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The Daily Triptych171 / 365

20 JUN 2026

Day 171

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

Edsger W. Dijkstra · How do we tell truths that might hurt?
A square marble relief panel, weathered and incomplete, showing two confronting figures in high relief, their limbs and drapery broken away in places, once set between the triglyphs of a Doric frieze.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

metopes of the Parthenon

Classical Athens · Marble · Acropolis of Athens

Ninety-two carved marble squares once ringed the Parthenon. Most were smashed or scattered; fifteen now sit in London. Their subjects were battles — and their meaning is still argued.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Vision Transformer (ViT) Scaling

architectures · ViT 2020 · Scaling ViT 2021 · image patches as tokens

A pure transformer, given only flattened patches of an image and no convolutional prior, can match and eventually surpass dedicated vision networks — but only once the training data grows large enough.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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

A small, nearly square oil painting on canvas, about fifty-one by forty-six centimetres, showing a single figure in a quiet interior scene of learned work.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Astronomer

Johannes Vermeer · 1664 · Oil on canvas

A canvas barely half a metre high, painted in oil by Johannes Vermeer in 1664, now carries a twentieth-century history as heavy as its subject was quiet.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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