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The Daily Triptych086 / 365

27 MAR 2026

Day 86

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Albert Einstein · Physics and Reality
A shallow relief carved in pale stone showing a bearded, winged figure in profile, holding a small bucket in one hand and raising a cone-shaped object in the other.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Ashurnasirpal II Palace Reliefs

Neo-Assyrian · 883–859 BC · Gypsum alabaster

A bearded figure with wings, holding a bucket and a cone-shaped object, repeated down a long corridor. The gesture was ritual purification, and the wall was meant to work on you.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Embedding Models

Systems and judgement · Encoder-only transformers, often smaller than generative models · Contrastive learning on sentence pairs

A generative model's internal embeddings are trained to predict the next word. That makes them poor at judging whether two sentences mean the same thing, so we train different models for that task.

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

A black quadrilateral, nearly square, painted on a white canvas. The black surface is crazed with fine cracks. The white border is uneven in width on all sides.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Malevich's Black Square

Kazimir Malevich · 1915 · Oil on canvas

Malevich painted a black square on white canvas, called it the zero point of painting, and placed it in the corner of the room reserved for religious images.

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