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The Daily Triptych054 / 365

23 FEB 2026

Day 54

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Susan Sontag · On Photography
A small rectangular whalebone box densely carved in low relief with narrative scenes and runic inscriptions covering all visible surfaces.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Franks Casket

Anglo-Saxon · 8th century · Whalebone

Four thought-worlds carved onto one small box: a Roman emperor and a Christian nativity, a pagan smith and runic inscriptions that switch language, alphabet and direction mid-sentence.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

What Goes Into the Corpus

Training and alignment · The Pile, 800GB across 22 sources · Deduplication at document and substring level

A corpus is never raw internet. It has been filtered, deduplicated and weighted, often by heuristics the lab does not publish. Those choices shape what the model knows.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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

A kneeling terracotta figure with arms wrapped around the torso, raised scarification lines on the face, and serpents coiled along the back and shoulders.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Terracottas of Djenné-Djeno

Djenné-Djeno, Niger River Valley, Mali · 250 BC–1400 AD · Fired terracotta

Kneeling figures wrapped in serpents, excavated from a Niger River Valley urban centre that flourished before traders arrived from the north — and looted at industrial scale in living memory.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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