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The Daily Triptych057 / 365

26 FEB 2026

Day 57

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths
A circular brass disc with intricate engravings, featuring a pierced openwork overlay shaped like a web of curves and star pointers, rotatable over a base plate marked with degree scales and hour lines.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

An Islamic Astrolabe

Islamic · Medieval · Brass

A disc of brass and rotating parts that could tell you the hour, the direction of Mecca, and which stars were overhead — if you knew how to read the sky it modelled.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

RLHF

Training and alignment · 2017 (Christiano et al.), scaled 2022 (InstructGPT) · RLHF, preference learning

A model generates several answers to the same prompt. Humans rank them. A second model learns to predict those rankings, and the first model is then optimised to score highly under that predictor.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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

A wide park scene with dozens of figures arranged across grass and along a riverbank. Most are in profile, standing or seated in stiff poses. At the right, a woman in a bustle walks a small monkey. The entire surface is built from small dots of colour.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

Georges Seurat · 1884–1886 · Oil on canvas

Seurat spent two years applying paint in separate points of colour, then framed the result in a border whose dots are chosen to intensify what sits inside it.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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