent must will universally, and rules out treating a person merely as a means.
Assumes prior ethics reading and a second pass; Kant defines his terms as he goes, then uses them strictly
about 2 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Sculley et al.
The model is a tiny box in a large diagram; almost all the cost and almost all the failures live in the plumbing around it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thucydides
The first account of war written as analysis rather than myth, including the still-cited claim about fear driving conflict.
about 14 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Krizhevsky, Sutskever & Hinton
AlexNet's error rate on ImageNet made deep learning credible and redirected the entire field within a year.
9 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026IPCC
The consensus statement of the physical evidence on climate change, with explicit confidence levels attached to each claim.
link checked 17 Sept 2026