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The Daily Triptych245 / 365

2 SEP 2026

Day 245

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Thucydides · History of the Peloponnesian War
A carved marble bust of a man shown bare-chested, without armour or drapery, the head and upper torso finished in the round and cut off below the chest.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Townley Hadrian

Roman · 3rd century · Greek marble

A marble bust of the emperor Hadrian, found in Rome and shown bare-chested rather than in armour, entered the British Museum with Charles Townley's collection in 1805.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Rise of Self-Supervised Learning

history · Self-supervised pretext tasks · RotNet 2018; SimCLR 2020

Before large labelled sets were assumed, networks were trained to guess rotations and pull matched views together. Those odd chores quietly rebuilt unsupervised visual learning.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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

A colossal iron statue of a warrior standing on a tall cylindrical stone pedestal, right arm raised holding a sword pointed skyward, surrounded by dense forest.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Hermannsdenkmal

Ernst von Bandel · 1875 · Iron

Ernst von Bandel spent nearly four decades building a monument to a war chief who defeated Rome. The statue went up in a forest believed to be the battle site — but probably was not.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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