18 AUG 2026

Day 230

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

Alan Turing · Computing Machinery and Intelligence

A small ivory panel with two narrower hinged wings, opened out; the pale carved surfaces are crowded with standing figures in fine drapery, framed by narrow borders.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Borradaile Triptych

Byzantine · 10th century · Ivory

Ivory, hinged, made to fold shut like a book. Nothing on record names its carver or its first owner, yet it belongs to a handful of ivories so alike that scholars file them together.

Enter lesson 5 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics

robot learning, multimodality · RT-2, arXiv 2307.15818 (2023) · PaLI-X and PaLM-E

A robot arm's next movement, written out as eight numbers, then produced by the same model that answers questions about photographs. The actions are literally spelled as text tokens.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

A wide horizontal landscape in oil: an abbey set among oak trees, with cemetery ground included in the scene, on a canvas much broader than it is tall.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Abbey in the Oakwood

Caspar David Friedrich · 1809–1810 · Oil on canvas

Painted in Dresden around 1809, this wide landscape of an abbey among oaks was first shown hanging beneath another Friedrich canvas — at the artist’s own request.

Enter lesson 6 MIN