11 SEP 2026

Day 254

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Susan Sontag · On Photography

A very wide oil painting on canvas, 244.5 centimetres (8 ft) high and 506.7 centimetres (16 ft 7 in) wide; the supplied record does not describe the pictured scene.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Horse Fair

Metropolitan Museum of Art · 1853 · Oil paint on canvas

Rosa Bonheur’s 1853 painting is more than five metres wide: a vast canvas whose listed genres and movements resist a single, easy label.

Enter lesson 4 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Memorization vs. Generalization in Large Models

data · memorisation vs generalisation · 2010.11970, 2205.10343

Long after a model has memorised every training example, it sometimes begins to generalise. That delay is called grokking, and it sharpens what “learning” is taken to mean.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

Three figures on a balcony, one seated and two standing, with a fourth person only partly visible in the dim interior behind them.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Balcony

Édouard Manet · 1868 · Oil on canvas

Berthe Morisot sits on a balcony between two companions; a fourth figure is half lost indoors. Manet showed the canvas once, then kept it for life.

Enter lesson 6 MIN