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The Daily Triptych255 / 365

12 SEP 2026

Day 255

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space.

Walter Benjamin · The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
A tall oil painting on canvas of a woman standing in bullfighter’s costume, shown at full length against a loosely indicated ground, the surface worked in visible nineteenth-century brushwork.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Mademoiselle V. . . in the Costume of an Espada

1862 · Oil on canvas · Édouard Manet

In 1862 Manet painted a woman in the costume of an espada. A year later the canvas hung at the Salon des Refusés, among works the official jury would not hang.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Model-Based RL with Learned Dynamics

Reinforcement learning · Learned dynamics · Imagination and planning

A learned model of how the world changes lets an agent practise inside its own head—rolling out futures that never happened, then improving the policy from those imagined trajectories.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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

A quiet interior with a woman standing at a table, holding a small balance level in one hand; the pans appear empty. The canvas is modest in scale and lit with restrained clarity.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Woman Holding a Balance

Johannes Vermeer · 1665 · Oil on canvas

A woman steadies a pair of scales that hold nothing. Once read as a scene of weighing gold, the picture now asks quieter, less settled questions about value.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

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