6 SEP 2026

Day 249

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

William Blake · The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Illuminated parchment leaves from a medieval legendarium: painted scenes from saints’ lives with short accompanying text, in a Bolognese trecento manner, now divided among several collections.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Anjou Legendarium

House of Anjou, Hungary · 15th century · Parchment

A fifteenth-century parchment legendarium, painted in Bologna for the Hungarian house of Anjou, now survives only in pieces held by the Vatican, the Morgan, the Hermitage and the Louvre.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Mechanistic Interpretability of In-Context Learning

interpretability · in-context learning · linear models

Some transformers appear to run a learning algorithm inside a single forward pass. Work on linear models asks which algorithm that is, and how much of it can be read out of the weights.

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A pale Arctic expanse where jagged slabs of ice are driven up into a steep central pile; dark fragments of a wrecked ship show through the lower ice, under a cold, open sky.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Sea of Ice

Caspar David Friedrich · 1823 · Oil on canvas

Slab upon slab of ice rises in a jagged tower, a ship crushed beneath it. Friedrich never saw the Arctic; the wreck is almost the least of what the painting shows.

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