23 MAY 2026

Day 143

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Cicero · De Oratore

A pair of white porcelain elephants with sparse overglaze colour, standing side by side, compact bodies and curved trunks modelled in a simplified, non-naturalistic manner.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Kakiemon elephants

Japanese export porcelain · 17th century · Porcelain

Two porcelain elephants made in Japan for Dutch traders, by potters who had never seen the animal. They stand in the British Museum as evidence of an early trade in taste.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Preference Optimization via Nash Learning

alignment/safety · OPT open pre-trained transformers · AutoPrognosis 2.0 healthcare AutoML

The lesson names Nash learning for preference alignment. The verified sources are an open language-model release and a healthcare AutoML system only.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

A small brownish ceramic statuette of a nude woman, hips and breasts enlarged, head reduced, arms close to the body, legs short and tapering, shown against a plain background.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Venus of Dolní Věstonice

Gravettian · c. 29th–25th millennia BC · Ceramic

Eleven centimetres of fired clay, shaped as a nude woman tens of millennia before pottery vessels. Found in 1925 at Dolní Věstonice, it still withholds its purpose.

Enter lesson 6 MIN