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The Daily Triptych175 / 365

24 JUN 2026

Day 175

No number of sightings of white swans can prove the theory that all swans are white.

Karl Popper · The Logic of Scientific Discovery
No specific image is supplied with this lesson; the subject is Fathi Hassan, an Egyptian-born contemporary artist known for installations involving the written word.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Fathi Hassan

Egyptian-born · 10 May 1957 · contemporary African art

Fathi Hassan's installations put the written word into space. Born in Egypt in 1957, his work is held by the British Museum and other major collections.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Transformer Memory Compression via Sliding Windows

systems/inference · memory compression · sparse and linear attention

Full self-attention stores a matrix that grows with the square of sequence length. Sliding windows keep each token watching only its neighbours, cutting that cost without discarding long-context usefulness entirely.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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

In a dark interior, an older man with staring eyes clutches a younger man across his lap; blood marks the son’s head and the father’s hand as the two faces meet in a tight wedge of light.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on November 16, 1581

Ilya Repin · 1883 · Oil on canvas

Repin’s 1883 canvas stages the moment after a fatal blow: the Russian tsar cradles his dying son, and the room tightens around two faces locked in irreversible knowledge.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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