16 MAY 2026

Day 136

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Michel de Montaigne · Essays

A copper sculpture of a bull, the animal’s body and head modelled in metal, shown as a freestanding figure from the British Museum collection.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Copper Bull

27th century BC · copper · Tell al-'Ubaid

A copper bull from Tell al-'Ubaid, made in the twenty-seventh century BC, found in 1923 near ancient Ur in southern Iraq, and now held at the British Museum.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Sparse Transformer with Local Attention

architectures · Sparse Transformers, 2019 · Linformer, 2020

Dense self-attention grows with the square of sequence length. Sparse Transformers replace the full matrix with local and strided patterns, opening sequences of tens of thousands of tokens.

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A woman in a dark bodice and grey skirt stands behind a marble bar with bottles, fruit and flowers. Behind her a mirror fills the wall with lights, a crowd, and the reflection of a man in a top hat.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Édouard Manet · 1882 · Oil on canvas

Manet's last major painting puts a barmaid between the viewer and a crowded Paris night. The mirror behind her does not quite agree with what stands in front of it.

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