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The Daily Triptych037 / 365

6 FEB 2026

Day 37

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections.

Francis Bacon · Novum Organum
Clay tablets densely inscribed with cuneiform script, the wedge-shaped marks pressed into the surface in horizontal lines.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Amarna Letters

New Kingdom Egypt · Mid-14th century BC · Clay tablets

Egypt's foreign office wrote in a language that was not Egyptian. These clay tablets, dug from a capital that lasted fifteen years, record thirty years of statecraft in borrowed cuneiform.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Encoder, Decoder, or Both

Transformer · Encoder, decoder, or both · 2018

BERT reads the whole sentence at once. GPT reads left to right and guesses what comes next. T5 does both. The difference is not a detail—it determined which models could learn to converse.

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

A large group of militia members in seventeenth-century dress, some in shadow, some brightly lit. A man in black with a red sash gestures forward; beside him a man in yellow holds a long spear. A girl in gold stands in the middle ground, and pikes and muskets cross the composition.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Rembrandt's The Night Watch

Rembrandt · 1642 · Oil on canvas

Rembrandt painted a civic guard company as though they were moving toward you through shadow and light. Then someone cut a metre off the left side to fit a wall.

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