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The Daily Triptych222 / 365

10 AUG 2026

Day 222

A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one's feet.

Laozi · Tao Te Ching
A painted manuscript page from Mexico, its surface worked in flat colour with figures and signs drawn in dark outline and set within ruled compartments.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Codex Waecker-Gotter

Painted manuscript · Mexico · British Museum

A painted manuscript from Mexico, in London since 1911, catalogued under three different names — and not one of them belongs to the person who made it. The gaps are the lesson.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Neural Tangent Kernel

theory of deep learning · arXiv 1806.07572, 2018 · arXiv 1902.06720, 2019

Make a network wide enough and gradient descent stops looking mysterious. The parameters barely move, and what remains is a fixed kernel doing linear regression on your training data.

Enter lesson 7 MIN
A tall, narrow painting of a standing female nude holding a water jar, set against a spare natural background, the figure filling most of the height of the canvas.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Source

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · 1856 · Oil on canvas

Begun in Florence around 1820 and finished in Paris in 1856, this tall canvas shows a nude holding a water jar. Two of Ingres’s students helped paint what stands behind her.

Enter lesson 6 MIN