I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
Archangel ivory
Carved in ivory around 520, this panel shows an archangel with sceptre and imperial orb — the largest Byzantine ivory panel known to survive.
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11 MAY 2026
Day 131
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.
II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Stable Diffusion Architecture
Most of the work happens not on pixels but in a smaller space learned by an autoencoder, with text entering through cross-attention inside the denoising network.
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Written before source checking was enforced · facts in this lesson are unverified
III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY
The Death of Marat
In October 1793 Jacques-Louis David painted Jean-Paul Marat as he had been found: dead in a bath, the scene stripped almost bare. Politics becomes the only subject left.
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