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The Daily Triptych224 / 365

12 AUG 2026

Day 224

Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Confucius · The Analects
A small rectangular clay tablet, buff-brown and worn, covered in dense rows of wedge-shaped cuneiform signs. Horizontal ruled lines divide the text into sections; part of a hand-written number in black ink appears near the top.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Amarna letter EA 161

14th century BC · Clay · E29818

Eight ruled paragraphs on a clay tablet the size of a postcard, the text spilling onto the edge because the scribe ran out of front. Explaining an absence, apparently.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Emergence: Abilities That Appear Only With Scale

Scaling behaviour and interpretability · Wei et al. 2022; Nanda et al. 2023 · Training compute, parameters, dataset size

Plot a task's accuracy against model size and some curves sit flat at chance for orders of magnitude, then lurch upward. Whether that lurch is real remains contested.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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

Six men in a diagonal line across a rural landscape, each holding the shoulder or staff of the man ahead. The leader is on his back in a stream; the others are tipping forward in sequence.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Blind Leading the Blind

Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1568 · Tempera on canvas

Bruegel painted six figures in a diagonal line, each with a different eye condition, each a little closer to the water. The leader is on his back in the stream.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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