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The Daily Triptych131 / 365

11 MAY 2026

Day 131

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.

Ada Lovelace · Notes on the Analytical Engine
An ivory panel carved with a standing archangel who holds a sceptre and an imperial orb.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Archangel ivory

Byzantine · c. 520 · Ivory

Carved in ivory around 520, this panel shows an archangel with sceptre and imperial orb — the largest Byzantine ivory panel known to survive.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Stable Diffusion Architecture

architectures · Latent Diffusion Models · 2112.10752

Most of the work happens not on pixels but in a smaller space learned by an autoencoder, with text entering through cross-attention inside the denoising network.

Enter lesson 7 MIN
A bare-chested man lies dead in a simple bath against a dark empty wall, one arm hanging down with writing materials nearby, the upper half of the canvas almost blank.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Death of Marat

Jacques-Louis David · October 1793 · Oil on canvas

In October 1793 Jacques-Louis David painted Jean-Paul Marat as he had been found: dead in a bath, the scene stripped almost bare. Politics becomes the only subject left.

Enter lesson 6 MIN