phon — with Analog²
a public demo of the machine

Ask a question.
Get a course you can check.

Type a question a fourteen-year-old might actually ask. This machine reads a hundred and nine complete books, chooses which of them have something to say, and assembles a course of six movements per unit — passages, questions, the strongest case for each book and the strongest case against it. Then it hands you a certificate saying every quotation in it is real, and where to look to prove it.

Build a course → Read one already built

Takes about ten seconds. Nothing to sign up for.

What makes it different from asking a chatbot

i

Nothing in the course is written by a model. The passages are selected from the books and reproduced exactly. The prompts are assembled from a fixed bank. There is no step at which something is invented and then checked — there is nothing to check, because nothing was invented.

ii

Every quotation is verified against the paragraph it names, byte for byte, before the course is allowed to exist. A course that fails is not written to disk at all. There is no “mostly fine” state on this shelf.

iii

The books disagree, and the course keeps the disagreement. Each unit carries the strongest case the book can make and the strongest case against it, with receipts on both. A learner is not told what to think; they are shown the argument with its best objection still standing.

The certificate is the product

This is what comes back with a course. It is not a summary of the checks — it is the checks, run over the exact bytes that were written.

VERIFICATION CERTIFICATE · “Should a person forgive someone who is not sorry?” · 4 units passages .............. 16/16 on the page, whole and in the paragraph they name quotations ............ 16/16 byte-exact against source claims with receipts .. 24/24 — every one traceable to its page structure ............. 4/4 units complete (3 depths · steelman · glossary · guide) receipts .............. 4/4 units carry at least one verified quotation verdict lint .......... 4/4 units end on the question attribution ........... 4 books joined from the record, 0 failed findings .............. none VERDICT ............... PASS — ships

That course was built by typing the question. Montaigne, Dostoevsky, Plato and Augustine — chosen by the machine, not by a person.

What you are looking at, honestly

A hundred and nine books, not the whole library
The house holds 356 complete works. This box carries the hundred and nine that can argue — the ones with a dossier behind them: a thesis, the strongest case for the book anchored to real passages, the strongest cases against it, and the book's own reply. A work without one can still be quoted accurately; it just has nothing to say back. The machine itself — a phon, which sits on a shelf in a house and needs no internet at all — carries the whole library, and the dossiers are still being written.
One of the two certificates
What runs here is the fidelity certificate: the quotations are real, the receipts verify, the attribution joins. The house also runs a second certificate — whether a course is worth teaching: distinct units, no invented proper nouns, prompts inside their length bands. That one runs in the house's own build lane and not on this box, so read the verdict above as “true”, not as “finished”.
A Phon is a unit, and also the machine
The house calls one unit of a course a Phon — a single sitting with one book. The machine is named after it. So when the builder offers you four Phons or six, it is asking how many sittings the course should run to.
A public box, swept
Courses built here are kept for a while and then cleared. Nothing you type is stored anywhere else, and there is nothing to sign up for.