29 JUL 2026

Day 210

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Baruch Spinoza · Tractatus Politicus

A short, squat black-figure amphora with a low mouth, short neck, small handles close to the body, and a tiny foot; one side incomplete where the surface was damaged.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Burgon vase

Ancient Greece · c. 560 BC · Black-figure pottery

Found in Athens in 1813 full of bone fragments and scarred by a pick-axe, this short black-figure jar is the earliest known Panathenaic amphora and the Burgon Group's name vase.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Optimization Theory for Adaptive Gradient Methods

theory · 1904.09237, 1910.07454 · Adam, AMSGrad, learning-rate schedules

Adam can fail on simple convex problems. The fix is not a larger learning rate, but a change to how the second-moment estimate is allowed to shrink over time.

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A young woman in a dim interior nurses an infant on her lap; behind them two arched openings show a pale mountainous landscape. The child holds a small bird in one hand.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Madonna Litta

Leonardo da Vinci · 1490 · Tempera on panel

A Virgin, a child, a goldfinch and two arched windows — a painting long carried under Leonardo’s name, though scholars still divide over whose hand made it.

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