31 JAN 2026

Day 31

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.

Ada Lovelace · Notes on the Analytical Engine

A large ceramic wine basin with a rounded body, painted in black-figure technique with a mythological procession encircling the vessel, and inscribed with the name Sophilos in Greek letters.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Sophilos Dinos

Archaic Athens · c. 580 BC · Sophilos

A wine basin painted with a wedding procession, signed twice by the man who made it. Before Sophilos, Greek potters stayed anonymous. After him, they wrote their names.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Position: Attention Has No Sense of Order

Attention Is All You Need · Vaswani et al. · 2017

Shuffle the words in a sentence and the attention mechanism computes exactly the same thing. Without an explicit position signal, the architecture has no way to know what came before what.

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A dim interior with five men around a table and two figures entering from the right. A shaft of light falls from upper right, illuminating the faces of the seated men. One bearded figure points at himself or at a young man bent over coins.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew

Caravaggio · 1599–1600 · Contarelli Chapel, Rome

Caravaggio dressed the apostles as street toughs and left scholars arguing for four centuries over which figure at the table is actually Matthew.

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