3 FEB 2026

Day 34

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

John Naisbitt · Megatrends

A tall, four-sided black stone pillar tapering to a stepped pyramid top, covered in five horizontal bands of carved figures and dense cuneiform inscription on each face.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III

Neo-Assyrian · 825 BC · Diorite

An Assyrian king carved his victories on all four sides of a black stone pillar, and in doing so left the oldest known portrait of a figure named in the Hebrew Bible.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Feedforward Block

Transformers · Two linear projections with nonlinearity between · Four times the model dimension

Attention gets the attention, but two thirds of the parameters live in a different layer entirely — one that widens the representation by a factor of four, then squashes it back down.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

A rectangular textile with a dark ground entirely covered in embroidered figures in red, gold, green, and blue. Small repeated figures with elaborate headdresses and limbs are arranged in rows and borders.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Paracas Embroidered Textiles

Paracas · c. 800–100 BCE · Pisco Province, Peru

Hundreds of tiny figures stitched in camelid fibre, each one different, wrapped around bodies buried facing the sea. The desert kept the colours.

Enter lesson 7 MIN