19 MAY 2026

Day 139

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Seneca · Letters to Lucilius

A large manuscript leaf with blocks of Persian script and a painted courtly or battle scene filling much of the page, the paper aged and the composition dense with figures.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Great Mongol Shahnameh

Ilkhanate · c. 1330 · Illuminated manuscript

A vast Persian epic illuminated at the Ilkhanid court around 1330, later cut apart by a dealer, now scattered as single leaves across four museum collections.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Model Soups: Weight Averaging for Improved Robustness

optimization · model soups · weight averaging

Several fine-tuned models can be stirred into a single set of weights. The resulting soup often beats every ingredient, yet costs no more to run than one model.

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Full-length portrait of a youth standing in blue clothing against a darker, loosely indicated ground, painted in oil on a tall rectangular canvas.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Blue Boy

Thomas Gainsborough · 1770 · Oil on canvas

A boy in blue, nearly life-size, painted in oil in 1770. The canvas is famous; the person standing in it has never been settled beyond argument.

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