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The Daily Triptych060 / 365

1 MAR 2026

Day 60

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

William Faulkner · Requiem for a Nun
A standing bronze figure of a goddess, nearly life-size, with one hip shifted and traces of gold visible on the surface. The figure wears jewellery and a lower garment; the torso and limbs are bare.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Statue of Tara

Sri Lankan · 9th century · Bronze, gold

A bronze goddess nearly as tall as a person, covered in gold, cast in ninth-century Sri Lanka — and kept in storage at the British Museum for decades because curators considered her indecent.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

LoRA and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Training and alignment · 2021 (LoRA), 2023 (QLoRA) · Hu et al. (Microsoft), Dettmers et al.

A base model holds billions of parameters. LoRA lets you fine-tune it by training a pair of much smaller matrices that sit alongside the frozen weights, making adaptation cheap enough for a single GPU.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

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

A page from an illuminated manuscript showing figures in a courtyard or market, with text in Arabic script above and below the illustration, all contained within ruled borders.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Al-Wasiti's Maqamat al-Hariri

maqāma · Text late 11th or early 12th century; illustrated manuscripts 13th–14th century · Ink and pigment on paper

A manuscript from 1237 Baghdad shows a con artist travelling through caravanserais, courtrooms and markets, deceiving everyone he meets with nothing but words.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

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