19 JUN 2026

Day 170

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Donald Knuth · Structured Programming with go to Statements

Embroidered textile with airborne human figures, each gripping a severed head by the hair, worked into the cloth in dense stitched detail.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Paracas textile

Paracas · 200–300 BCE · British Museum

Found wrapped around mummified bodies in a Peruvian necropolis, these embroidered Paracas textiles show flying figures gripping severed heads, and they survive from around 200 to 300 BCE.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Bitter Lesson of Compute and Scale

history · Kaplan et al.; Strubell et al. · 2001.08361 · 1906.02243

Across many orders of magnitude, language-model loss followed smooth power laws in size, data and compute—while intricate human design choices mattered less than expected.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A tall pale statue of a creature with a lion’s head and a fish’s body, mouth open as a fountain, standing upright above a wet base.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Merlion

Lim Nang Seng · 1972 · 8.6 metres (28 ft 3 in)

Lim Nang Seng’s 1972 fountain statue joins a lion’s head to a fish’s body at 8.6 metres (28 ft 3 in) high, turning a tourism emblem into a solid public figure.

Enter lesson 5 MIN