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The Daily Triptych036 / 365

5 FEB 2026

Day 36

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Michel de Montaigne · Essays
A horizontal silk scroll painted with figures in ink and colour, showing scenes of palace women in flowing robes, with red collector seals in the margins and areas of fading and wear.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Admonitions Scroll

Chinese · 8th century · Ink and colour on silk

The earliest surviving Chinese narrative scroll bears seals from emperors and collectors across a thousand years — and a signature no scholar now believes is genuine.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Residual Stream

Transformers · Interpretability research · A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits

Not a sequence of isolated transformations — a shared workspace. Each attention head and feedforward network adds its contribution to the same growing vector, and the next layer inherits everything.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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

A shallow ceramic dish with gently curved sides, covered in a pale blue-grey glaze with a fine network of darker crackle lines across the surface.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Song Dynasty Ru Ware

Northern Song dynasty, China · 12th century · Stoneware with celadon glaze

Fewer than a hundred pieces survive from kilns that served the Northern Song court briefly, then fell silent. What remains is a glaze the colour of sky after rain and nothing else at all.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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