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The Daily Triptych129 / 365

9 MAY 2026

Day 129

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.

Bertrand Russell · The Problems of Philosophy
A densely engraved scene of an armoured knight on horseback moving through a rocky pass, with a dog below, Death carrying an hourglass, and a horned monstrous figure nearby.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Knight, Death, and the Devil

Germany · 1513 · Laid paper, copper engraving print

An engraved rider advances beside figures named as Death and the Devil; Dürer’s 1513 print leaves its allegory open, while examples appear in several collections.

Enter lesson 4 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Crowdsourcing High-Quality Human Feedback

data · InstructGPT; DPO · pairwise preferences

Preference data at scale rests on ranked model outputs, careful labeler selection, and aggregation rules that turn noisy human judgments into a training signal two very different algorithms can use.

Enter lesson 7 MIN
A wide town view: water and shore in the lower part, a horizontal band of brick buildings and roofs beyond, and a large cloudy sky filling the upper canvas. Light falls unevenly on the town.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

View of Delft

Johannes Vermeer · 1661 · Oil on canvas

Across a stretch of water, Delft sits under a sky that takes most of the canvas. Vermeer painted his home city once, at this scale, and left almost nothing else like it.

Enter lesson 6 MIN