30 JUN 2026

Day 181

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

B. F. Skinner · Contingencies of Reinforcement

A small rectangular clay tablet covered in dense rows of cuneiform wedge marks, shown against a plain background.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir

c. 1750 BC · Clay · Ur

A small clay tablet from Ur records a customer's anger over bad copper. Nearly four thousand years on it sits in the British Museum, and the tone still feels familiar.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Speculative Decoding for Faster Inference

Speculative decoding · systems/inference · arXiv 2211.17192, 2302.01318

Most of the time spent generating text is spent waiting. A small model can guess ahead; a large one can check several guesses in a single forward pass.

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A yellow-skinned Christ hangs on a dark cross in open autumn countryside. Below, three Breton women in white caps and dark dresses kneel and sit in prayer among yellow and reddish fields.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Yellow Christ

Paul Gauguin · 1889 · Oil on canvas

In a Breton landscape painted yellow and red, three women kneel before a crucifix whose figure shares the colour of the autumn fields around him.

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