25 JAN 2026

Day 25

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil · Letter to Joë Bousquet

A life-size brass head with idealised features, parallel vertical striations across the face, and small holes around the hairline and jawline where attachments would have been fixed.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Ife Sculpture

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

When eighteen brass heads were dug up at Ife in 1938, their naturalism was so assured that European scholars invented lost Greeks and Atlanteans rather than credit Yoruba artists.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Vocabularies, Special Tokens and Chat Templates

Language and tokens · Between tokenisation and generation · Vocabularies hold 3–10 special tokens

A model trained on the internet does not automatically know where your message ends and its reply begins. Special tokens and chat templates supply the boundaries — and using the wrong ones silently breaks instruction-following.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A vast classical hall filled with figures in robes, grouped in conversation and study. Two men walk at the centre beneath a receding arch. Steps, sculptures, books, and geometric instruments populate the space.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Raphael's The School of Athens

Raphael · 1509–1511 · Fresco

Plato points to the heavens, Aristotle levels his palm toward earth — Raphael gave each ancient thinker a posture that embodies their ideas, then hid Michelangelo among them.

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