15 AUG 2026

Day 227

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

William James · The Principles of Psychology

A near life-size metal head of a man, dark with reddish patches, the face covered in fine parallel vertical lines, lips full, eyelids heavy, small drilled holes along the hairline and lower face, on a long neck.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Bronze Head from Ife

Yoruba, Ile-Ife · 14th century · Copper-based alloy (brass)

Eighteen copper-alloy heads came out of the ground at Ife in 1938. One of them, thirty-five centimetres of cast brass, made European assumptions about African sculpture look like nothing more than assumptions.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Elastic Training: Surviving a Lost Machine

systems/inference · data-parallel training across many machines · roll call, reshard, resume

A thousand machines training one model, and any one of them can die. The interesting part is not the failure but what the survivors agree on next.

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In a darkened tent, a woman steadies a sword as she cuts the neck of a man writhing on white bedding; an older woman leans in from the right with a cloth. Hard light strikes their arms and faces.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Caravaggio · c. 1598–1599 · Oil on canvas

Three figures, one blade and a field of darkness: Caravaggio’s oil on canvas holds the instant of a beheading and leaves almost everything else out.

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