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The Daily Triptych224 / 365

12 AUG 2026

Day 224

Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Confucius · The Analects
A small rectangular clay tablet, buff-brown and worn, covered in dense rows of wedge-shaped cuneiform signs. Horizontal ruled lines divide the text into sections; part of a hand-written number in black ink appears near the top.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Amarna letter EA 161

14th century BC · Clay · E29818

Eight ruled paragraphs on a clay tablet the size of a postcard, the text spilling onto the edge because the scribe ran out of front. Explaining an absence, apparently.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Emergence: Abilities That Appear Only With Scale

Scaling behaviour and interpretability · Wei et al. 2022; Nanda et al. 2023 · Training compute, parameters, dataset size

Plot a task's accuracy against model size and some curves sit flat at chance for orders of magnitude, then lurch upward. Whether that lurch is real remains contested.

Enter lesson 7 MIN
A wide, low painting. Six ragged men in a diagonal line cross a grassy bank, each touching the man ahead by shoulder or staff, faces tilted upward with damaged eyes. The leader has toppled into a stream at lower right; the next is falling across him. Behind them stands a small village church.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Blind Leading the Blind

Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1568 · Tempera on canvas

Six blind men walk in single file, each hand on the shoulder ahead. The first has already gone down. Bruegel finished the picture a year before his own death.

Enter lesson 6 MIN