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The Daily Triptych047 / 365

16 FEB 2026

Day 47

The eye altering alters all.

William Blake · The Mental Traveller
A brass ewer with a pear-shaped body, tall narrow neck, curved handle, and long spout shaped like a bird or dragon head, the surface densely inlaid with silver roundels containing courtly figures and Arabic inscriptions.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Blacas Ewer

Jazira / Mosul · April or May 1232 · Brass inlaid with silver and copper

Shuja' ibn Man'a al-Mawsili signed his name and the city where he worked into the silver inlay of this ewer — a rare survival that anchors the study of an entire metalworking tradition.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The KV Cache

Inference · Memory management for autoregressive generation · Transformer architecture (2017)

The first token requires computing attention across your entire prompt. Subsequent tokens reuse cached results, which is why long prompts cost more upfront but nothing extra per generated word.

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A dark locomotive emerges from rain and mist on a railway bridge, moving toward the viewer. The landscape dissolves into streaks of light and colour. A small brown shape runs ahead on the track.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed

J. M. W. Turner · 1843 · Oil on canvas

Turner painted a train on the Maidenhead bridge with such loose brushwork that viewers thought the canvas unfinished. Ahead of the engine, a hare runs along the track.

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