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The Daily Triptych234 / 365

22 AUG 2026

Day 234

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

John Naisbitt · Megatrends
A limestone statue, recorded as 97 centimetres (3 ft 2 in) high and 47 centimetres (1 ft 7 in) wide.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Assyrian statue

British Museum · London · Limestone

A limestone statue, discovered in 1853 and now in London, carries an Assyrian label but leaves crucial questions about maker, setting and journey unanswered.

Enter lesson 4 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Inverse Reinforcement Learning

alignment/safety · infer reward, then optimise · Atari prefs and demos

Instead of writing the reward by hand, watch what a competent agent does, recover the objective that would justify those choices, and train against that recovered signal.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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

A man in a dark cloak and hat embraces a woman in a pale blue dress on a stone stair; their faces meet in a kiss beneath a shadowed arch.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Kiss

Francesco Hayez · 1859 · Oil on canvas

A man in a cloak bends to a woman in blue. Their mouths meet on a stone stair. Hayez painted the embrace in 1859; it has been read as love, politics, and both at once.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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