17 JAN 2026

Day 17

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein · Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

A dark grey granodiorite slab, broken at the top left and along the right edge, densely incised with three horizontal bands of text: sparse hieroglyphs at the top, close-packed cursive Demotic in the middle, and Greek lettering across the lower half. A pale pink vein runs through the upper left.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Rosetta Stone

Ptolemaic Egypt · 196 BC · Granodiorite

A tax decree cut in three scripts, broken and reused as building stone, then dug out of a fort wall — and it gave back a language lost for fourteen centuries.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Tokens: How Language Becomes Something a Model Can Process

Language and tokens · 17 of 100 · Turning text into numbers

A model has never seen a letter. Before anything else happens, your sentence is chopped into pieces from a fixed vocabulary — and the pieces are rarely words.

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A dim, high-ceilinged room. A fair-haired child in a pale silver dress stands in a wedge of light, flanked by attendants and a large dog. At the left a man stands behind the reversed back of a very large canvas, brush raised. At the rear, a small bright rectangle holds two indistinct figures, and a man stands in a lit doorway.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Velázquez's Las Meninas

Diego Velázquez · 1656 · Oil on canvas

Nine people, a dog, a mirror and an open door — arranged so that the one thing the painting is about is the one thing you cannot see.

Enter lesson 7 MIN