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The Daily Triptych040 / 365

9 FEB 2026

Day 40

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius · Meditations
A small cylindrical gold reliquary with repoussé decoration showing standing figures in draped robes within arched niches.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Bimaran Casket

Gandharan · Gold · Bimaran, near Jalalabad, Afghanistan

A small gold box from a stupa near Jalalabad, holding coins and bone fragments — and showing the Buddha as a man, not a symbol, in a style borrowed from Greek sculpture.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Multi-Query and Grouped-Query Attention

Transformers · Shazeer 2019 (multi-query), Ainslie et al. 2023 (grouped-query) · Reduce KV cache memory during generation

Every generated token leaves behind keys and values that must stay in memory. Multi-query attention lets dozens of heads share the same pair, trading a small accuracy cost for a cache one-tenth the size.

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

Figures of women painted on a rock face, shown from the waist up, emerging from bands of ochre and white cloud. They are bare-breasted, wear jewellery, and hold flowers. The painting is sheltered under an overhang of rock.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Sigiriya Frescoes

Sigiriya, Sri Lanka · 5th century CE · Pigment on plaster

Halfway up a sheer granite cliff, figures emerge from painted mist. Who they are — celestial beings, queens, or attendants — has never been settled.

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