12 JUN 2026

Day 163

Every writer creates his own precursors.

Jorge Luis Borges · Kafka and His Precursors

A large, elongated bronze shield facing with a smooth dark metal surface, gently curved, shown as a flat decorative front rather than a thick complete shield.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Witham Shield

Iron Age Britain · about 4th century BC · bronze

A bronze shield facing in La Tène style, lifted from the River Witham near Fiskerton in 1826, now kept in the British Museum as an Iron Age artefact.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Continuous Batching in LLM Serving

systems/inference · mixed-length request scheduling · SARATHI chunked prefills

Static batches leave the GPU idle while long sequences finish. Continuous batching fills those gaps by admitting new requests token by token as others complete.

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A tall, slender ivory figurine stands upright: a lion’s head and ears above a simplified human torso, arms and legs, the surface worn to a warm brown-cream.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Lion man of the Hohlenstein Stadel

Aurignacian · Mammoth ivory · 31.1 cm (1 ft)

Carved from mammoth ivory tens of millennia ago, this standing figure joins a human torso to a lion’s head — and still refuses a single, settled reading.

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