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The Daily Triptych141 / 365

21 MAY 2026

Day 141

Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.

Marcus Aurelius · Meditations
A small gold fibula with glass elements, about five centimetres high and two and a half centimetres wide, shown as a compact ornamental clasp.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Braganza Brooch

Greek work for a Celtic Iberian client · 3rd century BC · Gold and glass

A gold and glass fibula barely five centimetres high, made in the third century BC, named for a royal house, and now held by the British Museum.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Speculative Decoding for Faster LLM Inference

systems/inference · arXiv 2211.17192, 2308.04623 · same distribution as target alone

A small model races ahead proposing several tokens; the large model checks them all in one pass and keeps only what it would have written itself.

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Written before source checking was enforced · facts in this lesson are unverified

A vast crowded cathedral interior in oil, with ceremonial figures gathered for an imperial consecration and coronation beneath high architecture.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Coronation of Napoleon

Jacques-Louis David · 1807 · Oil on canvas

Six metres high and nearly ten across, David’s oil turns Napoleon’s consecration in Notre-Dame into a fixed image of how power wished to be remembered.

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